Creating Fictional Characters—Part 6: Putting the Right Words in Their Mouths
July 16, 2009 by Lillie
Table of contents for Creating Fictional Characters
I’ve learned about dialogue since the first draft of my first novel. When I’d finished about half the book, a writer friend read it. When she returned the manuscript to me, she said, “Do you realize you don’t have one word of dialogue in this entire story?”
My characters talked—there was just no dialogue. I wrote things like Debbie asked Jake to fix her breakfast. He told her he’d be glad to.
I started writing dialogue but decided not to edit the first part of the manuscript until I finished the first draft. My mother, who was a reader but not a writer, said, “I don’t know what it was, but the second half of the book was a whole lot better than the first.”
In Make Your Words Work: Proven Techniques for Effective Writing-For Fiction and Nonfiction
Listen to a normal conversation. You’ll hear a lot of nothing.
“How are you doing?”
“OK. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
This kind of conversation won’t move your story forward or reveal character. It will simply bore your reader.
Rather than a mirror of real conversations, dialogue is:
- Two or more characters talking with purpose, not just chit-chatting but talking for a reason
- Something artificial that appears real—realistic, not real, without all the uhs and you knows and boring information
To create dialogue that works:
- Use real speech rhythms
- Include implication and evasiveness as real conversation
- Eliminate the trivial and banal
- Include the unspoken (body language) as well as the spoken
Dialogue has several purposes:
- Characterize – to prove what you said about the characters is true
- Give information – but only information that would naturally be exchanged in conversation
- Advance plot – move action forward
- Convey tension – shortcut to conflict
Conversations in fiction can be described in three ways:
- Summary – brief description of what was discussed: John told Susie about his argument with Joe.
- Indirect dialogue – description of what was said without quotation: John told Sue that he and Joe had an argument and almost got into a fight. She asked what caused the argument, and John said … This is how I wrote dialogue when I first started, and even my mother thought it was boring.
- Direct dialogue – verbatim quote:
“Joe and I got into an argument at the pool today. I thought he was going to hit me,” John said.
“Oh, dear, “Susie said. “What in the world brought that about?”
Use direct dialogue for important conversations:
- Don’t waste direct dialogue on inconsequential discussion or exposition. If the reader already knows the information and the only purpose of the dialogue is to provide the information to another character, summary or indirect dialogue is probably better than dialogue.
- Set off dialogue with quotation marks with a comma between the spoken words and the tag.
- If the tag comes after the spoken words, the comma goes inside the quotation marks: “I went to town yesterday,” he said.
- If the tag comes before the spoken words, the comma goes after the attribution: He said, “I went to town yesterday.”
- Put each speaker’s words in a separate paragraph. Although it’s best to break up the dialogue so one speaker doesn’t give a monologue, if one character talks for a long time, break up his or her words into short paragraphs. In that case, put quotation marks at the beginning of the paragraph only and do not close the quotation marks until the end of the speaker’s words.
Use dialogue tags for attribution of speakers:
- Avoid using a tag if it’s clear who’s speaking. If there are only two characters in the conversation, each of them can speak a few times without attribution. The reader can follow a few exchanges between two characters without losing track of who’s speaking.
- Said is transparent and should be the tag used most often. Writers often think said is boring, but readers hardly know it’s there.
- Use other tags—answered, explained, replied, stated, etc.—sparingly. Dialogue isn’t improved by using many different tags; in fact, readers find it distracting.
- Never use a verb that is a physical impossibility—smiled, chuckled, grimaced, grinned. A character can smile before or after he speaks, but he can’t smile a word or chuckle a sentence. The title of the book Shut Up! He Explained: A Writer’s Guide to the Uses and Misuses of Dialogue (now out-of-print but available from used booksellers) shows the wrong way to write dialogue.
- Don’t add explanation or adverbs
- If the dialogue is strong, you don’t need them: He stormed out of the room and slammed the door angrily. If he stormed out of the room and slammed the door, the reader can figure out he’s angry.
- If the dialogue is weak, strengthen the dialogue: He left the room angrily is not nearly as strong as He stormed out of the room and slammed the door.
- Use action tags – beats: “Hurry or we’ll be late.” Toni gulped down the last of her coffee and tossed the plastic cup in the sink. “Today’s going to be a busy day.”
- To complement the dialogue—in the example above the actions reinforce the words that Toni is in a hurry.
- For variation—people talking are not disembodied voices. They are doing things as they speak, and so should your characters.
- For pauses— an action tag varies the pace.
Give your characters distinctive voices. In Creating Characters: How to Build Story People
The words you speak, what you say and how you say, it reveal you as a particular person. … These are things the writer must think about, be aware of. If the words he puts in his story people’s mouths are out of character, he’ll be hard put to rise above them.
- Gender—in general, women strive to make connections and men negotiate to see who’s on top of the ladder.
- Age—a teenager is likely to use a lot of slang; an elderly person is apt to speak more formally.
- Education/literacy level—a high school dropout usually doesn’t sound like a college graduate.
- Background experiences—where someone lives, events they have experienced, people they associate with all have a bearing on how they talk.
- Attitude and self-image—a self-confident person will sound different than a timid person with low-esteem.
- Favorite topics—your characters’ conversations will reflect their interests and activities. A race car enthusiast will sound different than someone who loves to read classic literature.
Different characters have different speech patterns.
- Characters can use slang or proper English, short or long sentences, complete sentences or fragments.
- Use contractions to sound natural unless the speaker is pompous or not a native English speaker.
- Don’t use strange spellings to signify dialect; use rhythms, word choices, and word placement instead.
- Don’t worry about proper grammar—write as the character would speak.
- Don’t have characters repeat the other person’s name. Normally when you are talking to a person individually, you don’t call them by name. On the other hand, if several people are in a conversation, you might call a specific person by name if you wanted to talk to him or her.
Characters talk to themselves:
- Interior monologue is what goes on in the character’s head: unspoken thoughts.
- Direct thoughts are shown in italics: The world has gone crazy.
- Use the Q trick—state the thought in the form of a question to avoid attribution: Had the whole world gone crazy?
Here’s an example of how not to write dialogue:
“Jane, do you remember that your father died last year and left his entire estate to your brother Carl?” Kay asked.
“Yes, Kay, I do.” Jane answered. “We suspected that Carl knew something about the mysterious secret in my father’s past and that he bribed our father to leave him the estate.”
“Your cousin Marvin agreed with us,” Kay responded. “Now it looks like we may be finding out what really happened, Jane.”
“Marvin’s mother was my father’s sister. They had a falling out years ago, and no one knows why. Have you found out something, Kay?” Jane demanded.
Leave a comment and tell me everything you find wrong with this poor example.
photo credit: Amy Jeffries
That last example was stunningly similar to something I wrote in my first novel. Too much narration in dialog form. Too put on.
RW,
At least you wrote dialogue. You’re a step ahead of me, who wrote no dialogue at all.
I feel like I need to print out every single one of your articles
.
I’ve always wondered about dialogue tags – When to use them and when they are redundant. I also get bored with “said” and thought I should try to avoid it. It was good for me to hear that said should be the standard and every other tag should be used sparingly.
Season the story with tags like pepper. Used sparingly, it gives a kick. Used too much, and it just gets thrown away.
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S,
I think most writers are tempted to use a variety of tags. That’s something I point out a lot to my editing clients.
I like your analogy of seasoning the manuscript with tags like pepper.
I totally agree about taking chitchat out of dialogue because it is incredibly boring to read. Obviously, you want to read a conversation that is very riveting and moving the story forward, and not just useless talking.
C,
It’s amazing how much useless talking we do in real life.
wow..this is an incredible depiction of how to create fictional characters. I have only been writing seriously over the past few years and developing fictional characters is incredibly hard for me. I went back and read the previous 5 parts and this is quite the tool for me. Thanks for the help!
Crime (if you wrote YourName@CrimeCleaner, I could address you as a real person, and you would still get your keyword link),
It’s always good to hear that posts are helpful.
Fictional characters are of great help to improve the quality and make the story more and more interesting. This part will surely be of help to many people around and many people will be benefited from it.
danzil,
Fiction wouldn’t be fiction without characters, and interesting characters make fiction interesting.
This is a great series with a lot of excellent information. I typically write non-fiction, although have been wanting to get into the habit of doing some short stories mostly just for practice, so I found these posts very interesting.
I had never really thought about how different real dialog is as compared to book dialog. You really would end up with pretty boring story if you mimicked a normal conversation too closely…
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Steve,
Good luck with your short stories. I’m glad you’re finding the series helpful.
Yes, if we dupicated our typical conversations as dialogue, the reader would be falling asleep before the end of the fictional conversation.
Thank you for this post. You’ve been a great help as I’m just starting to try my hand at fiction writing. But how I do make the dialogues sound more natural? Because there are dialogues that are so plain obvious that people can just make their conclusions already. Isn’t that too old school already?
April,
It isn’t easy to make dialogue sound natural. It takes a lot of practice. The dialogue in my earlier writing was really stilted and awkward, but I have improved with experience.
Liked your ideas on dialogue characterisation makes a novel i think.. great post
graham,
Thanks. You’re right that characterization is critical to a successful novel.
Of the excellent suggestions in this post giving readers a distinct voice is probably the hardest to me. I have a certain way of speaking and, yeah, I can change it around a bit. But after a while all of my characters end up talking more or less like each other.
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Spot,
Ideally, readers should be able to recognize who is talking in your story without tags. Of course, that can’t happen all the time, but the closer you come to this ideal the better.
None of our characters should necessarily sound like us, and they should all be different.
You are so right when you say that is hard—it is extremely difficult.
These are really effective tips for getting out of the dialogue writing rut! What books showcase the best examples of dialogue for you?
personal (if you wrote Your Name @ personal statements examples, I could address you as a real person instead of a writing sample, and you would still get your keyword link),
At the risk of sounding totally conceited and self-centered
I’ll quote from an e-mail I received from a reader of my novel Dream or Destiny:
What’s wrong with the examples?
In the conversion, we know all things what happened in the past, i think it is better for readers to learn little by little in the dialogue and not all the things in one sentence.
It looks that they don’t have “personality”, it looks like it is robot who talk, it seems that they don’t have emotinons and it is always the same “dialogue”: “sentence 1, character said, sentence 2″, too boring.
What do you think of my analysis? ^^
Lucy,
Good analysis. The characters would already know what happened and wouldn’t be telling each other about it. Also, we don’t generally repeat people’s names so often in conversation. Some of the dialogue tags are inappropriate as well.
Science Fiction – a big challenge. Aliens, monsters, deep space, encompassing silence – that leaves little room for dialogues or complex characters. Descriptions of the battles are not enough. We need an interesting protagonist ( preferably human ) and no less interesting antagonist. Problem is how to build complex “not of this world” character – not flat, ridiculous, predictable or stereotypical. Does a complex character fits this literary genre ?
William,
I confess I’m not a fan of science fiction and neither read it or write it. So I will leave the fine points of sci-fi characters to those who are more familiar with the genre.
There have been character based SF stories.
SF can encompass many other genres. Anne McCaffrey did mostly romance, little plot tension, but wonderful stories (if you ignore Dinosaur Planet and sequels). Lois McMasters Bujold does excellent character and action in the same story (see Brothers in Arms). Isaac Asimov did mysteries with a logical protag, and was mostly character based. Heinlein’s characters are memorable (just stick to the books before and including Stranger). Elizabeth Moon in Reminant Population and The Speed of Dark is wonderful with character, and does decent character based story telling in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter and its sequels. Roger Zelenzy Characters drove both This Immortal (aka Call me Conrad) and many of his other books. Manly Wade Wellman might be character driven.
And sometimes the idea or the landscape is a character in its own right.
SF moves in similar ways to fantasy. LOTR had action, but also had characters. Terry Pratchett does character well.
The big problem/opportunity is to get the attributes of the world into place as the story unfolds.
Some of the best have a blend of character and plot.
So it is established that character based stories can be done in SF, they have been done, and done by some of the best ever. Since I am still unpublished, I will leave it to you to find how they are done.
Godel,
Sounds like you are very knowledgeable about sci fi. Thanks for your insights.
“Aliens, monsters, deep space, encompassing silence – that leaves little room for dialogues or complex characters. Descriptions of the battles are not enough.”
You must have been seeing the movies, not reading the stories. Almost none of the above is true for the best in the genre.Agreed, that the descriptions of battles or actual battles themselves are not enough, and there are many stories that lack battles.
And what goes for SF goes often for fantasy. Watership Downs did have battles, but they are not what the book is remembered for.
There usually is a fight scene in Bujolds books (see Sharing Knives series) but while important to the plot, are not the total point. The point often is the character struggling against a problem. (see Memories for a no fight book.)
Appreciate your comments on a topic I’m not very familiar with, Godel.
There is a dialog technique that may have started with Paul Kidd.
A friend of mine noticed, by counting the number of time Paul used the word ‘said’ or any other replacement in one of his novels.
Zero.
Paul does (action attributed to a character)(dialog) or the reverse instead of using any other way or other words.
BTW, thanks for the excellent blog, I am bookmarking this page for when I develop character based stories.
Godel,
Wow! Using no speech attributions is the goal of good writers, but I didn’t know someone had actually done it.
[...] Note from Lillie: For a longer and more detailed post on dialogue, see Creating Fictional Characters, Part 6: Putting the Right Words in Their Mouths. [...]