Character Dialogue
by Tim Edwards
As you will have read in the character building section, writing believable characters that readers can connect with is very important. The characters are the heart of your story, and getting them right is crucial. One part of characterisation that many people find difficult is character dialogue. Writers often talk about how tricky dialogue is to get correct, and how long they spend agonising over this part of their novel. Dialogue can be hard to get right, but with a few pointers and a lot of practice you will be well on your way!
Character Dialogue is Not Like Talking!
The first rule of character dialogue is that you shouldn’t write as you speak. When we talk we are generally making things up as we go along. Thus there is quite often a lot of pausing, umming and ahhing, and different people will have words that they fall back on to fill spaces, i.e. “like”, “you know” and so on. This sort of speech is not something that translates well to the written word! Dialogue is something that is carefully constructed in order to convey information to the reader. This might be plot developments, emotions and so on – and umming and ahhing definitely does nothing to advance the plot!
Choose Your Words Wisely
Readers will automatically connect more to thoughts and dialogue than the rest of the story. Therefore, what you have your characters say is what is going to stick in the minds of your readers. One of the most important things to remember when you are writing the dialogue is that it has to suit your characters. Have you ever read a book where a character says a line that leaves you shaking your head and thinking how out-of-character that was? This is what you want to avoid. You need to think about how to connect your character to the words that they are saying (try the exercise at the end of this article for help!).
What to Avoid
There are many, many traps that you can fall into when you are writing dialogue. Far too many to list, in fact! But there are some main pitfalls that you should know about so that you can work to avoid them:
• Rambling Dialogue – don’t allow your characters to waffle on and on - they are meant to be conversing, not delivering sermons or speeches! (Unless of course that is part of the story!)
• Out-of-Genre Dialogue – for example, if you are writing fantasy, don’t pepper your dialogue with modern speech or slang – it will seem out of place and pull your reader out of the story.
• Crying, Exclaiming and Hissing – when you are writing dialogue, don’t get caught in the trap of trying to replace the word “said”. Your readers won’t notice if you use “he said” and “she said” in every other line of dialogue – in fact, “said” has been argued to be an invisible word when it comes to literature. So, let your characters simply say things, they don’t need to “cry”, “exclaim” or “hiss” their dialogue!
When you are tackling the dialogue in your novel remember that it is something that will come to you in time. Like all writing, you just need to practice, practice, practice!
