Tracy
 

The secret is, ultimately, ear. You need to have an ear for the smooth flow of conversation, and impart the absolute minimums to your writing. Key principles? Avoid idiotic plot dumps. Focus on actually allowing two characters to interact. Use their words concisely and precisely. You shoudld be able to point to any one word and say, confidentially, this should be there.
 

Remember not everyone talks like you do, so throw in some variety.

Cadence is important, if you have a good cadence and you suddenly break it you get one of two things; a confused reader or a sudden punctuation to a ending though.

Don't over do foreign accents, especially if you don’t know such accent first hand.

Keep true to your character’s personality. If they make statements that don’t flow with their persona, for me that ruins a good dialog, more than anything.

 

Dialog is supposed to be words people say, but I'm surprised at how some authors seem to forget this and write things that no one could or would say, or write things in a way that makes them very challenging to say. It's an easy trick, just read it aloud. See if it sounds right. If there are long dialog passages, see if you can get a partner to read with you, you'll get a better sense for the flow and you've got an automatic critique right there with someone who has heard your words firsthand!

I have also started jotting down bits and pieces of dialog I've heard elsewhere or things I have heard people say in the notebook I carry with me, just to have some more ideas to start from when I get stuck.

Good luck! This is something I find hard too, FWIW.
Karen

[This message has been edited by KayTi (edited March 14, 2007).]
 

There are a lot of ways to write dialog. As with any other part of writing, you'll have to come up with your own style. It's good to give the characters different voices and mannerisms, but even in that there will be different approaches. And if all your characters belong to certain groups then they really will sound alike. (A sorority house comes to mind, for some reason.)

One great debate in dialog writing is dialectical vs. non-dialectical writing. I fall firmly on the non-dialectical side. "Ah fin' it annoyin' tah hafta read dis."

Keep in mind that while dialog should be realistic, it will usually not exactly reflect reality in a number of ways: You tend to clean up the stammers and the ah-ah's (unless it's important to the character), you tend not to exactly replicate speech patterns, and often what is said serves a purpose other than to directly mirror what a real person might say in that situation. This isn't to say that you can do, "As you know, John." style dialog. I tried to word it carefully to mean this -- dialog serves a purpose other than just to hear a character talk and talk realistically. It must move the plot or characters forward in some meaningful way.

The best way to learn to write dialog is to write it and see what people think. The bottom line about dialog, as with all other aspects of fiction writing, is that you are trying to evoke something in the reader.
 

Read the chapter on "beats." Then try your dialog, again.
 

One of the things that drew me to OSC's books was how tight his dialog is, how "real life" it comes across. I loved Harper Lee for the same reason. Study the masters--authors who write compelling dialog.

[This message has been edited by Elan (edited March 14, 2007).]
 

Break the dialog not just with attribution tags but other actions or events.

Be sure we know where we are.

Clear POV.

quote:

---

John came into Mary's office. "I'm going to hit you with this brick," he said. He knew she'd be angry, but...only yesterday she'd given him a wedgie. Did she really think she could get away with that?

"Can this wait?" Mary said. "I'm working." She turned back to the phone. "Right. Extra pepperoni, and don't let the cheese slosh off like last time or I'm not paying. Got it? OK."

"Ordering pizza is working?" John said.

"It is when you've got 25 screaming kids coming in to see a dog show, and the dogs are on strike. Now, what did you want to talk to me about? And make it quick."

"Nothing," he said. Mary could be a real pain, but...she sure could order pizza.

---

[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited March 15, 2007).]
 

Don't use a smile in the place of a dialog tag.
 

Is this common, and I haven't noticed it? To me, I look at what the action does for the character or the story. Many of these didn't seem to further anything; they just seemed to fill space. It seems to me this can be just as useless as trying to replace said with "commented" or "noted". It seems to go right along with the said-isms.

Am I right that this is unnecessary? Or should my text do more of that sort of thing?

 

Matt
 

Ideally the body movements would be body language and the action would naturally progress the story.

However Dialog needs to be careful not to run in too long of strings without interspersed action. He said, she said, he said, she said....gets tedious. But make sure the action is the action of the story and not just something thrown in there to break up the dialog.
 

What I have learned -- my opinion, of course -- is that those "body movements" within a run of dialog are usually not there so much to break up the dialog or change pace but are actually non-verbal responses.

"You knew already, before she bought the gun?" Sean asked.
John shrugged.
"Then," Sean said, "why in hexx didn't you stop her when you could?"

A cheesy example, but do you see what I mean? A lot of times in conversations some responses are non-verbal.
 

"You shot her!" said Joey. He had chewed his fingernails down to nubs and worked his teeth into the surrounding skin. "What are we going to do, Nick?"

"Clamp your teeth together and help me lug the body." Nick kept shifting his weight from one foot to another. He clenched an unclenched his fist.

As he bent down to grab Stephanie's shoulders, Joey spit out the hunk of callused skin he was squishing between his teeth. "Calm down, Nick, she's already dead."

Nick hefted her by the legs. He huffed, shifted his weight a couple of times, and said, "I'm going to be carrying you next, if you don't shut up!"

[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 16, 2007).]
 

Don’t be afraid of the dreaded fragment. Very few people speak in full grammatically correct sentences. Most responses are fragments. A direct inquiry to a character is usually a full sentence

 

Liked spitting out the calloused skin, though.

Matt
 

Okay, if it's annoying, it should at least be interesting. Make him gnaw on his armpit hair or something.