Writing Dialogue

 

What makes dialogue effective? I consider dialogue to be one of my strengths as a writer. It helps that I have done a bit of theater over the years and have written a number of plays, which of course, are almost all dialogue. Sometimes I hear people asking how to write good dialogue.

I say, listen to how real people talk. Pay attention when you are out among people. But, and this is a big ‘but’, written dialogue won’t sound exactly like real speech. If it did, it would sound rather boring and unimaginative. I say to listen to real talk to use as a governor. A governor is a device that keeps an engine from going too fast. Your dialogue governor should keep you from going too far into the realm that no speaking person would ever go. For example, real people (other than politicians) tend not use flowery, over elaborate descriptions when they talk. That doesn’t mean you can’t use beautiful descriptive word now and then, but be judicious with their use. You can choose to make a character bombastic and given to purple prose. That can be a valid choice for a character. But you had better only have one character like that in your story, and even then, you probably want to reign them in somewhat to keep them from being too ridiculous (unless ridiculous is what you are going for).

Consider Aldous Huxley’s character, Coleman in Antic Hay:

“Interesting mangle!” Coleman smiled his thanks. “But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works. Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.”

No one speaks like this in the real world. And yet, Coleman does and it works for his larger than life character. Coleman speaks like this consistently throughout the book which is another thing you should strive for. Be consistent. The way your character speaks in Chapter One should be the way they speak throughout the story. Even if they have grown as a person through the story, their manner of speaking shouldn’t change much.

There needs to be a reason for the character to be saying something, otherwise you are just wasting the reader’s time. It’s just like how you don’t need to tell us every detail of the husband’s clothing, bathroom, and breakfast routines between getting out of bed and going to work. That would be needlessly tedious. The same is true with dialogue. Cut out what doesn’t need to be there to move the story forward. Dialogue is used to develop the scene, to tell us something about the character, or to give the reader information they need to know.

When you are writing a scene, you should have goals for that scene. Your characters should have goals. The dialogue should reflect those goals. A character shouldn’t state the obvious, unless they are supposed to be dense. Good use of dialogue can tell us the education level of the character, their cultural background, show us their relationship with the other characters, show us their motivation, and emotional state.  This goes some way towards “show versus tell.” The narrator doesn’t have to tell us that Joe is hungry if Joe says, “let’s get something to eat.” This is particularly useful when writing in first person, where the narrator can not get inside the head of, say, the main character’s mother, but we can see what she is feeling through her actions or her words.  

What makes dialogue really sing is wit. Wit makes dialogue crisp and memorable. But wit is a hard thing to quantify and a hard thing to teach. It is a little like saying ‘be funny here’. Easier said than done. Wit can be overdone as well. I remember some scenes from the television show “The West Wing” that were just a little too witty. Aaron Sorkin is a witty guy, and I enjoyed his dialogue, but sometimes I would see a character come back with a snappy rejoinder that was just a bit too witty to be believed, especially if it had followed another one, which had followed another one . . .

So, the best way I can describe good dialogue is that it is heightened realism. That is, it is elevated a bit above what you might hear in a normal conversation, but not so elevated as to sound phony.  A good test for this is to read your dialogue out loud, or listen to others read it. Your ear will help to tell if it passes the B.S. meter.

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).