Dialogue: The Heart of Scene

Dialogue is often at the heart of scene.  Dialogue makes events in your story more vivid.  Relationships take on life through dialogue.  They become more real than they could ever be just through narrative.  This is because dialogue adds to the narrative’s force.  No longer are people being written about.  They are now coming to life, actually taking part in a drama.  When they come to life, so do the relationships between them.

 Dialogue is not small talk.  It must always depict change, reveal character, advance the plot and express theme. 

 Dialogue must appear realistic without being realistic.  It should:

 Not be natural, but suggest naturalness.

Be brief.

Add to the reader’s present knowledge.

Eliminate the routine exchange of ordinary conversation.

Convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Reveal the speaker’s character, directly and indirectly.

Depict the relationships among the speakers.

Real talk is anything but orderly.  People don’t always answer each other’s questions directly.

He:  “You want a coke with your pizza?”  She:  “Why were you looking at her like that?”

                 He:  “You want diet or regular?  Why do you ask?”

 If this were written dialogue, the reader might be a little confused.

Effective written dialogue isn’t real.  If you transcribed a real conversation, you’d find it full of fillers and inconsequentials such as “um,” “I guess,” “I mean” and plenty of unfinished sentences, even dropping off words, such as  “Never mind, I  was just wonder…”  Written dialogue may employ some of these fillers, but be sparse!

Every piece of dialogue needs a reason to exist.  Each line should add to the reader’s knowledge of the situation, the people, events relationships or the feelings.  Dialogue that merely gives information is better turned into direct narration –NOT “Look over there in that window display of mannequins in silky beige bras and matching thongs.” BUT “Honey, don’t look,” she said, pointing at the store window mannequins in silky beige bras and matching thongs.”

Effective dialogue doesn’t need the help of “said” substitutes or adverbs stating how the lines are delivered.  Writing appears more professional when people simply say their lines, rather than breathe, croak, snarl, hiss, wheeze, chortle spit, gasp or sigh.  These are called tonal tags.  These often tell the reader what can be found in dialogue itself.  When you insert explanation in dialogue, you cheat the reader out of a chance to collaborate in the creation of the scene.  However, there is plenty of good writing that uses verbs and adverbs to create the speaker’s emotion.  Today, however, it’s considered an intrusion and unimaginative.

One of the most common reasons for flat dialogue is the formality of language.  This is conversation that sounds stilted. Try short sentences, interruptions, contractions.  Use verbal tics, accents and expressions.  Natural speech isn’t fluid.  It starts and stops.  It wanders.  Phrases are rethought halfway through and substituted with other phrases that are themselves rethought.

Consider how the following affirmative statements can be used to make dialogue natural at the same time as they can be used to differentiate between characters.  And all you’re doing is changing the idioms:

Yes.             Yep.    

Yeah.           Sure.

Whatever.

In my next blog, I'll given an example of one book where dialogue comes alive.

Catherine Alexander

catherine@catherinealexander.net