Dialogue’s Ten Basic Can’t-Go-Wrong Rules

 

Ten Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp
And Why the Average Author Needs to Know Them

 

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Author of The Frugal Editor: Do-It-Yourself Editing
Now In Its Third Edition

 

Let’s start with the second part first because you, the author, are reasonably sure 
your published work will receive attention from the best editors ever, 
and in the meantime, running small documents past friends, relatives, and even English teachers
likely won’t cut it. This article covers grammar and dialogue that
  English Departments’ don’t offer until college and then only if you happen
 to choose it as an elective or major in creative writing. 
PS: If you write nonfiction, and are avoiding anecdotes to make 
your work sparkle, you’ll have tools enough to make your characters speak!

 

Dialogue’s Ten Basic Can’t-Go-Wrong Rules 

 

1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

 

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you be glad to ditch the overblown tag.

 

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

 

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much.  We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When readers are annoyed, they will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

 

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader and your own ability to write in a character's point of view. Whichever point-of-view you have choses for your narrative will let your reader surmise who is speaking.

 

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help to transfer “telling” from the narrative to what a character’s is saying. Professionals will know what you are trying to do and your reader will just think that character is long winded.

 

7. Don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along.  If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

 

8. Avoid having every character answer a question directly. Some people do that (say a sensitive young girl who has been reared to obey her elders) but many don't. Some veer off with an answer that doesn't follow from the question asked. Some are silent. Some characters do any one of these things as a matter of course. Some do them purposefully, perhaps to avoid fibbing or to change the subject or because they are passive aggressive.

 

9. Avoid dull dialogue that doesn't help draw better characters or move the action forward. Forcing a reader to hear people introduce themselves to one another without a very good reason to do so is cruel and unusual punishment.

 

10. Use dialogue to unobtrusive plant a seed of intrigue. If a character brings up a concern that isn't solved immediately, you can heighten the page-turning effect until you are ready to supply the “great reveal.”

 

Though this article will have writers using professionally-written dialogue to liven everything from their nonfiction to their novels, I strongly recommend 

Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue published by Writers' Digest. For more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find my The Frugal Editor in its third edition on Amazon.

 

Next month, right here on Karen Cioffi’s Writers on the Move
blog, I’m planning another list that
will give you ten reasons why knowing more 
editing than your do already might make

You a better (and happier) writer. 

 

MORE ABOUT TODAY’S WRITERS ON THE MOVE CONTRIBUTOR

 

Carolyn Howard-Johnson was an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program for nearly a decade. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is the winningest book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers (The first edition was named best of 2004 by USA Book News. ) It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more and the third edition includes even more. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com.