Writing Dialogue
While some choices in dialogue will come down to style preference, most fanfic dialogue suffers from a much earlier problem of being done incorrectly, no matter what the stylistic preference. Once basic spelling & grammar is mastered, and assuming the fic contains more than a handful of dialogue, I think bad dialogue is the thing that kills my enjoyment the fastest. I can handwave plotholes and understand emotions that werenât conveyed right, but I canât read people having a conversation that doesnât look anything like an actual human conversation.
Problem 1: Too Much Drama
We want our scenes to pulse with energy! Of course we want the dialogue to be dramatic! The problem here is, what makes for good dramatic dialogue is not people yelling powerful words at each other very passionately. What makes for dramatic dialogue is mostly the importance of that scene to the plot & the characters, so to achieve dramatic dialogue, the best thing you can do is not overly rely on the dialogue itself to be dramatic. Set up a dramatic situation, and then people donât have to yell. They can say a few basic sentences and the audience already knows why it is important and why the characters care so much.
Have you ever seen the scene in The Room where Tommy Wiseau yells âYouâre tearing me apart, Lisa!â Did you actually find that dramatic or did it just make you laugh because it was overdramatized? Thatâs what dramatic dialogue does to a story. Unless your characters are middle schoolers exclaiming it out in the hall between classes, chances are, older and more mature characters arenât going to do a lot of yelling or make weirdly dramatic statements like the world is ending.
One of the biggest offenses on this count is overusing exclamation points and overusing emphasis. Exclamation points should be used very, very rarely, as should telling your reader what words are meant to be emphasized. Your characterâs mood should primarily come through action - are they slamming doors, pacing back and forth, collapsing into a chair? Dialogue tags like âshoutedâ or âreplied angrilyâ can be used to help, but should not stand on their own as the only thing portraying mood.
Instead of looking like this: âOMG! Can you believe it! Drama! Let me scream all the drama out in a monologue!â Lisa screamed, it should look like *Lisa kicks off her shoes, one leaves a mark on the wall* *Lisa slams bag down on counter, opens fridge for beer* *Lisaâs boyfriend stands frozen, as this is not normally how Lisa comes home from work. âThis thing happened.â *Lisa collapses into kitchen chair and sticks head in her hands.* *Lisaâs boyfriend comes to put a hand on her back*. âOne sentence reminding reader why Lisa is upset about thisâ.
Problem 2: Too Little Drama
Alternatively, you get scenes that sometimes look like two college roommates got high and are trying to acquire a pizza with as little effort as possible. Letâs say, for example, you have one character that has a crush on another character, and they are trying to find out information about them. While maybe the character learning this information is going to do something with it, so itâs important to the plot in another way, so the conversation itself does not need to be dramatic, it might end up looking like this:
I met Crush after class and we walked together. âWhatâs your favorite color?â - âRedâ - âDo you like dogs?â - âYes. Did you do the homework?â - âYes. Math is my favorite class. How about you?â - âP.E.â
Like with the above, setup and action are everything. If you set up the scene where we know in advance how long it has taken Karen to get up the courage to talk to Chad and things like that, and then include actions in between the dialogue to show that she is nervous and therefore not very talkative, like her glancing up at him briefly but looking away as soon as he makes eye contact, or have her analyze Chadâs mood and wonder if heâs annoyed, etc, the scene can be made much more meaningful without needing to be a âdramaticâ scene.
Problem 3: Dialogue is written like exposition
This tends to go unnoticed by some authors who are otherwise decent, and for me really ruins an otherwise decent story. The writing within the dialogue tags is written well, it just isnât written like dialogue. It is written like exposition/narration.
In exposition: This project was doomed from the beginning. The improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns was going to stop it before it really started. Sounds...not excellent, I just pulled an example out of my ass, but fine.
In dialogue: âI think this project is doomed already,â Bob said, looking around the meeting room. âThe improvements might look nice on paper, but the law of diminishing returns is going to stop it before it really starts.â
...sounds like Bob is kind of a psycho, or possibly your most pompous and hated coworker. Who the hell says âLaw of Diminishing Returnsâ out loud if they arenât a professor? The longer the dialogue and more flowery/technical/big vocab it becomes, which often *adds* to exposition, the worse and more unnatural the dialogue becomes.
Dialogue should not feel the same as the âspeechâ when a character is thinking. We tend to be fairly limited in how we express ourselves, use shorter and more simple sentence structures, more basic vocabulary, and havenât memorized what we are going to say, so it doesnât come out eloquently.
The one real exception to this that isnât really dialogue, but is speech, is if you have a character making a speech or presentation, which they have prepared for in advance, and it is reasonable for them to give it uninterrupted.
If you want to make a point of one of your characters sounding like a total tool when they speak, you can also do this to achieve that and make it immediately clear to the audience why everyone hates them, but unless thatâs what youâre going for, avoid this at all costs.
Problem 4: Dialogue is otherwise unnatural
Always, always, until youâre pretty damn sure youâre pretty damn good at it, say your dialogue out loud.
Would that personally really say âWhat is that?â or is it âWhatâs that?â Along the lines of not needing to use emphasis as much as you might think, if you were, say, in Scotland and just saw the Loch Ness monster pop out and want to ask your companion what it is, âWhat is that?â is fairly unnecessary. âWhat is that?â suffices. The simple fact that you didnât use the standard contraction means the character emphasized the âisâ. If you just see a piece of mail on someoneâs desk that you are curious about, youâre going to say âWhatâs that?â and it wonât sound like you are dramatically asking about a generic piece of mail.
There are lots of very minor and small things that can easily go wrong in dialogue of this nature. Itâs really important to say to yourself: if I was in this situation, how would I say it? Read it like you are acting it out in a movie and see. Also, question if a person would even say a sentence like that to begin with, or if they would be more or less direct in their approach. More direct is appropriate in many cases because people are usually trying to communicate clearly. Even if they are lying, they usually just say a direct statement that is a lie, they donât dance around it indirectly and give hints to the other character. More indirect is appropriate when a character is trying to have a difficult conversation - we donât tend to give tough advice or be directly rude, we try to work around it to make it sound better.
Because people want to have âexcitingâ or âcoolâ dialogue, they will often also give characters great rebuttals all the time, where they have these snappy conversations. This *can* work, but itâs really hard to pull off well, so in general Iâd limit it to having a character having the occasional good rebuttal than a conversation of back-and-forth snark. Honestly, most of us just canât think on our feet that well, and unless youâve built the case that these characters can [ie, theyâve been married 20 years and are having the same arguments over and over so have it all thought out] it just seems very unrealistic.
Problem 5: Underutilizing dialogue tags
If you have two characters speaking, theoretically, if we know who the first speaker is and they switch off, a reader can follow the conversation indefinitely and know who is speaking.
In practice, that doesnât happen. We like to be occasionally reminded. Personally, I try to max out at four consecutive lines of untagged speech, so no more than:
âHeyâ said Kyle when he saw Brad.
âHey.â
âWhat are you doing tonight?â
âPartying, bro, what did you think?â
âHaha, true. Do you think Lindsey will be there?â
âMan, you have such a crush on her,â Brad laughed.
Problem 6: Overusing dialogue tags
Conversely, in a conversation that is easy to follow, every single line does not need to be followed by a variation of âX person saidâ. If you are going for a tight back and forth conversation where neither character is thinking in between, you want to gum it up as little as possible with extraneous non-conversation. Hit us with occasional dialogue tags, and thatâs it.
Problem 7: Not breaking dialogue up
This is somewhat of a style question, but in general, conversations should only be quick back and forth when thatâs the point, but otherwise should generally pause briefly to âshowâ people doing actions, give some character thoughts, or otherwise break it up so the entire scene isnât just a conversation.
Also, you can use these pauses as a way of showing hesitation/actual pauses that happen in the conversation.
Problem 8: Huge breaks between dialogue
This is something I am probably the *most* guilty of myself, because Iâm writing a story where characters analyze the other characters a lot, so sometimes theyâll pause and think for a while in between. I havenât quite arrived at the level where Iâve figured out how to get that all to flow in a way that breaks the dialogue up nicely, but not so much it is jarring and youâve forgotten what the last thing a character said was.
But, anyway, definitely something to keep in mind. While a scene shouldnât usually be all conversation, breaking the conversation up too much makes it feel like it isnât a conversation at all.
