Hey Story Crafters,
As it turns out, I’m not quite done talking about dialogue. I’d like to share a couple of editing tips for dialogue, and a reference book I’ve found helpful for writing and editing dialogue with you. Then the dialogue discussion will really be done, for now. :)
A couple of dialogue tips:
1. Listen to people speak. | Read your dialogue out loud.
To make sure your characters speak and sound the way real people do, you have to listen to people speak (for the sake of actual dialogue), and observe them while they are speaking (for facial expressions/body language). To really get a sense of how unique people sound—if they have an accent, or a verbal tic (saying a certain word frequently; like “like.”), or a certain speech pattern, etc.—you need to hear how people interact with each other in real life. Keeping dialogue as authentic as possible will help readers immerse themselves in your story.
And once the dialogue is on the page, you have to read it out loud to make sure it sounds authentic. (This tip goes back to a self-editing tip I shared a while back, about reading your work out loud.)
While it’s possible someone sounds like they talk in run-on sentences every time they open their mouth, it can be hard on the reader to parse their way through a line of dialogue that’s a really long sentence. It’s also not sustainable for a character to speak that way for long stretches of time. Reading dialogue out loud will help you find places where the character who’s speaking might take a breath, or pause to move in a scene.
2. Dialogue Tags: Limit the use of adverbs (otherwise known as -ly words).
It’s easy to slip adverbs in next to dialogue tags. Here are a few examples: “she said happily,” “they said grimly,” “he said angrily.”
Whenever I’m having a hard time writing, I tend to fall back on pairing dialogue tags with an adverb, just to keep up my writing momentum. So the dialogue in my very, very rough first drafts have a lot of dialogue that ends with [dialogue tag] + [adverb] threaded throughout.
And that’s fine, for rough drafts. But from a reader’s perspective, it’s not only repetitive to see this sentence structure; it also limits the reader’s perception of character. Just like each character has a unique way of speaking, the way a character feels and expresses emotions won’t be exactly the same either.
For example, say you have two characters. Character A has a reserved, shy personality, while Character B is outgoing, bubbly. They have a scene together where they say their dialogue “happily.” What “happy” looks like for Character A can look a lot different for Character B. For Character A, maybe happiness is shown with a small smile, or a soft chuckle. For Character B, happiness might be shown with loud laughter, or hugging someone else.
The point is that switching out the [dialogue tag] + [adverb] at the end of dialogue for beats is an opportunity to show characterization. It’s also an opportunity for you, as a writer, to use more descriptive imagery. For example, you might try using descriptive imagery to express how an emotion feels as a bodily reaction for the POV character: “Excitement bubbled inside of her like fizz from a newly opened soda bottle.”
An exception to this—when the [dialogue tag] + [adverb] structure might be appropriate—would be to explain how a character is speaking (e.g. “he said softly”). In this case, the adverb isn’t trying to explain which emotion a character is feeling, but describing how the line of dialogue is spoken.
An Editing Reference Book Recommendation
I highly recommend “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, 2nd Edition” by Renni Browne & Dave King. There are several chapters dedicated to writing and editing dialogue. If you found the beats comparison example from last week’s post helpful, you’ll find several more examples in this book to go over.
In addition to dialogue, this book covers other storytelling elements like characterization, point of view, and voice. Each chapter ends with a checklist to help you review your manuscript for a specific storytelling element, and exercises.
Do you have any dialogue hang-ups or editing tips? Feel free to share them in the comments!
Best,
Leah
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