My Author's Blog

He said, She said, They said...

         It's one of those things that sounds so easy to write about, something that comes so naturally for most of us in everyday life, yet in reality it can be so hard to put down on paper in a way that we feel satisfied with... Dialogue.
 
         Dialogue can be a part of any piece of writing, though especially in fiction, even some non-fiction will contain conversations that took place, or quotes from interviews. When writing dialogue in fiction, even when you know what you want to say, it can sometimes be difficult to know how to bring it across in a way that both sounds, and 'feels' satisfying.
 
         One problem that some of us have, which I continue to have to watch myself for when reviewing rough drafts I have writen, is throwing out too many 'tags' in a conversation. While it is necessary to tell our audience who is speaking, it is easy to fall into that trap of throwing in a 'He said, she said' a little too often. For instance, if you have two characters exchanging several short pieces of conversation between themselves, it can become fairly annoying if everyline is taged telling us who said it. Sometimes this can even turn a reader off of reading further, or at the very least interupt the flow of your story. One way to do this is to start out with a tag on the first couple of lines of dialogue, and then leave them off for a few lines, letting the audience infer who is speaking, though this works best as long as the exchange has an even pattern to it. Then of course you can throw in a tag here and there to emphasise the feelings of the character speaking, such as 'screamed Joe', 'Mary responded sadly'.
 
         Another way to keep these tags from feeling cumbersome is to use them to not only tell the reader who is speaking, but how they are saying it, or what feelings are being implied by their expression and tone. 'Joe's voice cracked with restrained emotion as he asked "How did it happen?"', '"Oh right, I'll just walk away," laughed Mary'.
 
         These are just a couple of examples that I try to keep in mind when writing dialogue, and I am sure there are many many more that could be included. Try thinking of the last conversation you wrote into a story, look at where, and how often you used these tags. Does the conversation flow the way you want it to? Is the emotion of the scene tripped up by overuse of them, or perhaps there are just a few that could be changed in the way they are worded.
 
         What are your suggestions to others in regards to dialogue? Any that you would like to share with other writers?
 
 
Happy Writing!
 
RD Williams
http://www.authorsden.com/robertwilliams1