A Little On Dialogue

I love dialogue. Maybe a little too much, at times. Where that fine line exists between dialogue that illuminates the plot and characters the way it should and dialogue-as-exposition, I’m not good at finding.

In the first couple drafts, anyway.

But I love how much you can build a character on just word choice and phrasing. I am not a fan of the idea that dialect should be refined out of fiction, because that becomes a true reflection of exactly no one. (Note: I kind of adore linguistics.) But it has to be done right.

“Right” means no stereotypes. (But stereotypes are shortcuts that weaken your writing, so you wouldn’t use them, anyway. Right?) If the dialect isn’t your own, get help. Find someone intimately familiar with it and ask for feedback. This can be difficult, but infinitely rewarding.

Creating a dialect for your story? Go for it! Just be careful to be consistent (don’t do it for the sake of doing it) and make sure you can identify your own influences. Whether you know them or not, you have them.

Whatever you write into your dialogue – dialect or not - I recommend a “realism” test: read it aloud. Better yet, have someone else read it. Does the emphasis turn up (the first time it’s read! Not when you’ve finally remembered how that sentence was intended to go) somewhere that causes the rest of the line to fall out of sense? I do that all the time. Then when I go back and read it aloud, I find I naturally put the emphasis elsewhere.

This is not a fault in my reading, but in my writing.

Elmore Leonard famously said/wrote that if it sounds like writing, he rewrote it. He meant that for all writing, but I find it especially true of dialogue. Chances are, you’re writing characters that you want the readers to feel are real. But give those characters unrealistic dialogue and the illusion shatters.

Speech is an extension of identity, as much for our characters as it is for us. Knowing your characters inside and out – knowing their thoughts, and goals, and motivations – will inform what they say and how they speak to each other. They will begin to sound distinct from one another on the page, and their stories will be richer for it.

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