People be talking, yo!
Not a lot of time to blog today – I’ve got to get caught up on some work this weekend, and I’m going through paperwork as we pack for out house move in a couple of weeks.
I’m the process of going through said paperwork, though, I came across my notes from the various creative writing courses I took at Washington University. While most of the notes are either utterly obvious or incomprehensible (or, more often, both), I did find a page of notes on dialogue that was interesting. This is a complete, word-for-word transcription of what I wrote down, including missing words, misspellings, and bad punctuation (I scribbled this down during a lecture).
- Dialogue reveals character, emotion between characters
- Short, pointed, and loaded
- Warn overture will be met with a cool response, both in dialogue and between writer and reader. If you’re cold to the characters, the reader warms up
- Dialogue needs tension
- Dialogue often has a subtext to what is really going on.
- Each character has a secret they do and do not want to reveal
- Tend to be guarded instead of saying what we mean, just like politeness to mask anger. That masked emotion can mask a different emotion.
- Most people don’t listen when the other is speaking.
- Don’t do narration in dialog. (No plot exposition!)
- Dialogue ties (“he said/she said”) Usually you want to hide these. If you use these to express thoughts, stick to one. Can be put in the middle. Instead of a tag, use a gesture.
I like these. This one: "Most people don’t listen when the other is speaking" isn't really true in fiction, for the most part, I find — but I think it'd be cool if more authors tried to pull this off.
– c.
I'm sure you could find instances when that happens, but I think you're right that it doesn't happen often. One question I have, though, is that does it make sense to have that happen in fiction too often? Usually the circumstances in fiction are exception by design, and I think people generally pay more attention to information in extreme cases.
"Dialogue ties (“he said/she said”) Usually you want to hide these. If you use these to express thoughts, stick to one. Can be put in the middle. Instead of a tag, use a gesture."
Funny. I tend to use these frequently when I write in French and hide then in English. One of my teacher told us that this was because in English "he said/she said" is one of the few thing you can say. But in French, we have a lot more of diversity to replace that.
That's pretty true. Generally, tags like "he scowled" or "she screamed" are looked down on in English. They're POSSIBLE, but it's generally better to use the plain "he/she said" or use a gesture.
I want to highlight this one:
"Warn overture will be met with a cool response, both in dialogue and between writer and reader. If you’re cold to the characters, the reader warms up"
Just for clarification, I am reading that as when you are being cold towards your character and putting them through the ringer (if I am off on that, let me know). It seems that people really respond to what I write when I am being a total bastard to my characters, and that's always been best conveyed with dialogue (ymmv, just what works for me).
That's what I recall, yes. Basically, if your characters like each other too much, the dialogue won't feel real, and the reader won't empathize. On the other hand, characters being bastards to each other makes for good reading. Obviously that's heavily simplified, but I really think it's another way of saying "conflict matters."