Today, as I continue to think about and define my writing process, I’m going to talk about dialogue.
Dialogue should be an extension of character. Dialogue should be unique to your characters, but it’s also a chance to show character connections through shared language, i.e. common vocabulary, inside jokes, etc. When I was writing Clean Freak, I wanted Mike and Val’s inside jokes and references to show their connection while also purposely excluding Clarence. Meanwhile, Clarence never said much to anyone, until his friendship with Lucy starts to bring him out of his shell.
Most of the time, when I’m trying to get to a character’s voice, I’ll focus on word choice, rather than apostrophes and intentional misspellings. I feel like there was a time that there was always that one character in every story I read that was always endin’ his words short or gittin’ ’em wrong. While this might work for spoken dialogue in visual media, I find this to be more distracting than anything else when written.
Speaking of distracting, writers tend to overthink tags. I will agree that “he said, she said, he said, he said, blah blah blah” is repetitive and boring. But tags aren’t necessarily meant to do anything but remind the reader who’s talking in longer passages of dialogue or when multiple people are in the conversation. In visual media, we don’t need tags; in written stories, we have “character said.”
In longer passages of dialogue, the way I try to keep it from being repetitive is by inserting bits of narrated action to stand in for tags. Consider this example:
“I wonder what we’ll have for lunch,” Sean said.
“Well, what do you want for lunch?” Cooper said.
“I like burgers and beans.”
Cooper nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
We don’t need a tag for the third line of dialogue. We know it’s Sean talking, based on the back and forth of the conversation. For the fourth line, I considered just leaving the action and not having the line of dialogue, but I’m trying to make a point here.
So where do adverbs and synonyms of “said” fit in?
Like italics and exclamation points, I try to be as sparse. Again, I focus on word choice, rather than trying to use adverbs and synonyms in my tags to prop up weak dialogue. Using myself as an example, I tend to swear a lot, mostly the word “fuck.” This tendency to swear increases as I get angry, but there’s a tipping point that I stop swearing and my words become clipped and my sentences shorter. That’s when people who know me know that I’ve crossed the line into truly pissed off.
I’m not saying that I never use an adverb or synonym or dependent clause to indicate how a character is saying something. I’m just saying that I don’t like using it for every tag. Especially in blocks of dialogue when characters have a good back and forth going.
I’ve also tried to set rules for myself for how I write different types of dialogue, i.e. interruptions, stuttering, and trailing off. I use em dashes for interruptions and stuttering, which is just a character interrupting themself. Of course, the ellipsis is pretty standard for trailing off.
Finally, it’s dialogue; you should read it out loud. This helps me hone in on a character’s voice as an individual, rather than just one character among many being written by the same writer. You’ll know you’ve written some strong characters when they can have a conversation and your reader knows who is saying which lines without tags. Reading it out loud can help you get there.
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This isn’t the end all be all of dialogue. Just some thoughts about how I generally approach writing it. How do you write dialogue?
