Talking to Myself

Notes on Writing Dialogue

Here are my thoughts on dialogue. Most of them are obvious but people who are struggling with these issues may find this useful.

Written dialogue is different from daily speech in that it is less repetitive, more grammatical, more structured, and more purposeful. A lot of daily speech is just meaningless vocalization that provides cover for basic primate behavior. Dialogue in fiction is there for the fiction, period.

Dialogue has three functions. It is an expression of character, it is a tool for moving the story along, and it is entertaining in itself. All good dialogue does all of these things.

Every character needs their own voice. The brute way to accomplish this is through catch phrases or trademark words that are associated with a particular character. I’m not going to say this should never be done but it’s a good idea to keep it light. Too much repetition will make a catch phrase irritating.

The use of a fully developed patois is a lot more satisfying but again it’s best to keep it limited unless you’re good enough to make the patois itself part of the story. Anthony Burgess did this to brilliant effect in A Clockwork Orange but I am not Anthony Burgess. If your characters have heavy accents or specialized vocabularies it’s a good idea to keep conversations brief. This keeps the reader from being overwhelmed by their language.

The most essential and effective means of characterization through dialogue is less a matter of what the characters say than how they say it. Speech is music. It has rhythm and pattern. It’s something you listen to. Readers listen to dialogue when they read it. Music affects people emotionally; so does the music of speech.
Personality is expressed in voice. Some people speak slowly, some quickly. With some the words flow in a stream and other people use words percussively, like bullets or drumbeats. There are people I try and avoid because the music of their voice is disturbing or irritating. There are others I’m attracted to because talking to them makes me feel safe or cheerful or excited. A writer needs to be able to put this music on the page.

A really individual voice can be tricky to develop. I find that it’s a process involving both intuition and experimentation and that the voice I find helps to define the character – when I can hear them talk I know them. I once wrote about a nonhuman character and when I found his voice it was very formal and clearly shaped by the customs of his people. Once I had the voice, I knew the character and the culture that produced him. My process involves varying the voice of a character until I have an intuitive grasp of their speech, then thinking through what that voice says about the character and their world. There’s a certain amount of hit or miss here but as I develop my internal ear I find that my intuition pays off more and more frequently.

If characterization is linked to the way a character talks then plot concerns what the character is talking about. Characters should talk about things that concern the reader – things that help the reader to understand the world of the story, the people who inhabit it, and the events of the narrative. Dialogue that exists to deliver the writer’s opinions or to demonstrate their ability to use words gets in the way of the story and thus must be eliminated.

The most elusive function of dialogue is that of entertainment. You have to love talking and listening to write truly entertaining dialogue. You have to relish the turn of a phrase and the subtle interplay of sounds and the way the words feel in your mouth. A writer who is sensitive to these things can make their characters speak to one another as if actually conversing and they can make it a conversation the reader will want to hear.

Here’s where I advocate insanity. When I write dialogue I talk to myself as my characters; I listen to myself speak in their voices. I don’t have to do this out loud since I’ve got an internal ear that lets me hear voices in my head. (I told you that I was advocating insanity.) Writer’s who can’t do this frequently experiment with speaking their dialogue out loud as they compose or revise. Don’t do it at the grocery store because you can get into trouble. Go ahead and do it on the bus because you’ll get a seat to yourself.

The best way to get an ear for dialog is to listen to people talking! I get the impression that a lot of writers, probably most writers, are compulsive eavesdroppers. I know that I am incapable of ignoring someone else’s conversation unless I’m specifically mentally occupied. The thing about listening to people in public is that there’s no way to get the context of what they’re saying but I can catch the feel of how they speak and guess what that says about them. In all likelihood I’m wrong about that stuff on a regular basis, but my observations are still fodder for fiction.

And that’s pretty much everything I can tell you. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to put my hands on my keyboard and start talking to myself.