Dialogue: It’s All About The He Said, She Said Bull…(Writing Workshop)

Today’s topic is extra-super important so why don’t you butt-scoot a bit closer, take your earbuds out, put the phone and curling iron down, and listen up; we’re talking Dialogue today.

Before we dive in elbows deep in storytelling ichor, let’s do a little group visualization. Think back on the last really good movie you saw. For the sake of this group exercise I’m going to use Avengers 2, which is nowhere near as good as the first Avengers, but works well for this example.

Now, say what you will about the overall quality of Avengers 2, something we can all agree on is that the dialogue was excellent (if you can’t agree to those terms then you just butt-scoot on out of here, I can’t help you). This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s seen Firefly or Buffy The Vampire Slayer; in terms of dialogue, there are few people in the business who do it better than Whedon.

But don’t take my word for it. Check out this clip from Avengers: Age of Ultron and then let’s dissect it to get to the delicious, juicy innards of why it’s so good. (Note: You can stop at about the :50 mark. No need to finish out the whole video unless you really, really want to.)

 

I think it’s Jim Butcher that originally put me onto this, but people tend to speak in 5 word sentences. This left me scratching my head in puzzlement, for surely that had to be too few words. Right?

Well, let’s go to the tape and do a bit of math. In the clip there are 14 exchanges with 18 distinct sentences. The word length breakdown for those sentences is as follows:

Words

2 words – 3

3 words – 2

4 words – 3

5 words – 3

6 words – 2

7 words – 2

8 words – 1

9 words – 1

13 words – 1

Average word count per sentence – 5.2

Huh, well would you look at that; Butcher might have been onto something after-all. Consequently that 5.2 average is skewed by the one outlying sentence of 13 words which Ultron uses as a mini-monologue, a tactic Whedon uses to point out the inherent flaw and silliness of monologues. If we remove that 13 word sentence, the average drops down to 4.8.

What’s the take away from this? Well, in my experience, new writers get way too word heavy in their dialogue. Bogging it down in all sorts of useless words that bring the conversation to a crawl.

Useless Words in Dialogue

Want an example of useless words? Contractions and monosyllabic expressions of wonderment.

Examples: Huh? Oh! Ah! Uh. <– these have a time and a place. That time and place is not in every sentence.

“But Anthony,” you whimper, “People use discourse markers 6-10% in regular everyday speech. Here, let me cite my source.”

Alright, true. These monosyllabic expressions are commonly referred to as discourse markers, and they serve a purpose in everyday speech, you’re right. But here’s the problem: Everyday speech is boring as hell.

Don’t believe me? Go to the coffee shop and spend thirty minutes listening to strangers. Pay really close attention to what, and how, they’re speaking, and you’ll soon come to the startling realization that we all sound like jibbering orangutans on Adderol.

Dialogue in stories shouldn’t reproduce everyday speech. If it did, we’d all stop reading. Good dialogue should distill everyday speech into its punchiest, most poignant iteration.

Notice in the Avengers clip, there’s only one discourse marker in the entire thing. Relying too heavily on these doesn’t make your dialogue sound more natural, it introduces too many starts and stops and makes me angry. Stop sprinkling these into your story like glitter at the Gay Pride parade.

Okay, so remember when I said imitating real life speech is bad? Now, allow me to completely contradict myself. Contractions in dialogue are your best friend.

Example: “What is going on over there.” 6 words that could be magically refined to five by contracting “What” and “is” into the magically scrumptulescent “What’s”.

Barring formal occasions, people mostly speak in contractions. Refusing to contract your words in dialogue adds a stilting effect because it strikes the reader’s subconscious as unnatural.

That’s not to say you should never use contractions, however. Sometimes it adds a layer of character development. Thor, for example, doesn’t contract his words because he’s from hoighty-toighty Asgard.

So cut out the useless words. Check. Next?

Involve Everybody

In that Avengers clip, there are 6 characters and each of them gets a line. Why is this important?

You can highlight the importance of certain characters in a scene by how much they speak. Tony Stark and Ultron are the two main players here, so they speak the most, but the other characters are not just spear-carriers so they get lines too.

This is especially important when your medium for storytelling is the written word. If a big conversation is taking place on the page between two characters, but there are six present, we are likely to forget the four people not speaking. Bad news, because when the action starts, and Thor MC-Hammer smashes Quicksilver, the reader is likely to pause and say to themselves, “Wait, where’d Thor and Quicksilver come from?”

Spread the love, involve all your characters in the scene and not only will you have much better dynamics, you’ll be less likely to confuse the ever-loving hell out of your reader.

I’m Picking Up What You’re Putting Down

 One of the most common mistakes I see new writers commit is having their characters constantly repeating what the other character just said.

Example:

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding you, I’m serious. Brenda was caught making out with a basketball behind the bleachers.”

“A basketball behind the bleachers? No way. I refuse to believe it.”

“Believe it or not, it’s true.”

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Ah, that Anthony, using hyperbole again.” I wish that were the case, but I see conversations like this all the time.

Starting your sentences by repeating the last thing the other character just said is born from lack of confidence on the author’s part. We don’t trust the readers to recall what was previously said, so we repeat it for them. Not only is talking down to the reader like this annoying and patronizing, it waters down your dialogue.

Let’s return to the Avengers example:

Iron Man – “Ah, Junior. You’re gonna break your old man’s heart.”

Ultron – “If I have to.”

Thor – “Nobody has to break anything.”

Ultron – “Clearly you’ve never made an omelet.”

Iron Man – “He beat me by one second.”

Notice how this entire exchange hinges on the inciting sentence “break your old man’s heart” which the other characters then run with, breaking off on tangents without ever repeating the original line.

Let’s rewrite the exchange in the style of a new writer to get an idea of how somebody less dialogue savvy than Whedon might handle the situation.

Iron Man – “Ah, Junior. You’re gonna break your old man’s heart.”

Ultron – “I’ll break your heart if I have to.”

Thor – “Nobody has to break anything.”

Ultron – “Nobody has to break anything? Clearly you’ve never made an omelet.”

Iron man – “He beat me to the omelet joke by one second.”

See how much more that sucks? Now, you might be screaming at your computer, “But Anthony, I don’t do that! I swear!”

But you do. I promise. We’re all guilty of it. Now it’s time to kick the habit. Go through your dialogue and find all the places where you’re character is rehashing a previous line, and then cut it. Trust your reader to follow the strands of conversation as they get tangled and untangled.

Technical Writing Aspect of Dialogue

Okay, we’re going to step away from the Avengers example for now (though we could dissect that thing for days) and focus on some of the nitty-gritty details of writing dialogue.

Speech Tags

This is simple: Only use said or asked. Occasionally you can throw in a shout or whisper for good measure, but jeepers does that need to be kept to a minimum.

New writers get all willy-nilly with their speech tags, throwing exclaimed, exonerated, shrieked, bellowed, whimpered and who knows what else into their dialogue. Cut them. You don’t need them. Said and asked are invisible, meaning the reader glosses over them. Those other speech tags hog tie the reader, and you never want to do that without written consent.

Clarify Who’s Speaking

You’d be surprised by how few he saids, she saids the reader needs to keep dialogue straight. That’s not to say that you do away with them entirely, but realize that one speech tag every few exchanges goes a long ways.

Even better than a speech tag is what we’ll call an action tag. Meaning you imply who’s speaking based on an action.

For example, you could say:

“Somebody poisoned the water hole,” Woody said.

Or you could say:

Woody spat out the water, spraying Buzz in his unthinkable face. “Somebody poisoned the water hole.”

When to Clarify

If your character is about to launch into a paragraph of speech, then as a rule of thumb you want to define who’s doing the speaking either at the very beginning, or really close to the beginning.

Example:

“And then Jenna went to the Jamba Juice stand and got a slushy. She drank it all and didn’t even share. I mean, come on, I picked her up from her mom’s house and drove her there, the least she could do is share,” Derek said.

See how I dropped the speech tag at the very end there? That’s worse than useless because it either confirms what we already know about who is doing the speaking (in which case it’s superfluous) or it’s highlighting the fact that we thought it was somebody else talking (in which case we’re now confused and rereading the paragraph with this new information in mind).

Better would be to throw that speech tag earlier:

“And then Jenna went to the Jamba Juice stand and got a slushy,” Derek said. “She drank it all and didn’t even share. I mean, come on, I picked her up…” You get the idea.

Show Emotions

Wrong: “She left without me?” Derek asked angrily.

Right: “She left without me?” Derek slammed his fist onto the table.

Never tell us what your character is feeling. Show us.

Alright, well … as you can tell, dialogue is pretty important, and if we wanted, we could go on talking about this one subject indefinitely. Unfortunately, I’m hungry, and that bowl of cereal isn’t going to put itself in my mouth, so I’m out of here.

Before you leave, however, why don’t you head over to the comments and share with us some of your favorite examples of good (or bad) dialogue.