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The secret of Dialogue


Another fun, easy, actionable session

Writing dialogue is normally fun

Reading dialogue is normally fun

Most writers don’t mess it up all that much

But nearly all writers have scope for improvement

You just need to learn the secret!

So here goes


Punctuating dialogue

Dull but important


Let’s start with the basics: punctuating it

‘This is easy,’ he said. ‘Anyone can get it right.’ [he said at end of a sentence]

‘Just careful with the punctuation,’ she added, ‘because a lot of people get it wrong.’ [she added comes in the middle of a sentence]

Notice: Are you putting the he said / she said in the middle of a complete sentence of dialogue or at the end?

The punctuation varies depending accordingly. And always use a new paragraph for even

very short snippets of dialogue.



‘Why do Brits use single inverted commas?’ he asked, as he sipped a cup of Earl Grey tea

and admired a portrait of the Queen.

“I have no idea,” she said, as she sipped a whisky sour and watched her five-

year-old play with her first ever handgun. “Our American doubletons are much nicer.”

Notice: Brits and Americans do this differently – I’ve no idea why. But, truth to tell, it doesn’t matter much.



He drank a little more, then said thoughtfully, ‘P.G. Wodehouse once

said, “Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible … Nothing

puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.”

There’s a lot of truth in that, you know.’

Notice: For quotations within dialogue, Brits use double inverted commas, while Americans would use singles. But who cares?

No one will kill you if you get this wrong.


Why we love dialogue

It’s alive!


And PG Wodehouse is quite right

“Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing

to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big

slab of prose at the start.”

(PG Wodehouse, Interview, Paris Review, 1975)

Dialogue is immediate

It’s alive

It’s the ultimate example of show-don’t-tell (the drama of the unfolding moment)


You probably need to rewrite your book

You should certainly question yourself

(Real literary authors can get away with little

dialogue – though they shouldn’t)

Some books have only dialogue

If you flip through your book and find very little dialogue


Writing great dialogue

Copying the master


Scene opens like this:

Dinner with a burglar, drinks with a flight attendant who did coke

and delivered large sums of money. Cocktail piano in the

background.

[…] Max watched her open a pack of cigarettes and light one before

taking a sip of Scotch and glancing towards the cocktail piano.

Let’s look at some stellar dialogue

Example: Elmore Leonard, Rum Punch


The same scene continues like this:

‘He shouldn’t be allowed to do “Light My Fire.”’

‘Not here,’ said Max, ‘in a tux.’

‘Not anywhere.’ She pushed the pack towards him.

Max shook his head. ‘I quit three years ago.’

‘You gain weight?’

‘Ten pounds. I lose it and put it back on.’

‘That’s why I don’t quit. One of the reasons. I was locked up yesterday with two cigarettes. And spent half the night getting advice from

a cleaning woman named Ramona, who doesn’t smoke.’

Not sounding too upset.

Do you like this dialogue? What makes it work? What can we learn?


First rule: brevity




Not a single wasted word.

(This is Elmore Leonard, who’s at the extreme end of the spareness spectrum, so you can be baggier than him and still OK.)

But still: brevity matters here just as much as it does in prose.


Second rule: character rules, first, last & always




That’s 24 words … or 16 words of dialogue

But look what it tells you!

She’s tough … he seeks agreement … she rejects it, emphatically.

Yes, the issue is minor, but we read character instantly – because it’s there.

If you know your character really well, then just write what they’d say. Easy!


Third rule: be random, be jumpy, be oblique




Max shook his head. ‘I quit three years ago.’



Neither person is here to talk about cocktail pianists – or about ciggies – or about weight

We’ve got six lines of dialogue and, already, three subjects.

Even the connections (‘I quit’ – ‘You gain weight?’) are loose at best.


You even get that jumpiness within a single speech

Discussion of cigarettes and weight loss jumps sideways into a mention of Ramona (totally irrelevant) and being locked up (the reason they’re talking)

The jumpiness actually makes you work to figure out what’s going on…

Which is the point!

That work means you are super-invested in understanding the character – which is the core act of reading fiction.

‘That’s why I don’t quit. One of the reasons. I was locked up yesterday

with two cigarettes. And spent half the night getting advice from a

cleaning woman named Ramona, who doesn’t smoke.’


Rule #4: the path to the real topic can twist and loop

‘I don’t do drugs,’ Jackie said. ‘I haven’t even smoked grass in years.’

‘You were carrying the forty-two grams for somebody else.’

‘Apparently. I knew I had the money, but not the coke.’

‘Who packs your suitcase, the maid?’ [NB: standard issue cop-style sarcasm]

She said, ‘You’re as much fun as the cops.’ [NB: standard issue hard-boiled toughness]

In her quiet tone, looking right at him in cocktail lounge half-light with those sparkly green eyes, and he said, ‘Okay, you don’t know how it got in your bag.’ [NB: Looks like he’s given up]

Here’s their first run at the ‘Whose drugs?’ question:

Max & Jackie talk more. Jackie is facing drug possession charges and jail time


But the topic is still there

He tells her he’s a bail bondsman, with 15,000 bonds written since starting out

She asks if he doesn’t get tired of it

He says yes. Asks the same of her life as flight attendant.

She says yes.

They have exchanged personal disclosures that are unexpectedly revealing.

They have another drink…


And they cycle back to the only thing that matters

Jackie was looking at the piano player now, a middle-aged guy in a tux and an obvious rug playing over the theme from Rocky.

Piano guy looks sadder now than he did.

She said, ‘The poor guy.’ Max looked over. ‘He uses every one of those keys, doesn’t he?’ And looked at Jackie again. ‘You know who put the dope in your bag?’

She’s no longer tough! He’s on her side now. The question isn’t tough, it’s just a question.

She looked at him for a moment before nodding. ‘But that’s not what this is about. They were waiting for me.’

That moment marks the shift – and kerching! We get the relevation that’s the real heart of this scene


Elmore Leonard is the ultimate don’t-mess-around writer…

True, his writing is very taut – no surplus words - but his dialogue moves like this:

• Piano players

• Cigarettes

• Cigarettes and jail and Ramona

• First ‘where did the drugs come from’ dialogue [hard-boiled version]

• Then a bit about his life

• And a bit about hers

• Back to the piano player [but gentle now, not tough]

And the real question and the real revelation

…but here he is messing around a lot.


You could just jump straight to the point

And in some circumstances you would:

‘Hey, the house is on fire,’ not

‘Banter – blah – evade – loop back – Hey, the house is on fire!’

But the entire tension / interest / drama in EL’s scene depends on this teasing game:

She’s got something – can’t / won’t release it – comes over tough, while Max comes over cynical – then they talk life things (a few dozen words, no more) – find

a gentler place (that piano player again) – and boom, find a truer level.

The slower pacing allows more drama, more suspense, more character, more interest.


That, in fact, is the basic point of dialogue

It shows characters in ‘live action’

It gives the reader the chance to decode character in exactly the way we do in real life. (Only, presumably, here the situations are more interesting.)

The author hardly has to help at all – we don’t need to use our ‘look inside their minds’ superpower.

The more interesting the play of character, the more interesting the dialogue.

And Elmore Leonard, remember, wrote genre fiction. You can be subtle AND popular.


The Secret of Dialogue – revealed!

Dialogue is there to track the emotional interplay of two characters in ‘real time’ with minimal

commentary from the writer so that the reader him/herself is left to do the job of analysis

If you keep your character interactions

interesting and supple, then your dialogue

will always be interesting.

It can’t not be.


Dialogue

Some rules of thumb


Some helpful rules of thumb: dialect

Are you be wroitin’ in some inerrestin’ rej’nal dieleck, boi chonz?

Yep, well, these days it looks incredibly patronising to write it out phonetically. That was OK for Emily Bronte; it is not OK for you.

So, here are your rules:

• Write with a minimum of phonetic spellings

• Do use non-standard words / word orders (that person’s grammar & speech merits as much respect as yours.)

• With non-English speakers, it’s fine to record their grammatical errors (but probably without much comment)

Honour your speaker’s dialogue; don’t patronise it


Dialect: some examples

Mostly just talks regular English on the page, but

occasional Scottisms do appear:

‘Ye might want to cook cold for a wee while. Only if it gets difficult, mind.’

In effect, you’re just nudging the reader – every few

pages – to remind them that this character is Scottish.

You don’t need to do much.

A Scotsman



‘That’s not very logical answer for a Cambridge girl.’ or

‘Of course you weren’t. This was fight.’

That’s as non-English as he gets, mostly.

(Though I’m a bit variable here – my bad)

A Russian



Orcadian is pretty close to being a separate language from regular English, and stuffed full of local terms. Here, you just have to go for it (but this kind of thing is rare!)

MacHaffie’s got a twinkly charm to him, a lightness. As though he’s saying, in his heavily accented Orcadian, ‘Ah cin tale

thoo're a peedie lass wantin tae dae thee best, but we baith ken thoo’d ower blether wi’ me than wipe yon teeble again.’

And if you do this kind of thing – DON’T get it wrong.

Getting it wrong looks unbelievably patronising.

An Orkney man


Rules of thumb: Longer speeches

Treat with extreme care

Most snippets of dialogue will run to a line or two.

Sometimes just a very few words.

You can have speeches of more than a hundred words, but

such things should be fairly rare.

If it sounds like speechifying, delete it…

Unless it is speechifying … in which case,

not too much of it, please!


Rules of thumb: Use place & actions as beats

We talked in our sense of place video about filtering location into our scenes…

We used those intrusions to help pace the scene & character development

Elmore Leonard’s piano player is a perfect case in point:

• He places the scene in physical space

• His second appearance is a nudged reminder of where we are

• He reveals character (twice)

• He paces the scene

Do likewise!


Rules of thumb: ‘give characters their own voice’…

It sounds good … but it just isn’t true.

‘I quit three years ago.’



Can you tell who’s who here? Answer no. Leonard’s characters

basically sound identical … but they’re different people so they

say and express different things.

…sounds better advice than it really is


Rules of thumb: humour in dialogue is at your peril

It’s hard to make spoken jokes funny on the page

Like, really hard.

So it’s fine having one of your characters try to be funny

Just be aware that he/she may not succeed

And if the reader senses that you, the

author, are trying and failing to be funny

That’s not good!


Humour often works best as a background flicker

I pull away from the mouth of the hole. Pull well away and say, ‘You’re closer.’

‘You’re smaller.’

‘You’re the senior officer. This is your investigation.’

He says, ‘Right. I’m senior. Exactly. So look, just … just bloody do it.’

I just bloody do it.

Example:

Fiona and her boss have just discovered the mouth of a low cave which may play a key role in their investigation. They

know they need to explore, but both hate the idea.


Same cave, a little later on

We both feel the pressure of the dark tunnel which snakes into the hillside behind us. Our duty will

require us to crawl that route. Not this morning. Not today even. But sometime soon.

Burnett shudders. Asks, ‘How are you with enclosed spaces?’

‘Fine.’

‘Really? The thought of that thing doesn’t creep you out?’

‘I’m fine with enclosed spaces, so long as they’re lit, heated and in possession of doors, windows and,

ideally, tea-making facilities. That thing creeps me out like all seven shades of fuck.’

Is that funny? Well, yes, kinda. But it’s not laugh out loud funny. And you

don’t have the sense of an author needing your applause.

Example:


Rules of thumb: she postulated suggestively

Our buddy Elmore Leonard thinks that you shouldn’t use verbs other than ‘say’ to carry dialogue – and that you shouldn’t use adverbs to modify that verb.

He’s wrong.

You can use tell, ask, reply, respond, answer, etc and no one will blink.

You can use shout, yell, murmur, whisper, etc – if you need to. (but very often – nearly always – the content of the dialogue will & shlould convey what you need.)

And you can use adverbs too – sparingly

Example: I just went through 30 pages of my text and found 2 adverb uses that seemed perfectly fine to me. She says sharply, for

example. I found no examples of verbs other than say / ask / reply etc.


Rules of thumb: control that twitching

As humans, we all do those things

As writers, we all seek little beats to punctuate our dialogue and keep a sense of physical action.

But as readers, we don’t need much of that kind of thing before we get irritated … especially when writers develop little tics (where everyone shrugs,

or smiles, or drops their gaze, or whatever.)

So keep it limited. Keep it varied. Or get your beats from elsewhere.

She shrugged … he rubbed his chin … she stretched her arms … he

raised his eyebrows … she sipped her coffee … he pursed

his lips … she smiled … he nodded … he ran his

hands through his hair.


Dialogue

That secret again


We’re done! (And here’s that Secret again)

Dialogue is there to track the emotional interplay

of two characters in ‘real time’ with minimal

commentary from the writer so that the reader

him/herself is left to do the job of analysis


A summary

• Keep it brief

• Stay close to character

• Oblique connections in dialogue are great

• Twisting paths through conversations are also fab

• Take care with dialect, speechifying & humour

• Use place & actions as beats to punctuate dialogue

• We do not love adverbs or suggestive postulating


With luck…

You’ll enjoy writing dialogue more than you did

And the dialogue you write will be better…

Which means your characterisation will improve too…

Because it can’t not


Next time

We’re going to look at themes

The deep heart of your novel and the thing that will make

your book memorable – and worthwhile

But while mostly we’ve concentrated on actionable advice

In our next session, I’ll give you mostly non-actionable advice.

We’ll stand back, not rush in.


Intrigued? I hope so

See you soon

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