5 Easy Tricks To Elevate Your Dialogue
Dialogue is tricky.
In fact it’s one of the most difficult parts of writing fiction, especially for beginners. There’s something about writing dialogue that makes you feel exposed and vulnerable. We spend a lot of our lives talking and listening to others, so we know what authentic speech sounds like. When dialogue is written poorly we immediately sense that something is off, even if we can’t put our finger on it.*Like that creepy kid in Polar Express.
Entire books have been written about creating believable dialogue, but you didn’t come here to read an entire book. With that in mind, here are “5 Easy Tricks To Elevates Your Dialogue”™.
Goldilocks language
Chances are you’ve heard the tale of Goldilocks, the cute-as-a-button home invader. She breaks into the house of three bears and steals their porridge. The first bowl is too hot, the second bowl is too cold, but the third bowl is just right.
Your dialogue needs to be like that third bowl of porridge. It must sit in the sweet spot between sounding too perfect, and sounding too real.
Here’s a wonderful bit of 90s nostalgia: A Closer Look with Dawn Funkangelo. It’s about teenage girls pursuing boys instead of the other way around.
At the three-minute mark*Honestly just watch the whole thing. It's magic., a boy called Jason complains about girls flirting with him:
“I mean, uh, these two girls I just met that both liked me and they were like both best friends … and they both tell me the other one liked me so that was like, really confusing.”
While I find it hard to sympathise with poor Jason, his dialogue is one hundred per cent authentic. So what happens when we plonk it straight into a story?
As the waves crashed against the cliffside, Danny turned to Jason and said, '“What’s got you down, buddy?”
Jason, seemingly unaware of the question, kept breaking pieces off the delicate seashell he’d found; tiny silver-white slivers falling to the sand. When the remaining piece became too small for his clumsy fingers to manipulate, he tossed it aside and arched back his head, breathing deeply.
“I mean, uh, these two girls I just met that both liked me and they were like both best friends … and they both tell me the other one liked me so that was like, really confusing.”
It’s too realistic for prose. As Goldilocks would say, “this dialogue is too hot.”
The obvious solution is to take out our dusty grammar textbooks and fix all the little pauses and unnecessary filler words like “uh” and “like”.
“I recently encountered two young ladies who claimed to be the very best of friends. Independently, they confided that their counterpart was indeed attracted to me, in a romantic fashion. I found it most perplexing.”
That dialogue is too cold.
Our job as writers is to find the happy medium. The place where the dialogue is realistic, but not too realistic. Proper, but not too proper.
“You know those two girls I told you about? The ones from the park? They said they like me.” Jason’s eyes were wide and full of terror. “Both of them.”
Purpose
Every line of dialogue must do at least one of two things:
reveal character
advance the plot.
Every line?
Yes. Every line.
It boils down to one thing: do not waste a second of your reader’s time. As Kurt Vonnegut so brilliantly said: “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
If your dialogue fails its purpose, it is wasting your reader’s time. They will get bored, get frustrated, and get lost. So how do you achieve this?
Reveal character
When your characters speak, their words should give the reader a glimpse into their inner life. Ask yourself: how would their mood affect the words they use? Or their relationship with whomever they’re speaking to? Or whatever they’re trying to get out of conversation?
When your characters speak, their words should give the reader a glimpse into their inner life. Ask yourself: how would their mood affect the words they use? Or their relationship with whomever they’re speaking to? Or whatever they’re trying to get out of conversation?*Every action taken by a character must be an attempt to achieve a goal. Even having a casual chat with a friend.
Consider this excerpt from Raymond Carver's Cathedral. The narrator has just rolled two joints for himself and the blind man. At this point in the story, the narrator has not started smoking. His wife was supposedly in bed upstairs, but has just appeared in her pink robe and slippers:
My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.”
He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t feel anything yet.”
Concentrate on the second line. After being glared at and questioned by his wife, his response is very laid-back. “I do now, my dear.” These are not the words of a man who cares what his wife thinks of him.
His response reveals a little of who he is.
Advance the plot
Dialogue serves its other purpose when it moves the plot along. A character may reveal information, make an accusation, suggest a course of action, or more, as long as their words carry the plot forward.
In Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three, the main character, Taran, has offered his strange friend Gurgi some food in return for information. Gurgi agrees to the trade and says:
“Many more hosts march in the valley with sharp spears—oh, many more.”
And from this we learn that their enemy has gathered reinforcements, and the story continues.
Leave questions unanswered
Underpinning every great scene is tension. Nothing is more vital to a successful story; everything else takes a back seat. Tension can be created through dialogue by simply leaving questions unanswered.
Stephen King is a master of tension. In this excerpt from The Gunslinger, the main character has asked Allie for a map, but she doesn’t have one. He instead questions her on the surrounding land:
“What’s on the other side of the desert?”
“How would I know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody’s tried since I was here.”
It’s an extremely simple exchange, but it raises the tension of the scene very efficiently. The Gunslinger asked a question and the answer was unsatisfactory. It’s not much, but King is building the tension slowly and deliberately.
Allie could have answered “I don't know”, and the story would have continued. By having her say “How would I know?” he lifts the tension.
Alternatively, your characters could ignore the question entirely and change the topic:
“What’s on the other side of the desert?”
“How long will you be staying?”
“What’s on the other side of the desert?”
“Your horse looks tired.”
“What’s on the other side of the desert?”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Indirect dialogue
Another choice you can make is to use indirect dialogue, which basically means it isn’t displayed between quotation marks. What this does is summarise the dialogue and allows you to focus on the narrator’s reaction.
Here’s the opening line from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club:
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.
Tyler’s words are shown indirectly. This puts the focus on the narrator’s point of view, rather than on the dialogue. It keeps us inside the narrator’s head for the entire sentence instead of jumping out to ‘hear’ what Tyler said.
Consider the alternative:
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth. He says, “The first step to eternal life is you have to die.”
There’s nothing wrong with this version at all, but it shifts the focus a little onto Tyler and takes us out of the narrator’s head for a moment.
Use indirect dialogue when you want to summarise a chunk of dialogue, or to focus on the narrator’s reaction to it.
Breath—Breath—Break
There’s almost nothing worse than being stuck listening to someone droning on and on. The same applies to books. While it’s sometimes appropriate for a character to make a big speech, a large slab of dialogue is one of the best ways of slowing down your scene.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to stop this from happening, and that’s by remembering the “breath-breath-break” rule.
Here’s how it works.
Imagine the famous Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln as a piece of dialogue in a novel.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It’s a wonderful piece of writing, if a tad androcentric, but perhaps its slowing down the pacing. Read it aloud and pay attention to where you need to take a breath. When you take your third breath, that’s where you break the dialogue up with an action of some kind. Breath—breath—break. Two breaths, then a break.
Perhaps you took your third breath after “a new nation”, and your sixth after “all men are created equal”. That’s where we put action breaks:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation”—Abraham paused to wipe the sweat from his brow—“conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He clenched his fists, to ward off the exhaustion and the cold. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
It’s not a hard and fast rule, and sometimes it can do more harm than good, but it’s something worth trying if you have large chunks of dialogue.
This also works with shorter lines of dialogue between two characters. This stripped-down passage is from Sky Dragon: Take to the Skies by Anh Do:
“We are in a special medical facility for unique cases like yourself. But before I explain that, I need to ask you some questions. Would that be all right?”
“Sure.”
“What is your name?”
“I … I don’t know.”
“How old are you?”
“I … twelve? No, thirteen. I think.”
That isn’t how it appears in the book. All the actions were removed to show you how bland dialogue can get. See how much better it is the way it was actually published:
“We are in a special medical facility,” said Doctor Harris, “for unique cases like yourself. But before I explain that, I need to ask you some questions. Would that be all right?”
“Sure,” he grunted, though he had more than a couple of his own right now.
“What is your name?”
He scoffed. Of course he knew his name. It was … his name was …
How could I forget my own name?
“I … I don’t know,” he croaked. His voice was deeper than he’d expected, as if it wasn’t really his own.
“How old are you?”
“I … twelve? No, thirteen. I think.”
Harris exchanged a glance with a young red-haired woman who’d now approached.
So there you go. A few*Five, specifically. quick and dirty tips to help improve your dialogue. I hope they help elevate your dialogue a little, and make your readers feel like they've spent their time wisely. Do you have any tricks*Or "hacks", as the youth call them. for improving dialogue? Leave them in the comments below.
Thanks for reading, and as always,
Happy writing.
