Showing posts with label dialogue. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2015
Integrating Tone into Dialogue
Dialogue is a key part of any story and it�s usually what readers find most engrossing. They might skim long descriptions, but when they get to someone speaking that�s where they�ll get pulled back in.
What people say and how they say it not only tells the reader what�s going on, it also sets mood, gives an idea of character and provides a natural back and forth that will naturally keep readers engaged.
It helps to keep the flow going when characters are talking, and being able to convey how characters are saying things without explicitly stating it is a very useful skill.
Here�s a basic example of what I mean: �Go to Hell!�
You know how that�s being said without my having to put he said angrily in the narrative. Hearing how the character speaks in the moment is a powerful tool, but it�s easier for some emotions than others.
Anger, like in the example above, is pretty straightforward. Exclamation mark, swear words, all caps�these are pretty easy to work in and for the reader to pick up on. Other emotions and tones aren�t so obvious, but there are a number of techniques that can help.
The best place to see all the different approaches is to read plays and screenplays. These are very dialogue intensive media with a specific culture of putting the bare minimum of descriptors when it comes to what is being said.
Reading the scripts of plays and movies that you like or that are of the same genre that you write can be very illuminating, but it�s also very time consuming. You can�t just read them like you would a normal story, even though you may find yourself doing just that. You have to stop yourself from being swept along�which can be quite difficult since that�s exactly what it�s designed to do�and go over the same section repeatedly until you see exactly what�s being transmitted and how.
This is quite tedious and not for everyone, but if it�s something you find interesting, as I do, then it will prove to be very revealing. In the meantime, here are some things I�ve picked up.
It�s helps if we see the thing that causes an emotion. For example, if a mother is irritated by a child focused on their iPhone when she�s trying to tell him something, then that�s a lot easier to convey than the same woman still in a bad mood because of that child a chapter later when she�s at the shops.
Having the trigger in the same scene means you can establish the cause of the emotion, assuming you can clearly set up the situation (who doesn�t find being ignored by someone glued to their phone irritating?), and the reader will simply transfer their feelings onto the characters.
Using specific verbs that suggest a particular mind set also helps. If she takes the phone from him, it tells you a lot more if she snatches it or rips it from his hands.
This is particularly useful when you have a set of short question and answer type dialogue where you don�t want to break it up with descriptions of people�s raised eyebrows and tightened jaws.
Once the phone is grabbed, the tone of the conversation between mother and child is clearly defined and doesn�t need to be restated after every line.
One strong action, whether a pat on the back or a surreptitious look in someone�s shopping bag, can establish the tone for any length of interaction.
Another method to control the tone is to use tempo. If a character is asked a question and then gives a long answer, that has a different effect to a character who is asked a question, gives a partial answer, has to be prompted for more, and so on.
Who talks more, who interrupts, who holds back, these things give an indication of a character�s state of mind and attitude without having to say Dave paused and looked out of the window to tell the reader what�s going on if you vary the tempo and line length.
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Monday, March 9, 2015
Interesting Chit Chat
Small talk is boring. Characters who waffle on about the weather and the dream they had last night and their favourite toy when they were a kid don�t hold a reader�s attention for very long.
At the same time, characters who enter a scene, get what they want, and leave can make the story feel rushed and sterile.
There are, of course, plenty of books that use the more rushed approach and it can work very well. It makes it much easier to keep the reader hooked and turning pages. Many bestsellers use this approach, although they don�t win many literary awards.
But we�ve all read books that had long passages of seemingly random observations and conversations that not only didn�t read as boring, but actually added to the story. You felt a stronger connection to the character because of the glimpse into their personality. So how did they manage it when your attempts feel like meandering asides and unnecessary tangents?
At the same time, characters who enter a scene, get what they want, and leave can make the story feel rushed and sterile.
There are, of course, plenty of books that use the more rushed approach and it can work very well. It makes it much easier to keep the reader hooked and turning pages. Many bestsellers use this approach, although they don�t win many literary awards.
But we�ve all read books that had long passages of seemingly random observations and conversations that not only didn�t read as boring, but actually added to the story. You felt a stronger connection to the character because of the glimpse into their personality. So how did they manage it when your attempts feel like meandering asides and unnecessary tangents?
Even though the most common advice is to not distract the reader with irrelevant information�if it can be cut, it should be cut�if you follow this to an extreme you can end up with something a little soulless.
In most cases you want to give your characters a little space and time to be people.
The simplest way to do this is to write interesting stuff. If two people are having a chat about nothing in particular, but it happens to be an interesting conversation, it will hold a reader�s attention. For a bit.
Making it funny is also a good way to prevent the reader getting impatient. If they're enjoying the conversation, even if it isn't pushing the story forward (I know, heresy), readers will happily stick with it. But not everyone is a comedian, so this tends to be easier for some than others.
However, there are also a number of other ways to allow characters to express themselves without derailing the narrative or boring the reader.
The first thing to bear in mind is that context changes the value of what people are saying. So two people having a chat over coffee will be viewed very differently if there's a ticking time bomb under the table.
Even though the two conversations (avec bomb/sans bomb) might be equally trivial, knowing there�s going to be an explosion in 30 seconds will completely transform how interested you are in what�s being said.
This requires the reader to know about the bomb. If you only find out there was a bomb when it blows up, the two conversations will be the same (dull).
This is an extreme example, you don�t have to have a life threatening set up to make things interesting, just a pressure to find the answer to a question, in this case will they find out about the bomb before it goes off.
It�s wanting to know the answer that provides the tension, which in turn allows you to delay the reveal with conversation.
If our hero tracks down his biological mother because he wants to find out why she gave him up for adoption, their meeting, although polite and casual, will have an undercurrent of tension as he gets closer to revealing his true reason for wanting to talk to her.
A skilled writer will make this preamble not entirely random. A guy with an agenda can use chit-chat to get information while a writer with an agenda can use chit-chat to establish a mood or a state of mind.
The important thing to remember is that while the reader is waiting for an answer to the question posed by a scene, you have a window where the reader�s attention is fixed.
Of course, you need to make sure the reader actually wants to know the answer.
A character who visits their auntie in the hope of getting hold of her recipe for apple pie isn�t going to appeal to a lot of people. But if she�s planning on stealing the recipe to use in a TV cookery show where the prize is a hundred grand, then the scene takes on an extra frisson.
And it�s not just the raising of the stakes that makes it more interesting, it�s the increased specificity. The more specific the question, the greater the tension, which in turn leads to greater room for manoeuvre for the writer.
So even for the guy confronting his birth mother, an already tense and emotional situation, if he�s discovered that she gave him up when she was married, well off, and already had one kid, that makes his need for an answer all the more interesting for the reader.
As long as the character�s/reader�s need to know is strong enough, what they talk about in the window before they get their answer has a much higher level of engagement for a reader than it would normally have.
This can even be used as a tool to draw the reader further in.
If a cop goes in to a room to interrogate the only guy who knows where the kidnapped heiress is being held, and he starts off talking about the new bathroom he�s having fitted and whether to go with the salmon or the teal, then the reader�s first reaction will be that he must have a reason for going off on this tangent. And wanting to know where he�s going with this approach can be as strong as wanting to know where the heiress is.
Of course, this means he will actually have to have a reason for taking the scenic route that you will have to reveal. If he talks about his decorating options for ten minutes and then beats the crap out of the suspect until he talks, that won�t make much sense. Eventually you get to a point where getting the answer to a question is so imperative that any deviating from that purpose seems unlikely.
But consider if he was talking about the colour of his new bathroom while he was beating the suspect. Psychotic, but not boring.
This is another way to use context to change the value of what a person is saying. A woman telling you how happy she is in her marriage isn�t very interesting. How about a woman telling you the same thing while she�s crying?
When somebody�s actions are at odds with what they�re saying, it immediately provides a question in the reader�s mind. Small talk doesn�t always have to be truth or irrelevance, it can be lies, and lies are very interesting, especially when you know the person is lying but not why.
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Monday, July 22, 2013
Decoy Dialogue
Words don�t always mean what the dictionary says they mean. It�s one of the pleasures of speech that we can mix up meanings of words to have completely different intentions, and we can impart that intention with tone, inflection or delivery.
This is something easy to replicate on stage or in movies. Even though a script might have to spell things out, once an actor delivers the line it�s usually obvious.
For novelists this is a little more tricky. Trying to capture the mercurial nature of dialogue on the page can be a lot of work, and often it�s easier to write simple, direct dialogue where people say what they mean in language that has no shades of grey.
Which is fine and suits some stories, but it can also read as simplistic, juvenile writing.
The kind of thing I mean is like the word �please�. This has a very definite use, conveying civility, deference and good manners. However, there are a number of other ways to use the word.
An angry guy at work: Will you please shut the fuck up!
An exasperated mother: Oh God, please no more.
A sarcastic teenager: Can you pass the salt, pleeeeease.
And so on. Each use of the word has nothing to do with the original polite intention, but while it�s easy to understand the person�s meaning when you hear the words come out of their mouth in real life, on the page it isn�t always so clear.
Capturing tone without having to spell it out (�Can you pass the salt, pleeeeease,� he said sarcastically) is a skill in itself, and there are many ways to achieve it. Context and set up have a lot to do with it. If you�ve established a character as a mouthy teen, or the situation as an unhappy one for the character, then that goes a long way to putting the reader in the right frame of mind to be able to get what the character means.
But as well as creating language that feels like how people actually talk, there�s an added benefit to using language in a non-traditional manner.
When you have a scene where one character has a specific purpose, let�s say Jack wants to tell his wife he wants a divorce, going into it head on can feel a bit stale and obvious.
If Jack says, �We need to talk,� you already know the kind of scene it�s going to be, even though the specifics may vary. No matter how well you write the scene it�s hard to get away from the feeling you�ve seen it all before.
But if you approach it with a more open view of language (�Darling, good news! Let�s talk.�) then you immediately engage a different part of the reader�s brain.
Because when you don�t use the words the reader is expecting, you end up pulling them into the narrative at a much deeper level. They know he was going to ask for a divorce, but how will he get there from here?
Rather than going all round the houses and adding bits of chit-chat in an attempt to fill out the scene and make it seem more than the standard scene the reader�s used to, simply using language in a more flexible manner can make the old seem new.
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Thursday, April 4, 2013
Differentiating Through Dialogue
While there�s nothing wrong with making characters sound different by giving them specific accents, it�s not something you can do for every character in a story. Not unless your tale takes place at the United Nations.
And while giving them vocal tics is useful, yeah? It helps identify them quickly, yeah? It also gets old just as quickly, yeah?
Rather than using how people speak to make them stand out, it is much easier and more effective to use what they say rather than how they say it.
And while giving them vocal tics is useful, yeah? It helps identify them quickly, yeah? It also gets old just as quickly, yeah?
Rather than using how people speak to make them stand out, it is much easier and more effective to use what they say rather than how they say it.
If one person is for the new helipad on the local hospital and one is against, and a third is only interested in getting the other two to stop arguing, then their individual positions on the matter is what marks them out.
In order for this to work you have to streamline the conversation a bit. In real life, people may go off on tangents or use chit chat to pad out lulls in a conversation, but doing that in fiction will only undo any work you�ve done to establish which character is taking which stance.
Obviously, you can still use dialogue tags and the characters� names to identify them, but even if you do that, it can become confusing in dialogue heavy sections if you allow them to go off-topic.
You don�t just want a reader to be able to follow who�s saying what if they carefully read every single word at full concentration, you want them to be able to get into the flow of things and automatically get a feel for who�s speaking.
By staying focused on the matter on hand, whether it�s robbing a bank or going shopping for shoes, and giving each character a distinct objective, who�s speaking will become much easier to work out.
In order for this to work you have to streamline the conversation a bit. In real life, people may go off on tangents or use chit chat to pad out lulls in a conversation, but doing that in fiction will only undo any work you�ve done to establish which character is taking which stance.
Obviously, you can still use dialogue tags and the characters� names to identify them, but even if you do that, it can become confusing in dialogue heavy sections if you allow them to go off-topic.
You don�t just want a reader to be able to follow who�s saying what if they carefully read every single word at full concentration, you want them to be able to get into the flow of things and automatically get a feel for who�s speaking.
By staying focused on the matter on hand, whether it�s robbing a bank or going shopping for shoes, and giving each character a distinct objective, who�s speaking will become much easier to work out.
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