When I started writing stories, I hated dialogue. Everything I wrote sounded stupid and stiff, and nothing at all like real human beings chatting. After a lot of writing, reading, and listening to better writers than myself, I learned some tips that helped. Once I applied them, I grew to love dialogue. Writing description and action took forever. In fact, the hardest kind of writing was when only one character inhabited the scene. No chance at dialogue at all (unless I was writing a character like Tom Hanks in Cast Away who chatted with a volleyball).
Over time, I’ve come to like writing dialogue most. If I can get characters talking, the words come so much more easily.
There’s plenty to be said about dialogue–way more than a single blog’s worth–so today I’m just addressing what happens outside and around dialogue.
I’ve done this exercise in workshops. You can try it on your own. First, write a brief exchange between two characters. Each one gets to speak twice so you have four lines of dialogue total. They can talk about anything, but the more mundane the better. For my example, I have two high school students talking. This is dialogue stripped bare. No descriptions or actions. No dialogue tags. You don’t know anything about the characters other than one of them is in band, and they both seem adequately pleasant.
“Are you practicing with the band tonight?”
“Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.”
“Congrats! Where’s state this year?”
“Colorado Springs. The same place we did it last year.”
The exercise is, without changing any of the dialogue, to insert thoughts, actions and descriptions so that the reader is in a scene instead of just seeing a record of speech.
I had no idea how writers would attack this the first time I did it. Some workshop attendees approached this prompt fairly unimaginatively, only inserting speech tags with adverbs, like this:
“Are you practicing with the band tonight?” she asked hastily.
Loudly, he said, “Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.”
“Congrats! Where’s state this year?” she said quietly.
Quickly, he replied, “Colorado Springs. The same place we did it last year.
Boring beyond belief, and also a good demonstration of the least you can do.
Some writers, though, used all the possibilities, turning this into a much fleshier dialogue like the one that started this way:
Tapping her foot against the chair while twirling a strand of hair around her finger, Tanya thought of a dozen ways to approach him–he was so gorgeous!–but they all sounded stupid. Finally, in desperation, she tried, “Are you practicing with the band tonight?”
But one of my writers was a genius, and they realized that they could put anything outside of the dialogue to create truly interesting effects, like this:
Sheila pushed the detonator cord into the C4. She didn’t like how greasy the cord felt, and she didn’t like the smell of explosives, but she had to get the job done. “Are you practicing with the band tonight?”
Peering through his binoculars while scanning for the inevitable blue-shirt patrol, Alex said, “Yeah, we qualified for state, so we’re doing extra time.” He flicked the infrared filter into place to check for heat signatures.
“Congrats! Where’s state this year?” She wondered if there would be State this year. If the blue-shirt tanks rolled across the demilitarized zone, they’d all be on the front lines, even the trombone players like Alex.
Alex put his binoculars down to look at her for the first time since they’d started setting the ambush. He sounded exhausted. “Colorado Springs, the same place we did it last year.”
When this writer read their dialogue and explained their theory that the dialogue was more fun if what was happening around it was unexpected, the other writers laughed and came up with their own wild versions, like this:
Ferdinand, the hermaphrodite squirrel, squeaked to his alligator friend, “Are you practicing with the band tonight?”
Or this one:
“Are you practicing with the band tonight?” asked Reefboy. He flicked his butterfly knife open and closed, making sure that the sun caught its sheen, sending razor flashes of light into Allison’s eyes.
It is a fun exercise. The writers realized the raw dialogue itself could go absolutely, absolutely anywhere. Once they grasped that, all the dialogue in the workshop became more interesting, and they were on fire for the rest of the session.
The exercise also demonstrates that when we’re writing our imaginations should be unbridled. So many weak manuscripts start with failures of imagination. The writers aren’t stretching themselves. You can get a lot from this exercise beyond learning about writing dialogue. You can use it to remind yourself that J.R.R. Tolkien argued writers were subgods creating their universe much like the biblical god he believed created ours. On the page writers should own their worlds, mold them, make them strange or beautiful or frightening and to do this work with abandon.
There should be no excuse for boring dialogue.
In a coming blog post, I’ll talk about what can happen between the quote marks where dialogue can advance the plot, reveal the characters, set the scene, show action, create dramatic tension and just about everything else. Oh, and most importantly, sound like human beings instead of the robotic hot mess I used to write.
James Van Pelt has been selling short fiction to many of the major venues since 1989. Recently he retired from teaching high school English after thirty-seven years in the classroom. He has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, Locus Awards, and Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Choice awards. Years and years ago he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He still feels “new.” Fairwood Press recently released a huge, limited-edition, signed, and numbered collection of his work, THE BEST OF JAMES VAN PELT. He can be found online at his website or on Facebook.
