Mike C

I think we should offer them positive encouragement to keep producing more of the same, Anne. The more writers are producing crap, the better the chances of the rest of us when it comes to publication.

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Dawnstorm

Yet, the people who are quick with warning you from the evils of adjective swamps usually procede to warn you of the nasty passive voice.

I wasn't all that serious either.

Tools, not rules. (*prints slogan on T-shirt and puts T-shirt into a drawer*)

Cheers,

Eddie

Nish

December dwells in América Latina at the moment, which gives me just enough time to get tanned and lose the weight of a smaller combat tank. Consider it done.

Hence in six months from now, at the Nobel Prize banquet I will have to disappoint Silvia, her Royal Highness, by refusing to get stuck with her…yet again. I need to mingle (woman!) and I will demand to be seated by this year’s Harold Pinter. And then, while slurping la soupe de tortue I’ll drop the bomb and say:

“I bet you never put © copyright notice on any of your works!”
After a minor cardiac arrest, the laureate: “How DID you know?”
Tanned, slim and sophisticated, I: “Mike told me.”

Ha!

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Dookie

That's a bit harsh, stop thinking you're so superior and understand that your point of view is not a cultural understanding - it is in fact...just a point of view.

Mike C

Harsh? Maybe, but it's not the first time in this thread you'd have been better advised to think before speaking, or maybe just not speaking.

In this particular instance my point of view is fact. Pro and experienced writers will never submit a work with copyright notices on it, newbies almost always do.

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Dookie

I thought you meant on writers forum, but you're talking about to editors. I'd agree with you in that case.

Anarkos

In this example, you only need two dialogue tags: "he said" and "she said". There are no indications of a third party, and after the first exchange, it is obvious who is saying what.

You don't need to say "expostulated". The dialogue itself makes it clear that this is what she is doing. It is a tautalogy. It's redundant.

Ideally, what is said should indicate how it is being said. It is better to make it clear that someone is positing a hypothesis by what they say, not by using dialogue tags.

I know Dookie has apologised etc, but I think what I'm about to say might help him understand dialogue a little better, and also see a bit more clearly where he went wrong.

No! While, yes, sometimes, just very sometimes, the dialogue tags can add to the character, mostly...they don't. Almost always, what the character is saying should make it clear how he/she is saying it.

If your character is a villain and he says "Haha! We shall ride down upon yonder township and put it to the sword! Rape and pillage! Kill the women, rape the men!" then it's pretty obvious that he is, one, villianous, two, yelling and, three, sexually somewhat confused. You, mostly, don't need flashy dialogue tags for this. Most of the time, what's being said, in the context, makes it very clear how it's being said.

If your character says "Please don't kill me!" to the villian, you don't need to say that he/she is pleading. It's obvious.

If your character speaks in brisk, harsh and short sentences, then you generally don't need to use grunt/bark/whatever:
The boss in this example is using short sentences and sentence fragments. He's interrupting his hippie-minion, who in turn is speaking in long and convoluted sentences, stammering over words in fear. Maybe it's just me, being as I wrote it and all, but I don't think I need to say the boss is yelling or barking his words. Add in some context:
Stupid example, sure. Scarface ripoff, sure. Terry Pratchett references, sure, but you get the idea. Action and dialogue can convey the way someone is speaking far more effectively than a few dialogue tags.

This is a simple application of the cliche rule of show, don't tell.

There are exceptions to this, however:
This isn't won of them.
"I just won the hand. We can go now."
"I just won. I'm the best poker player in Vegas!"
"But, I just won. How can I have lost it all this fast?"

See? It's better to convey the whining or boasting via the words said, not the dialogue tags. However, there are exceptions to this.

The most notable is when someone's tone and their words don't match up. A good example is Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, who says horrific things (eg "I'm going to kill you and play around in your blood") in friendly, conversational tones. Here, you, at times, need dialogue tags, but if you can avoid them...do.

For all the cliche "scowled/grimaced/laughed" pseudo-dialogue-tags, I prefer to write:
...not:
In the former, you're describing Johnny's action, then quoting what he says afterwords. Fine. Not brilliant description, but plausible. In the latter, you're quoting Johnny bizarrely and implausibly laughing out a sentence.

You can also tag dialogue to characters effectively enough without using "he/she said" by describing their actions before/after they speak, in the same paragraph. This isn't flawless, and can come across forced if overdone, but it works.

My rules for dialogue:
1) Keep it simple. Four way conversations? Not if I can avoid it!
2) Use the bare minimum of dialogue tags.
3) Intersperse dialogue with description and activity.
4) Allow characters to misunderstand each other.
5) Allow characters to ignore each other.
6) Allow characters to interrupt each other.
7) Use sentence fragments almost exclusively.
8) Give characters verbal tics or other little habits [the most obvious example of this is Yoda] to help build individual voices.
9) Rarely write dialect phonetically.
10) Use passive voice.

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S1E9A8N5

I know this is probably a stupid question but I am newbie and I was wondering if you could explain your rules in more detail?

Sean

cbrmale

For the newbie, you wouldn't use all of the rules in all dialogue in a MS. For example, don't have every character in a MS with a verbal habit, just some. The rest of the rules should be self-explanatory.

Four way conversations are complex (!) I know, I wrote one where two people are speaking Russian and conversing with a Russian - English speaker and an English only speaker. It works, surprisingly, but you need to be good to do it. It works better than if it were four English-speakers because I didn't need to use as many tags (the language changes work as tags)

Dialogue tags go with rule one, two people talking don't need tags if the conversations bounces from one to the other. Multiple people talking at the same time need tags on each line, and it really becomes clunky.

Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue is boring. Have someone sit up straight with interest or pause and scratch their nose while they think of an answer or something (anything).

Misunderstanding keeps it natural ('what do you mean?' he asked. 'Oh, I see.').

Again, sentence fragments in the simple examples I outlined. Three and four word sentences.

In terms of distinctive voice, in my Russian-set MS, the girl does not use abbreviated English, she speaks every word distinctly. If she were a natural English-speaker, she doesn't use abbreviated English, she... See how English is her second language? (does not rather than doesn't).

Rules about passive voice and so on get thrown out when writing dialogue. Write dialogue and read it back out loud and make sure it sounds okay, that is one the grammatical rule (if there is one).

I am not a dialogue expert, my prose usually comes out better. But realism in dialogue is not too hard to achieve if you think about each and every sentence. What I do is plan the speech patterns of the key characters in advance, and work to that plan as I write.

Slugfly

The verbal habits of a character are pretty important, especially for long works. It's all about identity, and it can also relay a change in the characters mood without you having to say anything. If in the first few chapters a character stutters (easy example) when he gets nervous, then for the rest of the book everytime he stutters the reader will know he's nervous or afraid and there will be no need to tell the reader how the character's feeling.

It also just adds flavor. If a character tends to use a particular idiom often then by hearing it many times you can feel like you understand and know the character.

Mike C

I mean both.

When submitting to agents/editors, it's pretty insulting to their intelligence to state the obvious with regards to copyright. It's not like they're planning on ripping it off, then see the copyright notice and shout "Curses! Foiled again!"

Same goes for writing groups - we're all writers, we all know the score.

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Rob

I have to disagree. Don't add anything just for the sake of it. Unless it adds something essential to the story, leave that pause or scratch or sitting up out. Far too often I see dialogue that should flow interrupted with pointless twitches and tics. If your dialogue, dialogue, dialogue is boring, write better dialogue.

Cheers,
Omni

Soul Ink

Talk to yourself a lot. This will help you build up good dialogue from charachters. To me it just comes natural, so I don't find any trouble writing dialogue.

huxley

thanks for all the great advice.

keep it comming.

cbrmale

Omni,
Like the verbal habits of different characters, this works well if its not overdone. I have written a 4,000 word chapter which had three short one-sentence paragraphs of non-dialogue. The rest was dialogue between two people breaking up. Something like that needs a few non-verbal cues.

For shorter chunks of dialogue, keep the cues in moderation, use them when someone really needs to pause and think of an answer or do something else. After a while, a writer will work out where a normal person stops talking, and write it in as appropriate.