Speaking of Speaking

You know dialogue can be the favorite part of writing.  The pacing is swift, a lot of information and characterization can be delivered quickly, and dialogue presents all sorts of opportunity to surprise the reader.  It's also a chance to take on perhaps the hardest part of writing, and that is attempting to be funny, but we'll tackle that in another post.

Writing dialogue is also full of traps, and just as I'm doing with this entry, there are countless people who are more than willing to tell you the rules.  

So, my first rule is look at all the rules as if they are only guidelines.  Dialogue is like music.  What is wonderful in one person's ear is pure clunker in the next.

Second, dialogue is the most human thing you'll write- meaning culture, ethnicity, education, socio-economics, generation, region, and individual personality all come into writing it.  Furthermore, it's all filtered through the POV of not only the narrator, but the author.  I'm a 50-something man, and so what a 12-year-old sounds like to me is different than what a 12-year-old sounds like to his 10-year-old sister.

The leads to a believability curve.  Someone may tell you, "This 12-year-old doesn't sound like he's only 12."  First, keep in mind that the reader is looking through a different life-lens than you are.  Second, the reader might not have had a 12-year-old in their life in 35 years.  The 12-year-old they are using as a model is now 47-years-old.

People resist changing these mental models.  If you write a story about a 12-year-old who speaks like a physicist, or an 85-year-old grandmother who speaks like a longshoreman, that character can become a really interesting feature, but some readers will reject it. 

For me, I write dialogue in three steps.  Step 1- get it down on paper.  Just write it, knowing you'll improve it later.  Step 2- streamline it.  Go through and economize.  For example, you'll almost never need the word "yes" or "no."  In 2000, I spent a month in China, and my Mandarin was never great, but my driver told me that they really didn't use a word for "yes" or "no." If someone asked, "Are you tired?" you could expect someone to simply answer, "I am" or "I am not."  

A mentor of mine pointed out early on that when a character asks, "Are you hungry?" better than answering with "yes" the second character could reply, "I could eat."  As is said so often, dialogue is not transcription of speech.

Step 3- make it more realistic with misunderstandings.  Almost no conversation goes smoothly, and the miscommunication is almost as revelatory as the communication.  Also, let some of it go.  Don't fix everything.  When humans talk, they let a lot of the stuff they didn't understand go without comment, until it becomes obvious that they missed a crucial bit.  All this is tough, but give it a try and practice.

This isn't a step, but it is another bit of advice...try to be fair.  Make an effort to not give all the best lines to the character most like you.  It's a nice way to resolve some conflict from your middle school years, maybe, but it shows, and if the reader detects the one-sided nature, they might take the side of the verbal punching bag.  Keep it balanced, if you can.

I'm one of those who writes dialogue with attributions "said" and "asked," almost exclusively.  No adverbs, no groans-shouts-sighs, etc. Occasionally, I will use "reply" or "answered" but rarely.  As many have pointed out, it's difficult to convey whispering with punctuation or context, so "whispered" makes sense, but keep in mind that whispering can be really creepy, especially when it's deadpan whispering by a child.  

Years ago, I wrote about accents, so I'll avoid it this time, except to again beg you to go easy.  There is a brilliant author, I love the work, but one novel was basically unreadable because the Scottish accent within is so overwrought, so heavy-handed, that it carries all the gravitas of Pepé Le Pew and Foghorn Leghorn.  Signal the accent, with a word here and there...do not try to recreate it.

To sum up, in my opinion, whenever you get stuck, have a couple characters say something.  It'll boost pace, it'll refresh the reader, and it will almost certainly put fresh choices before you as the author.