March 28th to April 3rd: “Dialogue can be tricky. As the author, how do you do it?”

“Did I tell you Fred hired someone to kill me?”

Not a bad line of dialogue, but it wasn’t the product of my imagination. I heard it while taking a walk with my wife in the park near our home. A pair of middle-aged, Midwestern women, a blonde and a brunette, were walking toward us when the brunette dropped that little conversational bomb.

It never occurred to her that anyone might be paying any attention to her conversation. But I was listening. It’s a habit with me. I like to collect turns of phrase. I enjoy hearing how people mangle grammar and syntax. I love to listen in when people attempt to hurdle polysyllabic names.

The death threat the woman in the park mentioned wasn’t the only one I’ve overheard. Taking the MetroLink in St. Louis from Lambert Airport to Union Station, I heard an African-American man speaking on his cell phone. He was telling his “baby” sister what he would do to the man who had beaten her.

“You tell Gerald he’s at your house when I get there, I’m gonna kill his ass.”

Both comments concerned the subject of murder, but each was voiced distinctively. So how do you decide which words to put in which character’s mouth. First, you have to know your characters. I write bios for mine. Then you use what you hear in the real world. You don’t have to repeat someone’s exact words — unless they’re really cool — but you use actual street talk, shop talk and office talk as starting points to which you apply fitting tones, accents and pauses.

Do your preparation, train your ear and your dialogue will be fine — and if you put the wrong words in a character’s mouth, he’ll all but look at you and say, “Hey, man, that ain’t me.”

Dialogue, to me, is probably the funnest part to write in a story. As a huge plotter, I pretty much know the course of the action throughout before I put a single word on the page. It helps me stay focused. I’m not big on doing a lot of character bios. Hell, half the time I forget an mc’s eye color and have to track down a prior reference to it to make sure I don’t change it mid-book. Beyond plotting out all of the details though, I spend a good deal of time pre-writing, talking with characters in my head. I put them in scenes, hit the “play” button, and kind of see what happens. Sometimes I’ll ask them questions to see what sort of answers they come up with. By the way, this isn’t as split-personality as it might seem.

When I got editorial feedback on Deadworld and its sequel, The Vengeful Dead, one of the more common refrians was, “too much talking here.” Like I said, dialogue is fun. It’s how a good deal of characterization gets played out in stories. Often, I think, a single line of dialogue does more to represent a character than pages of action. I don’t mull over words a lot, trying to get just the right turn of phrase. If the characters are cemented well enough in my head, they come out naturally. The trick of course, I think, is to understand your characters well enough, to get into their heads enough that you don’t have to think about it. Sometimes, the hard part is being able to type fast enough to get their words down on the page before I forget what they’re saying.

One of the harder parts with dialogue, for me, is distinct voices among various characters. It’s difficult to keep yourself out of the characters entirely, as we have our own ways of thinking and talking, and experiences that limits the range of what we’re capable of doing on the page. Listening to other people talk, lots of reading across a variety of authors, and such, can do a lot to expand our options in this regard. When I originally wrote Deadworld, it was in first person p.o.v. and it used more than one. One of the issues I had was making two female FBI agents sound uniquely different enough. In the end, I dropped the first person p.o.v. and rewrote the story in third person. I’ve been with these characters long enough now that I could probably pull it off better. The more characters you are switching between the more difficult it is, I think, to keep from having characters bleed over from one to the other. Anyway, these are issues I have, and I’m sure other authors are more capable than I at pulling this off.

Regardless, dialogue is likely the key attribute in a story for bringing it to life for the reader. It presents the quickest, most effective way to let the reader know just who the character is and what they are like. When I write, it’s the way I bring them to life for myself, which is why I likely end up editing dialogue more than any other part of the story. Not that the dialogue is bad, mind you, but more so because I like my characters and enjoy interacting with them so much that sometimes I’m not doing much to move the story forward. It’s a subtle balance to only talk as much as you need for the story and not interfere with how the character is as a person. As we know, people in general engage in a lot of interesting conversation that really doesn’t go anywhere.

I was taken by Jon Land’s point that storytelling began as an oral tradition, and each character called for the storyteller to give him or her a distinct voice.

I credit my father for inspiring me to become a writer — even though he suggested I go to dental school. When I was very young, my dad would tell me bedtime stories. He didn’t read them from a book; he made them up on the spot, and each character was voiced differently. It was thrilling theater performed not in stage lights but by the soft glow of a night light.

I’m sure this influence has much to do with why I like to listen to other people speak as a source for my dialogue. Then there’s the fact that Dad and I, hewing to cultural tradition, have both kissed the Blarney Stone.

This is great stuff!
This is shaping up to be a master’s class.
I like Jon Land appraisal based in the oral tradition.
My favorite piece of advise is Heywood’s editor: “Shut up and listen.” As a father of 3 boys (two of them are pre-teens), I use it a lot. 🙂

I must confess, same as Joseph Flynn, I like to listen in to strangers too. Which brings the question, Joseph, have you ever gotten into trouble for it?

Everybody speaks differently…that’s because how we frame a thought, how we choose our words, and what we actually have to say are reflections of our personality, our upbringing, our values, our intellect, our emotions, our education, our goals, our physical health, and our psychological stability, among many other things. But that’s obvious.

There’s a simple test that Michael Gleason, the creator of REMINGTON STEELE, gave me for evaluating whether an exchange between two people is good or not. If you strip the names off the scene, can you tell which characters are speaking simply by their words alone. The dialog spoken by Remington, Laura and Mildred was so distinct and unique, even if they were not in scenes together, it was obvious which character was speaking. His rule was if you could put the same lines in any other character’s mouth, then the dialog sucks.

You couldn’t put Spenser’s dialog into Hawk’s mouth and vice-versa. Their voices are too distinct. The same goes for Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock, Monk and Sharona, Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, Columbo and anyone else…I could go on and on.*

Gleason’s test I still use all the time, even after twenty years as a screenwriter and author. And I’m ashamed to admit how often I flunk and have to rewrite a scene, whether it’s in a screenplay or a book.

I know a character is well conceived if it’s effortless for me to write in their voices in any situation I put them in. If I have to struggle to find the voice, then the problem is with the conception of the character…or if its a character that has served me well, than with the structure of the scene, which doesn’t create a strong enough conflict, or clear enough stakes, for the character’s, well, character to reveal itself through dialog.

*side note. This is why I dislike so many of the police procedurals that are on the air now. The dialog is interchangeable and devoid of character…because the characters have no character. They are one-dimensional talking points spouting exposition. The only thing that really identifies their dialog is the expertise reflected in it… “oh, he’s talking about guns, so it’s the gun guy” or “the dialog is about the psychological profile, so it’s the shrink lady.”

Sometimes, think of dialogue as a weapon.

It warms my heart to see James invoke John Howard Lawson. Prolific screenwriter, first president of the Writer’s Guild, victim of the blacklist (You Tube his defiant testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee) unrepentant Stalinist–oh well, you can’t have it all–and author of one of the few usable texts on dramatic writing, Lawson could move the story, depict a character and make you laugh or cry with the same line. If you want to experience great dialogue watch one of his movies or the hundreds of others made in the Golden Age.

I agree with Lee. Nobody wants to read how ‘real people talk.’ They want to be entertained. The way real people talk is boring.

I learned a lot as a kid/teenager about novel dialog reading Gregory MacDonald’s FLETCH and CONFESS FLETCH, Robert B. Parker’s early Spensers, George V. Higgins’ FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE and KENNEDY FOR THE DEFENSE, and just about everything from Elmore Leonard and Larry McMurtry.

Lee

Wow, these are all great points. To me dialogue is part of story and EVERYTHING in what we do is about story. A young writer once asked the great John D. MacDonald, who always talked about story what exactly the definition was and MacDonald replied, simply: “Stuff happens to someone you care about.” I think a lot of what we’re all saying can be summed up by caring about your characters. Because if you care about them, you know them, or you think you know them until they surprise you. And if you know them you can listen better to their voices they’ve given themselves after you conceived their beings. The “stuff” MacDonald was talking about, the structure and plot, forms the struggle and conflict that brings them to life and infuses their dialogue with vitality, unpredictability, and relevance. So I guess what I’m saying here is that the action and incident that forms the heart of the thriller form also creates the conflict that enriches and empowers characters to act and speak on their own. For me, when a character’s dialogue isn’t crackling right, I always figure it’s because I didn’t define him or her properly in the context of their motivations and the conflict that’s moving the story forward. We need to breathe life into them so they can act and speak on their own.

I believe that dialog is real when it can immediately be identified as coming from a particular character. The reality is entirely situational. It sounds (or reads) so right coming out of their mouths, that it strikes you as real and genuine. What’s real about it is not that it’s a conversation that might occur in “real life,” or that its anything a real person might say, but that the words, and how they are said, are seem so true to the character you’ve created.

Dialogue, in addition to all the attributes mentioned above, has to be consistent with what might be expected from a character’s vocabulary and education. In my first novel, The Concrete Inquisition, there’s a young underling for a drug kingpin. His formal education stopped in elementary school, but after he pulls a big ripoff, he decides he has to educate himself and having come into money he starts reading the Wall Street Journal. He quotes an item from the WSJ to the cop for whom he’s a snitch, but he mangles the vocabulary of the story he’s trying to convey. The scene is played for humor.

But if you don’t keep a character’s vocabulary consistent with what a read might reasonably expect of him, the humor will be unintentional and the writer will be the butt of the joke.

So agree on what was said above about the “naturalness” of dialogue. How amusing it would look to have every sentence filled with, “uhm…well…you know…” Lol, what a nightmare that would be to read. That said, I think there is a place in dialogue for that naturalness in real speech to creep in. The trick of course is to do it without making the reader aware. How do you get interrupted, jagged speech patterns in without interrupting the flow of reading? It’s a good question I think, and not one I have a ready answer for.

Natural speech usually is clumsy, disjointed and even slurred. But there are also effective and even brilliant speakers. People whose genius is spontaneous expression. Think of Winston Churchill and Robin Williams. Imagine what a combination of those two would sound like. I like to include at least one gifted speaker in my work every now and then. Just to show they exist, and of course to serve the story.

I use “said” almost exclusively…and, from a practical standpoint, I drop them to remind people who is speaking, particularly when there are several people in the scene. But mostly I use the placement of my “saids” to control the flow or performance…to the adjust the rythmn/beat of a scene or a speech (particularly when writing humor, as I do in MONK). Robert B. Parker and Gregory MacDonald were great at using “saids” to create a pace to their banter. For me, there is definitely a beat to a good scene…particularly in a script. It’s hard for me to define in words, it’s something I feel. And when the beat is off, the scene doesn’t work for me.

Well said all, he said, admiringly.