'Dialogue?' she Gasped.
Our Quick Guide to writing dialogue
Books need dialogue.
Speech gives life to the page; it humanizes a story; it breaks up long pages of action & description. We've received entire manuscripts with virtually no dialogue - unsurprisingly, such scripts are a long way from being marketable.
But it's not enough to include plenty of dialogue. Getting speech right is an art form in itself.
Fortunately there are rules to follow – and the American Writer is here to tell you what they are. Please note, however, that if you want notes on punctuating dialogue, then you're on the wrong page. You should be here.
Lifelike is bad
The weird thing about speech-as-it’s-actually-spoken is that’s not actually all that easy to understand. Take this real-life snippet (taken from tapes recorded during Watergate) for example:
Haldeman: … the only network that paid any attention to it last night was NBC...they did a massive story on the Cuban...
Nixon: That's right.
Haldeman: ...thing.
Nixon: Right.
Haldeman: That the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, "Stay the hell out of this...this is ah, bus
iness here we don't want you to go any further on it." That's not an unusual development.
Nixon: Um huh.
Haldeman: ...and, uh, that would take care of it.
Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn't want to?
Haldeman: Pat does want to. He doesn't know how to, and he doesn't have, he doesn't have any basis for doing it.
Fairly obviously, you couldn’t have much of that sort of thing in a book and hope to keep your readers interested.
Wooden is bad
At the same time, you can’t afford to make speech too much like a game of tennis:-
Alice: Are you coming into town now?
Bob: No, I can’t come now. What about later?
Alice: It might be raining later on. Rain’s forecast.
Bob: Well, why don’t we go in later and we could always take the car rather than go on foot?
Can you see how quickly predictable these speech rhythms are? Don’t you start to feel bored almost immediately?
Achieving Perfection
The trick to achieving dialogue that feels right is to write speech that seems lifelike, while being anything but. The tricks of the trade are:
- Keep speeches short. If a speech runs for more than 3 sentences or so it risks being too long
- Keep interchanges oblique, not direct. The Alice and Bob example failed because A & B responded too directly to the other
- Ensure that characters speak in their own voice. You can overdo this, of course, but do try to make sure that characters don’t all sound the same as each other.
- Spice it up. Humor is good. Slang. Banter. A bit of swearing (not too much).
- Get in late & out early. Don’t bother with all the Hellos, HowAreYous and other small talk. Just say “they greeted each other, before Alice raised the million dollar question."
- Interruption is good. So too are characters pursuing their own thought processes and not quite engaging with the other.
- Don’t patronize the reader. He snarled. She simpered. He snapped back. She leered. What rubbish! 98% of the time, just use “he said” or “she said” or nothing at all. If the character is emoting, then that should come over in what they say.
Admiring the Masters
Good writers write good dialogue, and make it look so easy that the reader hardly even notices. Take this bit, for instance, blatantly lifted without copyright permission from Ian Rankin’s A Question of Blood. The detective, Rebus, is phoned up at night by Siobhan, his colleague: -Simple, eh? But masterful. Not a word too many. Sweet perfection indeed.His [mobile] phone was ringing … He picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘I tried ringing your home phone.’ Siobhan’s voice. ‘It was engaged.’
Rebus looked at the laptop, the laptop which was hooked up to his phone line. ‘What’s up?’
‘Your friend, the one you were visiting that night you bumped into me …’ She was on her mobile, sounded like she was outdoors.
‘Andy?’ he said. ‘Andy Callis?’
‘Can you describe him?’
Rebus froze. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Look, it might not be him …’
‘Where are you?’
‘Describe him for me … that way you’re not headed all the way out here for nothing.’
