Say What? Writing Engaging Dialogue

Transcript

We can learn a lot about a character based on how they interact with other people. What they say and how they say it can provide a different perspective on them than the one they might have of themselves.

What can we do to draw readers into a conversation between characters? How do we use dialogue to convey a larger message in a scene?

In today’s episode, I’ll be revisiting a topic I wrote about in a previous blog post.

We’ve talked before about using variation as a tool to write engaging sentences, and I’ve previously looked at how characters can and should be unique. We can use both of those principles when writing out dialogue.

One of the first things to account for in character dialogue is voice. Each of your characters should have their own distinct voice. This could be describing the character’s voice when they talk—for example, “His voice dripped with honey”—or, as is often preferable in these situations, you could show your readers. There is a place for describing the timbre of a character’s voice, but much like the physical description of a character, your readers won’t necessarily be conjuring the image or sound up as they read. They’ll need the odd reminder, and showing is especially helpful in these cases.

The number of syllables and the kinds of consonants and vowels people favour affect how they come across. If we wanted to show that a character’s voice is smooth, we could deliberately choose softer sounding words for their speech (maybe a lot of s- or l-words). A character might speak in clipped tones if they are reserved or brash, so think fewer syllables and maybe even shorter sentences. A long-winded person might render their thoughts in multisyllabic words and meandering sentences.

Other elements of a character’s background might come up in their speech pattern. Class status, region of origin, occupation and close relationships can all affect how a person speaks. Characters might even change their dialect or language in different contexts. This is a linguistic and cultural phenomenon called code-switching, which actually does exist in real life.

One thing to avoid is spelling out phonetic accents, but naming the character’s accent is fine. That’s one situation where telling is actually preferable to showing, as is taking into account a person’s background when it comes to word choices. In general, my advice is to not worry too much about this beyond the initial description. Unless it’s extremely relevant for the plot of the story, you don’t necessarily need to hit your readers over the head with that kind of thing.

Besides thinking about how a character actually sounds, sometimes you want to play with what exactly you actually put down on the page. Sometimes what we say isn’t actually the most meaningful. When we talk, a lot of what we say is actually nonverbal. We gesture, make facial expressions, our eyes dart back and forth. In fiction, you can describe these micro-actions (but be careful because too much can come across as amateurish). For the most part, your readers should be able to imagine a character’s expression based on their word choices.

And here’s where it gets interesting, especially if you’re trying to laden a scene with more meaning. What’s interesting is that characters don’t actually have to say everything that they’re thinking. In fact, knowing that a character is holding back can be a great way to show dramatic irony. Your readers will know what the person’s thinking, meanwhile other people aren’t privy to that. It can set up a lot of great tension for later.

Sometimes characters don’t feel like they can or should share everything with another person. Maybe they don’t trust each other, or maybe someone has threatened them into staying quiet. Think mob movies, things like that, where, you know, you wish the person would say something, but they can’t for some reason—maybe there’s danger involved. So that tension really ramps up in those situations. And as long as everyone isn’t trying to be coy all the time—every single character is trying to hold things back, which can seem a little bit forced, if taken to the extreme—it’s a great way to up the stakes.

As an author, you also get to decide this in another aspect: what you show your audience, actually. So imagine you’re trying to plot out a scene or you’re trying to plot out a novel or larger work. Sometimes a particular piece of dialogue between two characters just isn’t terribly interesting. It might not warrant space on the page. You want to evaluate carefully what gets your reader’s focus and why, then excise the rest. I’ve talked about this before—even, I think in my last podcast episode—that we only have our readers’ attention for so long. We want to make a really crucial impression in that time. So only the very best bits of dialogue should be left. It should serve a purpose.

How it’s presented can be tied into what is presented, but I would say that you should be very focused on what exactly you’re putting down on the page, first and foremost. So either it has to be something in that is service to the larger plot or tells us something very important about the characters—which, in my opinion, is the plot, that’s how you get plot—but there should be a reason for it. Sometimes we like to fill out pages based on this notion that, you know, a chapter might be lacking, a chapter might need to be longer, this work needs to be a little bit more fluffed out. If you’re adding fluff, it’s fluff. It’s not going to be anything of great importance for people to understand or see. And in those cases, it’ll take away focus from what’s the most important to get across to your readers.

But to pull it back to how to present dialogue, think about it as “realistic adjacent.” While observing people talking to each other in real life can actually help expand your repertoire—it can give you some interesting quirks, some interesting phraseology, things like that to incorporate into your characters to make them stand out and to make them seem more real—real-life conversations should not be what authors actually strive to emulate. And there’s good reason for that. Even the most eloquent people speak in incomplete or grammatically questionable sentences. We all pause, use filler words, we let our thoughts drop off in the middle. Sometimes there’s awkward phrasing. But generally speaking, because it’s in a conversation, we’re able to get our point across. Real-life speech actually does have that added dimension of physical communication, which often fills the gaps in something that would read awkwardly on the page.

Consider how often people (including myself) start to explain something, hit a wall, then say, “You get the idea.” This is such a ubiquitous part of everyday speech, you might not even realize how often it happens. Conversely, in dialogue, never assume that your audience just “gets the idea.” Unless it’s particularly important (maybe it’s a quirk of a particular character), adding things like that, having moments in the dialogue that are a little bit more akin to real life—too many of them can stack up and create a distraction from the actual meaning of the text. So even if you are trying to hold some of your cards close to your chest, your characters should generally speak in complete sentences—unless it’s absolutely necessary to interrupt them and things like that.

Dialogue can include pauses and interruptions—otherwise, we wouldn’t get to see our precious em dash nearly as much as we’d like—but there ought to be a good reason for doing so. Assess carefully whether a pause, interruption or stutter actually adds something to the flow, or better yet the narrative, of the scene. And as for filler words—they do have their uses. Maybe you want to show a character being nonchalant or nervous, among other emotions. But in general the advice is to choose those moments very carefully. The same as when you’re choosing what actually gets attention on the page, each time you add a filler word, each time you use a filler word, people are going to get potentially distracted, potentially annoyed if it’s done too much. It has to have a reason for being there.

Another thing to think about when it comes to creating compelling dialogue is what else is actually going on in the scene? I personally know that I love dialogue that is fast, that’s witty, that keeps the page turning, but sometimes you need to anchor your readers in what else is going on in the room.

One of the biggest threats to compelling dialogue when two characters are talking is a blank room with nothing else that’s going on. Sometimes this happens when writers feel that their dialogue is better than their description (and that’s something that I’ve felt personally for many years), but what’s really cool about scenes between characters is that they give you the opportunity to marry these elements together in interesting ways.

It can happen sometimes where we focus so much on what the characters are saying to each other that we actually forget to tell our readers where they are, for example. Setting informs readers a lot about the mood of a scene, so remember to tell us what we’re actually seeing beyond the characters.

For those of us who see the word “description” and think “one big paragraph to set the scene,” please put your fears aside. Some of the most dynamic descriptions are actually in the little snippets found amongst dialogue. And don’t forget that description not only means describing the world around the character (or having them think about or reflect on it), but also action. These actions can range from micro-actions and expressions I referred to earlier as well as bigger interactions with the world surrounding the character. This is typically how we bring the physical dimension into communication, both in real life and also in narrative.

I have two examples to give you.

First example:

“I don’t think we need to go to such extreme lengths,” said Mohamed.

“I think these lengths are perfectly reasonable,” said Abigail.

And in the second example:

“I don’t think we need to go to such extreme lengths,” said Mohamed, crossing his arms.

Abigail ran her fingertips across the countertop and inspected the dust that came away from it. “I think these lengths are perfectly reasonable,” she said.

Even in such a small moment, the added descriptions do three things. They 1) slow down the pace of the dialogue, 2) they tell us a little something about the setting without going into much detail and 3) they hint more at what the characters are thinking and the dynamic between them.

All that said, it’s not impossible to entrance your readers with the characters alone. Leaving the space purposefully blank might be useful when the dialogue needs to be the focal point. Consider the famous interrogation scene in Basic Instinct; the room is minimal, so what the characters are saying and doing takes the focus. Of course lighting and the actual set dressing makes a big difference considering the fact that it’s a movie, but it’s the way that the characters are framed that gives them that focus, that gives them that attention. You’re not, for example, in a busy police precinct with people running around in the background. It’s a very dark, sort of dimly lit room that really puts the focal point on the characters and the interactions between them.

If you’re not sure how to start incorporating action into dialogue, try making it a bigger theme and focus on the scene. Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts exchanging witty banter in The Princess Bride during their fight elevates the dialogue and the action at the same time. That said, their heart-to-heart moment before the big fight is a great example of when to keep the action minimal.

One of my last pointers here that I’ll talk about is dialogue tags. Dialogue tags can be a really tricky thing. Some people love them, some people despise them. I personally try to find a balance that makes sense for both readers and the overall flow of the dialogue.

Dialogue tags are an aid to what your characters are saying, but they’re not the focal point. So to that end, there are a few things to remember when choosing them.

First and foremost, make sure that you’re actually using a tag and not some action unrelated to speech. People can whine, they can shout their words and they can certainly say them, but maybe think once or twice before writing that someone “laughed” their words. “Laughed” just doesn’t really work. Characters might say something, then laugh, but rarely do we gasp out our words between every “hee” and “ha.”

A more egregious example of what I mean (and a personal pet peeve of mine, if you can’t tell) can be found in this sentence:

“I beg your pardon,” Jane frowned.

This particular phrasing conjures up an image of words appearing in writing across Jane’s forehead. Surely they do not, no matter how upset she is. And if they are, I recommend attributing it to some funky kind of magic, rather than letting your reader wonder if you made a mistake.

“What about ‘said’?” you may ask. “Said” is terribly underrated, in my opinion, and in a lot of people’s opinion. It’s not fancy, but it definitely is  effective. It just has to be used the right way. When we think of the point of dialogue tags, it really is just to orient your reader in the conversation, to tell them who is speaking in what order. Most of the heavy-lifting should be done by what they’re saying (or doing in between). If you’ve created characters with a distinct enough voice, typically you can kind of get rid of the dialogue tags at a certain point.

You can also consider maybe—does it matter who’s saying what? It’s kind of an interesting dynamic to have that in a conversation. It might be something to consider sprinkling in every now and then. I wouldn’t recommend necessarily trying to disorient your readers all the time. But sometimes they’re characters in a scene who—maybe they’re overlapping voices, maybe they’re a bunch of people kind of talking about the same point—you could potentially completely get rid of all dialogue tags in those situations. It will seem more chaotic, but maybe that’s actually what you’re going for.

So dialogue tags, including “said,” don’t actually need to appear alongside every piece of dialogue. It’s when they do that gives them such a bad reputation. It’s not that any singular tag lacks value, but that dialogue tags themselves become pointless or tiresome if overused. If we see them after every single piece of dialogue, our eyes tend to glide past them eventually.

And again, I would come back to finding balance. So choosing dialogue tags that serve a particular purpose in the scene. Think back to maybe those actions that we talked about, the little bits of things that you can have your characters doing in between dialogue or to accentuate dialogue—maybe somebody gestures to something, maybe they’re packing a suitcase or something like that—and you can tell how they’re feeling based on how they’re actually performing those actions.

Tags are there ultimately to orient your readers, so maybe use them when it’s particularly important to quickly convey an emotion. Think something like “shouted,” although I would still kind of argue that showing a character smash something on the floor prior to speaking implies the tone of their voice. You might not even need an exclamation mark at that point.

Last thing I would say to do is to try an experiment. See how few dialogue tags you really need in a scene. And don’t forget that describing a character’s actions and fleshing out how their voice sounds in your head, on the page, trying to translate that—see if that can do a better job of maybe orienting your readers in a scene and also conveying a larger meaning beyond just the words that you’re seeing.

You might find that removing most (or in certain cases, even all) of the dialogue tags lets the dialogue fall into a more engaging rhythm and allows for your characters’ words to speak for themselves.

With that, I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you have any questions on the topic discussed, or if you'd like to suggest a future topic, please don't hesitate to reach out. Contact me through elixereditorial.com or find me on Instagram, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn @elixireditorial.

Intro and outro modified from Danse Macabre by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com and licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License.

See you next time in The Laboratory.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.