Talking the Talk: Dialogue

“Why should I bother with dialogue?” she raged.

Oxford University, home of
the Oxford comma.
Oxford also expelled the
poet Shelley. Boo, hiss.

This is a joke. How boring would a story be if no one ever spoke? Like setting, plot and foreshadowing, dialogue is part of any good story. 

Cranky Rah is desperate to go over the Rules of Punctuation for Dialogue. (Cranky Rah thinks punctuation is the bomb, but don’t get her started on the Oxford comma. She’s against it.) Fortunately for you, though, Cranky Rah doesn't have space in this post because there are too many other groovy points to hit on about dialogue. So consider yourself reprieved.

Okay, not really. There are two things I have to mention with regard to the technical aspects of dialogue: dialogue tags.

1. Please use said, mostly. As in "Father's dead," Nikki said. Nikki doesn't need to shriek it or mutter it or rage it. Okay, she can, occasionally. But usually, she should just say it. Show passion (or lack thereof) through the words a character says, not the dialogue tag.
2. And pretty, pretty please don't write "Father's dead," Nikki sneered. You can't sneer (or grimace or grin) words. You can sneer while speaking, but sneer is an expression, not a sound. Pretty, pretty please.

“Dialogue is so rocking!” she gushed.

The gushing joy Rah feels about
dialogue (and punctuation).

Cranky Rah has been known to disregard her own advice. In this case, she must gush because dialogue is so awesome.

Dialogue shows the personality of our characters.

You know what your character looks like, what kind of clothes she wears, who she loves and who she hates, how much education she has, where she's from. All those aspects, physical and psychological, make her different from everyone else in the world and in your story. What she says and how she says it should, too.

Dialogue shows the relationship between characters.

The way people speak to each other reveals a lot about how they feel about each other. What does it sound like when you disagree with your best friend versus someone you don’t know? How would you confront someone when you’re in a crowd? What about if the two of you were alone?

Yeah, we've seen them
before, but what a public
scene it is.

Dialogue shows conflict.

You see how that word show keeps popping up? A good writer looks for ways to show her characters through action and dialogue. Instead of writing After he left her all alone to deal with her overbearing father, Nikki hated the pool boy, have Nikki scream at the pool boy when she unexpectedly runs into him years later. After all, there’s nothing better than a public scene. 

“Yeah, so what does dialogue stink at?” she demanded.

Reflecting real-world conversation.

Alfred Hitchcock once described drama as “life with the dull bits cut out.” This goes for dialogue, too. The real world is full of people having conversations like this:

                “Hey, Nikki,” the pool boy said.
                “Oh, hey. I haven’t seen you in a while.”
                “Yeah, I’ve been keeping busy. Um, been at the pool a lot. We’ve had, um, some great weather this summer. What have you been, like, up to?”

Seriously, no one wants to read a book where people talk like that. Who cares that the pool boy’s been to the pool (duh) or what the weather’s been like? We just want to know how Nikki’s overbearing dad died and whether she’s going to start screaming at the pool boy or just stew.

On the other hand, you do want your dialogue to sound like real-world conversation in some ways. Unless they’re uber-serious or historical, most people talk in contractions. They also often speak in phrases instead of whole sentences. Just don’t bludgeon your reader with too many dialogue quirks; unlike with garlic, a little goes a long way. (You can never have enough garlic.)

Explaining what’s going on in a story (aka exposition).

Don’t use dialogue as exposition, like in soap operas:

“As you remember, Nikki, Jessica took up with your dad, Dr. Howell, after he botched Matilda’s emergency lip surgery, just before the aliens abducted your pool boy.”

‘Nuf said.

“But what else?” she pleaded. “I need more tips!”

Okay, okay. Simmer down. Here are a few more tips for making your dialogue rock.

Flavor it with action.

When the pool boy gets fed up with Nikki blaming him, don’t just write Frustrated at how Nikki wouldn’t see his side, the pool boy exploded, “What is wrong with you?” Instead, try:

“What's wrong with you?” The pool boy flung his lapboard down so hard, the lifeguard tweeted her whistle at him. “I can’t believe you think this is all my fault!”

Situate your speakers.

Where are your characters? The sun’s beating down, stoking the pool boy’s frustration. Nikki’s best friend is eavesdropping by the diving board. Some brat cannonballs in right next to Nikki and splashes her. Include sounds, smells, textures and the other people around your characters.

Don’t forget silence.

Sometimes the answer to a question is silence. Maybe when Nikki screams at him, the pool boy is sullen and won’t talk to her. Maybe he struggles to find the words to say he’s sorry he left her. 

Also, think about what your characters wouldn’t say. We’re not always honest, especially in emotional situations. Maybe Nikki’s never going to get over the pool boy’s abandonment, but she’s made a scene and now she’s embarrassed and just wants to get out of there. When he asks for her number so they can keep in touch, maybe work this out, she gives it to him, but she is never ever going to answer the phone when he calls. Does she tell him that? Nope.

                “I’m sorry, Nik,” the pool boy said, running a hand through his chlorine-stiff hair. “I didn’t know it was going to be so bad for you. Can I make it up to you?”
                “Sure,” she said brightly. “Why don’t you buy me a Coke, and we’ll call it even.”

Read aloud.

When you’ve done everything else you can do to make your dialogue pitch-perfect, read it aloud to hear how it sounds. Hopefully you won’t, as Cranky Rah once did (many, many years ago), decide that your characters are the lamest creatures on the face of the earth. Luckily, she has gone on to write things much better than The Pool Boy. (She swears.)

Group Hug: Building Characters From Apples

It was a long, dark summer without The Three (mainly because Cranky Rah's life kept getting in the way of us meeting up), but we had a lovely afternoon together yesterday. I bang my head on the floor in delight over L's pie cookies. Pie. Cookies. Two great things that go great together. And they were lemony, just like Cranky Rah.

We played with dialogue yesterday, which was great good fun. Before you play with dialogue, you need some characters. Otherwise, it's just you and the voices in your head—and while they might have some interesting things to say, it's probably best that you get away from them every once in a while.

So, first you need some characters. It's easiest to do this exercise (adapted from a newsletter on writing tips by Brave Writer) if you have the game Apples to Apples, but if you don't, you can just make a stack of cards with one adjective written on each.

Here's how it works: Each person takes three of the green Apples to Apples cards and uses the adjectives on them to write a brief character sketch of a person with all three traits. (You can up the crazy factor by drawing five cards instead of three.) 

We did this twice—and I did not, by the way, tell The Three what we were going to do with these characters when they were creating them. We did this first half of the exercise at the beginning of our afternoon, as a warm-up, and it wasn't until we were reading our character sketches to each other that I mentioned, oh-so innocently, that their characters would later be talking to each other.

Poor Matilda. It wasn't her fault.
Sometimes genetics are just
against a girl.

A note on this in practice: After I drew the adjectives long, furry and unhappy for my first character, I went through and took out all the adjectives that could only be used for physical traits so that when we drew a second set of adjectives, they would all be personality traits. But I'll be honest, at the end of the day, the fact that my first character, Matilda, was furry had a huge impact on her relationship with the difficult Francesca, so maybe it was a mistake to take out the physical traits. If Matilda hadn't been furry, she wouldn't have been carrying that duct tape around with her (for emergency hair removal, you know), and the vengeance she wreaked on Francesca would have taken a different path, perhaps one that left Francesca's perfect eyebrows intact.

So after we warmed up by creating characters, we talked a while about dialogue (more about dialogue in then next post). And then we went back to our characters, to have them talk to each other. There were three rules:

1. Each character's dialogue must reflect his or her personality.
2. You can use said or asked but no other dialogue tags. You have to express each character's attitude through the words they speak.
3. You can use some action narrative to keep things going, but limit it. The focus here is on dialogue.

The conversation between the two characters could be about anything, but the dominant emotion in the scene had to be anger. (This is technically not a fourth rule; it's really just the set-up. If we had had more time, we would've done different versions of this, wherein the dominant emotion was confusion, joy, etc.).

As you might expect, hilarity ensued. 

Seriously. Anyone else want to know
what these three are talking about?

Once you've built your characters, there are a lot of other dialogue exercises you can put them through. One idea I really liked (but that we also didn't get to; in 90 minutes there are, well, only 90 minutes) was to have those two characters talk to each other about one of them being really late for an appointment. The first time, the characters are dating each other (this would've been a problem with M's characters, one of whom was six). The second time, they're meeting for the first time, and one of them is more powerful than the other. 

All these exercises are about playing around with how a character's personality is reflected in how he or she speaks and how the way characters speak to each other shows their relationship, two of the most important roles of dialogue in a story.

What else does dialogue rock out? Find out in my next post. Right now, I have to go crawl around the couch and see if anyone dropped any pie cookie crumbs.