All the author has to do is the typing

[John Dean]

The process of writing continually teaches the author new lessons. It also reiterates the wisdom behind old ones. The truth of that statement has been proved to me yet again as I write the final chapters of my latest DCI Jack Harris novel for my publisher The Book Folks.

I have found myself struggling with pulling together the threads of the story. I know where I want the story to go but have struggled with some of the crucial scenes. The solution – the age-old lesson I refer to above – was to give the characters their heads, let them talk, type what they say and tidy it up later.

The result in this case was that some characters assumed greater prominence, which meant going back to earlier sections of the book to strengthen the plot and their part in it. The narrative had much better coherence, as a result.

Good dialogue lifts a story, bad dialogue wrecks it. However, it’s vital to remember that writing dialogue isn’t about replicating a real-life conversation. It’s about giving an impression of it.

The role of the writer is to select what’s important and it is worth mentioning here some of the key rules, especially if you are an aspiring writer in the early stages of learning your craft.

 

In real life we repeat ourselves. Not so in fictional dialogue. Yes, it must sound like real people speaking but without the elements of conversation that slow it down. With dialogue in stories, you need to cut day-to-day conversation that is extraneous. Instead, focus on the core of each conversation. If it doesn’t reveal anything about the character or the plot, you need to question its right to be on the page.

 

We tend to talk in short, sharp snaps of dialogue so a writer should aim to get rid of most of the social niceties. Don’t remove them completely because you still want conversations to sound natural, but remember that dialogue in novels needs to cut to the chase a lot quicker than in real-life. A character may well think that it  ‘looks like it might rain’ but do really they need half a page to say it?

 

We assume a lot. If you are talking about a relative, we tend not to say ‘How’s your sister, Barbara?’ We tend to say ‘How’s your sister?’ If there’s more than one sister, we tend to say ‘How’s Barbara?’ Getting it wrong can give such a bad impression of a story. As an example, there’s a line in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies when Jack Sparrow asks the character played by Jennifer Lopez ‘how’s your father, Blackbeard?’ Both characters know that Blackbeard is the father and as a result the impression is of a writer shoehorning a bit of plot information in without thinking how natural or otherwise it sounds. ‘How’s your father?’ will suffice.

 

Good writers do not cram detail into dialogue. We say ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop’, not ‘I’ll meet you by the bus stop on Green Road, by the corner shop, opposite the park gates, next to the bins’. Good writers find other ways to drop in important information or decide that the colour of the gates isn’t actually important anyway.

 

Good writers inject energy into dialogue. They make their characters do things while they talk - make the tea, hang up the washing, overtake a lorry on the motorway etc, all of which gives the conversation context and injects life.

 

It’s a good idea to give the characters conflicting goals. One of them wants one thing from a conversation, the other wants something else. Even if it doesn’t end in a shouting match, the underlying tension will keep the readers turning those pages.

 

Dialogue should drive the story forward. Every line should do a job. Ask yourself, will the story still make sense if a passage of dialogue is removed? If so, hit delete.

 

Don’t have characters all sounding the same – give them distinct voices so that the reader can instinctively tell them apart.

 

Tackle these challenges and your dialogue will work.