Wooden Dialogue

[DamaNegra]

So, how do you recognize wooden dialogue in your WIP? What are the most common signs that your dialogue is bad?

[AndreaGS]

You can try reading it aloud. It can be kind of embarassing, but really helps me to spot unwieldy turns of phrase.

[clara bow]

I think one contributing factor to wooden dialogue is the use of too-formal words or phrases. Or not using enough contractions that occur in speech.

Another might be having someone speak in really long sentences that doesn't mimick the natural cadence of speech.

Ok, another one comes to mind: Having a character explain things the the reader that should be shown, not told through dialogue.

[cleoauthor]

Try for shorter speeches, contractions and sentence fragments. Writing narrative and writing dialogue are two completely different animals. In real conversation, people often interrupt each other. Use interruption, too, as a means of duplicating real speech. And as been suggested, read it aloud, and if you find it's difficult to say, then you'll probably want to rewrite that sentence.

Don't be afraid of dialogue; I personally find it the most fun to write. How a character speaks, the rhythm of his/her speech, says volumes about who that character is.

[maestrowork]

As someone else, a friend maybe, to read it out loud. If it doesn't sound like real conversation, then your dialogue is no good. Even if your book is set in the past (18th century or something), it should still sound like real people are talking.

There are many good books on writing great dialogue. Also, observe how people talk -- go to coffee shops, malls, restaurants, dinner parties, etc. But remember, dialogue only simulates real speech. Still, it needs to sound real.

[Vuligora]

Make sure it is something the character would say. Make sure all interuptions are natural.

Example:
"What ab-" That is stupid. What-ab doesn't give the reader a good enough idea of what the person is about to say and thus why the interrupting character is interrupting.

Make sure they're aren't too many inturruptions. Use tags that follow the flow of the dialouge. Is the dialouge at least mildly interesting or has a point? Did you enjoy writting the dialouge? Dialouge I enjoy writting is the best because I feel what the characters are saying and why. If I am struggling through dialouge, it means I'm not in that character's zone at present.

Are you, as the author, satisfied with you're creations conversation. Can your beta reader understand what you want them too. Read it out load. Does it make you ashamed of yourself?

[Cheryll]

When I first started out in writing, I used a lot of dialogue tags and long, rambling sentences. A mentor of mine suggested I pick out some of my favorite dialogue scenes from novels and type them out.

What an eye-opener that was for me! I found that what made the best dialogue was shorter sentences, the use of contractions, and minimal use of dialogue tags.

Try that exercise and see if it works for you.

I also just sit and listen when I'm out in public. Coffee shops, restaurants, the grocery store... anywhere. You pick up on how people really talk. Then work on duplicating that in your writing.

Also, this might not work for everybody, but I actually visualize my character saying the dialogue before I type it. I put the character in the setting, I see who they're with, I visualize the surroundings, etc. It just seems to flow better for me that way. And always make sure the particular character would actually say what you've written them to say.

Cheryll

[AdamH]

Like a lot of other people have said already: read it aloud. Also, listen to how other people talk to you. Make notes if you catch a turn of a phrase that you like. Contractions are useful too unless the character really doesn't speak that way.

[SeanDSchaffer]

A lot of good advice has already been given, but I think the best thing to do, personally, is to read the dialogue out loud like a couple other posters pointed out. If what you hear coming out of your mouth sounds unnatural or stinted or just plain unrealistic, it very well could be what you referred to as wooden dialogue.

[JA Konrath]

Avoid using phonetic spellings of dialects, except in rare cases.

Watch out for speaker attribution. "Said" and "asked" should really be all you use.

[dragonjax]

Read Elmore Leonard novels. He's a master of dialogue and rhythm of speech. I highly recommend GET SHORTY, and his children's novel COYOTE IN THE HOUSE.

Here are some guidelines, which may help:

- In regular speech, people drop words and speak grammatically incorrectly.

- Listen to the rhythm of speech. Where do people pause? What do they stress? How can you mimic that on paper, using punctuation? Once you get the hang of this, you can selectively use dialogue tags as reader pauses for the same effect.

- People rarely stay still when they speak. Use beats to describe action while people are speaking.

- Don't use dialogue to convey information that all people involved in the conversation already know. This "as you know Bob" technique does not mimic real life, and is a cheat that savvy readers (and even many not-so-savvy ones) pick up on. Avoid this.

- Don't write huge monologues, unless you're writing a stageplay. People don't naturally speak in speeches. They tend to use short, choppy sentences.

- And yes...read it out loud. If your tongue automatically replaces words that are written, exchange those words on paper for what your mouth uses.

[L.Jones]

Loads of great advice already.
Will add that to learn dialogue you might -
Watch old movies heavy in dialogue not action.

Audio books rather than reading can help you train your ear so that when you read your work aloud you know what sounds right.

Each character should be distinct. Don't over use catch phrases or gimmicks but a few sprinkled in might help. Think in terms of speech patterns. Does your character speak in rushed rambling sentences? Or incomplete sentences? Do they interupt themselves?

Read a book on communication styles. It's often thought women tend to couch things (as I just did - it's often thought and tend instead of just saying: women couch meanings)

As others have said - listen. Listen. Listen.

annie
Luanne Jones
Heathen Girls (available now0

[DamaNegra]

I liked the reading out loud advice. The listening advice is also good, but unfortunately I don't know how english-speaking people usually speak, because I don't live in an english-talking country. I get most of knowledge from books and this forum.

[SeanDSchaffer]

Judging by your posts, I'd say you have a decent knowledge of the grammar in the English Language. And you make good sense to me--I can't speak for the others, myself, because I'm not them. But if you're not confident in your abilities with the language you're writing in, might you have friends or maybe acquaintances who would know how dialogue would sound in the English Language? I was thinking if you could bounce some of the dialogue off of them, they might be able to critique the dialogue on its realism.

I don't know if this will work or not, but it's all I can think of at this particular time. I hope it helps you out.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/smilies/smile.gif

[mesh138]

There's a program called Textaloud. Do a search for it, because I'm not going to plug a website on here. Nonetheless, you can download a demo for a month or something. Cut, then paste your text into the screen and it will read it back to you. I sit there at night, taking notes on all the little things I couldn't catch even if I read and reread my MS a hundred times. A suggestion. You might want to even buy the program and pay extra for the AT&T voices.

[Albedo of Zero]

So, how do you recognize wooden dialogue in your WIP? What are the most common signs that your dialogue is bad?


splinters?

[Pike]

I know I'm jumping in here late but felt the urge.

I'm an avid people watcher. I enjoying scoping out folks in the stores, how they conduct themselves when none else is around and then straighten up when they know they're being watched. And then there's the conversations. You wouldn't believe how many people carry on a conversation that slightly reflects what the other person they're with is talking about. So many people have something to say and they more or less stomp over each other. I do hear people that genuinely pay attention to their partner, freind, check-out clerk but for the most part, the conversations or damned interesting.

If you listen to enougn people, friends and strangers, you can get a sense of how conversations flow. If you think back about the many you've held yourself, often the only thing that sticks is the point you were trying to make.

That's my little piece of advice.

[DamaNegra]

Oh yes, I also love to watch and hear people. It's actually quite fun. For example, it's fascinating how a simple sound like 'Mmmta' can mean something along the lines of 'that's really bad, and it sucks that you can't do anything about it' or 'tough luck' or even 'you're so stupid'.

And I can accurately reproduce dialogue- in spanish.

What works for me, in english, is to read a LOT in english. Most books I own are in english. And if they're well-written, they give me an excellent idea of how dialogue should be. Watching movies in english is also quite helpful, both for my dialogues and pronunciation

[nandu]

IMHO, many of the great bits of dialogue in literature are not natural. Try recording an informal conversation and playing it back. What you get is a jumble of sentences, interruptions, and repititions. If you try to reproduce actual dialogue, it will fall flat.

What you should do is produce dialogue that seems natural, but actually is "filtered". Reading aloud is a good method. If it sounds good, bung it in!

[Bookworm0o0]

IMHO, many of the great bits of dialogue in literature are not natural. Try recording an informal conversation and playing it back. What you get is a jumble of sentences, interruptions, and repititions. If you try to reproduce actual dialogue, it will fall flat.

What you should do is produce dialogue that seems natural, but actually is "filtered". Reading aloud is a good method. If it sounds good, bung it in!

Bingo!

Back when I was studying to be a psychologist, we had to record our sessions with clients, then type them out. In Cognitive Behavioral Psychology, sessions are structured and orderly. With just me and the client in this structured environment, man was I shocked when I started typing up our conversations! I would ask a simple question and often get rambling answers that contained questions, rabbit trails, and way more words than were necessary to answer the question.

As Nandu pointed out, we must write dialogue that sounds natural but that is NOT natural--or the reader's head will spin and he'll end up throwing our book out the nearest window.

I'm a-thinkin' that if you find your dialogue feels wooden, it might be that you need to intersperse it with a little "showing." Observe:

"You stink," said Fred.
"I know I do," said Betty.

"You stink!" said Fred, turning away and waving a hand before his nose.
"I know I do, and I quite like it," said Betty, poking her nose into her armpit and inhaling deeply. "Ahhhhh!"

Especially with longer bits of dialogue, try bringing the reader into the head and body of the speaker or listener ("...as Larry carried on with his monologue, Letitia made her way to the open window. Grandma's beans and onions had kicked in and, wanting to maintain Larry's respect, she had no desire to fumigate him..."); let Reader see how the environment acts on the characters (Marty's giving the graduation speech at high school... "...and, as our Waldo Meade High's founder, Waldo Meade, once said..." A snicker followed by a loud cough floated up from the audience; Marty's classmates were anxious to get to Disneyland, but he had a message to give them and, doggone it, he'd give it to 'em!); and so on.

[SPMiller]

This is a serious case of thread necromancy, but here goes anyway:

What no one tells you about fictional dialog is that it should never be anything like real, spoken dialog. Nobody wants to read that, even if they claim they do. It's bad advice. I was once terrible at dialog as a result, but I think I've been improving.

One of my favorite tricks is to disallow characters in most situations from saying what they actually mean. Instead, they say something else that skirts close to or hints at their intended meaning, which can then lead to misinterpretations.

Another favorite trick of mine is to have characters almost always say the wittiest thing they could possibly say. Not witty from the perspective of the character, who may be the least witty person ever, but for the reader's benefit. This never works out in real life, where you have maybe a second at most to think up a response, but I have plenty of time to think up dialog.

[Devil Ledbetter]

Short sentences, fragments and contractions do help. But I see dialogue falling flat when the character who is being spoken to has nothing to react to.

This happens when exposition is placed in dialogue: "Oh my, just look at the autumn colors of the maple trees and the way the leaves are slowly falling."

It happens with as you know Bob dialogue: Mary, we've been married for six years. We haven't taken a vacation since our honeymoon in Cancun. We both work at stressful jobs and have two kids to look after."

The crux of it is that dialogue should enhance characterization and move the plot forward.

Part of the problem I see with wooden dialogue in SYW seems to come from the oft-heard advice "show, don't tell." New writers mistakenly think that packing exposition or backstory into dialogue isn't telling. But it is, and it's telling of the worst sort. Better to use interesting tell than turn our characters into sock puppets.

[Susan Littlefield]

You can try reading it aloud. It can be kind of embarassing, but really helps me to spot unwieldy turns of phrase.

I agree with reading out loud! In my own editing process, I have caught silly little errors that went undetected even in my hard copy edit. You hear how the dialogue sounds as well.

[Margarita Skies]

I don't think there's such thing as 'bad dialogue'. When my character wants to say something, he or she says it, and if it's stupid, the character he or she's talking to will point it out quick. "Hey, Arturo, stop talking bullsh!t!"

[kittyhoward]

Read it out loud! In my Writer's Group we get together every Friday night simply to read out loud what we're working on so we can determine if the dialogue sounds too forced, too formal, etc.

[IdiotsRUs]

Learn to listen

Where ever you are, just listen to people talk. Listen, learn, absorb. Posh people, chavs, inbetween. Then write in that manner.

[Sentosa]

There's a program called Textaloud. Do a search for it, because I'm not going to plug a website on here. Nonetheless, you can download a demo for a month or something. Cut, then paste your text into the screen and it will read it back to you. I sit there at night, taking notes on all the little things I couldn't catch even if I read and reread my MS a hundred times. A suggestion. You might want to even buy the program and pay extra for the AT&T voices.
I've used TextAloud since 2000. I agree with everything said above. It is fantastic for picking up errors that I easily miss otherwise. :hooray::hooray:

Admittedly, the "free" voices are not great, but they work. I bought 2 premium voices (male and female) and I find these much better.

TextAloud is not expensive, and IMHO, well worth the price, particularly as all updates (so far) have been free.

[Bufty]

If a character has nothing to say he should shut up.

[dpaterso]

Lovely to see old threads from 2006 resurrected, they feel so lonely and neglected! :)

-Derek

[Greeble]

Make your dialogue opaque. Don't let characters answer other characters' statements directly all the time.

[Lady Ice]

So, how do you recognize wooden dialogue in your WIP? What are the most common signs that your dialogue is bad?

1- Read it aloud
You could even make an event of it and get other people to 'play' the other characters. If the dialogue sounds awkward or stilted or cheesy, chances are that it is.

2- That sounds like it could be from a movie!
If it sounds like it could be from a movie, or it sounds like something from a movie, chances are that you're relying on movie-style dialogue instead of trying to create believable dialogue.

3- It doesn't make me feel anything
If the dialogue doesn't make you feel something about the character, it's not very good dialogue.

[Qbynewbie]

Short sentences, fragments and contractions do help. But I see dialogue falling flat when the character who is being spoken to has nothing to react to.

This happens when exposition is placed in dialogue: "Oh my, just look at the autumn colors of the maple trees and the way the leaves are slowly falling."

It happens with as you know Bob dialogue: Mary, we've been married for six years. We haven't taken a vacation since our honeymoon in Cancun. We both work at stressful jobs and have two kids to look after."

The crux of it is that dialogue should enhance characterization and move the plot forward.

Part of the problem I see with wooden dialogue in SYW seems to come from the oft-heard advice "show, don't tell." New writers mistakenly think that packing exposition or backstory into dialogue isn't telling. But it is, and it's telling of the worst sort. Better to use interesting tell than turn our characters into sock puppets.

This is excellent advice. :)

[Jamesaritchie]

Good dialogue is sometimes exactly like real speech, and sometimes like real speech with the clutter removed. When it isn't like real speech, it still needs to sound like real speech. Not everyone speaks the same way, and "no one really talks like that" is most often simply not true. You may not, your friends may not, but this does not mean no one does. If your character would in real life, he should in the book. Good dialogue matches the character, and if all the characters sound alike, it's bad dialogue.

Reading aloud helps, but it's certainly no cure all, and if you lack the ear for dialogue, reading aloud is meaningless. Just because dialogue sounds good in no way means it is good. or right, or needed, or does the job. It's good if it's the way that particularly character would sound if you met him on the street, and if it's needed.

Good dialogue always has a point, always move things ahead, or reveals character. It's never just small talk or filler. If a character has nothing to say, don't make him say anything. Never write a line of dialogue because you've been writing narrative and you think it's time to break it up with some dialogue.

But, much as I hate to say it, dialogue is a matter of knowing people, many different people, but primarily a matter of the ear, not of technique, not of tricks, not of skills. If you have a tin ear for dialogue, you're in trouble, and I don't think there's much you can do about it. Except maybe to follow the road H. P. Lovecraft travelled, which was to write as little dialogue as possible. He wasn't very good at writing dialogue, he knew he wasn't very good at it, and wrote accordingly.

[Fame<Infamy]

Dialogue is one of those few things I feel really comfortable with when I write and know I can do a decent job of. I can usually just tell its good and leave it or tell its bad right off.

One thing I remember is this tip thing on how to write dialogue that pops, to me this seems like a bad idea because you want characters to sound unrehearsed.

[Eddyz Aquila]

Think it out loud! Act your characters, speak their dialogue out! That way you're under the skin of all the characters, get a better perspective and make everything sound more natural.

:)

[N. M. Hayden]

"What do you think of my fiction book writing?" the aspiring novelist extorted.
"Darn," the editor hectored, in turn. "I can not publish your novel! It is full of what we in the business call 'really awful writing.'"
"But how shall I absolve this dilemma? I have already read every tome available on how to write well and get published!" The writer tossed his head about, wildly.
"It might help," opined the blonde editor, helpfully, "to ponder how NOT to write a novel, so you might avoid the very thing!"



(From How Not To Write A Nove (http://www.amazon.com/Write-Novel-Them-Misstep-Misstep/dp/0061357952)l)

Still makes me giggle every time I read it.

[John Marlow]

There is of course the "read it aloud" standby, but if you wrote it that way, you might not be the best judge. Have others read it aloud and comment, making it clear they're not to spare your feelings.

If you can, get a local actors' group to stage a reading and get feedback from the audience (usually actors and writers). A less-public (and less potentially-mortifying) option is to ask several actors to join you for a private reading.