There are times when dialog seems to come by means of mental torture and pretzel twisting, and to be the most difficult writing I do. I continue to learn. In reading through my second draft, a few weeks ago, I checked for those places where the story dragged or faltered, and I found those were often the same places where dialog stumbled or rambled on too long. Nothing much seemed to be happening, even though something was, because I’d buried it inside too many words.
I got lost in the accompanying narrative, the setting, the characters’ activities, movements, body language, or overwrought cleverness. Sometimes I bogged down in the minutiae of sighing, nodding and eye gazing. Writers can get so caught up visualizing each detail of character interaction they rob readers of their mental interplay, their own visualizations based on common human experience. We presume readers don’t know how a character might deliver a line in a given situation. The stream of dialog reads as dammed up where it should flow. It loses its surface tension, its sparkle, and its undercurrent. It becomes stagnant.
Poorly managed narrative is part of the problem. Most dialog needs a little helping narrative to aid the reader’s orientation in the scene. Too much can create pauses that aren’t natural and interrupt the pace. Too little can cause the characters to move too quickly from one topic to another, making them appear to suffer from attention deficit disorder. Narrative placed well and in the right amounts creates natural pauses and shifts in dialog and action that don’t mimic but create life—the life of the story. The right narrative enhances the rhythm. It provides a satisfying ending to one scene, breaks that shift the topic or course of dialog within the scene, and a smooth transition into the next, all while holding the tension that keeps a reader turning pages. A good story follows the characters to precisely the places the reader needs them to go. To the reader it feels like a natural course of events, purely believable—no matter how the writer had to agonize in order to get there.
One dialog overhaul method that works for me is to copy the scene into an empty document, then strip out everything but what’s inside quotation marks. This allows me to start from the basic dialog. I trim that to its essentials, then work up to just the right helping narrative. If there’s a lot of action occurring at the same time as the dialog, it might help to strip that down as well, in a separate document—or as separate paragraph blocks differentiated by color in the same document—then work at merging the two into a cohesive whole. It’s easier, using this strip-down technique, to find where something is said that isn’t needed or doesn’t fit because it’s redundant, tangential, or just bad writing.
I read the characters’ words out loud and get a feeling for what they’re communicating underneath it all—to each other as well as the reader. How does the conversation flow? What’s needed and what isn’t, and in what order? Is there a shorter, snappier and more natural way to say something? Are all these words in character? Can I hear and differentiate the voices? Is the purpose of the scene being met? Am I missing an opportunity for humor, or drama? What are the characters saying between the lines, or what might someone mistake them for saying if I’m not careful? Why are they droning on, when what they need to say can be compressed into two lines of speech?
When I stop to think about it, I realize this is how I write dialog in a burst of inspiration. Just the speech, in a series of lines on paper, with a pencil, scribbling as fast as I can to get it all down before I lose the thread and my place inside the heads of the characters. The best dialog I’ve ever written has come to me that way. Why not force inspiration, by writing it that way to begin with?
Your posts like this one always make me wonder if I could ever really do what you do…you are an inspiration.
I once asked my favourite writer of dialogue, Frederick Barthelme, how he did it. He said he used dictation in the first draft, and explained as follows:
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I started the dictation as a way to loosen up, and in the first of the dictated books, Two Against One, there was very little re-writing. Since then there has been more re-writing, and the dictation has been a method of generating material. Plus, it’s a great tool for ‘naturalizing’ the dialogue, which I suppose is a trick, but it’s a trick that works, so it’s OK.
Much good writing is good editing — cutting a word or two, substituting a phrase for another, swapping two lines of dialogue. So, I do that. I learned from my brother Don first, and then, perhaps more brilliantly, from my New Yorker editor Veronica Geng. She was brilliant, I wasn’t. You want to compress the prose enough so it springs off the page; too much and it remains the unrisen biscuit. So the dialogue is a mating of the two — dictation for the sound, editing and compression for the economy.
I never know the characters ahead of time. What would I do when writing if I did? The writing is creating the characters, reflecting on them, going back and changing stuff in the early going so that it seeds what developed later.
We are all modern writers, all afflicted with too much seriousness aggravated by too little talent. I place a premium on ‘charm’, and also ‘grace’, both of which are mysteries in short supply these days, and install them wherever possible in my work. I keep wanting to write a really grim book. Doesn’t happen. Maybe I’m a real life music man, maybe I believe too much. Even the horrible things we do seem wonderful to me, somehow. That explains the ready employ of Jen’s horror stories — I have some sense of the terrifying grief of these grisly murders, beheadings, tortures, and yet their presence reminds me of what it is to be human, of the range of humanness. So in a peculiar way, every unspeakable act is a reassurance.
Apropos of nothing here (I promise to write a relevant post later)… thanks for the recommendation for the movie! I’ll put it into my Netflix queue. Have you read Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” or seen any of the few episodes of the short-lived TV show of the same name?
I probably should remind myself of some of these points more often when I’m trying to write dialog. Dialog, I find very difficult. Describing scenery, for example, is something you can do just about any old way without messing it up too much.
I realize my characters often sound too alike — or just like no one. I dislike conversations that are too naturalistically rambling, but then I probably err on the side of making them too short to be realistic. The worst thing of all is trying to come up with some “business” to identify who’s saying what and keep the sense of a live scene. I always have to go back and do a global search for nods and sighs and then there are still too many nods and sighs by far. I don’t actually nod or sigh that much. I don’t think most people do but fictional characters are forever nodding and sighing.
I’ve pretty much made a mental note, that the next project I undertake, paying more attention to the kind of dialog problems you mention will be top of my list.
I should note, when Mary and I started the Byzantine mysteries we decided we did not want our characters speaking in a modern idiom. We decided we would pretend as if their speech was being translated from the ancient languages they spoke, and by a rather stodgy translator, thus the dialog is purposely stilted. Or so we claim
My brain is buzzing with all these ideas. I really, really like your idea of stripping down the dialogue to the spoken words and analyzing and re-building from there. What a terrific process.
Sometimes the dialog move the plot forward, sometimes the narrative. From what I’ve read, you seem to have achieved a good balance between the two.
violetismycolor, I’m not positive yet that I can really do what I do. Well, I’m pretty sure, but it’s a continuous learning process. Thank you!
Dave, thank you for that quote from Barthelme. I have used a tape recorder now and then, and I find it helps quite a bit with this.
blogdog, no I haven’t read or seen that. Thanks for the tip!
Eric, making speech sound as if it was being translated makes sense to me. I’m struggling right now with exactly how to handle a character’s regional accent (a West Texas drawl). I want it to stand out, emphasizing his different background just a little, but not in such a way that it hinders readability. Requires some subtle tweaks.
Sarah, thanks! I’ll be very happy if anyone else finds that helpful.
I guess I’d better stick to writing blogs, and PowerPoint presentations.
Have a nice weekend.
Cas
Burying dialogue is only one of the comments that I’ve heard in connection to my writing. You have helped me to understand more about what that means and ways to avoid it. Do you have any suggestions of where I might find more information about that particular problem, including examples? It always helps me if I can see something done in both a wrong and right way. I stumbled on to your site by accident, but I am sure I will be back for more. I really appreciate your insight.
DC — Awareness of the problem is half the battle. The best way to learn is by reading examples. In fact I consider reading (both good and bad writing) the best teacher for a writer. It helps you see what works and what doesn’t. You can look at what I’ve written in Snow Angels or Shadows Fall, or any book you choose. There are also several books on writing that cover dialog. I found quite a few with a simple search at Amazon for “writing dialog“.
Another important way to improve your dialog writing skills is to listen to casual conversation. While fictional dialog shouldn’t necessarily contain all the flaws of spoken speech, it should have that feeling to it, of not being stilted or too formal. Also try reading what you write out loud to get an handle on how it sounds. If it doesn’t sound right to you, perhaps it needs work. Best wishes with your writing.
Barbara, thank you for your quick reply. I really appreciate it. I took a look at Snow Angels, and now I want to come back and read more. I think it’s great that you are offering others a chance to read your work. Thanks for the opportunity.