DIALOGUE AND CHARACTERIZATION FROM REAL LIFE

by Jackie King

Realistic dialogue with clear attributions makes the characters in your story come alive. Natural sounding dialogue helps distinguish one character from another. 

The death knell for a writer:

Have you ever been reading, and suddenly wondered which character is speaking? I have, and the experience frustrates me. I'm forced to stop reading and count quotation marks backward to the last attribution, then count forward to learn who’s talking. I’m annoyed right out of the story. I want to throw the book across the room. If I haven’t bonded with the characters in a special way, I might quit and move to another book in my TBR (to be read) stack.

Solution to the problem:

Dialogue confusion occurs when attributions aren’t given or when characters all sound alike. Realistic dialogue makes the people in a story come alive. Natural sounding dialogue can help distinguish one character from another even without names. If there's any doubt about the reader knowing who is speaking, use the simple attribution, said.  The word, "said," is almost invisible to American readers. Don't be afraid to use it .

 How do we keep the reader turning pages?

Try the following exercise to hone this skill:

Write a scene with three people without using names of characters.

I did this in a class once, and it was so much fun! I chose a high school principal’s office as the setting. The three characters were a teenage boy, his father and the principal. I worked all afternoon on this project, and finally achieved the goal to my satisfaction. I used body language and conversation only. No names.

My challenge:

The boy needed to sound young, and inexperienced. He's embarrassed, and intimidated  by the situation, but trying not to show his feelings to the grownups.

The father channeled a middle aged businessman, highly annoyed and embarrassed by his son’s bad behavior. He snapped at his son, was tersely polite with the principal, and he looked at his watch every couple of minutes.

The principal was professional, but obviously most interested in solving his problem and getting on with running the school. The premise of the scene was to portray a student getting little real guidance from either adult

A stealthy technique:

Good dialogue is not easy to write. Some people seem to have a natural flare for this, and others have to work hard and rewrite a number of times. Both writers create successful novels, and entertain readers.

Eavesdropping is a good tool for improving dialogue. When you’re at a restaurant, listen to the conversations nearby. This works even better, if you can’t see the people who are talking. Picture their appearance, age, color of hair, level of education, and apply that method to your own characters. Is one person from a different part of the country? How does his speech pattern and lingo differ from locals?

Moving on.

None of us, writers and readers alike, graduate from the school of life. We experience either joy or vexation, both through books and in life. We learn continually, and writers record this fine journey. 

Remember:

Everything that’s going on in our seemingly mundane lives, will one day be considered history.

The Art of Communication

By Mark W. Danielson

WTF?  KFC?  LOL!  That’s a teen’s description of what they’re having for dinner, sent via Twitter.  To a cyber-friend, it’s all they needed to know in nine characters.  And we wonder why we have generational communication issues.

For those of us who grew up prior to any cell phones (or a lot of other techno-inventions), it’s hard to imagine how the English language has degraded into selected letters and symbols.  Having said that, it’s unlikely we will ever return to long drawn-out verbiage we’ve seen in classic literature.  Simply put, today’s readers don’t make the time or have the patience for it.

As an airline captain, I can tell with great accuracy the age group of my first officers by their communicative skills.  Bear in mind that I am dealing exclusively with college graduates who have spent years perfecting their professional skills as pilots.  Even so, there is a marked difference between those who are a generation or two below me in how they communicate and also react to constructive criticism.

A recent Bones episode centered on brutal honesty.  While watching, I couldn’t help thinking how well agents, editors, and publishing companies fall into the brutally honest category.  “No” is not an abbreviation – it simply means, no.  “No thank you” may be a more polite version, but it doesn’t soften a rejection.  Most authors handle this well because they are thick-skinned, but see what happens when you tell a twenty-year old no.  More likely, you will hear a trail of excuses spilled in brief sentences because they aren’t used to communicating with their voices.

But rather than blame our younger generations, it’s important to understand that we made them this way by creating all of these gadgets, and now that every kid has his or her hands on a techno device, they speak in simple terms because it’s easier to type a few characters than communicate with a live person.  If you are writing about younger people, it is important to understand this because their dialogue will sound completely different from your own.  Rather than type out a sentence using a few characters, it may be better to describe the scene and use minimal dialogue.  When writing, it is always important to understand and appreciate your character’s frame of reference.  After all, that is one thing we cannot change.  

 

Common Writing Flaws

By Chester Campbell

I'm in the midst of reading manuscripts for a mystery writing competition. I thought it might be instructive to mention a few of the most common shortcomings I've found. Overall, the writing has been quite competent, but most entries could use the sure hand of a skilled editor. I took on the job with some trepidation. When reading for pleasure, I (like most readers, I suspect) tend to ignore minor miscues if the story is interesting. With this task, I have been forced to adopt a more critical stance.

The most common problem I've found is getting too carried away with the characters or the settling and failing to move the plot along. Let's face it, a mystery is about a crime and the difficulties it causes, usually including a murder. Character is important, but unless all these well-drawn people get involved in the crime or its solution before too many chapters pass, readers will lose interest. In so-called "literature," characters can go on doing mundane things ad nauseam, but in mysteries something critical has to happen.

In a minority of the manuscripts, the writer needed to loosen up when it came to dialogue. That's one place where reading the lines aloud helps. If it doesn't sound natural, it ain't. Some casual conversations sound more like lectures. Long, carefully constructed sentences instead of several fragments, the way real people talk.

One manuscript began: "It was a dark and stormy night." The second sentence said, "No really, it was a dark and stormy night." It was written as a humorous piece but rambled too much. The rules for the contest said you could send up to fifty pages. This one stopped at sixteen. If the manuscript ended there, it would make a great short story. But this was a novel-writing contest. Oh, well.

Another problem I encountered was overwriting. I got introduced to that subject early in my novel-writing career when I sent a manuscript of more than 600 typed pages to an agent. The agency was interested but said the story was overwritten and needed to be pared considerably. I didn't know what the term meant but quickly learned I was guilty of things like too much description. One of the contest entries is set in a popular European city and sounds too much like a travelogue.

Frequent shifts in point of view can be a show-stopper for a mystery writer. Constant head-hopping leads to confusion. You encounter an important point and wonder "how did he know that?" Then you realize you're wandering around in some other character's mind.

Fortunately, all of these problems are fixable. Unfortunately, most of the writers guilty of them don't realize what they're doing wrong. It's why the advice to let a competent editor critique your manuscript before you send it off is so important. We all make mistakes, and with a little extra effort we can correct them.

Mystery Mania