Dialogue - the bit where your characters talk to each other. It's important. It's also kind of hard to do right.
The thing is that dialogue in fiction has to read and sound like real conversation without being like real conversation.
Real conversations are confusing things full of interruptions and elisions that would make a written conversation unreadable. So - as I've said before - you are trying to catch the essence of speech without its confusion.
In practice what this means is there are two common mistakes authors make with dialogue.
1. They make it too formal. The character's say things no one would - which removes transparency of writing. Not a good thing.
or
2. They try and making it authentic and fill it with pauses, interruptions, repetitions, missing bits, slang and dialect to the point it is unreadable.
The best way to get round this is to read it aloud - if it sounds stilted it's probably got problem 1. If it's impossible for a single person too read it aloud it's probably got problem 2. Try to write dialogue that is both comprehensible and sounds natural when read aloud.
Once you know what's wrong with it you can start to fix it. It's one of those things you just have to keep plugging away at until you get it right. I still get it wrong sometimes (probably a lot of the time).
And now the useful links on the subject:
About Me
- Becka
- Becka Sutton is a self-described crazy cat lady, but she’s not very good at it: While she is crazy she only has one cat. She was born in Britain in 1972 and has lived there her entire life. In her early teens she started scrawling fantasy stories in exercise books her mother bought her to stop her scribbling in her school books. She hasn’t stopped writing since, and she credits writing as the outlet that allowed her to recover from the nervous breakdown she had after her parents died. Her other interests include reading, listening to music, attempting to draw, growing her own vegetables and looking after the aforementioned cat, Pumpkin. No, you can’t read the novel she scrawled as a teen – she burned it long ago because it was awful. You can read more of her work at http://firebird-fiction.com
2 comments:
Hardest thing for me is giving my different characters distinct voices, especially when they're similar demographics.
I feel like I'm cheating in my current WiP that has the narrator going off in Italian when she gets upset.
Yeah, giving characters a distinct voice is difficult.
I've developed a terrible habit of eavesdropping on buses - that way I can listen to groups of simlar people talking and see what in their speech makes each of them distinctive.
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