Talk Like a . . .

Answer an easy 25-question quiz about how you pronounce words, and the New York Times will show where you most fit in dialect-wise on a U.S. map.

I took the test, and here are my results:



How accurate is the test? Well, in my case, 99.9%. As a young kid I lived about three blocks south of Pembroke Pines, and later spent much of my teen years in Fort Lauderdale. I'll guess the Jacksonville crept into my speech patterns when I was a young adult and commuted there for work for several years.

(Test link filched from Gerard over at The Presurfer)

Can We Talk?

Whether you're a reader or a writer, reading poorly-written dialogue is the same as being a musician and listening to music being played off-key. There's only so much of that you can take before it becomes almost painful -- and I think that's why so often bad dialogue is a book killer.

No one is a master of dialogue; a few authors come close but it's not something I believe can be mastered. We all wrestle with it, crafting it, reading it out loud, listening to it, trying to shape it into what it should be: something effortless and natural on which everyone wants to eavesdrop. If good dialogue is tough to compose, great dialogue is insanely difficult to bring to the page. I'm probably more forgiving than most writers when it comes to encountering bad dialogue because of this. Absolutely I will let pass the occasional "Hi, how are you?" and "Isn't the weather nice?" in order to get to the good stuff -- assuming there is some good stuff.

I wish I could sprinkle every writer with magic dialogue dust, but it doesn't exist. Like everything with writing, dialogue requires thought, practice and hard work. For me dialogue comes from a combination of listening and picking up rhythms in real life, letting that constantly percolate, and then pouring all of it into the characters and allowing them to draw on it to speak to me rather than me putting words in their mouth. While I'm listening to the character, I also have to be in their head, in their point of view, which puts me literally inside and outside the character. This is why head-hopping never works for me -- I can't switch back and forth within a scene; I'm too invested in the POV character.

Like any story element dialogue can be over-thought and over-written, and when that happens it loses the natural rhythm of speaking and engaging and becomes trapped atop a soapbox of stilted monologue-type speech making. Everything is grammatically correct, all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed, and it looks perfect because it is. The problem is none of us speak perfectly. We use bad grammar. We drop and pick up thoughts in mid-sentence. We bitch, we complain, we laugh through the shouts and we sob between the whispers. We're emotional creatures, often we don't think before we open our mouths, we react. Those reactions are raw and imperfect and real.

Every person has a distinct voice, too; what we say is unique to us, like a fingerprint. Ask twenty people to describe to you an event they all attended, and you'll get twenty different descriptions. Their word choices, statement structures, tonal emphasis, focal points and memories will all be slightly different. Some will go on and on about one thing; others will be more general. Their emotions will play a part as well. Did they event excite them, bore them, make them happy or push them into despair? What did they bring to the event? Was it after a bad day, a great day, or a nothing day in their lives? Were they happy to get out of the house, or did they wish they'd never left?

If you want to tap into your subconscious, which is where I think all great dialogue originates, considering all these very conscious things should happen before you begin writing. Let it all process, but when you begin writing, set the conscious things aside entirely. Put your characters in the scene, watch them, listen to them, and record it on the page. Once you've finished, take a break and disengage. Then, when your head is out of the story, edit the scene.

The primary dialogue litmus test I use for dialogue is my own awareness of it. If I know I'm reading dialogue, then I flag it. If I forget I'm reading and hear the characters in my head, I don't. The dialogue should flow across the page. If it doesn't, I don't fiddle with it too much; I don't think flow can be forced. When I find a line I don't like, I usually delete it. Once I've edited the rest the scene, I go back to the beginning, re-read and put myself back in the character's head to again listen and record what I hear from them.

For writing practice, you might take a pen and pocket notebook with you the next time you're going to be around a lot of people. Eavesdrop (discreetly) and jot down every interesting thing you hear someone else say. I do this all the time; here are some lines I overheard during my travels just the other day:

I wish I had them power tools.
You can fit anything into the bags. A truck if you wanted.
Those eggs look a little dark.
No more nuts. I mean it. Not a one.
She's been waiting a while so I'm gonna take her before you.


When you get home, take the best lines you heard in the real world, and turn them into a conversation between two of your characters. Another lesson I often give my students is to watch a recorded, new-to-them movie or television show, stop it in the middle of a conversation and write the rest of it as they imagine it might go, then start the show again and compare the results.

Emerson said In good writing, words become one with things. If dialogue should be one with anything, it's your ear. Don't just write it, listen to it, the way you would music, or birdsong, or the beat of a heart -- it should sound just as natural, and just as real.

Related links:

PBW's Ten Things to Help Writers with Dialogue and Ten Things I Think about Your Dialogue Tags.

Author Amy Rose Davis talks about the rhythm of dialogue here.

When does dialogue overwhelm a story? Editor Beth Hill has some suggestions in her blog post Dialogue ~ My Characters Talk Too Much.

Julie Musil's blog post Dialogue ~ Make It Matter invokes how-to author James Scott Bell and offers some interesting tips on what dialogue should do for your fiction. (Added: sorry about the link not working; I messed up the code -- it should take you there now.)

(outside links gleaned from the wonderful writers' search engine over at The Writers Knowledge Base)

Taggedy Ten

Ten Things I Think about Your Dialogue Tags

"!@#$," he grated.

This is an RWA staple, and I'm still trying to weed it out of my books. So I don't mind seeing it once. Even twice I'll let it pass. But when you use "grate" as a dialogue tag in every single chapter, I'm definitely going to nickname your hero CheeseBoy.

"All you ever do is swear," she croaked.

If you kiss her, does she turn into a princess?

"Betty is a complete slut!" he declared.

Am I too stupid to realize this is a declarative sentence? Survey says: nope. P.S., the exclamation point is just annoying.

"I don't give a hoot about Betty or anyone else you sleep with," she retorted.

We stopped retorting back in the nineteenth century. Didn't you get the memo?

"I thought you loved me, and now you think I'd do something as dastardly as go to bed with Betty and let her have her wicked way with me from dusk until dawn?" he gasped.

According to Random House dictionary, a gasp is "a sudden, short intake of breath, as in shock or surprise." Yes, I checked. So unless your hero has lungs the size of garment bags . . .

"Unless you want the mage to invoke the curse of Chaos, open the gates to Hell, release the demon horde and destroy the world in fifteen minutes," he growled, "we have to have wild monkey sex on top of the Chrysler Building. In front of Betty."

I actually tried to growl this line. I gave myself laryngitis.

"Sebastian, how could you cheat on me with Betty, of all people, when you could have assuaged your needs with the floozy redhead down at the tavern who puts out for every rake with a shilling?" she yelped.

A yelp is shorter than a gasp, I think. Like a microgasp, only louder. I should really conduct a scientific study of this. Until then, please pair with briefer utterances.

"Betty says that the sixth shiek's sixth sheep's sick," he stuttered.

Speaking on behalf of all stutterers, no. Just no.

"You and Betty can go tiptoe through the tulip patch together for all I care," she hissed.

A hiss should only be used by snakes, steam irons or overheating radiators. Homo sapiens who have to employ it should be hissing sibilant fricative words (words with "s" or "z"). Otherwise they're lithping the hith.

"Why do you hate Betty so much?" he complained.

This is a question, not a complaint. Here's a complaint: "You're sleeping with my sister, my best friend, your ex, the Domino Pizza delivery girl and Betty," she complained. "I love you. Please stop it."

Astronaut Pants Ten

Ten Things to Help Writers with Dialogue

Freeware Caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Mary Emma Allen's Writing Captivating Dialogue for Children's Stories has tips that also hold true for other genres.

Janis Cramer's workshop Collaborating to Write Dialogue has some great tips for those of you who are working with a co-author.

Holly Lisle's Dialogue Workshop offers some valuable exercises to help improve your composition and delivery of dialogue.

Dramatist 1.5 freeware is "a playwriting dialog editor for writing drama screenplays" (OS: Mac OS X 10.2 or later)

How Not to Bore Your Readers: Write Better Dialogue by Helen Vance sees dialogue as the voice of the story, and offers some ideas on how to better analyze your own.

If you're not sure what makes an interesting argument, or how an argument is structured, check outHow to Recognize an Argument by Jonathan Dolhenty, Ph.D.

MagneticPoetry.com has an online Pickup Lines game that features such tried and true phrases as at first sight nice shirt and astronaut pants.

Writing Compelling Dialogue in Fiction by Nicholas Morine looks at the overuse of one particular/popular dialogue tag and offers some ways to combat it.

Writing Effective Dialogue by Michael Daniels is geared toward screenwriters but the tips are great for fiction writers as well.

Screenwriter Stephen J. Cannell has a good article and examples of Writing Exercises to help you with your dialogue.

Just for fun:

To see a master of dialogue at work, play with Jonathan Aquino's Jane Austen Pride & Prejudice Random Dialogue Line Generator (the link will give you three random lines from the novel; for more or less just change the number at the end of the URL.)

Taggedy

The soft, warm night settled around John and Marcia, a blissfully cozy chenille-like throw that cuddled the lovers' entwined limbs and tickled their bare cheeks. Cheeks that were ruddy with that special pinkness indicating recent, very intimate activity, as it happened. And their faces glowed, too.

"Marcia," John blurted out suddenly and impetuously. "Can we discuss something?"

"John," sighed Marcia, the contentment after achieving three orgasms enriching the exhaled name with feminine satisfaction. "I'm all ears."

John wrapped the slightly damp sheet around his manly chest, sat up and tried to think of how to confess what he had been pondering without sounding as if he were complaining before he murmured, "I've been thinking about us, sweetheart."

"Darling," Marcia purred like a kitten with a ball of interesting yarn (not, you understand, the imported cheap acrylic crap you can buy for $1 a pound, but that expensive designer stuff like Caron Bliss that costs an arm and a leg for one piddly skein.) "Tell me," she continued, picking up the thread of conversation and toying with it, just in case someone forgot she was the one speaking, "what about us?"

John reached for his trousers and then turned to look at Marcia while opening his mouth to utter in honesty, "We" -- he put one leg in his jeans, jeans that were comfortably faded but still a bit stiff, as he had hung them out to dry versus using the dryer as part of his endeavors to go green -- "never" -- he pulled up the waistband just like that very hot but sexually waffling young man in the Levi's 501 commercials-- "talk" -- he zippered the fly and fastened the button with what he hoped was a casual disregard for the fact that the woman he loved was watching him wrap his package -- "anymore."

"We're talking now," Marcia retorted with passion and the natural emphasis of her emotions, tossing her head as she leapt out of bed and jerked on her own clothing as her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkled with temper and annoyance that made her assume the position of a highly indignant painter's anatomical doll. Her rich brunette hair settled around her blushing features as her lips, the lipstick on which had been kissed away during the last, loving hours of delight, turned a little white with her swiftly-shifting mood. A loose eyelash, uprooted by the more-rapid blinking of her eyelids, drifted from her upper lid to land in the crease next to her right nostril.

Jumping jacks seemed like the thing to do to work off some of his own ire, and so John began the exercise as he carefully formulated his response to her retort and let the words, which might have sounded defensive if he wasn't careful to modulate his tone, come up out of the spot in his chest that transformed speech into a cavemanlike guttural growl of masculine frustration as he blithely informed the woman he loved more than life itself, "I just want to say things." He dragged in a breath, filling out his muscular chest, now covered with tiny but sensual beads of sweat from this, the latest round of vigorous exertions. Would that it could have been from making love to Marcia again, but even John needed five minutes to recharge his supply tanks. "To you."

"Oh, for God's sake . . . " Marcia trailed off, first to a blown breath and then to a sharply-drawn inhaled snort of contempt, which whistled through her deviated septum with high-pitched irritation, much like the sharp sensation in her heart which provoked her to add with equally pointed intonation, ". . . . say whatever you want," she snapped like a fourteen-day-old oak twig left in a seasoning shed on a cold fortnight in November that knew no humidity, among the crackling brown leaves and the chips and wood dust left behind by the merciless teeth of the chainsaw, which seemed to her to be as destructive as the man she loved, at least whenever he decided to discuss things with her that were better left unsaid. "Whatever you want," she repeated, much more gently this time, because with her own eyes she saw that John was staring at her with weary acceptance and tolerance that made her own impatience seem ungrateful and childish.

"Tell me you love me."

Marcia frowned before she attempted to button the front of her dress to give herself time to compose a new tag for her dialogue.

"No." John put his hands over hers to stop the buttoning and composing. "Tell me you love me."

"I," Marcia offered, desperate now to gain some space to properly tag her words so the reader would know absolutely everything she was feeling, doing and physically experiencing, "need--"

John kissed her. "Say it."

"Darling, you don't--"

"Say it."

"I love you," Marcia whimpered.

"Don't whimper."

Marcia whined, "But John--"

"Or whine."

"Oh, all right," Marcia said. "I love you. There. Happy now?"

"Not yet." John grinned, picked up Marcia and without another word or dialogue tag, tossed her back on the bed.

(Dedicated to my ninth grade English teacher, who maintained that important published writers never stoop to use the plodding, unimaginative word "said.")

Protagonism

"Marcia, please come into the library," John said from the open doorway. As his one and only true love walked over the threshhold, he gestured to the sofa. "Do sit down over there, darling, if you don't mind."

Marcia sat and crossed her legs daintily at the ankle. "Would you tell me why you asked me to come into the library and sit, dearest?"

"Don't let my request disturb you, beloved, I beg you." John went and kneeled with the utmost courtesy before her. "If you would kindly comprehend that all I want to do is talk with you. Not about my request for you to come into the library and sit, of course. Would you be so gracious as to allow me to discuss something else with you?"

Marcia nodded.

"Excuse me, sweetheart, but I would be terribly grateful if you would put that head motion into words -- as long as it doesn't inconvenience you." He pressed a hand to his heart. "I'm sure you recall what Jack and Diane had to go through with that 1-800-CONSENT situation. If you have no problem with recalling that blog post, that is."

"If you have nothing better to do," Marcia said, tapping the floor with her shoe, "I would be gratified if you would relay the details of that something else that you wish to talk to me about that is unrelated to my coming into the library and sitting down, John."

"Naturally, I live to please you, my sweet." He smiled at her. "Permit me to say that my affection for you, if you are interested in such a thing, knows no boundaries. Except the usual, polite ones."

"I would love to express how hearing that your affection for me, in which I am interested, knows no boundaries," she said through gritted teeth. "Only I can't think of another synonym for please."

John felt uneasy, but forced a laugh. "Don't forget your manners, darling -- I mean, if you are so inclined not to forget them, that would be very convenient at this moment."

"Please -- oh, the hell with it." Marcia grabbed John's tie and used it to jerk him forward until their noses were only a centimeter apart. "I'm yours. You're mine. Forget about the polite chit-chat and kiss me."

"Please, Marcia." Sweat began running down the sides of his face as he tucked in his chin and watched her unknot his tie. "Please don't ask such things of me. I feel compelled to adhere to my innate courtesy--"

"Which does not make for very good dialogue," she pointed out. "You're polite as all hell, which makes for good Beta hero, but you're basically saying nothing. I practically have to give myself diabetes just to respond in kind. You're my boyfriend, John, not a robotic butler. I swear, sometimes I could just put you over my knee and spank you. . . " Her eyes sparkled. "Is that it? You want to play Big Bad Sexually Deprived Beta Hero again?"

"Oh, I couldn't impose on you like that." His eyes bulged. "It would be unspeakably rude of me to ask you--oomp." His eyes widened as she suddenly pressed her mouth over his. He jerked his head away. "Honeybunch, I entreat you--"

"Not for the next hour or two." Marcia whipped off his tie and gagged him with it before she pushed him back on the carpet. "Tell you what. This time I'll play the monosyllabic Special Forces demolitions expert who fell in love with you when I sat behind you in Mrs. Randa's second grade class and again during senior year but who ditched you on Prom Night to join the military because your mother secretly hated me for being so big, strong and sexy, and who never forgot you or had sex with another person for an unspecified but lengthy-seeming amount of time while single-handedly defeating thousands of terrorists and who has finally taken an honorable discharge to come back from the Middle East to claim my ancestral ranch, the millions in the saving account left to me by my maiden aunt, and have wild monkey sex and a subsequent, pseudo-shotgun wedding with my one and true love. You can play the one and true love."

John jerked down the gag. "That's backstorymbalance," he protested. "Not protagonism."

"All right." Marcia sighed. "You play the one and true love," she said, trailing her finger down the buttons of his shirt, "pretty, pretty please with sugar and me on top?"

"I suppose . . . as long as we understand each other." John tucked his hands behind his head and batted his eyelashes as he let his voice rise to a sweet falsetto. "Oh, Major Marcia, whatever are you planning to do to me?"

She ripped open his shirt and said in her deepest, gruffest tone, "Anything I please, Cupcake."