Wooden Dialogue

You can try reading it aloud. It can be kind of embarassing, but really helps me to spot unwieldy turns of phrase.

I think one contributing factor to wooden dialogue is the use of too-formal words or phrases. Or not using enough contractions that occur in speech.

Another might be having someone speak in really long sentences that doesn't mimick the natural cadence of speech.

Ok, another one comes to mind: Having a character explain things the the reader that should be shown, not told through dialogue.

Try for shorter speeches, contractions and sentence fragments. Writing narrative and writing dialogue are two completely different animals. In real conversation, people often interrupt each other. Use interruption, too, as a means of duplicating real speech. And as been suggested, read it aloud, and if you find it's difficult to say, then you'll probably want to rewrite that sentence.

Don't be afraid of dialogue; I personally find it the most fun to write. How a character speaks, the rhythm of his/her speech, says volumes about who that character is.

As someone else, a friend maybe, to read it out loud. If it doesn't sound like real conversation, then your dialogue is no good. Even if your book is set in the past (18th century or something), it should still sound like real people are talking.

There are many good books on writing great dialogue. Also, observe how people talk -- go to coffee shops, malls, restaurants, dinner parties, etc. But remember, dialogue only simulates real speech. Still, it needs to sound real.

Make sure it is something the character would say. Make sure all interuptions are natural.

Example:
"What ab-" That is stupid. What-ab doesn't give the reader a good enough idea of what the person is about to say and thus why the interrupting character is interrupting.

Make sure they're aren't too many inturruptions. Use tags that follow the flow of the dialouge. Is the dialouge at least mildly interesting or has a point? Did you enjoy writting the dialouge? Dialouge I enjoy writting is the best because I feel what the characters are saying and why. If I am struggling through dialouge, it means I'm not in that character's zone at present.

Are you, as the author, satisfied with you're creations conversation. Can your beta reader understand what you want them too. Read it out load. Does it make you ashamed of yourself?

When I first started out in writing, I used a lot of dialogue tags and long, rambling sentences. A mentor of mine suggested I pick out some of my favorite dialogue scenes from novels and type them out.

What an eye-opener that was for me! I found that what made the best dialogue was shorter sentences, the use of contractions, and minimal use of dialogue tags.

Try that exercise and see if it works for you.

I also just sit and listen when I'm out in public. Coffee shops, restaurants, the grocery store... anywhere. You pick up on how people really talk. Then work on duplicating that in your writing.

Also, this might not work for everybody, but I actually visualize my character saying the dialogue before I type it. I put the character in the setting, I see who they're with, I visualize the surroundings, etc. It just seems to flow better for me that way. And always make sure the particular character would actually say what you've written them to say.

Cheryll

Like a lot of other people have said already: read it aloud. Also, listen to how other people talk to you. Make notes if you catch a turn of a phrase that you like. Contractions are useful too unless the character really doesn't speak that way.

A lot of good advice has already been given, but I think the best thing to do, personally, is to read the dialogue out loud like a couple other posters pointed out. If what you hear coming out of your mouth sounds unnatural or stinted or just plain unrealistic, it very well could be what you referred to as wooden dialogue.

Avoid using phonetic spellings of dialects, except in rare cases.

Watch out for speaker attribution. "Said" and "asked" should really be all you use.

Read Elmore Leonard novels. He's a master of dialogue and rhythm of speech. I highly recommend GET SHORTY, and his children's novel COYOTE IN THE HOUSE.

Here are some guidelines, which may help:

- In regular speech, people drop words and speak grammatically incorrectly.

- Listen to the rhythm of speech. Where do people pause? What do they stress? How can you mimic that on paper, using punctuation? Once you get the hang of this, you can selectively use dialogue tags as reader pauses for the same effect.

- People rarely stay still when they speak. Use beats to describe action while people are speaking.

- Don't use dialogue to convey information that all people involved in the conversation already know. This "as you know Bob" technique does not mimic real life, and is a cheat that savvy readers (and even many not-so-savvy ones) pick up on. Avoid this.

- Don't write huge monologues, unless you're writing a stageplay. People don't naturally speak in speeches. They tend to use short, choppy sentences.

- And yes...read it out loud. If your tongue automatically replaces words that are written, exchange those words on paper for what your mouth uses.

Loads of great advice already.
Will add that to learn dialogue you might -
Watch old movies heavy in dialogue not action.

Audio books rather than reading can help you train your ear so that when you read your work aloud you know what sounds right.

Each character should be distinct. Don't over use catch phrases or gimmicks but a few sprinkled in might help. Think in terms of speech patterns. Does your character speak in rushed rambling sentences? Or incomplete sentences? Do they interupt themselves?

Read a book on communication styles. It's often thought women tend to couch things (as I just did - it's often thought and tend instead of just saying: women couch meanings)

As others have said - listen. Listen. Listen.

annie
Luanne Jones
Heathen Girls (available now0

Judging by your posts, I'd say you have a decent knowledge of the grammar in the English Language. And you make good sense to me--I can't speak for the others, myself, because I'm not them. But if you're not confident in your abilities with the language you're writing in, might you have friends or maybe acquaintances who would know how dialogue would sound in the English Language? I was thinking if you could bounce some of the dialogue off of them, they might be able to critique the dialogue on its realism.

I don't know if this will work or not, but it's all I can think of at this particular time. I hope it helps you out.

text aloud

There's a program called Textaloud. Do a search for it, because I'm not going to plug a website on here. Nonetheless, you can download a demo for a month or something. Cut, then paste your text into the screen and it will read it back to you. I sit there at night, taking notes on all the little things I couldn't catch even if I read and reread my MS a hundred times. A suggestion. You might want to even buy the program and pay extra for the AT&T voices.

DamaNegra said:

So, how do you recognize wooden dialogue in your WIP? What are the most common signs that your dialogue is bad?

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splinters?

I know I'm jumping in here late but felt the urge.

I'm an avid people watcher. I enjoying scoping out folks in the stores, how they conduct themselves when none else is around and then straighten up when they know they're being watched. And then there's the conversations. You wouldn't believe how many people carry on a conversation that slightly reflects what the other person they're with is talking about. So many people have something to say and they more or less stomp over each other. I do hear people that genuinely pay attention to their partner, freind, check-out clerk but for the most part, the conversations or damned interesting.

If you listen to enougn people, friends and strangers, you can get a sense of how conversations flow. If you think back about the many you've held yourself, often the only thing that sticks is the point you were trying to make.

That's my little piece of advice.

IMHO, many of the great bits of dialogue in literature are not natural. Try recording an informal conversation and playing it back. What you get is a jumble of sentences, interruptions, and repititions. If you try to reproduce actual dialogue, it will fall flat.

What you should do is produce dialogue that seems natural, but actually is "filtered". Reading aloud is a good method. If it sounds good, bung it in!

nandu said:

IMHO, many of the great bits of dialogue in literature are not natural. Try recording an informal conversation and playing it back. What you get is a jumble of sentences, interruptions, and repititions. If you try to reproduce actual dialogue, it will fall flat.

What you should do is produce dialogue that seems natural, but actually is "filtered". Reading aloud is a good method. If it sounds good, bung it in!

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Bingo!

Back when I was studying to be a psychologist, we had to record our sessions with clients, then type them out. In Cognitive Behavioral Psychology, sessions are structured and orderly. With just me and the client in this structured environment, man was I shocked when I started typing up our conversations! I would ask a simple question and often get rambling answers that contained questions, rabbit trails, and way more words than were necessary to answer the question.

As Nandu pointed out, we must write dialogue that sounds natural but that is NOT natural--or the reader's head will spin and he'll end up throwing our book out the nearest window.

I'm a-thinkin' that if you find your dialogue feels wooden, it might be that you need to intersperse it with a little "showing." Observe:

"You stink," said Fred.
"I know I do," said Betty.

"You stink!" said Fred, turning away and waving a hand before his nose.
"I know I do, and I quite like it," said Betty, poking her nose into her armpit and inhaling deeply. "Ahhhhh!"

Especially with longer bits of dialogue, try bringing the reader into the head and body of the speaker or listener ("...as Larry carried on with his monologue, Letitia made her way to the open window. Grandma's beans and onions had kicked in and, wanting to maintain Larry's respect, she had no desire to fumigate him..."); let Reader see how the environment acts on the characters (Marty's giving the graduation speech at high school... "...and, as our Waldo Meade High's founder, Waldo Meade, once said..." A snicker followed by a loud cough floated up from the audience; Marty's classmates were anxious to get to Disneyland, but he had a message to give them and, doggone it, he'd give it to 'em!); and so on.

This is a serious case of thread necromancy, but here goes anyway:

What no one tells you about fictional dialog is that it should never be anything like real, spoken dialog. Nobody wants to read that, even if they claim they do. It's bad advice. I was once terrible at dialog as a result, but I think I've been improving.

One of my favorite tricks is to disallow characters in most situations from saying what they actually mean. Instead, they say something else that skirts close to or hints at their intended meaning, which can then lead to misinterpretations.

Another favorite trick of mine is to have characters almost always say the wittiest thing they could possibly say. Not witty from the perspective of the character, who may be the least witty person ever, but for the reader's benefit. This never works out in real life, where you have maybe a second at most to think up a response, but I have plenty of time to think up dialog.

Short sentences, fragments and contractions do help. But I see dialogue falling flat when the character who is being spoken to has nothing to react to.

This happens when exposition is placed in dialogue: "Oh my, just look at the autumn colors of the maple trees and the way the leaves are slowly falling."

It happens with as you know Bob dialogue: Mary, we've been married for six years. We haven't taken a vacation since our honeymoon in Cancun. We both work at stressful jobs and have two kids to look after."

The crux of it is that dialogue should enhance characterization and move the plot forward.

Part of the problem I see with wooden dialogue in SYW seems to come from the oft-heard advice "show, don't tell." New writers mistakenly think that packing exposition or backstory into dialogue isn't telling. But it is, and it's telling of the worst sort. Better to use interesting tell than turn our characters into sock puppets.

AndreaGS said:

You can try reading it aloud. It can be kind of embarassing, but really helps me to spot unwieldy turns of phrase.

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I agree with reading out loud! In my own editing process, I have caught silly little errors that went undetected even in my hard copy edit. You hear how the dialogue sounds as well.

Read it out loud! In my Writer's Group we get together every Friday night simply to read out loud what we're working on so we can determine if the dialogue sounds too forced, too formal, etc.