Publish and Be Damned

Firstly I’d like to fess up – I’m a lousy plot writer and you’ll never see a post here written by me about how to craft a good plot. But there are a couple of things I am good at, and one is writing dialogue.

A lot of writers have a terrible time writing dialogue and, unfortunately, if you are going to ‘show’ your story instead of ‘telling’ it, writing dialogue becomes an integral way to get information across to your readers in a natural way.

What I’d like to do is cover a number of basic issues with dialogue, and then lead you through a dialogue writing exercise that I was taught recently by the very lovely and talented Stella Duffy, at a literary erotica writing course I attended at Faber and Faber in London last year.

1. How do people really speak? Have you been listening?

Being a shameless eavesdropper, I’ve often bought coffee after coffee at a cafe just to sit next to people having a conversation. If you actually listen to the way people talk to each other, they seldom speak for very long. Most of their sentences are short and clipped, and sometimes incomplete and, if you weren’t listening from the beginning, you wouldn’t have a clue as to what they were talking about.

Man: Been waiting long?

Woman: ’bout five minutes.

Man: Is this line even moving? Feels like we’ve been standing here for hours.

Woman: She’s pretty slow, isn’t she?

Man: It’s like she’s telling her life story – to each of them.

Woman: *sighs*

Man: Are those the new Doritos? D’you like ‘em?

Without any speech tags, or actions, or explanation of any kind, you can probably tell that my characters are in a supermarket line-up. They almost never speak a complete sentence to each other – and this is the way real people talk. This is because they are doing it in the context of a time and a place and a specific situation. When you write dialogue, keep it short and natural

2. Rhythm: there’s a beat.

If you go somewhere crowded – somewhere where people are waiting or eating is good – and listen to people talk, you’ll start to notice there is a rhythm to the way they speak to each other – a sort of back and forth swing that feels real. How the rhythm moves can tell you a lot about the relationships between the people who are speaking. And you can often discern discomfort in one of the parties because either they dominate the conversation, or they hardly participate in it, either they give too much information or too little.

My characters in the supermarket line-up are strangers, but neither of them are unfriendly or unwilling to talk. However, she is not as comfortable having a conversation with a total stranger as he is. And, as his information becomes more specific, calling for personal opinions from her, she gets quiet. She’s giving him a subtle hint that she doesn’t know him well enough to discuss how the checkout attendant is behaving. He, feeling just slightly reprimanded, changes the subject and gets nosy about what is in her shopping cart.

3. How people say things tells you a lot about who they are.

English is an amazingly flexible language; there are many ways of saying the same things. Obviously accent and word choice can tell you about where someone is from, level of their education, their generation. But it can be even subtler: turning a statement into a question can infer that the speaker wants to engage the listener and keep the talk going. Short clipped answers can act as an invisible stop sign.

4. Tone and body language.

When we talk, we aren’t just exchanging words – we aren’t just speaking or listening. We talk with our eyes, our bodies and the tone and breath we put into our words can often carry more weight than the words themselves.

People who turn almost everything into a question are often insecure and looking for approbation. People who are nervous and trying to hide it will often either speak too rapidly and say too much, or say almost nothing and come off as arrogant.

Superficially, people who look directly into your eyes appear to want to engage, but please…go and watch people talk! Very seldom do people actually look directly and levelly into each other’s eyes unless they are very, very intimate or one is challenging and the other is defiant. Quite often people will look away from a face when they’re trying to remember something, or thinking about what they will say.

However, don’t turn people into caricatures. You’re not writing comedy, so be careful when writing extremes.

5. Speech tags and dialogue punctuation.

A speech tag is the little phrase you tack on before or after a line of dialogue to let the reader know who did the speaking. Some writers say that the only legitimate speech tag is ‘said’, as in ‘”Good morning,” he said.’ I don’t hold to this. I think any verb that infers sound is a perfectly legitimate speech tag:

“Fuck you!” she shouted.

“I give up,” he murmured.

“Thank god!” the taxi driver whispered.

But I have to warn you, this is controversial and there is no absolute rule. However, if you use speech tags sensibly, and make sure the reader isn’t confused about what you mean, you should be fine.

Nonetheless, never use a speech tag you don’t need. If it is obvious who is talking, then don’t use one, because speech tags do push readers out of the flow of the dialogue a little.

“Damn, your breasts are big.” “Don’t you like big breasts” “I do, I love them. They make my cock instantly hard.” “Would you like to touch them?” “Oh, um… yes. Yes, I would.” “How’s your cock.” “Hard.”

“Damn, your breasts are big,” he said. She smiled. “Don’t you like big breasts?” she teased. “I do, I love them. They make my cock instantly hard,” he whispered Unbuttoning her blouse and exposing her overflowing DD cups, she invited: “Would you like to touch them?” Mesmerized, he stared at her enormous tits, then planted his open palms on the swells. “Oh, um… yes. Yes, I would,” he said “How’s your cock?” she asked. “Hard,” he panted.

There are only two people in the scene here – a man and a woman. With the first line, we know who’s talking – the one who doesn’t own a pair of breasts. There is no need for a single speech tag in this dialogue as it is perfectly clear who is saying what to whom. In fact, you don’t need most of the surrounding descriptive language either. What is being said, and the way it is being said, makes everything pretty obvious.

At this point what I’d like you to notice is how dialogue with speech tags is punctuated: if you are going to use an attribution (he said, she gasped), then the end of the dialogue inside the quotes should be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation mark – never a period. Beyond the closing quote tag, the attribution should NOT be capitalized unless it is a proper name or I.

“You bite too hard,” I said.

“You’re only after my Ferarri!” he shouted.

“When is the next train to Paris,” asked Anne.

“This food sucks,” Bert muttered.

For a more in-depth look at the rules of punctuation for dialogue, read this: http://www.glencoe.com/sec/writerschoice/rws/mslessons/grade6/lesson30/index.shtml

6. Ready to try your hand at writing some dialogue?

a) Take a couple of sheets of lined paper. You’re going to write some dialogue between two characters. Imagine there is a camera that is capturing the two of them from the shoulders up – like a head and shoulders shot. It doesn’t really matter who the characters are, but don’t make them extraordinary. Try and make one of the characters almost the exact opposite of you.

b) Take three minutes to: write 9 lines of dialogue, one after the other – a back and forth exchange between two people. Leave space (3 or 4 blank lines between each line of dialogue). Don’t write any speech tags or descriptions of anything – just the words they say to each other. Make is a mundane as you like. Keep it short and snappy. (Three minutes? How can I write anything good in three minutes, you ask? That’s the whole point – don’t write anything good. Just write things two people might say to each other.)

c) Take three minutes to: describe their immediate surroundings. Make up a setting – a bank, a bus stop, a kitchen. Here and there, sprinkle a few descriptions of ambient noise, the quality of light, ambient temperature, smell. You might want to write the first statement of the setting before the first line of dialogue, but scatter the other bits here and there in the gaps. Just three or four lines – don’t fill up all the gaps. 3 Minutes!

c) Take three minutes to: find three or four places in the dialogue to describe some physical action for each of the speakers – i.e. she wrinkled her nose, he kicked the tire. And one place where one character touches, or tries to touch the other. 3 Minutes!

d) Now, this is the hard part imagine you’re the camera again, but now you’re on a dolly… pull out to reveal the two characters and their talk in a larger context. Make it crazy, strange, silly, wild – the stranger you ‘reveal’ the more ironic and interesting the dialogue is going to seem in context. Take three minutes.

If you do this exercise and enjoy it, please feel free to post the results in the comments area, if you want. Or tell me how it went for you. Sometimes the first time you do it, you’re a little nervous and too worried about writing well, but don’t sweat it. Now that you know how the exercise works, try it again and have more fun with it.

February 2nd, 2010 | Remittance Girl | Tips & Tricks | 8 Comments »