Dialogue may advance the plot, improve the reader’s knowledge of the characters, reveal relationships, add conflict or suspense, reveal your character’s voice, foreshadow, set a scene, and provide important information.
What are the purposes of the following excerpt from The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green?
Me: I refuse to attend Support Group.”
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”
Hazel the narrator has lung cancer. At the Support Group she meets a newcomer, Augustus, who has a prosthetic leg due to osteosarcoma. Read the following excerpt. What makes the dialogue effective?
Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “You think that’s cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing.”
“Which whole thing?” he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.
“The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally.”
“A hamartia?” he asked, the cigarette still in his mouth. It tightened his jaw. He had a hell of a jawline, unfortunately.
“A fatal flaw,” I explained, turning away from him...
“... They don’t kill you unless you light them,” he said as Mom arrived at the curb. “And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”
Tips for Writing Dialogue
What to do:
· Know how dialogue differs from conversation.
· Use simple dialogue tags—they do not draw attention from the dialogue itself.
· Give each character a distinctive voice. Know each one individually, including motivation and special speech patterns.
· Give your characters conflicting goals.
· Vary the length of the dialogue lines. Variety adds interest.
· Be concise. Condense to avoid the unimportant stuff.
· Good dialogue does more than one thing at a time.
· Check for correct punctuation and paragraphing.
· Keep the character’s action within the same paragraph as the dialogue of that character.
· Read, listen to people’s conversations, and keep a written record of interesting dialogue, but be aware that dialogue is different from real conversation in important ways. Director Alfred Hitchcock said that a good story is “life, with the dull parts taken out.”
· Break up dialogue with action. Action can convey emotion and communicate indirectly to the reader. At times, add description. Images can convey feelings and function by showing, rather than telling, readers.
What to avoid:
· Wordiness.
· Putting too much information into dialogue at one time.
· Heavy handed dialect.
· Putting your words into characters’ mouths.
· Imitating real conversation without improving on it. Use it in small doses only.
· Dialogue that lacks purpose.
· Over-using dialogue tags. Balance use with simplicity and a lack of tags (at times).
· Injecting too many adverbs.
· Writing dialogue without context such as scene or action.
· Having characters speak in full, correct sentences.
· Having characters lack individuality in their speech.
· Too much slang.
Indirect Dialogue (Inner Monologues)
· Use indirect dialogue in short bursts.
· Always italicize the character’s thoughts.
· Watch for examples of inner dialogue (Ulysses, by James Joyce).
· Choose significant characters for use of indirect dialogue. You need to know these characters well.
· Have a clear purpose for using indirect dialogue.
· Indirect dialogue slows action so it is best used between action segments.
· Return to the indirect dialogue and edit out wordy parts.
Read the following example of Indirect Dialogue from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. This is also an example of black (or dark) humor. It becomes foreshadowing.
“...his steps lilting just slightly to the right as he walked steady and confident on what I had determined was a prosthetic leg. Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.”
Read the dialogue of Gabrielle Zevin in The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. A.J. owns a bookstore but his life is characterized by a bad attitude, with reason. His wife died; sales are at an all-time low; and his prized collection of Edgar Allan Poe poems has been stolen. Amelia is a pretty sales rep for a publisher. She is very much impressed by a book that she enjoyed reading, but A.J. is rude and antagonistic, and initially he refuses to read the book. Things look up when he adopts Maya, reads the book, and invites Amelia to lunch.
Discuss reason that this dialogue is effective.
Read the dialogue of James Lee Burke in Feast Day of Fools. Hackberry is a sheriff; Pam is his deputy. Their county has had a number of killings recently and though the murderers are known they have not been caught. Pam is much younger than Hackberry but she would like to have a romantic relationship with him. He feels that the age gap is too extreme. What is achieved by this dialogue?
“You look tired,” Pam said.
“You mean I look old.”
“No, I don’t mean that at all.”
“I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”
“Pray that liars aren’t kept a long time in purgatory.”
“Pam, you should have been a low-overhead dentist, someone who does fillings and extractions without the extra cost of Novocain.”
Pick two significant characters from your first or second novel and write a dialogue. Your dialogue does not have to be lengthy but it should achieve some goals.
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