Writing Help: Dialogue

The Thin Man, 1934, movie still

I used to be terrified of dialogue. I’d write it, sure, but I can honestly say that I more often than not scrapped it. dialogue was the thing that stopped me from finishing any stories. Partly because the dialogue process just stopped the flow.

Another reason was because, like most beginning writers, I revised my writing as I went along.  Expecting perfection from the get-go, expecting to have little to no revision when all was said and done. 

More often than not, dialogue writing seemed to take so much time.

Now, some people have no trouble at all with dialogue.  It comes naturally and they seem to excel in the writing of dialogue more than they excel in any other part of their story writing.  I was not one of those people.

Then I decided that all I would do was write dialogue. Something I should have done long ago.  That’s it, dialogue. I read a bunch of plays and thought it ought to be the thing to do. Good dialogue would, I figured, be much akin to a good play.  If I could finish stories that were merely dialogue, I’d have accomplished what I needed to do. Jumped the hurdle. Faced my fears. I didn’t use quotes or names or he said she said, I just used line spaces, adding the “who”s when I was done writing if I wanted. I got better and better, and faster and faster.

The real reason I got better is because I had to KNOW the characters to write their words. I realize, now, that if you don’t know your characters well enough, you can’t necessarily write what would come out of their mouth. You need to know them like you know the rest of your story.

Mind you, a writer doesn’t necessarily know their story.  Even when it’s plotted out, one small thing may change which requires possible other and major parts to need change and revision.  For this reason, when you’re practicing, keep your dialogue writing small in size, like a simple scene or scenerio, and use familiar characters:

• yourself a close relative or friend,
• someone you know,
• a favorite character from a book you read,
• the someone you want to be,
• be stereotypical if you need to.

Once I felt confident in writing scene dialogue as a story telling device.   I moved to monologue stories which included someone saying what someone else said and did. That allowed me to focus on one character and bring in other voices; the main voice was the story, the other voices were the dialogue I’d be bringing into the story.

And then I just kept building from there.

I never write all the way through anymore as if I’m reading a book. So when I do write dialogue I take whatever method I need to utilize and work it. Then I link everything back together and embellish (with short stories this is easy, with novellas and novels this can get tedious and excruciating but must be dealt with).

Yes, dialogue can go on and on. But the trick is to write it and cut the crap out of it later. Don’t get attached to awesome words or phrases because they may be cool but may not really be the meat on the bone.

As a writer, one needs to be quite a few different people.  A writer needs to be all the elements of the story, the editor, the audience, both emotionally and unemotionally involved, right brained and left brained. Sometimes all at the same time.  Writers do not have an easy task.  The better the writer, the less this fact is apparent. 

Does it (writing dialogue) still cut my flow? Sometimes, but when I find that it does I go to what doesn’t. No one reads what you write until you show them. That’s the beauty of it, and it’s also the agony of it.

I don’t avoid it.

• Sometimes dialogue comes together with the narration.
• Sometimes it’s separate because it creates a scene of it’s own and the narration is the embellishment.
• Sometimes it embellishes the narration.

I suppose knowing which it is doing will make your life much easier. A major tip here: IF YOU DON’T THINK, it will tell you which it is.