Let’s Talk: Ramping up your dialogue

The most difficult aspect of the writing process, for me, is creating dialogue. Give me a setting and I can put you right there so as a reader you will believe you are walking through the Scottish Highlands five hundred years ago. Ask me to get my character from one side of the room to the other, no problem. A sentence or a well-crafted tagline will accomplish what I need nicely. But getting my hero and heroine to have meaningful conversations that move plot, tension, conflict, and, yes, romance forward and does not just fill the pages with meaningless words—well, that continues to be a definite struggle. The thought of having to create dialogue often causes my stomach to clench and my brain cells to run off in fear.

However, I have realized that despite my best efforts to simply avoid it in its entirety, all stories—short stories, full-length novels, fiction or nonfiction, and memoir—need dialogue to craft a good, readers-will-want-to-turn-the-page-from-first-to-last tale.

So to overcome my obvious resistance, and my terror that my dialogue would cause readers to cringe, I decided to face my fears. I began by reading all the articles I could find on writing riveting, believable dialogue. I read. I read some more. I read novels and memoirs, and studied the cadence of conversations between characters, even the most minor ones that have only a couple of lines within the pages. I practiced writing and re-writing my own sorry-ass pieces of dialogue until I began to see some improvement. Yes, I have improved, but it takes practice. Good writing takes practice. I eavesdropped on conversations while sitting in cafés, browsing about bookstores, waiting in restaurants. I practiced writing more dialogue until I detected more development in my skill set.

Dialogue can be complex. Dialogue can be simple. Dialogue to make your story worth reading to anyone except your mom, best friend, or partner must be spot-on terrific. Through my incessant study, research, and conversation with other writers, I have come up with a few observations and suggestions for crafting richer, more nuanced story conversations that enhance your plot rather than just fill pages with unnecessary talk.

Every line of dialogue needs to be there for a reason.

Dialogue shouldn’t exist simply as filler in between action scenes and because you can’t figure out what to do with your characters. Story conversation should serve a real purpose such as building tension/conflict, revealing important backstory, establishing a mood, a new setting, injecting some humor, but always moving the plot forward.

If you can take out a line of dialogue, or if you feel you can remove an entire conversation from a scene without it impacting your story in any significant way, then more likely than not the dialogue is filler—words on the page for no purpose.

Characters who people your stories, like real people who are in your real life, are usually complex and multifaceted.  Each character, whether created from your imagination or based on a real person, should have a unique voice that makes them stand out. Voice is not simply about what a character says, but about using both verbal and nonverbal cues, their individual personalities, self-esteem, views and opinions, and the culture they were raised in. Crafting strong, authentic dialogue that shows the varying degrees of subtlety and shading can be a thorny process, but worth the time and effort.

By the way, perfect speech is not necessarily a good thing—at least, not for every character you have on the page. When people speak, few people/characters talk with perfect grammar, complete sentences, polite sentences. Some people curse all the time, others might blush fire-engine red if they accidently utter a mild curse word aloud, never mind  “fuck” (an adjective for me in real life, though one of my closest friends used to apologize every time she said the word). People are messy. Your characters should be too.

Questions to focus on:

What is the relationship between the characters involved in this particular dialogue?

What is the circumstance in which the conversation takes place? (This can often shape the context.)

For example, how two lovers talk about the weather will be much different than how that same conversation takes place between an estranged mother and daughter, or perfect strangers meeting for the first time.

Body language and facial expressions are vital.

When people converse, they also make faces or move their bodies, such as drumming fingers, tapping feet, shifting from one foot to the other, clenching hands into fists, rolling eyes, not making eye contact, visibly tensing, farting, something. People relay as much important information with the use of body language and expressions as they do with their words. Sometimes more.  A character’s mannerisms are an integral piece of creating dialogue that will engage the reader.

Find balance.

Not everyone gets equal time on the page or in each scene. Just like in real life, some people talk more than others. Some people go on and on and on, yet say nothing. Others can say an enormous amount with the delivery of one or two words. When you are writing dialogue scenes, take into account the dynamics of power and which character is holding it.

Ramp it up.

Tension is what I am speaking of here. Dialogue exists—well, ninety percent of the time it exists—to create or resolve story tension in some way. Remember, it’s the tension, the guessing what is going to happen next, how a character is going to react or behave, that will keep your reader reading.

Read your dialogue out loud.

Last, but not least, read your dialogue out loud. Whether you read it yourself or having someone else read it for you, hearing it is the best means to discover if something doesn’t sound authentic or believable. Hearing the words of your characters’ conversations is where you will discover if the dialect you are using is not working, or if the conversation feels stilted or just unbelievable.

It doesn’t matter whether you write novels, short stories, flash fiction, or nonfiction; it is beyond important to know how to write compelling dialogue in a story. Read up on the topic. Take a class that focuses especially on dialogue. There is no one article that covers all aspects of this topic. I have barely touched on various aspects of it here. There are many differing opinions from many, many writers. Take in as much as you can, keep the best of it and make it your own.

My last piece of advice for craft improvement: Make the writing of dialogue a top priority.

Happy writing!