Character Dialogue

What do people in real life who are similar to the characters talk about in similar situations?

What one or more characters have to know or find out - in terms of advancing the story - determines what they talk about.

If they have nothing to talk about - keep their mouths shut.

That's a good question. I sometimes get stuck on dialogue. It should have a natural flow rather than being contrived. On the other hand, I sometimes feel challenged when each time my characters open their mouths, it's to speak about the heart of the matter. I just want to plunge right into the nitty gritty. So the issue for me is intensity level. In terms of narrative flow, the wrong level can detract from the tale. In certain places, light banter may be a more effective device. I think your determining factor is what dialogue level will enhance the tale at a certain point. Will your content level add to it's force or lessen it by dragging the reader under? Sometimes, less is best too. It is a matter of balance.

Good luck

You can do a lot with dialogue. There are so many dynamics to it that you can advance the story, add humor, add drama, interrupt people.
You ever go to a party or you're just with a bunch of friends and someone begins talking about one thing and before anyone discusses that topic they're off on some other thing. You can do this, If you do it right and still advance the story you can demonstrate the friendship of these people at the same time by their inability to stay on topic and still be comfortable in a running conversation.
Dialogue is a lot of fun to play with.

DwayneA said:

When characters are engaged in conversation, exactly what are they supposed to say and what determines it?

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What do the characters want or need to talk about?

Do they need to learn something?

Do they need to pass on information?

Are they discussing something interesting?

Are they getting to know each other?

Are they having an argument?

Or what? You get to decide, you're the writer.

Pick a random page from a novel or short story and just read the dialogue. What are the characters saying? Why are they saying it? Help yourself to understand by analyzing the purpose of their dialogue.

-Derek

DwayneA said:

But how do I make the dialogue for each character so that it's "in character"?

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This loops around, again, to what does each character want?

What are their motivations, their goals?

They may not want to talk about these directly. But they might want to steer the conversation in a particular direction that suits them.

You need to understand your characters' wants before you can guess what they're going to say.

-Derek

That's a good point. When I write, I usually have a 'sense' of who my character is. This makes it easier for the dialogue and the manner in which it is communicated to come out. For example, a middle-aged, working class, single man immediately speaks to me. I get a visual. i get an idea of what his tastes may be. I get an idea of what sort of topics of conversation he may indulge in (the footy, say). I can imagine the sort of dialogue he may use as well. It would probably involve some slang and misuse of grammar, to put an accent - an edge on just who this man is, after a hard day's work. All these factors serve to locate him demographically. How do you know what he should be talking about? Would he be interested in the Wall Street SE? Ask yourself what is reasonable.

hope this helps

DwayneA said:

is it what they want at the moment or what they want more than anything?

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People don't usually tell other people what they want more than anything. Sometimes they keep secrets. Sometimes they talk about something else to hide what they're really thinking. Sometimes they bend the truth, or exaggerate. Sometimes they lie.

-Derek

If your character's been burned in a fire, then she might have trouble talking about it. Others could try and bring the subject up, but she'd steer the conversation in another direction.

The character who lost her parents might talk about them to a friend.

There's usually dialogue in most scenes and what the characters need to say is going to depend on the scene at hand. It can be a complex break-down where someone is blamed for someone else's troubles, or a light comment or two about what a character chose to wear to give insight into her personality.

That's interesting, too. Maybe you have characters that are chatty, gossipy. Maybe you have some that are very quiet, but when they do speak it comes as a surprise to the reader.
There are as many ways to do dialogue as there are people who speak.

If you really want to concentrate on learning how to use dialogue to advance a story, reading a lot of plays and screenplays might help, since dialogue is all they have to work with.

If you really want to concentrate on learning how people speak naturally, you could do worse than recording and transcribing actual conversations. It's really tedious, but if you've never done it, you can learn a lot.

One thing I've been told and always believed was that stories are not like real life, thus dialog is not like real conversation.

Real life is chaotic, without order, contains handfuls of mundane between real movement. Things happen without reason. For the most part, I think fiction readers aren't interested in that kind of transcription; they have their own lives to live like that.

Same with conversation. It gets clunky and mundane. A lot of informal speaking isn't as effective once it ends up on a page. Here's my example:

"Um, like, Jerry totally said he would come over. Did he call you?"

"What?"

"Did Jerry call you?"

"Oh. No. But I talked to him earlier."

"Did he mention he'd be late? or anything? I'm worried. Ralph, can you get the roast out of the oven? I think it's done."

"No. , he didn't mention anything about being late. Hold that thought, I have to take a whiz ."

You have to be aware of what you want out of this scene. In my imagination, Jerry has been in a car accident. You want the reader to focus on the uncertainty of where he is, and thus have some tension. The other crap detracts from that.

I probably did a bad job of building tension anyhow, but, hopefully I got the idea across somewhat. Otherwise I'm just rambling...

I'm a HUGE movie fan. A lot of times I'll take a character from a favorite movie, print out a picture (or use the DVD inserts) and hang it near my computer. This helps me literally "hear" the inflections, tone, word choices, etc. of this particular character to the point where the dialogue often write's itself for me.

This isn't to say one should plaigarize the screenplay though! I choose based on similarities between my characters. For instance, in one of my books, the ex-boxer turned bodyguard is based on Vin Diesel's character in The Fast and the Furious. Drawing from the timber of his voice, his mannerisms, etc. to flesh out a hero with a similar background helped me immensely at a time when I was still shaky on writing the male point-of-view. Yet reading the book, no one would be able to tell I had done that.

Does that make sense?

Ultimately, studying the way people talk and how other authors have written dialogue will help a ton. Another quick example: I once struggled on how to create smooth dialogue between 3+ people. I believe it was a Dean Koontz (maybe Tom Clancy, can't recall now) where I read a multiple character situation and he used the construction:

To Jane, Mike said, "How did you..."

That "To Jane," helped immensely. It was quick, it disappeared from the dialogue the same way that he/she said does and it solved the issue of how to direct the dialogue without resorting to the character speaking the name of the person they were addressing in every line--which doesn't happen in dialogue and sounds odd on the page.

Hope that helps!
Warmly,
Jenny

Dialogue between characters is never gratuitous. IMO it does one, or more, of three things:

It moves the story foreword
It sprinkles in backstory
It asks/answers story/chapter/scene questions

For me, writing dialogue has always come easy. It’s some of the other components I continually struggle with.

Listen to the way people talk to each other, then write like they speak.

Two things I disagree with:

smoothseas said:

Dialogue between characters is never gratuitous.

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It shouldn't be, perhaps, but often is, especially when it's on the nose or of the "As you know, Bob," sort.

smoothseas said:

Listen to the way people talk to each other, then write like they speak.

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This is exactly what one shouldn't do. Dialogue shouldn't be like real speech; it should represent it. Real speech is boring as hell to listen to.

My favourite good quote from a bad writer: "A novel is a monumental lie that should have the absolute ring of truth."

Verisimilitude is key here. Not veracity.

scarletpeaches said:

This is exactly what one shouldn't do. Dialogue shouldn't be like real speech; it should represent it. Real speech is boring as hell to listen to.

My favourite good quote from a bad writer: "A novel is a monumental lie that should have the absolute ring of truth."

Verisimilitude is key here. Not veracity.

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*cuts the "V" section out of SP's dictionary.*

A dictionary is the one book I don't have; I use words on AW that I use in real life.

Which perhaps proves my point that you shouldn't necessarily write the way people really speak.

DwayneA said:

When characters are engaged in conversation, exactly what are they supposed to say and what determines it?

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With every scene, including dialogue, you have to determine if it:

a) advance the plot
b) develops the characters (and relationships)
or
c) deepens the themes


Not every dialogue needs to be written out. If the characters are just chitchatting or talking about the weather, then don't write out the dialogue. Summarize it.

Good dialogue:

a) reveals information (without doing the "as you know, Bob" info dumps)
b) advances the plot (something we don't know already... or the dialogue leads to action or consequences, etc. etc.)
c) reveals more about the characters and their relationships (that's when even mundane dialogue could be very telling)
d) sounds real without being verbatum (no fillers such as ums, ehs, ohs, ahs, likes... unless you're trying to build a character -- for example, one of my characters like to say, "you know.... blah blah blah, you know?")


Verisimilitude is what we're aiming for. And it should serve one of the aforementioned purposes. If it's just random chitchats, etc. then, again, summarize the conversation instead.

It sprinkles in backstory

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It should be done as "transparently" as possible. If done well, it could be very revealing, especially when it also reveals the characters (how they say things, what they don't say, etc.). But don't do the "as you know, Bob" type of backstories.

Also, pay attention to silence, subtexts, and things people don't say. They can be as powerful as what is actually being said.

smoothseas said:

Listen to the way people talk to each other, then write like they speak.

Click to expand...

scarletpeaches said:

This is exactly what one shouldn't do. Dialogue shouldn't be like real speech; it should represent it. Real speech is boring as hell to listen to.

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And believe me, after transcribing a few hours of it, you will know that in your bones. That was really my intended point.

My major was linguistics, and I had one project where I had to map a half-hour of a four-party conversation onto a precise timeline, so that we could study the interruptions and overlaps in speaking, and the way the conversational turn-taking was negotiated. Oh. Dear. God.

But having said that...

The Lonely One said:

One thing I've been told and always believed was that stories are not like real life, thus dialog is not like real conversation.

Real life is chaotic, without order, contains handfuls of mundane between real movement. Things happen without reason. For the most part, I think fiction readers aren't interested in that kind of transcription; they have their own lives to live like that.

Same with conversation. It gets clunky and mundane. A lot of informal speaking isn't as effective once it ends up on a page.

Click to expand...

You would never want to depict dialog *exactly* like conversation. But if you pay attention to how real conversation works, you can add in elements -- not scads, just a few -- to make your conversation seem to the reader that it is very naturalistic, even though in reality it is just as stylized, just stylized differently than the the norm.

Most of the things that I do have to do with finding ways to convey speech rhythm and flow without overusing blunt instruments like ellipses or italics.

So I do use a lot of placeholder words to signal pauses and for, you know, emphasis.

"Or," she said, "you can do the same thing with the precise placement of dialog tags."

Sometimes a slight stammer can, can signal indecision. Or distress.

And if -- well, I find a false start can reveal a lot of things. Indecision followed by decisiveness, perhaps. Or the real speaker's real focus, followed by a phrasing that is more deceptive or, well, delicate.

I used to have a few other things that I did, but I've dropped them, mostly, because they were too much. And not as effective.

You wouldn't want to do things like that constantly. Maybe twice a page. Maybe a touch more in a pivotal scene. It takes practice and a good ear to get it right. Practice, you get by writing. A good ear? By listening (or reading) to the type of speech you want to portray.

scarletpeaches said:

Verisimilitude is key here. Not veracity.

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QFE, because this is the most important thing I ever learned about writing.

But then, I would say that verisimilitude consists of the strategic deployment of veracity. If you know nothing about truth, it's awfully hard to mimic it effectively.

I totally agree with the opinion that character dialogue in fiction should NOT be exactly like real conversation.

Think about it this way: dialogue in fiction = dialogue in real life minus the boring parts.

To use a (not very apt) analogy, dialogue in fiction is just like life as portrayed in fiction. Fiction should try to be true to life, but you never show people going to the toilet. Similarly, in dialogue, you never have your characters make meaningless digressions, say a lot of "um"s and "ah"s, or chit-chat about things that are boring to the reader.

Think of those as the dialogue equivalent of describing someone going to the toilet. They're boring. They're unnecessary.