Mary Rosenblum, author of three SF novels, four mysteries, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres is also the web editor of the Long Ridge Website.  She has taught writing for many years, and turns her attention here to the way our characters speak.

 

 

                           He Said, She Said:  Stop The Ping Pong Match!

                                               Creating Realistic Dialogue

 

                                                     By Mary Rosenblum

 

            “I don’t know,” she said.

            “Neither do I,” he answered.

            “Well, what do we do now?” she asked.

            “You tell me,” he snapped.

            We’ve all created dialogue like this, in our early days as writers.   The characters talk, we carefully tag those lines so that we don’t confuse the reader.  We vary ‘said’ with ‘announced’, ‘snapped’, ‘answered’.  But when we read the story over, that carefully crafted dialogue sounds…flat.  Why? What does it take to make a conversation sound like a conversation?    Why is it so often well…boring? 

 

The Dialogue Tripod 

           When we think of dialogue, we think of conversation.  Words.  That’s what a conversation is, isn’t it?  An exchange of words between two or more characters?  Well, yes, and no.  Conversation is indeed based on an exchange of words, but is that all it is?  Think back over your last conversation.  You and your boss were talking about the upcoming Forsythe project.  Words were flying back and forth between you, yes.  But at the same time you were proposing a brilliant new approach to the client’s needs, you were also watching your boss’s face and body language.  Tense shoulders?  A hint of a frown?  He doesn’t like this idea?  And you’re thinking that this guy wouldn’t be a very junior VP if he had more gumption and was willing to take a few more risks.   

            So what did our ‘exchange of words’ include?  It included the words, of course, but it also included our awareness of the other person’s body language and our own mental counterpoint to the conversation.  Here we have them – the three legs of a strong dialogue scene: words, visuals, thoughts.

 

Talking Heads 

            You’ve probably read a piece of fiction where a couple of characters chat interminably with nary a glimpse of the scene.  After a few lines, our sense of setting tends to fade away.  Eventually, we find ourselves floating in a gray mist, watching two heads chattering away!  Remember that readers only carry a sense of the scene with them for a short period of time.  If the characters make no references to their surroundings, then we forget where we are.  By the end of a long dialogue scene with no visuals, most readers will have completely forgotten where the conversation began.  The sudden appearance, say, of that teakwood bar and noisy after-work crowd, may really startle your reader.   Besides giving us glimpses of that teak and the crowd of suited men and women, you can also show us the other speaker’s expression and reaction to the POV character’s words, thus letting us watch body language the way we’d do it in real life.    

“I don’t know.” 

            “Neither do I.”  He stubbed out his cigarette in the brass ashtray, his trembling fingers sending it skidding down the polished teakwood bar.

            She fixed her eyes on the blonde in the Armani suit, blinking rapidly.  “Well, what do we do now?”

            “You tell me.” 

            Okay, we’ve added quite a bit of visual interest to our little exchange of words.  Now we see him stub out his cigarette and that brass ashtray skids down the bar.  There is at least one woman in an expensive suit in the bar.  So we’ve added to the scene.  We’ve done more than that, though.   Take a look at the body language.  His fingers are trembling.  She’s trying not to cry.  Clearly, this is a moment of emotional intensity.  And you, the author, haven’t told us a thing.  We’ve figured this out from watching the characters, just as we would in real life.  This piece of dialogue also varies in pace, although it’s too brief to really vary much.  But we’ve begun with a stripped line (no tag) which usually indicates an intense interchange.  We end with another stripped line.  In between we have a bit of a pause where we watch him stub out that cigarette and watch her blink back tears.  By varying the rhythm of your dialogue from intense to leisurely, you keep the reader’s attention.  We get bored with a monotonous pace, be it either intense or slow.   You don’t want to pad every line with visuals, but you don’t want thirty lines of stripped dialogue, either.  Use both to vary your rhythm.

 

Said-isms.  Your Teacher Was Wrong 

            Sometime during your school years, I will bet that a teacher handed you a nice printed list of words to use instead of ‘said’.  Instead of ‘he said’, ‘she said’, you used ‘he announced’, ‘she shouted’.  This is how you avoid using ‘said’ too often, your teacher probably told you.   

            Well, your teacher was addressing a real problem, but offering the wrong solution.  When we use a tag line ‘he said’, ‘she said’ after every line, it does hurt our dialogue.  That rhythmical ‘he said’, ‘she said’ begins to take on the sound of a ping pong ball bopping back and forth over the net.  But simply changing ‘said’ to ‘announced’ or ‘shouted’ isn’t the answer.  ‘Said’ is fairly invisible to the reader.  It simply labels the speaker.  It doesn’t tell us anything else.  When you substitute ‘announced’, or ‘shouted’ we notice this tag, and we hear the speaker differently.  The character may not need to shout, or may not be the type of character who goes about pompously ‘announcing’ his thoughts to the world.  Again, your dialogue sounds phony. 

            Use action tags instead.  “Neither do I.”  He stubbed out his cigarette in the brass ashtray, his trembling fingers sending it skidding down the polished teak of the bar.  We have no doubt who said ‘Neither do I.”  You have labeled the speaker without using ‘said’, or any of the ‘saidisms’.  And you have showed us the scene, and you have given us a glimpse of his emotional state.  Wow!  You’ve accomplished three things with that single line of dialogue!  Congratulations.   By using action tags, you give us glimpses of the scene and the characater’s body language and you avoid the repetitive ‘said’.

 

Think Lightly 

            The third leg of our dialogue tripod is our mental leg.  Often, we carry on a second ‘conversation’ inside our heads, especially when we’re talking with someone in authority, like a teacher or boss, where we can’t express our actual feelings without risk.  In first person, you are using internal monologue much of the time, of course, as our POV character carries on a one sided conversation with the reader.  This is a technique to use sparingly in third person.  Too much internal POV does tend to bog down the flow of the story in a third person POV piece.  It is more effective in first person POV.  But it is useful.  Let’s take a look at our evolving dialogue again.  

“I don’t know.” 

            “Neither do I.”  He stubbed out his cigarette in the brass ashtray, his trembling fingers sending it skidding down the polished teak of the bar.

            She fixed her eyes on the blonde in the Armani suit, blinking rapidly.  “Well, what do we do now?”

            “You tell me.”  As if you would.  He spun on his heel and pushed his way toward the door.  

            Here, we’ve added a brief snatch of thought: As if you would.  This is his unspoken addition to his spoken line.  What does it do for the dialogue?  Here, it lets us know clearly that he is our POV character, of course.  We don’t know what a non-POV character is thinking, unless we’re using omniscient POV.  It also gives us a sense of what he thinks about her at the moment.  He’s annoyed, not happy with her for some reason.  It is one of many small clues to his thoughts and feelings as a character that he will give us.  These internal insights allow you to deepen a character beyond his actions in the plot, so that we begin to think of him or her as a real person, and not just a cartoon character, or a cardboard cut out.   

            So here, in our final interchange, we have a nice solid dialogue tripod.  We hear the characters’ voices, we see the scene and their reactions to the words, and we overhear a snatch of our POV character’s thoughts.  Remember that a tripod is a very stable form.  Next time you write dialogue, remember to create those three tripod legs, and see if your dialogue doesn’t suddenly come to life.