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Angie's Writing Workshop — Column Archive 2   [Next]

Snap to It! Writing Quotable Dialogue
By Paige deRosa

Dialogue isn’t pretty and clean. It’s slang-filled, colloquial, and fast-paced. But it’s our job as writers to give it fluidity and cohesiveness. When you pick up your pen and begin to scribble away ideas and imaginings on your characters’ interactions, your page should be covered from margin to margin—and then some. But where to begin? That’s the question most writers face when they actually commit to writing their first dialogue sequence.

So you’ve got your book all figured out and your characters (whether in fiction or narrative non-fiction) developed on the page. Everything looks good on paper. The next step in bringing them to life is getting them to talk like real people. Really good dialogue must snap. Eye-catching phrases and a little bit of lingo-wrestling are what make the dialogue a standout.

Before you can create memorable dialogue, however, you need to master the basics. One of the biggest mistakes writers make is in trying to emulate day-to-day discourse:

“Hey, Harry,” Joan said. “How, uh, are you today?”

“I am, well…I am fine. Um, I just made employee of the month!”

Sans the “uhs” and “ums,” this passage would work quite well. Unless there’s a specific reason for their placement—such as emphasis on a character’s evasiveness (though even this can be achieved through a simple dialogue attribution tag)—they don’t need to be there. Throw in some contractions, and it’ll flow a little better and be punchier. With a bit of finessing, the passage can still be made useable:

“Hey, Harry. How’re you today?” Joan asked.

“I’m fine. I just made employee of the month!”

Even a simple tweak can tighten and sharpen your dialogue. Though some situations will necessitate the use of “stutterings,” it’s best to steer clear of them altogether. They add nothing to the dialogue short of an eye-ache.

In any discourse on dialogue, the topic of clichés is bound to arise. Some people think the use of cliché in real life justifies the use of cliché in a book. This is incorrect. Readers want to see an author’s fresh new take on things—not some rehashing of last week’s bestseller. Being original and bold with your dialogue choices is what will set you apart as a writer.

The best test to see if your dialogue flows well is to read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound natural to you, and even if it does, you might want to have a friend or family member read it. Sometimes we need an unbiased eye to assess our work because we are too “close” to the work to properly critique it.

Many first-time writers fall into the trap of writing expository dialogue—at the risk of making the characters and the conversations themselves seem contrived. Avoid giving characters lengthy, explanatory paragraphs to recite (as if they don’t already have enough to do). Reserve the urge to explain everything for your narrative passages, not your characters. Characters, like people, are more than just vessels of extraneous information waiting to be tapped at just the right—or wrong, as the case may be—moment.

Another common pitfall that distinguishes beginners from non-beginners is the overuse of speech attribution tags, or dialogue tags. When you have too many “he said/she said” tags tacked onto one conversation, it begins to look unprofessional. A teacher once told me that editors would pass over any manuscript with too many tags because it was a surefire mark of an unseasoned writer. Quote attributions should be used once to introduce each character, and then only as needed:

“Did you see the race on TV today?” John asked.

“Yeah,” Bobby chimed in.

“What’d you think of it?”

“I was hooked, man.”

“Who do you think’s goin’ to the finals?”

The point is, simply, that the dialogue should speak for itself. Once you’ve introduced both the characters, you must assume your reader is intelligent enough to follow who is speaking and when. Excessive use of dialogue tags severely undermines the reader’s intelligence—and it’s just plain annoying.

Perhaps some of the most memorable dialogue I have ever encountered is the quirky, offbeat dialogue in the 1957 film-noir Sweet Smell of Success, based on the novella by Ernest Lehman. The film stars Burt Lancaster as the ruthless, cutthroat, business-savvy newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker, who is out to destroy his sister’s chance at happiness with an unworthy suitor. The screenwriters throw clichés out the window in favor of a whimsical kind of jargon. Hunsecker’s deadly declaration “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic” sets the precedent for the dialogue to follow. Similarly, his nemesis, Sidney Falco—played by Tony Curtis—avows that “the cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” Here the dialogue assists an already good story in becoming an utterly memorable one.

So what are you waiting for? Pick up your pen and begin jotting down ideas on your own dialogic style. Chances are you’ll surprise yourself with what you can come up with using just a little bit of imagination and creativity.