Writing A Novel - Dialogue

Writing good dialogue is a tricky business. Even though we spend most of our waking hours listening to and participating in the act, the art of capturing it for the page is not as easy as one would suspect. If we write dialogue exactly as we hear it, we are likely to bore our readers right off the page, however, if we don't pay attention to the reality of dialogue, then our characters will be two-dimensional and lacking voice. In the end, we have to fall somewhere in between keeping a delicate balance throughout our novels.

Listening To Dialogue

To fully engage readers, dialogue has to fall somewhere in between realistic and entertaining. Adding in every hesitation, "um" or staggering thought a person utters while engaged in a conversation will easily get distracting and dull for a reader. In their article How To Write Dialogue That Works, Creative Writing Now presents a perfect example of how a fictional phone conversation ends versus a real one:

Something I've noticed in TV shows and movies is that people hang up on each other a lot.
"I think the police are onto Scotty."
"I'll take care of it."
Click.

I don't know about you, but my phone calls tend to end more like this:
"I think the police are onto Scotty."
"I'll take care of it."
"You will? Great."
"Yeah, well, I'll try."
"Okay, great, thanks a lot. Appreciate it."
"Anyway, I should get back to making dinner."
"Okay, then, talk to you later. And good luck with the police."
"Thanks, I'll need it. All right. Got to go."
"See you."
"Right, on Saturday."
"That's right. We'll be there at six."
"Okay, see you then."
"Hm..."
"What's that?" [...]

Let me stop there before you stop reading my blog! I personally cracked up when I read this article, because I had just got off the phone with my best friend, and our farewell was oddly similar. The fact is, our real conversations have so much nonsense in them that isn't necessary.

So what do we listen for when we are listening to dialogue for realism?

David Corbett, author of Devil's Redhead (New Blood) and Done for a Dime wrote a guest post for The Bookshelf Muse today that answers that very question. He offers up five different characteristics of real dialogue that can safely included in written dialogue without fear of boring our readers, They are:

1. Giving unsolicited advice.
2. Topping the other person’s story.
3. Finishing the other character’s sentences.
4. Interpreting what the other character is saying.
5. Asking a question, then not listening to the answer.

Hop on over to The Bookshelf Muse to read the entire article, called Communication Breakdown, to read the full power of each of these characteristics in defining both your character and his/her voice.

Reading Dialogue

After grabbing the tools from real dialogue that are appropriate for your prose, the next step is to see how to fictionalize dialogue to be pleasing to your readers.  Think back to Creative Writing Now's TV dialogue example:

"I think the police are onto Scotty."
"I'll take care of it."
Click. 

It's short, to the point, and moves the story forward. Now we know that the police has figured out Scotty's scheme. It's going to be taken care of; the drama is about to begin! Of course, since this is TV dialogue and not from a novel, there is a glaring omission. Who said these things? it is in reading dialogue that we learn about the importance of dialogue tags.

Dialogue tags are a tricky business. After reading Stephen King's On Writing , quite frankly I was terrified of them. In the first pages of my first draft of Dear 302, I had a half-page long conversation that looked exactly like the TV conversation above - there were no dialogue tags! Bad idalogue tags King warned me about (page 126 of On Writing):

• Swifties (named for Tom Swift) adding adverbs for description, like "Tom cried bravely"
• Shooting the verb attribution full of steroids like "Jekyll grated", "Shayna gasped", and "Bill jerked out"

 Creative Writing Now adds to the list of dialogue tag don'ts, with these gems:

• Don't get too colorful with the dialogue tags.
• Don't feel obligated to add a tag to every bit of dialogue.
• Don't let your reader get disoriented.

After all this it almost feels like all you can do is write tag-less dialogue! So what's left? He said, she said, Joe said and Mary said are really not as boring as they sound when placed into your writing. They are clear, to the point and, above all, not distracting to your reader.

The Continuing Conversation on Dialogue

There is so much to talk about dialogue, I could probably complete and entire A to Z Challenge with Dialogue as its theme. For now, I will end off with these tips and send you over to David Corbett's article on The Bookshelf Muse as well as Creative Writing Now's two articles on dialogue, How to Write Dialogue That Works and More On Writing Dialogue for a deeper education on the topic.

thanks for reading!

Do you have any tips or "dos" and "don'ts" for writing dialogue?

How about further references to learn about writing dialogue? 

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UPDATE: Here are a couple more resources for writing dialogue that I forgot to add into the article:

• A NaNoWriMo Worksheet on Writing Dialogue (includes a list of "Tags Other Than 'Said'")
• Top 8 Tips on Writing Dialogue from About.com's Fiction Writing