Writing Dialogue
There are areas in the story where the dialogue uses a lot of exposition. This is all in the interaction with Tom and Marjorie and the kids, where the characters seem to dump a lot of information in one go. There are also areas where you same the same thing twice in dialogue. A generic example would be:
The rain soaked his clothes. They were wet through.
Sometimes writers often say the same things twice or repeat dialogue from character to character. Think about how you can condense this down in the genre you are writing in.
5 Tips for Dialogue Writing
There are a number of tips that can help if you want to use dialogue well in your writing:
Dialogue should reflect your character’s background. To get dialogue right, you must understand how your character’s speak. This is likely influenced by where they come from, their social class, upbringing, and myriad other factors. Speech and tone are always bound up in what has happened and is happening to a character. William Shakespeare was exceptionally deft at encoding his character’s speech patterns with these social markers, and for blending these idioms within a single play.
Be true to the period. If you are setting your story in the past, your dialogue should accurately reflect word choice, idioms, and speech patterns of that period. Words, like clothes, go in and out of style. Conversations need to be specific to the time you’re writing in, without seeming contrived.
Desire should motivate your characters to speak. When your characters are speaking, they should be trying to get something from one another or make a power play. When writing dialogue, ask yourself what your characters want. (This is a crucial aspect of character development). Ideally, you will know your characters well enough to sense not only what they want, but also how they would express their desires verbally. Will they be blunt or subtly manipulative? Will they be angry, or do they always keep their cool?
Fictional characters don’t overuse “uh.” In real life, speech has lots of padding or “stuffing”: words like ‘umms and yeahs.’ But good dialogue in fiction must be both more incisive and selective. It is shorn down to reveal what people want from one another, reveal character, and dramatize power struggles. One of the most common mistakes when writing dialogue is to write down exactly what people say most of the time. This will probably be dull, as it will be full of “um” and “ah” and “you know” and “like” and so forth; rambling, repetitious, and not very sparky. Pay careful attention to dialogue punctuation, particularly things like exclamation points (which should be used sparingly). Try to avoid CAPITAL LETTERS FOR SHOUTING. You can show your characters are shouting by the rhythm of the dialogue, the words you choose and the actions before and after dialogue.
There is always subtext. There are often wide gaps between what people say and what they are thinking, between what one understands and what one refuses to hear. These gaps can collectively be referred to as subtext. They are valuable territory for the fiction writer. Stay alert to them, and let them generate drama in the scenes you write.
Using All Five Senses
Don’t forget to use all five senses: touch, smell, sight, sound and taste. Instead of saying Tom was tall, you could say the room seemed to shrink as he entered it. Smells are often anchors for our past or present. The smell of freshly mown grass evokes memories, or the musky scent of a character’s aftershave tells us how they smell rather than saying, ‘Tom’s aftershave was nice. A song or a sound can evoke memories and feelings and remind us of things from the past. Running your hand along a sofa that feels like an old bus seat, tells us a lot without having to describe it.
How to Write With Sight: It’s fine to describe how things look. In fact, sight might be the most important sense when it comes to descriptive writing. While a photographer might be able to take in an entire scene at once, a writer has to choose what details to focus on and place them in the most effective order. That means you’ll want to be judicious about what details you choose to highlight. The ocean may be blue, bricks may be red, but are these really the details you want to call to the reader’s attention?
Writing Tip. One good technique to keep in mind is describing things indirectly: To convey the brightness of the sun, you could say directly that the sun is bright, but you could also describe the way the light from the sun causes the glass windows to shine solid white.
How to Write With Taste: Taste is often considered the most difficult sense to write about, but it can also be one of the most powerful. For one, it’s extremely subjective: We all may know (or think we know) what a fresh apple tastes like, for instance, but how do you describe that taste? Is it the crispness, the tiny burst of acidity amidst the sweetness? Or is the apple bland because it is not fresh? Another difficulty is finding the right time to deploy taste imagery. As with smell, taste is extremely personal and evocative, so you’ll want to be careful to avoid distracting the reader with excessive descriptions.
Writing Tip. One common technique that writers often use is the deliberate mixing of sensory words for effect. For instance, you might describe the zesty taste of a lemon as bright (a visual description) or the last light dissolving over the horizon as a whimper (an auditory description).
How to Write With Touch: Touch is an easy sense to overlook. You’re always touching something, even if it’s just your clothes. (Even if you’re not wearing clothes! Air has its own feeling, and different temperatures and levels of humidity create different physical sensations. Write about what it feels like to sit in your office chair. How does your body feel? Where are your points of contact? The places where you feel sore or stiff? Now write about how it feels to sit in your favourite chair. How does your body feel different? Where is your weight situated?
Writing Tip. The sense of touch is about more than the way things feel in your hands, although texture is an important part of it. Touch also captures sensations that typically occur internally, like your experience of temperature, pain, and pleasure.
How To Write With Sound: Sound is a great sense to use to create mood. Consider two scenes of the same forest: You might describe the chirping of many small birds, the rustle of small mammals moving through the softly falling leaves, or the whispering of a breeze through the trees. This creates a particular atmosphere, one that seems peaceful and maybe even a little magical. Now consider another set of sounds from the same forest. Somewhere in the distance you hear the howl of an unidentifiable animal. Nearer to you, the creak of an old branch, followed by the snap of a twig. The wind, when you hear it, seems to moan. The same two descriptions of a forest can create entirely different atmospheres with sensory language.
Writing Tip. Use onomatopoeia to help capture the sound of a scene: The plop of a frog dropping into a pond, the clink of two champagne glasses, the crackle of a dry log on a hot fire, the whoosh of a car racing by. In general, though, you’ll want to be judicious about using onomatopoeia, unless you’re going for a deliberately cheesy, comic book-type effect.
How to Write With Smell: The sense of smell is very closely connected to memory, and a good writer can use that to their advantage. Walking into your grandmother’s house and immediately recognizing the smell of her cooking (or her flowery perfume) can succinctly evoke a powerful emotional response. Similarly, the smell of something unpleasant—the acrid stench of motor oil, the rancid, vinegary smell of expired milk—can provoke strong, visceral reactions in a reader.
Writing Tip. As with perfume and cologne, a little bit goes a long way. You don’t (generally) want to overwhelm the reader with olfactory descriptions, but a few well-placed details can create a powerful impression.
Thanks to Jericho writers, Curtis Brown Creative and Masterclass for a culmination of their writing tips.
