Exercise Your InkTank
That’s What You Say
There’s a specific and ripe power in dialogue that can’t be matched by other levels of discourse in storytelling. In short, it’s sublime. Its delivery is pure and immediate, or at least it can be. When dialogue is working well, the barriers between our readers and our characters can seem to vanish. The marks on the page fall away and readers believe they’re witnessing people using their voices in the world—they hear the words spoken. It’s a powerful tool we’re dealing with here.
Readers look to dialogue to gain an unfiltered understanding of who characters are. Rather than trusting a narrator’s or another character’s estimation of a character, readers can see for themselves how that character responds in conversation. When readers sense the writer behind the dialogue, it fails. And it can fail massively. We’re going to work on ways to avoid that today.
Every direct utterance in a story is an opportunity to do at least two jobs. Dialogue should always work on the level of character development. (After all, the things people say and the way they phrase them can tell you a lot about them.) But it can also raise and lower tension, move the plot, and add significantly to the verisimilitude of the storytelling. Although dialogue can be used to reveal information successfully, informational dialogue is the kiss of death. Please oh please do not use dialogue to establish the setting or the detailed histories between characters—it’s so embarrassing. And try to get out of the way of your dialogue. Use tags that disappear, like “he said” and “she said.” Interrupt when you need to create pauses in conversation or to move someone around, but not because you want to explain how the reader should interpret something.
My sense is that dialogue should be used sparingly. It should come in when it can do more than one job and it should come in when it can do those jobs better than any other kinds of discourse in the story. Cut out words and phrases that aren’t absolutely necessary to create the tone and timbre of the exchanges you’re aiming to create. Think about the way people actually talk and then try to concentrate and streamline the speech. The first step in learning to write good dialogue is learning to listen. Remember, though, that dialogue isn’t transcribed speech; it’s storytelling that works to render the illusion of direct discourse. We’ll make this craftshop topic a two part deal. Here’s part one:
Listen to Me
Let’s partner up. I’ll give you simple directives with which to stage a conversation. This isn’t acting, exactly. (Try to restrain your inner hams.) It’s an experiment in real speech. After you have your conversation, write it down to the best of your memory. From there, try to create dialogue.
