Say That Again, Would You?

Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems like it ought to come naturally – after all, everybody talks, right? Yet dialog is a considerable problem for a lot of writers, and a tin ear for dialog has brought more than one would-be novelist to disaster.

The first most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is a model of speech, not a transcription. I’ve talked about that before on this blog, so I won’t repeat myself in detail, but I think it’s worth at least mentioning here.

The second most important thing to remember about dialog is that it is communication between two or more characters. This means that it is almost always made up of short exchanges, back and forth. Unless one of your characters is giving a lecture, like the detective in a classic murder mystery doing his summing-up, you should expect a page of dialog to have paragraphs that are mainly one to three lines long. There’s usually lots of white space as a result; in fact, one of the classic tests for whether the characters’ speeches are running on too long is to print out a page and tape it to the wall, then walk across the room so that you can see the pattern of the paragraphs and how much white space there is on the page. These days, you can get the same effect by reducing the font size:

Description vs. dialog

Above is an example. On the left is a page of descriptive paragraphs; on the right, a page of dialog. Shrinking the font makes it instantly obvious which is which – and you can see immediately if your dialog is bogging down in long speeches, and take steps to break it up.

The second classic trick for checking your dialog is to read it out loud. This lets you know whether it sounds right in general; it also is an easy way to identify tongue-twister phrases that no one would actually ever say.

If you’re having trouble figuring out how to do dialog generally, try reading some plays or screenplays. Out loud, so you are seeing and hearing the words at the same time, and can get a feel for how the words-on-the-page work when spoken aloud and vice versa. If you really want a workout, get hold of the screenplay for any movie that has lots of dialog, read it aloud, and then watch the movie while following along with the script. Even if you’re not having trouble, paying a little extra attention to passages of dialog in your favorite movies and novels will very likely give you some useful ideas.

The next thing to think about is the difference in the speech patterns of your various characters – the way each particular person phrases things, depending on their individual personalities and backgrounds. You can do this either by consciously coming up with speech tics (like having a character who never uses contractions, or who always ends their sentences with “yeah?”), which can be effective in small doses but which gets really annoying to read when every character in a story has one, or you can come up with broader ways of distinguishing your characters’ voices (Shakespeare had all his noblemen speak in unrhymed iambic pentameter, and their servants and more ordinary people just any-which-way. The lyricist for Man of La Mancha gave Don Quixote complex sentences and syntax [“I am I, Don Quixote, the Lord of La Mancha; destroyer of evil am I!”] and his servant short, simple sentences and no words of more than two syllables  [“I’m Sancho! Yes, I’m Sancho! I follow my master to the end!”])

Or, you can just look at different speech patterns in real life.  Take the same sentence of dialog/information, and rephrase it in as many different ways as you can:

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“That’s wrong, dumbo.”

“I believe, sir, that you are in error in this instance.”

“Um, do you think…I mean, is that really the way you want to do that? Because it doesn’t look quite right to me.”

“That ain’t no way to do that there thing.”

“Kiddo, you got that upside down and backward.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to work.”

“A guy could have some problems, doing things that way.”

“You’re screwing up again! Honestly, can’t you do anything right?”

…and on, and on.

I was on my third book before I started trying to do this consciously, and my first few efforts were exaggerated (Telemain in Talking to Dragons, Amberglas in The Seven Towers) because it was the only way I could be sure I was keeping them consistent. More subtle variations took me longer to get the hang of. Most of the time now, speech patterns and character voices are automatic  for me – I know when I’ve used a word or a turn of phrase that a particular character just wouldn’t say, that’s all, so I fix it immediately. But at the beginning, it required a lot more conscious attention. So don’t worry if it takes a while.