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Dialogue
Your story has gone through all of the writing processes; the initial idea, the rewrites and all of the polish, and still there is not one single publisher willing to accept your manuscript and make you a viable talent at Barnes & Nobles. What are you overlooking, what are you not seeing, are you hearing your writer’s voice but not listening to the dialogue of your characters?
Dialogue feeds through, and grows from, character. Voice, as an element of dialogue, is a product of the writer’s understanding of an individual character. Tom Chiarella
You have developed these characters from snapshots of your family, friends and other encounters. They speak to you and as a writer; you need to help your characters tell their story; to talk to us. You can see their gestures, the spit spraying from their mouths, and hear their accent but all of this is secondary to their diction; manner of expression in words; choice of words; wording. When crafting dialogue, diction rules.
Good diction lends precision. When chosen correctly, a character’s diction can show us who they are and what they know. The way people choose (diction) and the way they use them (syntax) can do much to show us who they are. We do not have to reinvent language to show peculiarities of a dialect. We can and should make use of the language as we know it. That is the key to varying diction and syntax. Reinventing them is poetry. Using them accurately and convincingly is a particularly important key to writing strong dialogue.
Does dialect, the sum total of an individual’s characteristics of speech, add to or detract from your dialogue? One needs to be careful when trying to impose our character’s idiolect into our writings. Are we looking for authenticity or are we trying to show off our keyboard experimentations to our readers. Remember to listen to the music of the language and conduct yourself accordingly to its rhythm.
While writing or reading an interesting piece of dialogue, ask yourself these questions:
What do they want? Bring the characters and conflict into focus.
What’s holding them together? Be driven by the needs of the characters, more so than the needs of the story.
Where are they? Locate us, give us a sense of where we are, who we are listening to.
Write dialogue to discover character rather than to reflect a set of givens. In fact, push yourself to work against the givens and your dialogue will crank you into discovering entire stories as well as fully voiced characters.
Trust the language as you know it. Tom Chiarella, “Writing Dialogue”
I’m going to end this article in the same fashion as “Writing Dialogue”, with another quote from its author. All, but not everything. What this statement means is that we should be able to hear all that a character is through his words, but we don’t have to hear everything that he says. There is no need for us, as writers, to capture every word that is spoken. Every word, every conversation, is not a story upon itself. The story finds itself in the words spoken, in the moments of silence, the pace and pause of exchange… All, but not everything.
I challenge you to go back to your manuscripts, with a little more thought on the voices of your characters, and see if you can define who they are from the writer that has created them. Read your written conversations out loud to see if they reflect the language that YOU know and trust. Check to see that your dialect is more than keyboard experimentations; a shortened word here and a lengthen one there, and make your character’s personal exclamations and catchphrases pop every time you have the need to use them. |
This Month I've selected these poems or stories for your reading enjoyment.
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Fantasy: November 23, 2005 Issue [#735]
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