Dialogue Dragon

Everyday, we all do one thing that many writers find difficult to translate into written word: talk. Dialogue can make or break a drama, submerge or expel a reader from your fantastical realm. It’s a handy tool to have in your tool belt, and the better the quality of your tools, the better quality of work you can do.

Getting my characters to talk to one another was always hard when I first started writing. Everything I wrote was stiff and sounded so formal. It all changed when one of my elementary teachers noticed I liked writing stories. She started giving me photocopies from a young author help book. It had advice in it about anything and everything to do with writing short stories. It had a very small chapter on dialogue. One of the tips it had has stayed with me until now: speak the lines out loud as you write. This makes them more realistic, and sound coherent. If you, or someone you know, wouldn’t say it that way, your character wouldn’t say it that way (unless your character was super dry and/or brainy, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”).

You can adjust the tone of your dialogue much easier by saying yourself what you want your character to say as opposed to imagining how they would say it. Writing from experience is usually much simpler to do than creating a whole new scenario that you know nothing about. It’s like we’re always told: “Write what you know”. And you have to know your character if you want to write dialogue that sounds like them.

It’s true that I’m the type of writer that has to submerge myself in the world I’m writing about or the person I’m talking as in order to write a story that is believable. This method doesn’t work for all people, so here are some tips that can help:

1. Make a character sketch. This is basically a brief description of the person you’re writing as with some background info, personality traits, fears, dreams, basically anything that’s special about them.
2. Force some of your friends to have a fake conversation as though they are your characters. Not only will this help you with your dialogue, it can also be pretty funny.
3. Watch some movies and focus on how they talk. It doesn’t really matter what they’re talking about, but how they say it. What kind of language are they using? Is their tone light, serious, sarcastic, bored, annoyed? How do you notice it? All these little details that are found in movies can be used in your stories. You aren’t stealing them. It’s inspiration.
4. Spy on total strangers in public places. Listen in on their conversations and try to figure out their emotional state just by their word choice. Different words have different connotations, even if they’re synonymous.

Dialogue doesn’t have to instill fear in the hearts of every burgeoning author. Face the dragon head on and find out it was only a kitten with cardboard triangles on it’s back. Happy writing!

-Seivan Engelhardt