On Writing: Dialogue

[SimonDoom]

Mostly about the technicalities of dialogue punctuation, but with some bits about tagging or omitting tags thrown in for good measure:

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-punctuate-dialogue

This is very good. I strongly recommend that anyone with questions about dialogue should read this article. It's very short, and it quickly conveys a lot of information, with useful examples, about how to do dialogue.

 

[yowser]

Dialogue is often a tremendous antidote to the dreaded (and tedious) infodump. Instead of a long wearisome backstory in prose (part of which is necessary for the story) have another character do the interrogation.

Remind me why you left that job? Didn't your girlfriend object when you decided to move out of town? How in the world did you decide that a vacation in Pittsburgh was going to improve your marriage? All this can be used to explain much of the story/character setting/headspace.

All kinds of things can be teased out with careful use of dialogue, and many earlier comments in the thread are true about illuminating character traits, displaying tics, defining (and delineating) various actors in your tale.

Please, oh please, make your different speakers distinct however. All parts of the story improve if I have a vivid notion of who is talking, not by just what they're saying, but how they're putting their words together.

 

[anthrodisiac]

There's also the verisimilitude problem. Some people want their dialogue to be as accurate as possible. However, people tend to talk fairly meandering, not straight to the point, often with asides that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, tangents, etc. That doesn't serve you well in stories. So, another balancing act. You want dialogue that feels like real people talking, but also keeping the story on track and not dumping ungodly amounts of useless information and irrelevant details that will distract from the bigger picture.

I almost included this in my original post, but I wanted to avoid jamming in too much of my own opinion in the OP and leave it a bit less specific, more open for other people to play off of.

That balance is crucial. Couple examples to show why:

Phone call between two 90-year-old women, verisimilitude:
*ring ring*
Mildred: "Hello."
Gertie: "Hello, it this Mildred?"
Mildred: "Yes, this is she. To whom am I speaking?"
Gertie: "Good morning, dear, this is Gertie."
Mildred: "Gertie! Gosh, I was just thinking of you."
Gertie: "As I was with you. How are you this lovely morning?"
Mildred: "I'm doing well. The grandkids are coming over for lunch, and I think I have time to start on my rhododendrons once this gosh-dang arthritis clears up."
Gertie: "I know, dear. My Barney's arthritis kicks up something fierce when-"
*Twenty minutes of dialogue later*
Gertie: "So, I wanted to ask you something about Martha."
Mildred: "Oh, Martha! How is she doing after the hip replacement?"
Gertie: "Well, you'll never believe it, but-"
*Ten minutes of dialogue later*
Gertie: "Anyway, I was calling to see if you wanted to have brunch with Martha on Tuesday?"
Mildred: "Oh, of course dear! Do you remember last time we-"
*Thirty minutes of dialogue later*
Mildred: "Well, I will see you on Tuesday, then!"
Gertie: "I'm looking forward to it. Say hi to the kids for me."
Mildred: "Of course, and you say hi to-"
*Five minutes of dialogue later*
Gertie: "Goodbye, Mildred."
Mildred: "Goodbye, Gertie."

That, if actually written out, would've probably be a novella in and of itself. It leans way too heavily on accuracy. Instead, you want to balance it out, get pertinent information and keep things moving along, while also getting enough of a vibe for flavor and giving the reader the impression of a real-world conversation. That's where you ought to be aiming, an "accurate impression," as it were.

Phone call between two 90-year-old women, readable, but terse:
*ring ring*
Mildred: "Hello, this is Mildred."
Gertie: "Hello, Mildred, it's Gertie! How are you this morning?"
Mildred: "Well, thank you. The grandkids are coming over, and I think I have time to start on my rhododendrons."
Gertie: "That's wonderful. Listen, I was calling to see if you wanted to join Martha and me for brunch on Tuesday. IHOP, eleven o'clock?"
Mildred: "Oh, that would be splendid! I can't wait to catch up with the two of you."
Gertie: "Likewise. You have a wonderful day. Say hi to the grandkids for me."
Mildred: "You too, dear."

This is a bit too lean and to the point, making it kinda bland. You'd want to consider (maybe) adding a touch more of the asides from the first. But this one does keep a bit of the flavor, the impression, of two older women talking, while still moving things along, even if that flavor is mild. Somewhere between these two is the happy path. Not so much that we have to sift through 50 pages to find out that they're going to have brunch, but not so to the point that we might as well have just paraphrased it.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I’m often complimented on my dialog. I think it’s partly the autistic super power of trying extra hard to parse what people are saying all the time. It makes you a student of the spoken word.

This is also 1000000% where I learned all my dialogue skills from. Both for real life and writing. Nobody's directly complimented my dialogue on Lit, but it's one of the more common compliments for my non-erotic writings.

 

[FrancesScott]

This is very good. I strongly recommend that anyone with questions about dialogue should read this article. It's very short, and it quickly conveys a lot of information, with useful examples, about how to do dialogue.

Thank you for the recommendation.

 

[MK_Whimsy]

Gags feature in a lot of things I write. Needless to say, writing that dialogue is easy.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Gags feature in a lot of things I write. Needless to say, writing that dialogue is easy.

Personally, I find writing humor to be very challenging. [takes tongue out of cheek]

 

[StillStunned]

Gags feature in a lot of things I write. Needless to say, writing that dialogue is easy.

I think you want this thread: Things That Make You Go Hmm

 

[MK_Whimsy]

Oh I could mention that some of the nonhuman characters in my stories (i.e. Minotaur, lizard aliens) have relatively little human dialogue. While this is often implicitly because the characters' mouth anatomies make human speech somewhat more challenging, I also like to think this works well with dominant characters who don't need to say much to assert their power and control anyway.

 

[MK_Whimsy]

I think you want this thread: Things That Make You Go Hmm

Things That Make You Go Hmmh Hmmph Mmmph

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Mostly about the technicalities of dialogue punctuation, but with some bits about tagging or omitting tags thrown in for good measure:

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-punctuate-dialogue

This was covered years ago in the how-to by Whispersecret as well. There are some handy exercises included that drive home the examples.

I still caution writers to consider whether omitting dialogue tags works for the story in all instances.

The writer knows who is speaking.

A reader has the opportunity to go back a few sentences if they lose track of who is speaking.

Someone who is vision impaired or otherwise listening to the dialogue may not have anything but the tags to help them remain focused on who is speaking unless different voices are involved.

This same consideration should be applied to special formatting gimmicks or other artistic license ideas that a writer wants to employ with their story. How does it sound?

 

[BobbyBrandt]

There's also the verisimilitude problem. Some people want their dialogue to be as accurate as possible. However, people tend to talk fairly meandering, not straight to the point, often with asides that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, tangents, etc. That doesn't serve you well in stories. So, another balancing act. You want dialogue that feels like real people talking, but also keeping the story on track and not dumping ungodly amounts of useless information and irrelevant details that will distract from the bigger picture.

I agree to a limited extent.

I believe that characters need to have contrast. If all we ever experience is a character while they are doing something exciting or adventurous, without also experiencing them doing routine things, we lose the contrast that real people have.

There needs to be a balance in order for characters to come alive in a story.

 

[StillStunned]

There's also the verisimilitude problem. Some people want their dialogue to be as accurate as possible. However, people tend to talk fairly meandering, not straight to the point, often with asides that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, tangents, etc. That doesn't serve you well in stories. So, another balancing act. You want dialogue that feels like real people talking, but also keeping the story on track and not dumping ungodly amounts of useless information and irrelevant details that will distract from the bigger picture.

I once went on a road trip around the American Southwest with a pair of friends. This was before the days of dash cams, but I had a small digital video camera and we put it on the dashboard on some scenic stretches to rewatch when we got home.

When we did rewatch it, we all said the same thing: what a load of bollocks we talked. Hours of complete nonsense, interruptions, misheard words, uhms, ahs, never-minds, pauses, you-know-the-thingies and so on. Because that's real dialogue.

Nobody wants to read that.

 

[TheLobster]

When we did rewatch it, we all said the same thing: what a load of bollocks we talked.

Well, in your defense, you were driving through basically a featureless desert, that’s very occasionally interspersed by signs proudly proclaiming how the village you’re now entering has a population of 58 and yet deserves to be called Something Something City.

Under such harrowing circumstances, everyone would talk bollocks.

 

[BeechLeaf]

Overheard at a station this morning, loud male voice:

'Good morrow! How the devil are you?'

And this, students, is how you pinpoint a character with a few words of dialogue.

 

[RoyalAuthor]

I've found that I can balance implied reality of a conversation without it being a meandering info dump by focusing only on snippets of a conversation - the important parts for the story. I like to give them impression that my dialogue is picking up mid-conversation and cuts off before the conversation ends, oftentimes by beginning the scene with a character talking and ending it with either a question or some teasing or something else that, in the real world, would have a response.

It lets the reader briefly imagine how the scene might continue, letting them do the work for me while still getting across what I need to. And the part of the conversation I do write usually has banter, an inside joke or callback, or something else to make it human.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I've found that I can balance implied reality of a conversation without it being a meandering info dump by focusing only on snippets of a conversation - the important parts for the story. I like to give them impression that my dialogue is picking up mid-conversation and cuts off before the conversation ends, oftentimes by beginning the scene with a character talking and ending it with either a question or some teasing or something else that, in the real world, would have a response.

It lets the reader briefly imagine how the scene might continue, letting them do the work for me while still getting across what I need to. And the part of the conversation I do write usually has banter, an inside joke or callback, or something else to make it human.

So the entire scene is literally just the middle part of a conversation, nothing else?

 

[Leopold_Cleland]

A key goal is to impose cadence and intonation onto dialog, otherwise it will lie there like roadkill. This is not easy because writing doesn't have a complete set of tools to do so. Specialized ones are italicization and the recently much-maligned trio of ellipses, semicolons, and em-dashes. Of regular punctuation there's commas, question marks, and exclamation points, and the latter two are for one thing only apiece. Question marks affect only the intonation at end of an utterance too, and exclamation points only impose a volume filter on a whole sentence. All-caps can substitute for exclamations but using them is gauche.

All these tools except commas and the single-purpose question mark have to be used sparingly as they're distracting, but most authors avoid them too much. Even commas require care in dialog: if you "hear" the dialog as you write it, it's much too easy to mistake the ubiquitous minuscule pauses in speech as places to use one. I find it necessary to make multiple passes through my writing to remove them or the page looks as if someone attacked it with a shotgun full of macaroni.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Even commas require care in dialog: if you "hear" the dialog as you write it, it's much too easy to mistake the ubiquitous minuscule pauses in speech as places to use one. I find it necessary to make multiple passes through my writing to remove them or the page looks as if someone attacked it with a shotgun full of macaroni.

I'm stealing that.

 

[liliput1]

A key goal is to impose cadence and intonation onto dialog, otherwise it will lie there like roadkill.

All these tools except commas and the single-purpose question mark have to be used sparingly as they're distracting, but most authors avoid them too much. Even commas require care in dialog: if you "hear" the dialog as you write it, it's much too easy to mistake the ubiquitous minuscule pauses in speech as places to use one. I find it necessary to make multiple passes through my writing to remove them or the page looks as if someone attacked it with a shotgun full of macaroni.

I think commas or even ellipses belong when the dialog becomes fraught or the speaker overwrought. There are moments when the feelings are big but you know that if you say the wrong thing now you might break something precious. So you’re picking your way through an emotional minefield and every pause deserves to be acknowledged.

If you’re just describing the ice cream cone you had after lunch then maybe rein in the commas.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I think commas or even ellipses belong when the dialog becomes fraught or the speaker overwrought. There are moments when the feelings are big but you know that if you say the wrong thing now you might break something precious. So you’re picking your way through an emotional minefield and every pause deserves to be acknowledged.

If you’re just describing the ice cream cone you had after lunch then maybe rein in the commas.

I used to overdo the punctuations and stylizations to force the reader into reading the dialogue exactly how I want. I still do to an extent, but I've massively pared it back, because it should really only be when it's useful for conveying the emotion. They're a lot better than using an adverb in my opinion (show vs. tell), which is why I still use them to the extent I do.

 

[StillStunned]

Some years ago, I read a T/I story here on Lit that had long stretches of dialogue between the characters, who were siblings. I don't remember their names - let's call them Adam and Eve - but the dialogue went something like this:

"Adam, it's so good to see you."
"Eve, I haven't seen you all week!"
"Adam, I've missed you. Would you like a drink?"
"Eve, that would be lovely, thank you. You're looking hot today."
"Adam, you're just saying that because you're horny."

Etc.

In case the message wasn't clear: people don't address each other by name every time they open their mouth.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Some years ago, I read a T/I story here on Lit that had long stretches of dialogue between the characters, who were siblings. I don't remember their names - let's call them Adam and Eve - but the dialogue went something like this:

"Adam, it's so good to see you."
"Eve, I haven't seen you all week!"
"Adam, I've missed you. Would you like a drink?"
"Eve, that would be lovely, thank you. You're looking hot today."
"Adam, you're just saying that because you're horny."

Etc.

In case the message wasn't clear: people don't address each other by name every time they open their mouth.

StillStunned, that's an excellent point.

 

[StillStunned]

StillStunned, that's an excellent point.

anthrodisiac, I'm glad you agree.

 

[liliput1]

Some years ago, I read a T/I story here on Lit that had long stretches of dialogue between the characters, who were siblings. I don't remember their names - let's call them Adam and Eve - but the dialogue went something like this:

"Adam, it's so good to see you."
"Eve, I haven't seen you all week!"
"Adam, I've missed you. Would you like a drink?"
"Eve, that would be lovely, thank you. You're looking hot today."
"Adam, you're just saying that because you're horny."

Etc.

In case the message wasn't clear: people don't address each other by name every time they open their mouth.

I do confess though that authors I like have a habit of making one character say something that breaks the volley and return and then for the rest of the conversation it’s ambiguous as to who is saying what and I kinda want to thwap them with a rolled up paper or at least crumple it up and throw it at their head.

After internal dialogue, an uncomfortable silence, or a double take it’s not clear who is talking next, people.