Writing Lessons • Formatting Outlines and Manuscripts - Mar 7, 2006 • Third-Person Characters - Sep 28, 2004 • Copyrights - Apr 1, 2004 • Chapter Length - Apr 1, 2004 • Parallel Storylines - Oct 14, 2003 • A Conversation on Character - Oct 14, 2003 • Stories with Soul - Oct 13, 2003 • Naming Characters - Mar 5, 2003 • More in Naming Characters - Mar 5, 2003 • Starting a Short Story - 05 Mar 2003 • Writer's Block - 23 Sep 2002 • Classroom Writing Activities - 10 Apr 2002 • Background - How Much is Too Much - 14 Jan 2002 • Thought vs. Action - 19 Apr 2001 • Distractions from Writing - 15 Mar 2001 • Writing Spec Scripts - 15 Mar 2001 • Inventing Aliens - 15 Mar 2001 • Hot and Cold Third-Person - 15 Mar 2001 • Themes - 2 Aug 2000 • Point of View - 2 Aug 2000 • Your Inner Editor - Aug, 2 2000 • Digital Books - Aug, 2 2000 • Novel Length - Aug 2, 2000 • Plotlines and Ideas - Apr 26, 2000 • The "Maguffin" - Apr 26, 2000 • On Plagiarism, Borrowing, Resemblance, and Influence - Dec 20, 1999 • When is Conflict Good? - Oct 05, 1999 • Inventing Stories - Jan 29, 1999 • Do I need an agent? - Jan 29, 1999 • OSC Critique - Nov 17, 1998 • Beginnings - Oct 29, 1998 • Discussion of Dialogue and Style - Aug 14, 1998 • Does a Writing Career Always Mean Novels? - Jul 16, 1998 • On Rhetoric and Style - May 12, 1998

I personally think that one of your greatest strengths as a writer is dialogue. I would imagine it has something to do with your time spent writing plays, as those consist almost entirely of dialogue. But I also notice that many of your characters sound like you and your wife (at least as you are in public forums like Life, the Universe and Everything at BYU). How do you go about making your characters sound real when they talk? Do you try to use your own conversations as a model? How would you recommend a new writer learn about writing dialogue?

-- Submitted by Traci R. Klein

The Playwriting Connection

Playwriting is indeed a good practice for a writer of fiction, because you don't really understand your own scenes until actors perform them and you watch the audiences watch them. Without changing forms, however, you can get some of that effect simply by reading your own dialogue aloud -- or, better yet, making somebody else read your dialogue aloud and hearing how it sounds. When the reader stumbles over your dialogue or reads it incorrectly -- wrong emphasis, wrong intonation -- it's usually not bad reading, it's bad dialogue. Playwrights learn to "actor-proof" their dialogue (though in fact actors can always find hopelessly wrong readings of dialogue no matter how carefully and clearly the playwright sets it down); a fiction writer can also learn to "reader-proof" his dialogue, to some degree, at least.

Of course, it helps too if you actually pay attention to other people when they talk. Not that you write down their dialogue -- you're a writer, not a reporter. But you get a sense of the music, the word choice, the attitude. That becomes part of your tool chest.

As I said before, though, there's no escaping from your own style. Of course when I have a character speak wittily, he will be witty in precisely the way that I'm witty when I'm trying to be witty. I mean, the person thinking of the dialogue is always going to be me, right? So when I come up with dialogue, I'm "putting on" that character's attitude and improvising as that character -- but all the language is going to have to be my own, because mine is the mind it comes out of. You can make yourself insane trying to write something that doesn't sound like you, because you can't write anything that doesn't sound like you, unless you copy somebody else, and what's the point of that? So you just settle down, create characters, and have them say things the way you would say them if you were they. That's the only character differentiation that's really possible, but if you do it well enough, it's enough.