Previously, we talked about how you must know your characters well enough for them to speak for themselves. But they don’t actually come up with what to say. So here are some tips on how to craft great dialogue: what to do and what not to do.
“Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying.” - Robert Towne
Real vs. Reel
Your job is to create the illusion of real dialogue. But nobody is paying $18 a ticket to hear the real thing. No, they are paying to hear your carefully structured lines, polished to a high gloss, witty, succinct, to the point.
And when you do that well, it tends to sound more real than the real thing. Easy, right? I wish.
Read it Aloud
Everyone thinks they are a direct descendant of William Shakespeare until they take their draft and read it aloud. That’s the great equalizer. It’s easy to sound cool when you’re in your head. Only when read aloud will you be able to see what dialogue is or is not working.
If you don’t trust your own voice or mouth, then put together a table read or staged reading. Then sit back and listen closely to see if it flows, moves the story along, creates tension, and most importantly moves you to feel something.
If you have a policy of never reading your own stuff aloud, then you are admitting that you don’t care what your dialogue sounds like. In that case, you should just print the 90 pages you have, and collage them into a mural on your biggest wall and continue to be the only one who looks at them.
Remember the Characteristics of Great Dialogue
Great dialogue conveys a sense of realism, defines and reveals character, conveys information indirectly, advances the action, reveals or hides character motivations, is active/has purpose, is appropriate to both the scene and the genre, foreshadows what’s to come, and has emotional impact.
If you have dialogue that’s not doing at least one of those things, then you should probably get rid of it.
“Any time any character is saying to another ‘as you know’, that is, telling another character, what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.” - David Mamet
Avoid Expository and On the Nose Dialogue
Don’t be obvious and explicit. Characters shouldn’t directly state what they think, mean, and feel. And when you need to present the reader or viewer with information, you should misdirect their attention and layer it in subtext and conflict.
On the nose dialogue is the most common sign of an amateur. Don’t be that person, rewrite and rewrite. Don’t hand out your first draft which has the first line of dialogue you thought of.
Avoid Stilted, Wooden, Stiff, and Predictable Dialogue
You don’t want the dialogue to feel like it lacks ease and grace or that it seems artificial or contrived. And you don’t want to be so predictable that the average person can watch or read what you are writing and always correctly guess the next line.
Once your structure is working, once the scenes are firing, once the characters are fully fleshed out, then spend all the remaining time, draft after draft, refining the dialogue.
Forget Chitchat, Repetition, and Dialects
Cut all the small-talk, you don’t need it. Don’t repeat. Always try to show, rather than tell. And don’t show and tell. That’s just redundant. You might think the way to have a character stick out is to give them an accent or a dialect. Ignore this urge, it never works out in your favor, and you run the risk of messing up the read and confusing the reader.
Instead, if you are looking to differentiate the way your characters speak so that they pass the Thumb Test, it’s time to go back to character. If you’ve done the character work we previously outlined, the characters should each have different sounding (natural) dialogue.
"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.” - Elmore Leonard
---
Note From Tongal: “The Dos and Don'ts of Character Dialogue" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
