Zombie hamsters and making the best dialogue with some easy tips
write better now
We’ve been having a bit of a series about dialogue. If you missed some posts, you can just go to the main Living Happy/Write Better Now site and look for the dialogue tag.
Dialogue can:
Summarize things—They talked about the zombie hamsters.
Be indirect speech—And did they find the zombie hamster interesting? No, not at all, of course.
Be direct speech— “Are you serious? Zombie hamsters?”
Most of us really think of it as direct speech.
If you’re using it in a novel (or if you are Dutch like I am, I guess), you want that dialogue to have a purpose.
Typically, in traditional publishing, that purpose is to not just give some information but to:
show character
show something happening in a way that isn’t dull or too obvious
set the scene
Move the plot forward
foreshadow that zombie hamster action is about to go down
remind us of an important event that brought the plot and/or characters to this moment (this is usually emotional resonance)
In the best of all writing pages, your dialogue is doing more than one of those things at a time.
TRY NOT TO DO THESE THINGS:
Try not to have your characters say:
um
uh
yep
hey
hello
I mean
hi
bye
Why not? It’s sort of filler and it’s boring. When you revise, go and see if your dialogue is doin more than one thing.
Have super long sentences
When my characters finally get motivated at the three-quarters point in a story, they tend to speechify. My agent hates this. But I love it because I’m often doing it to show that she’s passionate and is a leader and has finally claimed her own damn voice. I can’t make the case for this if every one of her dialogue sentences is super long throughout the book.
And also, remember that one-breath rule we talked about before.
TRY TO DO THESE THINGS!
Think about each characters’
Quirky speech patterns
Are they a questioner?
Are they blunt?
Do they say, amirite, after everything?
Do they use big words? Little words? Words that deal with their profession?
Does the music of their sentences sound like the music of everyone else’s? Are they all trumpets? Guitars? Stacatto? Poetic?
When you revise, listen to the sentences? Can you hear the differences? Look at the sentences on the page. If there was no dialogue tag, would you be able to tell the speakers apart?
Think of the dialogue as action
When your characters speak to each other, give them wants, but also have one win and one lose the conversation. Allow them to change tactics to get their goal. Look to see if the conversation escalates.
Put in some subtext
Subtext is the unspoken meaning under the words.
Alicia Rasley said that in writing: “Subtext is like a gift to the astute reader—an additional layer of meaning implied by the text but not accessible without a bit of thinking. … Experienced readers aren’t confined to the text—what’s printed on the page—they interact with the text, fully participating with the writer in the making of meaning in the story.”
Subtext is basically the hidden motivation/emotion/wants of your character that aren’t right there out on the surface.
So if I wrote:
“Look at you in that onesie! What a brave person you are.” Shaun said.
You’d know that Shaun is really thinking that the other character is more unconventional than brave.
Think about your dialogue tags and about your grammar/punctuation.
He said. She said. Those are your standards. Don’t deviate too much with hissed, sulked, boomed, squeaked, intoned. It takes away from the important part—the actual words being said. Adverbs do this too.
Look at the differences:
“I saw zombie hamsters,” she yelled.
“I saw zombie hamsters!” she yelled.
“I saw zombie hamsters,” she said loudly.
“I saw zombie hamsters,” she said.
“I saw zombie hamsters!” she yelled.
“I. Saw. Zombie. Hamsters,” she said.
“I saw zombie ham—!” she yelled.
“I saw zombie hamsters. . . .” she said.
Dialogue can make things more exciting
When you have two characters bickering, it tends to be more interesting on the page than saying, “They bickered.”
Dialogue and voice helps provide context, drama, and interest. It pulls the reader in. It’s a big part of showing rather than telling.
“I can’t believe you don’t like my onesie,” she said, spinning around in front of the couch, arms out.
He smirked. “Didn’t say that.”
“Manatees are frolicking on this.” She stopped spinning and pulled out the fabric a bit. “Look! Look at the print. It is imported.”
“You look like you’re two. A two year old with boobs.”
“Boobs! Call them breasts. Oh my word . . .”
“That makes you sound like a chicken.”
“You are the chicken, mister, a negative, judgmental and derogatory chicken and I am incensed that you don’t understand the value of this outfit or me.”
“WTF, baby.”
That immerses us in the bickering and shows character rather than just “the bickered,” right?
Good dialogue and good voice show us how the characters aren’t the same. Even in my horrible example up there, the two characters don’t sound the same. One has longer sentences and more Latinate word choices. The other is a bit more blunt. One uses conjunctions and the other doesn’t.
Dialogue and voice go hand in hand to really make a huge impact on your story. Get cozy with them. Learn their rules. Buy them a coffee. Make them your friends. You won't regret it.
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