Dialogue

1. Dialogue Techniques, Styles, Tips

2. On Dialogue • Used to convey information (story, plot, characters). • Dialogue reveals character and the relationship between characters. No two people speak alike and you should try to give your characters a verbal as well as a physical distinctiveness.

3. Tips for Making Unique Dialogue • Do they use a certain turn of phrase? A slang word? A swear word? Do they stutter or um and ah? Are they pompous or verbose? • Think of personality and speech. • Dialogue is also a means of exposition (communicating essential information to the reader about the background of the story) and is one of the basic ways of activating your text by showing not telling. • Don’t try to say everything at once.

4. Tips For Making Unique Dialogue • Beware of allowing your characters to carry on talking for any length of time without breaking it up with action or description, otherwise you’re in danger of producing a radio script.

5. Tips for Writing Unique Dialogue • Manipulate dialogue for your purposes:- Reveal character or motives- Individualize speakers- Convey important information- Highlight crucial moments or build suspense- Move the action forward- Make use of dialect, if needed • Think of your story in terms of a stage performance: how do your characters sound? Choose words for their dramatic impact: their emotional overtones, imagery, sound and rhythm.

6. … continued… • Keep dialogues short and to the point. • Short paragraphs create lots of white space and make the page look more inviting to readers. • Avoid long speeches; they pack a page with type and make it difficult to read as there is no rest for the eyes. • If you're tempted to write long passages of dialogue, ask yourself whether the story really needs it.

7. Do’s • Edit dialogue to trim off most of the fat. A lot of what people say is just blah-blah-blah, but you don't want to bore your reader. • Show how the character speaks instead of telling it. If the character speaks angrily, you can make this come through in her words -- it's therefore often not necessary to add an expressive dialogue tag such as, "she said angrily." The same if a character is shouting or crying, etc. Keep the reader's attention on your character's speech, not your explanation of it.

8. Don’ts • Don't get too colorful with the dialogue tags. "Hello," she shouted; "Hi there," he cried; "How are you?" she queried," "Fine thanks," he shrilled"... too much of this stuff gets distracting fast. Put your thesaurus away. The basic dialogue verbs "say," "tell," and "ask," have the advantage of fading in the background, letting the reader focus on what your character is saying. • Don't feel obligated to add a tag to every bit of dialogue. If it's clear who's saying what without them, then you can leave them off. • Don't let your reader get disoriented. Use dialogue tags when they're needed to prevent confusion. There's nothing worse than stopping in the middle of an exciting scene to retrace the dialogue and try to figure out who's saying what ("Okay, it's the killer speaking here, so this must be the detective who's answering him, not his sister...")

9. Formatting Dialogue • Use speech marks and punctuation. “” , . ? ! • A good rule of thumb is that every time a character speaks, it starts a new paragraph. • However, if one character speaks then performs an associated action then speaks again later, it can remain in the same paragraph. You can also have mixed actions by more than one character in one paragraph, but not mixed dialogue. For example: John hovered in the doorway, wondering if he needed to wait for a hostess or just sit down at the first table he could find. “Oh miss …” he said, trying to catch the uniformed blonde’s eye. She ignored him. “Oh miss …” he tried again.

10. Formatting Dialogue • Dialogue tags – the ‘he said, she said’. These should be kept to a minimum as otherwise it reads like verbal ping pong.

11. In-class Prompts: • A dark alley would be considered a normal setting for a thriller, as would a deserted house for a horror story. A café in Paris or a bright, sunny beach would be considered a normal setting for a romance. Take 2 characters, place them in a setting that would not be considered normal for the genre, and convey the emotions you want to get across to your readers through their conversation.

12. In-class Prompts: • A mother and father are discussing their son. He has been accused of stealing petty items from many of the other students at his private school. Write their conversation, only alluding to but never naming, the accusation towards their son. Be sure and allow it to come through whether or not they believe their son is capable of committing these thefts.

13. In-class Prompts: • A father and son are camping in the woods, far away from anyone or anything. The father realizes they are being watched by someone that is a threat to them. He must somehow convince his son they need to pack up and leave without scaring him, since he doesn’t want to alert whoever is watching them. How does the father convince the son to leave quietly with him? Write the conversation between the father and son.

14. In-class Prompts: • Take 2 or more of your characters and have them argue about something they feel passionate about. Allow the dialogue to increase the tension between the characters to the point that it destroys any kind feelings they once had for each other.