Writing dialogue is an art. You will know that if ever you stumbled onto one of those books where it doesn't work at all. Worse, you might remember when you wrote something yourself and your family collapsed in universal mirth. To save yourself from humiliation, and the world of some more atrocious dialogues, there are three things to keep at the forefront of your mind.
Bad dialogue can kill an otherwise good book. An ingenious story can fall flat because people talk like sticks instead of living human beings. I remember a Young Adult book I read where the 13 year old heroes talked like their own grandparents; or was that my grandparents 40 years back?
It might sound good in your head. What comes to paper are two strangers that sound like Siamese twins almost finishing off each other's sentences. That is hardly what you are aiming for. Before starting your first novel or (worse) screenplay, train writing dialogue in little snippets. Once you think you can believe it's a real dialogue, try it out on someone you trust.
When you start writing your first serious dialogues, there are three things to know, to do, and to keep hold of.
The first step is to get out of your mind. Get into the real world. The dialogues you hold silently with yourself or your alter egos tend to be stilted and elaborate. They are what you think you should sound like. They are not what real talking sounds like. You and your alter ego are the Siamese twins, finishing off each other's sentences. But two strangers should talk and sound different to each other. Making them both sound like the voice in your head won't fix that. Hearing evil voices might remedy that; they usually don't lead to writing, though.
The second step is to get rid of one very big illusion. Dialogue has nothing to do with talking. It has everything to do with listening. You won't learn how to write dialogue by talking. What you have to do is listen to other people talk. The more people you listen to, the more modes of talking you will catch onto. Listening includes watching, too, as facial expression and mannerisms are part of any conversation you will be observing.
Perfect places for people watching and being near enough to overhear dialogues are public spaces. Your local tea house or coffee shop will do nicely for starters, but the list is open ended. Restaurants, bus stops, railway stations, parks, malls, and airports can all be a target for you. When drawing up your hit-list, go for places with high people frequency but low sound exposure. Trying to listen to someone over music blasting at you with 180 decibel is not healthy in any way.
Take along pen and paper or whatever you have replaced them with. You want to be writing down or recording snippets of conversation for later use. Don't go for interesting content or salacious gossip, you're not on a real spy mission or reporting for Hello. Go for turns of phrase that you wouldn't be using yourself and expressions that sound different or even strange to your ears. If you are a fast writer, try to get down whole dialogues to get a better idea of the full range of a conversation. Recording will do, but I prefer writing to get into the flow of things.
Once you return home with your new armament, play with it. Use what you learned to write a short piece of dialogue. Work on it until you're happy. Then read it out loud while listening to yourself. Then throw it away, sit down and start again. Chances are high that your first few tries will sound completely weird. Once you get that problem sorted, its back to the person you trust. Once you get a thumbs-up there as well, you're ready to write dialogues in earnest. And once you are writing your first novel, reading out loud any dialogue you put in there is sort of an insurance policy on not getting derailed into stilted sentences.
No comments:
Post a Comment