Meaningful Dialog Hints and Help

“Writing is a struggle against silence.” - Carlos Fuentes

Fiction is populated with the characters you have created and breathed life into. As human beings (or reasonably personified non-humans) your characters crave communication. Plain and simple, people talk to each other, it’s what we do.

In fiction we are limited in both space and time, so words become very precious resources. You do not want to use up all of your syllables describing in detail how your character washed their hair or on a conversation about the weather that goes on for half a page.

Let’s talk about the purpose of dialog.

Dialog is a form of communication between your characters (not the only form of communication mind you, but certainly an important one). Most of the time, you do not speak just to hear the welcoming sound of your own voice, and your fictional characters shouldn’t either. Dialog used in a story should have a purpose. The following is a list of what I believe to be the most important reasons for including dialog in your story.

(While we are talking about my opinion let’s consider what my opinion is worth to you. How much are you paying me right now to give you my opinion? The answer is zero dollars. So, in effect I am giving you zero dollars worth of information. Take it or leave it, it’s up to you and you’ve paid no money for it. You are, however, spending your precious time on this planet reading my opinion. For every second you spend reading my opinions that’s one less second of your life that you could have used for sleeping or watching TV or saving the world. When you think about it that way, then damn, my opinion suddenly gets a lot more valuable. Man, now I feel all kinds of crazy pressure, thanks!)

GenXblogger’s Top Three Purposes for Including Dialog:

1. To give the reader insight about the character, their speech, their beliefs and personalities. This can be done by showing how they react to situations and information which further gives you insight into who they are (part of characterization).

2. To share information with the reader they wouldn’t otherwise have known, moving the story forward

3. To be entertaining

Let’s start at the bottom of the list, entertainment value. The communication between your characters can be dramatic, endearing, romantic, scary or just plain humorous. Fun to read dialog is certainly important as is raising the overall fun-factor of your story. There are ways to make your dialog more (funny, suspenseful, dramatic, etc). One tip is to not make the speeches too long – often, shorter lines are better. You can achieve this by removing extraneous words that do not add value to what you are saying.

Example:

No: “I don’t like him because he has an attitude that is cocky.”

Yes: “I don’t like him or his cocky attitude!”

You can also mix speech with narration (although I would suggestion if more than one person is talking that you put the text of each person on a new line of its own).

Example of text with narration:

“Have you really not started on your paper?” I asked. Normally I was just as big of a slacker myself but this paper was going to be worth a large portion of our grade. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t even started it. “It’s due tomorrow you know!”

Dialog in fiction is almost like real life – only much more interesting. The boring bits are cut out and we only make the reader be subjected to the important stuff. To make your dialog flow smoothly you want it to be realistic but not interrupt the speech with all of the “erm, ah, ehh’s” we normally use. Using an “Ummm…” once or twice in the entire story will not kill it but you shouldn’t be using ellipses (…) and “Umms” in every sentence.

You do not have to end sentences in dialog where they would normally end in a grammatically correct sentence, you can have people trail off or interrupt each other. Do not, under any circumstances, drown your reader in text-speech or grammar and slang usage that is unreadable. It doesn’t matter that your character is a teenager and an extra cool one at that; their dialog should still be understandable.

Sometimes you need to share information with the readers that otherwise they wouldn’t have known. Let’s say you are writing a story told in the first person perspective of Stella. Since Stella is telling the story you cannot suddenly state what another character is doing at that moment in another city because Stella has no idea that is happening. You can, however, have someone tell her that it happened so that both Stella and the reader find out at the same time. Now you’re getting somewhere! This also works well with providing back story and can replace confusing flashback scenes.

Finally, one of the most important things in my zero dollar humble opinion is taking the opportunity to flesh out your character and make them believable and also give the reader an in-depth idea as to who they are. You never have to write a paragraph or sentence about Stella’s fear of spiders because you can work it into the dialog. Is your character an environmentalist? You don’t have to write, “Stella was a stead fast environmentalist.” Instead you can write a scene in which Stella goes ballistic on someone for tossing their bottled water container into the river. You don’t have to tell us she’s gone green, it will come out her dialog.

In addition, paying close attention to what your character says and how they say it will help make your character and story realistic. Pay attention to the historical or modern period, the slang of the region, or common phrases your character says.

In the next edition of Watt’s Happening we will be going over everyone’s favorite topic – “Punctuation In Dialog: Everything you never knew you wanted to know!”

Happy writing!

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Title: The Story

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