DIALOGUE, JOYCE AND CLARITY

Plaintive email from a blog follower the other day. (The bit she quotes from me is from a post I did about dialogue). She says:

Please help me get my head around this hugely difficult problem. I’m copying your example of awful dialogue below:

“Gosh, Sally, I hardly recognized you. You used to have dark hair with a fringe and now it’s a blonde bob. Did I tell you I recently saw Samantha, your younger daughter, the one who went round Australia? Lovely girl. She’s married now, of course, and they have a baby on the way.” Bleurgh.

Okay, fair enough. However, I’m now studying a creative writing unit with Oxford Uni and we have been asked to read James Joyce’s The Dead. I couldn’t believe how dreadful it was. There were great tracts of dialogue, 95% of which was pointless and frustrating to the point of me wanting to murder the author/lecturer etc!

As a side issue, not helped by the dialogue issue, just when there was a hint that something interesting might happen, it didn’t. Right, so personal preference for literature and what constitutes a good read aside, how did this story get published! The story seems to contain all your dialogue no-nos. I’m so confused.

 Well, two things:

1. I can't stand James Joyce. Can't read it.  find it twaddle. That's my personal opinion. Luckily, I don't have to write an essay on it.
2. However, I don't think Joyce makes the dialogue error that I was highlighting above.

Let me explain the dialogue error that I was talking about. It wasn't that it was boring and trite - both of which things it was. The point was that the author was using false dialogue to fill in bits of back-plot. False in the sense that there's no way on earth that character would have said those things. Think about it. She would not say to Sally, "Samantha, your younger daughter," because Sally knows fine that her own daughter is called Samantha and went to Australia. No, this is the author telling us those facts and it's Just Not OK.

OK?

Joyce on the other hand...

Luckily, I've run far, far away and am not here to deal with the flak from all the Joyce fans amongst you. Come on, then, DEFEND HIM! (Dan, surely, you can leap to his defence?)

I'm off!

DIALOGUE TAGS

Following from my earlier post on dialogue, I now come, as promised, to dialogue tags. Dialogue tags are the he queried / asked / opined bits that come between the spoken sections. Once beloved of Enid Blyton and many others, their unnecessary use is now regarded as a bad habit and poor style. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s better to repeat he said, than to vary it with questioned, opined, muttered or expostulated. The main reason for this is that it’s too easy to be tempted to tell the reader how the speaker spoke, but often more satisfying for the reader when the attitude is revealed in action. Dialogue tags are just a bit lazy and spoon-feed the reader too much. At the same time, they give the instruction after the reader has read the dialogue: too late, in other words. Sometimes, they're necessary, but you should only use them when they really are.

Let me illustrate with an example of an over-use of dialogue tags:

“Do you want to come in for coffee?” she suggested.
“Is coffee all you mean?” he wondered.
“What else would I mean?” she scoffed.
“Well, just that I thought you might have some biscuits as well,” he responded.
“Aye, right!” she laughed.

Do we really need any of the words outside the speech marks? No: we can manage perfectly well with just the speech, if the dialogue is strong enough. And that’s the key: your dialogue needs to be strong. If it is strong enough, it is strong enough to do the job on its own. Then you will need very few dialogue tags, and then usually only to show who is speaking. (Young children need more dialogue tags, as it is harder for them to follow who is talking.) Dialogue tags should show who is speaking, not how he spoke, unless that feels absolutely necessary.

Often, you can make the dialogue speak for itself, without any dialogue tags. Take a look at the same conversation re-written:

Carmelle looked straight at him. “Coffee?”
“Just coffee?” He stared back, streetlight shadowing his jaw.
“As opposed to?”
“Well, biscuits. I was thinking you probably do a mean chocolate digestive.”
“Aye, right!” How did he manage to make the word digestive sound so desirable? Carmelle felt herself begin to blush.

Finally, just in case you haven’t quite got the point, here is an example of too many dialogue tags with the extra burden of unnecessary adverbs. (I've written about lazy adverbs here. Remember that there's nothing wrong with adverbs per se, just with their lazy use.)

“Listen,” she whispered conspiratorially.
“What?” he interrupted eagerly.
“Nothing,” she replied, hesitantly, deciding that she was not going to tell him after all.

And here is how you could re-write that without dialogue tags or adverbs:

She leant towards him, her hair brushing his cheek. “Listen. I ...”
His pulse quickened. “What?”
Carmelle took a breath. She paused. What if her informant was wrong? She shook her head, looked down at the stem of the glass pressed between her fingers. “Nothing.”

Well? Please tell me you think the second one is better. Yes, the second one uses more words, but it uses them better. It uses verbs and action, shows us how the two characters behaved, allowing us to feel that we are there, to experience what they do. It draws the reader into the conversation, relegating the author (me) to a very appropriate sideline. After all, when you go to a puppet show, do you want to see the puppeteer?

DIALOGUE TECHNIQUES

Good dialogue is very hard to do and some writers are much better at it than others, just as some actors are much better than others at doing accents. Good dialogue is dialogue that a reader hardly notices as good or not, but bad dialogue sticks out painfully, dragging the whole book down. Poor dialogue is certainly one of the things that can contribute to rejection, not on its own but then poor dialogue is most unlikely to be the only thing wrong.

The first thing to know about writing dialogue is that you should not try to write exactly as people speak. If you did, you’d have lots of ums, vast tracts of nothingness and many non sequiturs. At the same time, you mustn’t write dialogue that the characters would actually never deliver. So, we devise a kind of stylized representation of speech, something that feels very natural. In essence, good dialogue is not about writing as we speak; it’s about not writing as we would not speak.

Dialogue is usually best broken up into sections, separated by narrative. You are not writing a film script or a play – unless, of course, you are, in which case you are boiling a whole different kettle of fish. You do not have to relate the whole conversation; in fact, you shouldn't. Most parts of a conversation are way too boring to set down. Yes, no, I don't know, and OK should all be reduced to their absolute minimum.

Oh, God - so should Oh, God. Amateur writers put loads of standard minor expletives in their dialogue but, again, the fact that a real person might have used a word doesn't make it deserve a place in your book. This is not about being prudish and avoiding swearing - probably the topic of another blog post - but about creating flowing, strong dialogue.

Some other big bad things to avoid:

• As I say, too many yeses and noes. Better to replace some of them either with nodding / shaking of heads – though that can quickly become repetitive – or with the rest of the sentence and context indicating positive or affirmative.
• The blatant provision of information for the reader, which the characters would already know and therefore not say. For example, “Gosh, Sally, I hardly recognized you. You used to have dark hair with a fringe and now it’s a blonde bob. Did I tell you I recently saw Samantha, your younger daughter, the one who went round Australia? Lovely girl. She’s married now, of course, and they have a baby on the way.” Bleurgh.
• Dialogue tags – I'm going to tackle this in the next post, but dialogue tags are when we say, for example: he replied, she opined, he queried, she reiterated. Where possible, stick to said, asked, or nothing. I will show you how on Friday.
• Anything which makes it hard for a reader to hear the words in his head – this means that using dialect of any sort becomes very tricky for writers. You have to be very confident in your reader and in your writing to get away with the heavy use of an accent which that reader doesn’t speak. Trouble is, sometimes it would be absurd not to use dialect to some extent, if that’s how the character would speak, but do try to keep it toned down. Think of your reader.

The key to writing dialogue is to read it aloud, preferably imagining yourself acting it. If you’re not an actor, as I’m not, this is difficult but it’s the very difficulty which will help you think more carefully. If there’s a bit of dialogue that keeps jarring every time you read it and you can’t find another way to express it, turn it into narrative instead. Better no dialogue than poor dialogue.

I admit that dialogue is not something I find easy or something I shine in. Perhaps that's why I'm extra careful with it and extra aware of when I get it wrong. I spend a lot of time trying not to get it wrong. Good dialogue sings and makes your story sparkle and come alive. Bad dialogue is horrible and drags a book right down.

She opined.