Dialogue Tips:
Making Dialogue Believable
Common Mistakes
- Using too much dialect- Being too true to the way people speak (adding um, etc.)- Sounding too stilted (
Stilted:
"Mother, I will not go to the prom with Charles Melhan. He is gross. Hishair is always so unpleasant."
Better:
"Mom, there’s no way I’m gonna go to the prom with Charlie. He’sgross. And his hair...yuck.")
- Using people’s names too often in conversations (
"Yes, Jane, that’s true.")
- Losing track of who said what- Unclear pronoun references (
If there are three men in a room and you say "he," which "he" are youreferring to?)
- Conversations where characters tell each other what they already know
(
"As you know, Bill, your mother died last year and when the will was read...")
- Don’t have a character talk
about things they wouldn’t normally discuss. (
"So, Mister Bond, aslong as someone doesn’t hit that big red button marked self-destruct, my plan to take over the world willbe complete by the time I get on my yacht sailing for Tahiti in one hour.")-
Long, boring speeches to provide information to the reader. See above—just longer… Showversus Tell applies to dialogue as well as narrative. Having a character tell something is stilltelling.- All characters sound alike- Having a character hiss dialogue when there’s no "s" in it- Overusing synonyms for the word "said" (
cried, howled, bellowed, whispered, stated, replied,voiced, expressed, vented, responded, uttered, shouted, vocalized, asserted, declared…)
Tips to Improve Dialogue
- Read it aloud—better yet, have someone else do it- Use contractions- Keep attributions to a minimum- Interrupt long passages of dialogue with beats or interjections from other characters- Make each character’s dialogue distinctive and you won’t need tags- Get into character—become an actor or picture an actor playing your character
Dialogue Tags:
Dialogue tags show the reader who’s speaking. There are two primary typesof tags:- Speaker attribution tags attribute the dialogue to a specific person by using a form of the word"said" (
"This is a speaker tag," John said.)-
Action tags/beats show action with the dialogue; the assumption is that the person performingthe action is also doing the speaking. (
Mary grinned. "And this is an action tag.")
To connect a tag to dialogue with a comma, the tag must show
how
the speaker said the dialogueand/or use a synonym for the word said. If you use a tag to show the character’s action
alone, donot connect it to the dialogue with a comma. If you use an internal beat, connect both sections of the dialogue with a comma if it’s one sentence; connect only one if it’s more than one sentence.
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