One of the hardest skills to master in writing fiction is dialogue. It’s extremely difficult – even well established authors often struggle.
When it comes to quick-fire dialogue, it’s hard to go past Hemingway – check out Farewell To Arms, for instance. Much of the time he didn’t even have to put ‘he said’, ‘she said’ – the speakers were obvious from his choice of words, and their speech painted their characters in ways that made them alive. Brilliant, brilliant technique. But also one that’s very difficult to master.
The reason is that people don’t talk in prose. Try transliterating a conversation – it’s full of half-sentences, broken phrases and misplaced words. That’s because words are only half the way we communicate; there also body language – gestures, expressions, even the context. Imagine two people talking about a flight of passing birds. They might not mention what they’re looking at, because they both know.
Written English is a different ball game. It’s linear – it presents one idea at any moment. It’s a thread. So you, as author, have to disentangle not just the broken dialogue people actually use, but also present the simultaneous experience of conversation – context, body language and so forth – as a string of words. What’s more, ideally the style should be not dissonant from the general style of your book – you’re providing a consistent reading experience as well as a story.
Just to add spice to the whole issue, dialogue is also the way that your characters convey their reality. It will make them come alive.
My suggestions:
1. Speech (disentangled, processed and reinterpreted by the mind) usually parses in iambic pentameter (“I WANdered LONEly AS a CLOUD’).
2. Different people have different patterns of speech – but not too much. Overstating in your novel can appear contrived.
3. Don’t spell out speech characteristics. Bring them out – for instance, in the way a character reacts. “Fred’s mouth dropped open. ‘Will ya look at that!’ We know he’s surprised.
4. Convey some of the background as your own prose, around the speech – don’t try to work it into the dialogue – avoid: “‘Look, Wilma, at that flight of Pterodactyls over there where I am pointing, with the light on them.’”
5. Vary lengths. People don’t always talk in four-sentence blocks. Sometimes they just get in one word. Multiple quick-fire snap back-and-forth dialogue can be effective, sometimes.
6. Sometimes, not speaking is effective – focus on the reaction.
And finally – the piece de resistance - do what John Steinbeck suggested – read it aloud as you write it.
Do you have a technique for dialogue? What are your experiences writing it? I’d love to hear from you.
Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012
Your insights about the linear nature of written English set off a lightbulb for me. I have often wondered how an author manages to create that organic sense of “presence” in a natural conversation, and I think it comes down to, as you pointed out, interspersing spoken phrases with lines to set the scene, depict body language/speakers’ reactions/blocking.
And I have to love the Flintstones reference
Thank you. The Flintstones were the first TV show I have recollection of watchng.
Writing believable and effective dialouge for film scripts is one thing I particularly struggle with. Specifically I find it difficult to give each character a unique voice, I suspect increasing my own vocabulary might help for starters.
It’s incredibly difficult to write dialogue for film – a different framework again from dialogue in prose with its own demands of structure, form and so forth, because it’s got to carry the same expression of story and character, but unlike prose it’s got the added dimension of the visual side – the actors, the scenery and so forth. Kind of half way between the demands of a novel and what we actually experience in real life.
Great thoughts – and especially agree on point 6. Ties into the whole ‘show, don’t tell’ mantra.
Thank you!
I have to watch myself. I can’t make people sound too much like me because I use a lot of arcane and out-of-fashion words sometimes, especially if I want to make a point. I won’t say I dumb the language down, necessarily; I just have to be very careful how I write it.
I use a lot of em-dashes and semi-colons (and elipses) in my written dialog so the pauses and rhythms of natural speech are there. AND I try to put in some actions or character thoughts every few sentences just to break everything up. The only time it sounds natural for someone to say more than a few sentences with perfect grammar–and nothing else going on–is when he or she is giving a lecture.
How do you manage it?
I make a point of trying not to punctuate dialogue too much like prose. It’s often difficult.
Reblogged this on Naimeless and commented:
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I’ve always been told that my dialogue is strong, and it’s one of the parts of writing a story that I enjoy the most. I love having characters speak realistically – half sentences and non-words and things that don’t make sense anywhere outside of a verbal conversation. It always bothers me how some write dialogue as if the characters had written their speech down first and then read it aloud. It just doesn’t work.
Absolutely true. Thinking along those lines about authors who ‘write’ their dialogue reminds me of a particularly execrable chapter in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in which the ‘Michael Baigent/Richard Leigh’ anagram spouts off about the Grail for pages and pages in what was OK prose (insofar as Brown ever wrote ‘good’ prose), but hardly real speech. To me, the fact that Brown had an assassin creeping through the house to slaughter them all at the same moment added melodrama without rescuing the dialogue.