writing dialogue

Writing 101: Let’s Talk Dialogue

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Working on my dialog was my Nanowrimo 2015 focus, beyond writing the 50k words of course. I applaud every author that can manage dialog. After a while I start going a little crazy because how many times had I used the word “said”. Kaitlin Hillerich address “said” fatigue among other important dialog points in her article on Inks And Quills. What are your strategies for dealing with dialog?

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Writing 101: Let’s Talk Dialogue

"I think we should sell everything and invest in racing llamas."
“I think we should sell everything and invest in racing llamas.”

~ Kaitlin Hillerich

Dialogue is a tricky little beast when you’re a new writer. From punctuation to making it sound realistic, there’s a lot that can go wrong. When done well, dialogue can be a true delight for the reader and make a story shine. But mess it up and, well…it can really put a damper on things.

Today, we’re going to look at some dialogue basics to get you started off on the right track. If you’re confused about punctuation, speech tags, or the difference between spoken and written dialogue fear not–keep reading and we’ll tackle them together!

Behind on the Writing 101 series? Click to catch up! Part 1 (The Fundamentals of Story), Part 2 (Writing Term Glossary), Part 3 (Creating a Successful Hero & Villain), and Part 4 (Unraveling Tension, Conflict, and Your Plot).

What is Dialogue?

Dialogue is the spoken words between two or more characters, which is signaled with quotation ” ” marks. Most of your story will consist of dialogue. Dialogue not only moves your story along, but it also helps reveal who your characters are.

However, dialogue in fiction is not the same as dialogue in real life. When we write dialogue for a story we are actually creating an artistic imitation of real speech.

Why? Because no one would want to read real-life dialogue. In real speech, people stammer, um and uh, talk over and interrupt each other, get distracted, forget what they were going to say, bring up random stuff, chit chat about the weather… Trust me, no one wants to read that! It would be a mess.

To really see the difference between real and written dialogue, take a look at this piece of dialogue I’ve transcribed from an interview with Doctor Who actor David Tennant:

Read the full post on Inks And Quills

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Writing A Relationship

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This post by Adam Ganz originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 8/20/14.

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of Dorothy’s arthritic hands, the hands she said she thought with.

What intrigued me [was] seeing the combination of skills she needed, not only mathematics but hand and eye co-ordination and vision to work out how the thousand atoms in say the Vitamin B12 molecule fitted together. It was somewhere between chess and Rubik cube- a giant jigsaw puzzle where she couldn’t see the picture, or even all the pieces.

I met Judith as part of my research for a radio play about Dorothy Hodgkin and Margaret Thatcher, two extraordinary women who reached the pinnacle in their chosen spheres –and were about as different as any two women could be.  From 1943 to 1947 Hodgkin was the then Margaret Roberts’ s chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford from 1943 -1947 when Hodgkin was working at the cutting edge of X ray crystallography. In her fourth year Thatcher worked in Hodgkin’s lab on a molecule called Gramicidin S, which originated in the Soviet Union and had some antibiotic properties.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

Switch Character POV to Write Better Dialogue

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This post by Ksenia Anske originally appeared on her site on 6/4/14. Note that this post contains strong language.

I’m reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky right now, and it’s taking me a sweet sweet time. Because. I’m trying something new. Don’t ask me where I picked up this idea, I actually don’t remember. I started doing it at the end of writing the 2nd draft of IRKADURA (and today is the day I’m starting to write the 3rd draft! Ahhh!! AHHH!!! I’m so fucking scared!!!). Here is what it looks like (and it actually legitimately helped me write better dialogue, I swear, has been confirmed by a NY Times Bestselling author). Are you ready? When I read, at every line of dialogue, I pause and get inside that character’s head, THEN I read the line. Like, literally, remember the movie Being John Malkovich? Yeah, like that. Or, think of it this way. Think like a movie director. Imagine the shots. So, switch between camera angles. Rotate the whole scene in your head in 3D. That’s what it looks like to me. I become that character, for that one particular line of dialogue she or he (or IT?) says. Then, when the other character answers, I switch again. I get out of the first character’s head and get inside the second character’s head. It’s hard. It takes me time to pause and force myself to do it, and to switch the scene view in my mind. I also do something else. If there are more characters, I pause and hop inside their heads too, just to see what they see, even if they don’t do anything. It takes forever! But it’s worth the effort! Here is why.

SWITCHING POV WILL MAKE YOUR DIALOGUE REAL.
It totally will. You will see what is going on in real time, pick up real emotions your characters are experiencing, pick up nuances you haven’t seen.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ksenia Anske’s site.