Writing Lesson: Dialog: Common Pitfalls join for free to get your assignments critiqued by your peers
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By avoiding the pitfalls of Character Clones, Info Dumps, Bad Tags, “Said” Phobia, and Talking Heads, you can create believable dialogue.Lesson© Review Fuse 2009
Lesson Assignment
Find a 1–2 page section of your work in progress with a lot of dialogue. Read it aloud to yourself.
Reread portions of just one character’s words, and then another’s. Do they sound the same? How can you make them sound different? What word choices and sentence structures might they use that the other characters might not? Rewrite.
Can you find places where information is dumped on the reader—especially where “as you know” might fit? Can you find a way to get that information across in a better, more natural way? Rewrite.
Mark every speech tag and attribution. How many tags aren’t “said”? How many include adverbs? Revise your tags: make most of them “said,” remove adverbs and punch up the speech so it reveals the tone, and eliminate a few tags by using actions.
Does the dialogue read like a tennis match, or do you have sensory details (the five senses, plus thoughts, actions, feelings, facial expressions) interspersed so the scene can be experienced as well as heard? Rewrite.
Proof your selection before posting for review.
One of the most effective ways of revealing character and propelling plot is through effective dialogue. The problem is that good dialogue isn’t just a matter of throwing your characters into the same room and letting them chat. Below are four dialogue pitfalls. Learn to avoid them, and you’ll kick your dialogue up several notches.
Character Clones
Know your characters wells enough to differentiate them by speech. Age, gender, education, geographical background, socioeconomic level, and much more can impact how a person talks. Flat dialogue is often where all the characters sound alike—their personalities aren’t revealed.
A Harvard-educated, middle-aged career woman is going to speak very differently than a sixteen-year-old Latino boy. They’ll both speak differently than a nine-year-old girl who loves Hannah Montana or her father, a car mechanic who grew up in Brooklyn.
Speech differences don’t have to be huge, but they should exist. You should be able to take most lines out of context and still know who is speaking because no one else talks quite like that.
Info Dump
Dialogue is a fantastic way to give needed information without dumping it on the reader. It’s also easy to get caught up thinking that because it’s dialogue, then it’s not info dumping. Wrong.
Imagine Jan on the phone with Beth, her best friend, talking about her husband’s recent lay-off. She would never say, “My husband, Peter, was laid off from his position in as Marketing VP at JKL Corporation.”
Jan and Beth are best friends. They both know Jan’s husband is named Peter. They both know where he works and what he does. Jan wouldn’t state the obvious. But a lot of writers do this very thing, thinking the reader needs the information. The result is awkward and fake dialogue.
Much more natural-sounding would be Jan saying simply, “Peter was laid off yesterday.” Beth knows the rest—who Peter is and where he worked.
Trust that readers can figure out a lot of the details on their own. For those parts really needing explanation, dole it out in bits and pieces—naturally. Avoid any dialogue where, “As you know,” could be fit into the sentence.
Remember: If two people already know something, one of them isn’t going to state it.
Bad Tags and “Said” Phobia
By and large, “said” is an invisible word that acts as a place holder so readers can keep the speakers straight. Don’t be afraid of using it—at least 90% of the time.
Using “said” more often will help you avoid another problem: bad tags that draw attention to themselves, like sighed, exclaimed, announced, queried, and so forth. Also avoid adverbs paired with “said,” such as angrily, quietly, and loudly. If your reader can’t tell that your character is angry without the –ly word, rewrite the dialogue so the tone can stand on its own.
Periodically, you can drop speech tags by pairing an action with a line of dialogue, such as: Brandon paced back and forth, raking his fingers through is hair. “What am I going to do?” The reader knows right away that Brandon is speaking, because his words are next to the action.
Talking Heads.
This may sound counter-intuitive, but good dialogue isn’t just about what the characters say. It’s also about what you write between their words.
Talking heads happens when dialogue reads like disembodied voices speaking or like a tennis match: he said this, then she said that, then he said this—back and forth, back and forth, without giving the reader the benefit of contextual details.
Show those other details—facial expressions, actions, thoughts and emotions. Sprinkle in sensory details of the setting. Are we in a restaurant? An alien spaceship? A park? A kitchen? If we hear, see, smell, and feel the location, we’ll experience as well as hear the conversation.