How I Write Fiction: Dialog (Samhain 2016)

Eye Contact

Long before stories were written, they were spoken. So you would think writing dialog would come as easily as talking. For many authors, it does not. Dialog is consistently mentioned as one of the hardest aspects of the craft for a writer to master. Why?

Well, there’s a dirty little secret underlying dialog. It isn’t really the way people talk at all. It’s a graceful illusion, a shorthand for the way people actually speak. It’s convenient stand-in, a body-double. A doppelganger.

Don’t believe me? Listen to how people actually talk to one another. I mean really listen. People pause, they stumble, they interrupt, they insert random asides. They er, they uhm, they use the wrong words, they leave sentences dangling without completing them. In general, they use a shorthand that relies on the others in the conversation to interpret what they really mean, more so if their co-conversationalist is well-known like a friend or family. If you want a really good example of this, listen to only one half of someone’s telephone conversation.

Yes, people are lazy even in the way they speak. It’s an evolutionary advantage. Never use more energy than you absolutely have to. Save it for something important like survival.

A writer cannot survive by being lazy. The last thing a writer wants is for her readers to have to infer what her characters really mean, what they are really trying to say. So mimicking speech is unlikely what she wants to do if she wants to be clearly understood. No one wants to slog through an unedited transcript of an actual conversation.

Learning to listen to the way people talk is a lot like learning to draw. First, you have to train your mind to see what’s really in front of it, not the symbolic shorthand it uses to quickly categorize items it sees everyday to save time. Don’t believe me, picture a chair, quick, right now. Odds are you just pictured something like a simple, straight-back chair without arms or even a padded seat. Whatever it was, compare it to the chair in your office, the chair in your living room, the chair at your dining room table, the chairs in your twelve-step program. Chances are they look nothing alike other than in the most basic, symbolic ways. They both have backs, they both have seats, they both have four legs (or maybe five with wheels). In order to draw one of those real chairs, you must cast that symbolic one aside and actually see the unique chair in front of you. Otherwise, your mind will continue to try and force that symbolic chair into your drawing which will mar the results. It’s the same with faces, or shoes, or anything other common item you want to draw.

And it’s the same with listening to people in conversation. Your mind filters out the ers and uhms, the pauses and stumbles, the wrong word choices and interruptions you don’t always know you make. But only after you learn to hear what’s really there can you capture the essence underneath.

What a writer wants to do is make her readers think she’s captured authentic speech, at least the way people hear it in their heads. People are very good at filtering out those odd little speech ticks and filling in what’s missing. A good dialog writer captures what comes out the other side of that black box in people’s heads. What they think they hear, not what is actually said. And if you only employ the front-end filter, you’ll end up with perfectly acceptable dialog. Kind of like listening to the neutral Ohio or California accent of a newscaster, it works well if the main point of your dialog is to convey information and emotion. Master that alone and your dialog will be generally well received. For many applications, that’s enough.

But if you want to use dialog to reinforce a character, there are further choices to be made. The first, just like writing in first person, is finding the voice of that particular character. For me, a great deal of that revolves around word choice.

First, a quick aside about phonetic spelling to reinforce a character or his accent. This used to be quite common. I still run across it now and then. I don’t favor it and never really have. Mainly because I find it very difficult to read and slow to sort out. If I do it at all, it tends to be once with one or two words (or an explanation in exposition) to set the example then let it go.

Colloquial or regional speech is different, though here again, I try to be careful. While a few choice words can immediately set where you are (say “wicked” around Boston, or “y’all” in the South), it’s easy to overdo it and have it sound like a parody (or worse, an offensive stereotype, cuz). There are more subtle constructions, phrasing and patterns of speech that tend to lend better affect. In the South, phrases like “God love her” or calling someone Mister Edward (for me), or Miss Karen (for my wife), depending on the speaker and the context. And that’s before you get into the alternate regional choices of words for things like cola, soda and pop. The best thing to do again is listen and mimic what you hear, lightly. Like salt or Tabasco, a little flavor goes a long way. 

Perhaps best way to illustrate that is with foreign accents. Many non-native English speakers tend to initially speak English based on the rules of their native language. Where English tends to construct its sentences in the order of subject-verb-object, other languages do not. Welsh prefers verb-subject-object. As does Hebrew. That construction sounds odd to an English speaker because of the word order (which may explain why the Bible has a particular cadence at times like, “spoke God to Moses” rather than “God spoke to Moses”). It’s the same with languages that don’t use articles (a, an, the), languages that put the adjective after the object, languages that don’t use contractions, languages that have gendered nouns, and a host of other features you might hear if you listen.

As an example, having a character not use contractions can make him sound formal or authoritative or foreign depending on the context of the other word choices around that tick. 

Word choice and phrasing can vary depending gender, too. As I’ve read it, part of gender speech patterns are socially derived, but perhaps an equal part are evolutionary. They are a bit tough to pull apart. In broad strokes, there are different patterns to male and female communication evoked by word choice and style. That’s not to say all men or all women speak in a particular way, just that there are tendencies a writer can exploit or reverse for either resonance or effect. Having a female character speak with a distinctly male style might make her strong in some reader’s eyes or come off as a bitch in others. Just as having a male speak in a female style can make him seem either empathetic and charismatic or weak and effeminate, depending as much on the reader as the writer. Or they might not notice at all.

Another aspect of word choice that is more unique to English derives from its history. For many words, we have a choice of two equally weighted synonyms, one that derives from Old English, another that derives from Norman-French (from the days of the Norman Conquest). We use most interchangeably but there is sometimes a subtle difference between them. Old English words tend to have more impact (often, though not always, they tend to be shorter). Norman-French words tend to soften the impact (and sometimes tend to be longer). An example might be cunning (Old English) and guile (Old French). Cunning has a meaner, more raw connotation to me, where guile comes off as more artfully manipulative. Compare your reaction to weird (Old English) and strange (Old French). Or freedom (Old English) and liberty (Old French via Latin).

It’s the same with Old English and Latin directly. As an extreme example (because of variants in recent news stories), think of the words vagina (Latin) and cunt (Middle English). Or fornicate (Latin) and fuck (Old English, or just old). One of each pair probably sounds more jarring and profane to your ear. If your character is educated, of a certain status or a certain morality, she might prefer one over the other. And, yes, many of our English curse words come down from Old English (bitch is another but bastard isn’t). That alone should demonstrate their power.

Which segues to a broader point about profanity. It’s not something I avoid if it fits the character, but it’s also not something I throw in gratuitously. It can be an effective tool in revealing character, by its absence as well as its presence. Consider a soldier who does not curse like the others in a hard-bitten company. That might say he is naïve. Or innocent. Or religious. Or aristocratic (so not acceptable language). None of which you have to call out but all of which might resonate with other word choices to reinforce the trait. But the same word of caution: profanity, like most other aspects of dialog, is very easy to overdo.

As is slang, which can be even more fraught with danger. True youthful slang ages and morphs at lightning speed. Words that sound hip and edgy today can totes sound outdated and overused literally overnight.

Also note that the same person tends to speak in different ways depending on their audience. They might choose different words or phrases when talking to their wife, their children, their coworkers, or the cashier at the grocery store, never mind giving a formal address or being dead drunk in a bar. In other languages, this trait can be even more pronounced with separate words, endings or forms used to address subordinates, peers or superiors. The trick in fiction, if you choose to represent the way we casually do this in English, is to somehow keep the character consistent.

Which brings up tag lines, phrases a character repeats like a touchstone to establish and reinforce who they are. I’ve used them at times to anchor a character, especially in stories within a series. But, again, a light touch or you risk being read as a Simpsons parody. Doh!

All of which is a very weighted way to say that your word choice can reinforce your character. Educated, common, urban, rural, formal, casual, foreign, regional, all of these can be represented without resorting to phonetics. A writer’s word choices can resonate with a reader even if they don’t consciously understand why.

Beyond word choice, the essence of what a character says (or doesn’t say) is critically important. Why are they speaking? Does the content sound natural or artificial? More importantly, is the conversation necessary? Is it furthering the plot or revealing and developing character, or is it extraneous? Do these things need to be said at all? The answer, at least for me, can be more of an art than a science.

With the exception of using dialog as exposition (having a character deliver information to reader by talking to another character). Think of the data dumps in science fiction, massive chunks of exposition disguised as dialog used to convey either the science or the setting. Basically, if you could add the words “as you know” to a piece of dialog and it doesn’t sound out of place then you’ve drifted into exposition. And just deleting those words won’t change that. Unless it’s subtle and well done, it sounds clunky or stilted. Unless there’s no other good choice, it might be best to say it outside of dialog.

This leads into a final touch point about dialog: attributions. For the most part, I find “said” covers most of what I need. He said, she said. While there are times that other verbs would work (yelled, droned, drawled, whispered), said is reliable, generally inconspicuous and inoffensive. While, for the most part, using very specific verbs is a hallmark of good writing, in attributions they can scream for attention where you don’t really want it. Or they can come off as redundant if your word choice makes it clear a character was, say, being sarcastic, dude. So I find said to be my go-to. Usually but not always without an adverb. Said quietly and whispered are almost but not quite interchangeable. Though, like many things in writing, it’s a style choice you can make work if you want to.

Attribution also lends to another subtle shading of dialog, pacing. Where you put that he said, she said in a sentence, or whether you do at all (with two people in conversation, I find I only occasionally need to re-anchor who’s speaking), breaks up the speech pattern and can add a short pause that you don’t always have to call out. It also gives you a chance to move characters around the scene as they speak, which implies other, perhaps longer pauses. It can illustrate that a character is distracted, or thinking as he examines something in the scenery you might want to draw attention to, say as he picks up and reads the spine of a book before he answers a question.

As well, it gives you a chance to intersperse a few non-verbal cues (head shakes, sighs, frowns, furrows, gestures, glares, grunts, sidelong glances) that comprise a huge portion of human communication.

So how can you tell if you’ve succeeded? The easiest way for me is by reading my dialog aloud. I focus on a few questions. First, do I run out of breath trying to get a sentence out? If I don’t find easy, natural breaks, it’s unlikely a real person wouldn’t say it the way I’ve written it. Second, are there words or phrases I consistently trip over? If so, they likely need to be smoothed and revised. Especially to remove any unintentional rhyming or alliteration. Third, does it sound like something I might hear on television, or in a movie or a play? A good trick is to pick a couple favorite actors and imagine them doing a reading with the lines. If it comes out sounding like a B-movie they’d probably try to purge from their IMDB listings, there might still be work to do.

Which circles back to the key point of dialog. Listening. That’s what dialog is all about, capturing what you hear in words yet stylizing it to make it flow smoothly in the reader’s ear. Perfecting it requires practice and patience. But when you get it right, it sounds like an exercise in creative eavesdropping, which is what your readers really want

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III