Image by geralt via Pixabay
We love our conversations. In-person, on-screen, on-page. Dialogue is one of the most essential components of a novel. Even if the descriptions are stunning and the world-building is mind-blowing, weak dialogue can do in an otherwise well-written novel. Clearly, it’s worth a writer’s time to nail this aspect of their craft. But how?
That’s the million-dollar question, and I don’t have a quick and easy answer. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve and general advice to give, but before we dive into that, let’s talk about the mechanics.
Mechanics
I know this sounds tedious, but if your dialogue is formatted oddly or you forgo the conventions, you look like a novice. You can always feel free to go against the grain, but it’s safer and easier to learn the basic rules and apply them. At least to begin with.
I prefer to learn (and teach) by example, so let’s use an example to illustrate the correct mechanics for dialogue in a novel. Here is an excerpt from Neuromancer by William Gibson:
“I saw your girl last night,” Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.
“I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.
“Miss Linda Lee.”
Case shook his head.
“No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?” The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”
The dialogue is indented (on the novel page but not done so here), starts with a quotation mark, ends with punctuation inside the closing quotation mark, and can be followed by a tag if the writer chooses.
Tags
What is a tag? Just like it sounds (sort of). It’s the text related to the dialogue that is not a part of the spoken word.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said.
In this example, the bold text is the tag.
Tip #1: Tags are best placed at the first natural break in the dialogue. What does that mean? Read the dialogue out loud, and your first pause gives you the natural break.
Tip #2: Avoid putting the tag before the dialogue. It takes the reader out of the moment and reminds them they are reading rather than experiencing your writing.
On the topic of tags, “said” is perfectly fine. Some people might tell you to vary your tags to make your writing more interesting, but this is a personal preference. In my opinion, less is more. Save the spice for the parts of your writing that could benefit the most from it. Nothing is more distracting to me (as a reader) than when a writer overdoes their tags.
You could of course go the other way completely and forgo tags a la Hemingway. I wouldn’t recommend it though. I get annoyed when I’m reading and have to backtrack to figure out who is saying what.
Tip #3: Use tags as needed to establish who is speaking. If it’s clear from the sequence and/or the content of what is being said, leave off the tag. If there is any ambiguity, include it.
Okay, back to the mechanics. Notice that every line of dialogue is preceded by a line break and an indentation. Every time the speaker changes, the text should occur on a new line. This is the convention that readers expect. Fiddle with it at your own risk. So what happens when one speaker goes on a bit of a monologue that stretches into multiple paragraphs? In that case, you simply drop the closing quotation mark.
Here’s an example from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:
“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.
“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place – then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement – and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
That’s it. Those are the rules. At least the ones I adhere to. Now, on to my general advice.
Best Practices
How much dialogue is too much? How little is too little? This depends on your story, genre, and writing style. I, personally, love dialogue. I joke that I should write screenplays because I find myself trying to skip ahead in my writing to the back-and-forth between characters.
The one suggestion I will give is to balance out your writing. Avoid large blocks of anything. Too much description of a scene is boring (hi Tolkien!), too much exposition is bland, too much action loses its power and urgency, and too much dialogue pulls the reader out of the scene. Ideally, you want to do all of these in equal measure within reason. Action doesn’t have to be a fight scene. It just means something is physically happening. A character is standing from their chair or pacing the room. They are interacting with the environment (using the five senses) to remind the reader of the setting.
If you know you will have a long conservation, think about how you can mix it up. Does all of the dialogue need to be conveyed word-by-word? Could you summarize it? Could some of the information be conveyed non-verbally by expressions or actions? The last trick is to keep your long chunk of dialogue but break it up on the page. This is an art and can be tough to pull off at times, but just peppering the dialogue with a sentence here and there that lets the reader see the setting or peer into the characters’ thoughts goes a long way.
My Best Hack
This information is all very well and good, but mechanics and best practices alone don’t make realistic dialogue. What’s the trick? The best advice I have is to soak in dialogue and pay attention to what makes it good or bad. This can be in any medium (books, movies, video games). When do you find yourself getting distracted by poorly written dialogue? What about it keys you in to the “wrongness” of it? I don’t have answers for you because it’s just a kind of feeling for me.
But I do have one hack. When you’re trying to write a scene with dialogue, act it out yourself. This can help you see what flow makes sense or feels too forced. It can also show you what phrasing just sounds unnatural. You might even consider recording yourself to hear it on playback. I use the voice-to-text feature in the Notes app on my iPhone. That way, if I have some decent dialogue to work from, I can just email the file to myself and copy+paste it into my Word document. This saves me a huge amount of work. Simple and efficient!
What do you think of my suggestions? Do you have any other ones to share? Let me know in a comment.
Leave a Reply