Blog Post #9 - Dialogue

Realistic dialogue is one of the most powerful tools at a writer's disposal. Done well, dialogue advances the story and fleshes out the characters while providing a break from straight exposition (telling rather than showing). It results in immediacy. The reader feels as if he/she is in the room and part of the situation. However, just as realistic dialogue is one of the most powerful tools at a writer's disposal, nothing pulls the reader out of a story faster than bad dialogue.You can find some examples of BAD dialogue HERE:

http://theeditorsblog.net/2011/11/03/bad-dialogue-bad-bad-dialogue/

You'll find, as you read the stories I've selected for the class, that famous writers avoid certain pitfalls when writing dialogue:

* They avoid stilted language. Instead, they write in natural speech patterns. What's a natural speech pattern?  Well, think about the things you say over the course of the day. Your statements are surprisingly short. You might also find that you rarely speak in complete sentences. When having a conversation, we rarely lapse into dramatic monologue, wherein we're speaking in paragraphs before someone responds.


Hint: you might need to tune your ear to the patterns of normal conversation. To do this, you certainly should study the dialogue you find in the short stories I've assigned, but you should also engage in a little spying or eavesdropping. Find a crowded place such as a restaurant, a bar, or a shopping mall and listen to the conversations you hear.

* They avoid Filler. They don't include any dialogue that does not further the plot and does not deepen your understanding of the characters
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* They don't use it to explain the plot or repeat information for the benefit of the audience.In some instances, backstory will be necessary to the plot of a story. However, dialogue isn't the best place to deliver that data.

*They don't use people's names in dialogue.  People almost never say other people’s names back to them.

*They don't use too many attributive tags  (e.g. shouted, exclaimed, cried, whispered, stammered, opined, insinuated, hedged, etc.). A good writer can express the tone of a conversation and the emotions behind it without having to resort to using attributive tags. It's all about precision of word choice.  If they use them, they usually keep them simple (e.g. said, told, asked, etc.), and they only add them when it's absolutely necessary.

Assignment: Write a short scene (let's say that, if it was a double-spaced, MLA-format document, it would be 1 1/2 to 2 pages long) in which one person is listening to two other people have an argument or discussion. There should be some sort of conflict or tension. For example, maybe you'll write about a child listening to her parents argue about money. Have the third character narrate the argument and explain what is going on, but have the other two provide the entire dialogue.Think of this as primarily a script. If you gave your writing assignment to a couple actors, those actors should be able to act out the that script primarily via conversation. Try to follow the rules of a good fiction dialogue that I've outlined above.

Notice how Raymond Carver's story, "Popular Mechanics," reads like a script with very little in the way of blocking. That is, we don't get tons of setting description. We don't get tons of physical description about appearance or action. Almost everything we know about the characters and the plot (particularly the conflict and it's climax or point of most tension) is delivered within one conversation.

You can see his story played out in cinematic form here: