Let’s have a chat about dialogue

Dialogue. It’s a double-edged sword. At its best it’s a chance for your characters to dazzle. They fool each other, maybe they fool themselves. They open their hearts. They slam doors and burn bridges. They devastate and they redeem. Brilliant, active stuff.

On the other hand dialogue can turn your characters into marionettes. Kill them dead. Like that. And not even because of what they are saying.

It’s because of how they say it.

We’re all trained from our earliest years to be creative with vocabulary. I still remember a teacher from…when? I must have been ten, I think. ‘Don’t just say “said,”’ she said, eyes flicking over my precious story and shrivelling it. ‘Use more interesting words. Extolled. Reviled. Expostulated. Things like that.’

Okay, well, I made that bit up. I don’t remember what words she dangled in front of me. I do know that it heralded a period of absolutely barf-inducing dialogue-writing, in which my characters trilled and gabbled, chortled and exclaimed, and a succession of teachers gushed over my use of vocabulary. I don’t fault them for this. It was their job to stretch my language use. What they didn’t tell me—I’m sure because they were trained this way themselves—was that it’s a phase. It’s temporary. Learn to use all the words. Absolutely. Then learn to throw them out.*

But we’re not taught to throw them out. Even in UNIVERSITIES** we’re still being taught to write like that. ‘“No, Sebastian, you are mistaken,” he sibilated.’

We’re up to the eyeballs in words that sabotage us at every turn. We opened the gates to the enemy when we were small and innocent and now we’re being murdered from within. These words are not your friends, my friends. They’re nasty scheming trolls.

The trick to writing good dialogue is to make your narrative invisible so that your characters’ voices can carry us along, and we can feel their intentions, emotions and subterfuges, not the author’s. Get out of the way. Take the expostulateds and the whimpereds and the rebukeds and put them in the bin. They take all the air out of a sentence so there’s no oxygen left for the words that really count. If the dialogue itself is full of manipulation and revelation, if it drives action as it must, it deserves to be heard clearly. But if the characters go around expostulating, what they actually say won’t matter half as much.

Let them speak for themselves. Write the dialogue truthfully, trust the reader to connect, and the tone-of-voice subtleties will take care of themselves.

Use ‘said.’ Go on. I mean it. Your characters will thank you for it.

Joanna x

* An exception can be writing for children. I’ll come to that in another post.

**hashtag notalluniversities