Writing Interesting & Purposeful Dialogue

To the Point:

•  Every conversation needs a purpose

• You can use dialogue to quickly set a scene’s tone or mood

• You can also use it to rapidly establish basic relationship dynamics between characters

• It’s everyday banter and funny kinds of miscommunication we experience in real life that makes a day interesting. Mimicking that in writing adds relatability and a feeling of delight or enjoyment.

• It’s possible to write dialogue without any speaker tags or identifiers (using said, replied, answered, etc)

Dialogue: The Many Ways to Use & Shape It

Let’s get right to it. Dialogue uses are many and dynamic. The most obvious reason for inserting it is revealing or exchanging critical information between characters. However, many other reasons for using it abound. For example:

• Inserting some comic humor to ease tension or the prolonged darkness in a chapter

• Set a scene’s mood. The exchange of a few short statements is all that’s needed. You can create relaxation:

– “How far did you get last night?”

– “Level 10. I can’t get past the boss. I make it 90% of the way, but the last enemy wave kicks my butt.”

– “You gotta use the scattershot.”

– “Wait…what scattershot?”

• You can create excitement or tension:

– “Take out the trash! Quick! I’ll take the chicken out of the freezer!”

– “Why?”

– “Mum just pulled into the driveway!”

– “We’re so dead!”

• You can also relieve tension or heaviness:

– “What the heck, man!?”

– “What?”

– “I said, ‘Move in fifteen seconds.’”

– “You said, ‘Fifty.’”

– “No. Fifteen, as in one-five, not five-zero.” He eyed his teammate with displeasure. “It’s my fault…I forgot you can’t count past three.”

– His teammate matched his tone. “And I forgot you can’t speak. Learn to enunciate.”

• Or, still more:

– “Ah, rats. We’re out of beans.”

– “You are a bean.”

– “Well, you’re a can.”

– He gazed at the box of Cheerios as one seeing a memory from long ago. “I was a piece of aluminum once…”

– “Oh my gosh. You’re such a nerd.”

Additional Dialogue Uses & Options

A chapter can become stale or lose momentum if you have pages of straight narrator exposition. Two basic ways to break it up are:

1. Check if you can insert some of the narration into dialogue.

2. Put some sections into a character’s thoughts. This pulls the reader’s focus to that character, which helps hold attention.

   
   

Managing Dialogue Scenes—Including Lengthy Ones

This is a persistent and common struggle in stories: how to make dialogue exchanges engaging and prevent your reader from dropping your book on their face.

A measure of monotony is inevitable in any story. This is especially true if you have a war council with a dozen generals convening or a scene involving a boardroom meeting. Riveting (sarcasm). Granted, the shared information is essential, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t lengthy or complex.

So, how, for the love of maple bar donuts, can you make it a little more interesting?

1. Check if you can add movement. Instead of characters standing or sitting, have them walking through a corridor or outside. The movement itself is slightly more engaging. Plus, if you put them in an environment where other things are happening, you can insert snippets of these peripheral activities to keep the reader alert and mentally scanning.

For lengthy “boardroom” scenes, the difficulty increases. But you can try:

1. Adding conflict. Make two members dislike each other and quarrel. This adds tension.

2. Bring up or weave in a relevant moral or ethical dilemma associated with the main topic or debate. This can engage the reader and lower them into the deeper pools of their minds.

3. Choose a character to sum up the information in simplest terms. “So, basically…” This provides essential clarity to the scene.

Cuing up Dialogue Sequences—And Removing “Said” Tags

The following technique is great for dialogue between two characters. You will remove the tiresome “said” and “replied/answered” every time they say something.

Step 1: The Cue. You introduce or identify the two characters.

Example:

            Malok eyed the prisoner in an unflattering manner. “They have no idea who has been walking in their midst for years,” he said as a soft sneer twisted onto his face.

“Most people are ignorant of the others around them,” replied Veera, regarding him with an impassive, sidelong glance. “We’re usually the main characters in our lives. So, why would we bother to take a second look at someone else?”         

Step 2: Remove the tags. Now that you’ve identified the two speakers, you can forgo any further speaker tags or indicators. Proceed with straight dialogue.

“True enough. But every once in a while, someone comes along who pulls people from their self-preoccupation and reminds them life isn’t all about them. There’s someone above themselves who demands their attention at the least and fear at the most.”

“What are you implying?”

“You know.”

“I’d rather you use your big-boy words and explain. You know I don’t play games.”

And end.

It’s important to keep these sequences short. If the conversation continues, re-identify and recue the speakers before proceeding with another dialogue-only sequence (if you want).

This technique also works for the previously-mentioned “boardroom” scenes when you have a rapid exchange between two disagreeable characters.

Dialogue without Speaker Tags & Identification, Period

What is this sorcery I speak of? Action. What do I mean? Just this: instead of using “said,” “replied,” et cetera, exercise your descriptive powers. Describe a character’s physical reactions and expressions to a speaker’s words and then feed them off of each other.

Example:

He tilted his head curiously [describing character movement]. “You mean, you really spent all day finding the perfect name for one character?”

Her mouth pulled into a line, and her face grew warm as she slouched a little [describing character reaction; intuitively sets the tone of her defensive response]. “The perfect name for a main character is important. It has to sound and read right. Like…it has to match their personality and everything. You can’t have a big, strong Viking warrior-king named Wilbur.”

He raised a hand and offered an apologetic smile. “I wasn’t making fun of you. I just didn’t realize that kind of, uh, task could be so…tedious, I guess.”

The tension left her body as she smiled, and her face brightened. “Oh. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, finding the perfect character name is an awful quest, really.”

End scene.

How or why would this work? Because in reality, human communication is about 90% nonverbal. We convey meaning and intention through posture, how we shift our bodies, and how still or mobile our features are. We can send someone a very clear communication in a single glance. Facial expressions and the expression in the eyes alone speak huge volumes. When we do speak, we don’t use words only. Further meaning is expressed in our tone. Combine all these things and you have human communication.

Let’s Make a Scene

Now, let’s bring it all together, minus a boardroom setting. Ready?

“Go, go!”

They scuttled as quickly as they dared down the rugged mountainside. The spring sun shone warm while the air currents from the trees below brushed cool against them. Countless wildflowers of all kinds peeked through the new grass carpeting the ridge.

Unfortunately, their pursuers didn’t allow them time to enjoy the scenery.

“Hurry!” panted John.

 “Yes, yes. I’m hurrying!” huffed Emily, rolling her eyes.

“There’s the trail!” he exclaimed, pointing below them and nearly clotheslining her.

He then decided she wasn’t hurrying fast enough and cut in front of her toward the trail.

A sharp rebuke formed on Emily’s tongue. However, before she could inform John of her thoughts about his rudeness, his boot caught an unseen rock. He pitched sideways and ate grass.

Emily tripped over his ankle as he sprawled in her way. She went down on the trail in a cloud of dust. With an awkward twist, she got herself rolled about and looked behind them. Three enemy combatants had crested the ridge and were now advancing swiftly.

A fresh burst of adrenaline surged through her, making her hands tremor so badly that she fumbled to unholster her gun.

John, meanwhile, was barking out orders as if he was the leader. He managed to draw his gun before promptly dropping it into the grass.

For goodness sake, thought Emily, who finally unholstered her weapon. She aimed at the nearest enemy and squeezed the trigger. The trigger didn’t move. An unladylike explicative shot through her mind. It’s stuck! Why is it stuck? Oh gosh. The safety is still on!

Her thoroughly panicked brain proceeded to forget what to do and how to fix the problem.

John continued flailing through the grass and searching for his weapon. As he did, he alternated between giving orders and swearing. The resulting sound was representative of a braying donkey with a sore hoof.

He emerged out of the grass itself then: Tom, their third teammate.

Tall, strong, and generally good-looking, his appearance was like that of a stereotypical movie hero. Unfortunately, appearances were all he had at the present.

“I’ll pop smoke for cover!” called Tom unnecessarily loud.

He removed the smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and strode forward. The heel of his right boot rolled over a round stone. He fell a few feet from John and dropped the grenade, thereby successfully enveloping them all in green smoke.

A whistle echoed off the ridge and signaled the end of the training session.

The three enemy combatants and another man marched down the ridge.

Tom, John, and Emily had picked themselves off the ground and were dusting green from their clothes when the four joined them.

“That was the most pathetic display I’ve seen in this simulation in a long time,” declared the commander, not looking the least bit amused.

“I’ll call Hollywood and tell them that we have the perfect replacements for the Three Stooges,” grinned one of the enemy fighters, a burly, seasoned operator.

That brought a wheeze from his buddy on the right.

The commander, who had lost his sense of humor several decades ago, held up a hand. “Let’s run through what went wrong.”

“Emily was moving too slow,” started John, always quick to place blame.

“I wasn’t running too slow,” she countered sharply, “and I also wasn’t the one who tripped in the first place. And you nearly hit me when you flailed your arm about!”

“Yes, you were running too slow! You’re always falling behind, and we’re always having to wait for you.”

“Ha! That’s rich. Criticism from the one who dropped his rifle in the lake, followed by the ammo canister five minutes later.”

Deep crimson flooded John’s face. “There was moss on the rocks!”

Emily put her hands on her hips, leaned back, and belted out another laugh.

His scowl deepened as he pointed at Tom and changed the subject. “Well, we might have had a chance today if Tom hadn’t smoke grenaded us.”

Tom, tending toward the strong yet sensitive type, looked like a man betrayed. “Hey,” he replied with some woundedness, “it was an accident. I was just trying to help my teammates. What about yesterday? When you got mad because I threw you my knife?”

John slapped a hand on his forehead. “I said, ‘Move in five.’”

“I thought you said you wanted a knife. You really need to learn how to make up your mind about these things.”

While the trio continued arguing, the commander slowly closed his eyes, sighed, and thought, training new recruits is always such agony.

End scene.

And there you have it.

I hope this was somewhat helpful to you at the most and amusing at the least. Until the next post: stay sane, my writing friends. I know that’s a tall order, but I believe in you.

~Jo

Random Endnote

Want to write but don’t know what to write? Trying to decide the best way to write a particular scene for peak awesomeness? Becoming frustrated and thinking about swearing off this whole ridiculous hobby? Breathe. Relax your jaw, neck, and shoulders. Okay. This might not be what you want to hear, but too bad: stop forcing it. Stop trying to force the creativity and the imagination. Take a break. That’s right. I’ve learned that the more you try forcing the writing, the deeper into a mental rut your brain goes. The deeper you go, the longer it takes to escape. Think of it as a truck stuck in mud. The more the driver stomps the accelerator, the more the tires spin, and the deeper the vehicle sinks. Getting yourself out of the mental rut is easier when you notice early that you’re forcing things. Besides, the more you stress, the more the reasoning part of your brain shuts down. It shifts from “relaxed and creative” to “survive.” Survival mode won’t do your creative side much good.