Say What?
Writing Realistic Dialogue
(3/3)
Keep an eye out for a future post, where I will be looking at dialogue attribution – the stuff outside the speech marks that tells us who is speaking and how they are saying it.Suggestions for writing authentic dialogue.
Not everything needs to be said: The first rule is to remember that you aren’t transcribing what a person says. AI-powered speech recognition software means that automatically generated subtitles are far more accurate than they used to be. But what gives away those that aren’t edited by a human before broadcast is their slavish attempts to faithfully render every utterance the actors make.
Natural speech is full of pauses, repetition, mis-pronounced words, stutters and verbal tics like um, and ah. Unless you are using this as a way to signpost that a character is nervous, or drunk etc, cut them out. Otherwise, you’ll drive your readers mad!
Rehearse it. I have learned a lot from conversations with my audio narrator. One of his most important tips is not to write sentences that are so long that they leave the reader gasping for breath! Even if you aren’t planning on having your book narrated, remember that your character can only speak for so long without pausing for breath. The easiest way to test this is to actually read the dialogue out loud yourself – if you run out of breath, you need to break it up into shorter sentences!
Break it up anyway. Even an inspiring superhero-style monologue gets dull if it is too long. On screen there will usually be things happening and movement that keep the viewers attention. In books, you need to break the monologue into more manageable chunks.
Supergirl loves a good monologue to inspire the people of Earth. Written down, they would last for several paragraphs, so if they were in a novel, every couple of paragraphs would need some sort of break. This break can be invisible to the reader, but it keeps them focused for example:
“People of Earth! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
She looked around the room. “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Around her, the audience started to stir.
” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah! Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!”
Stepping back from the podium, she acknowledged the applause.
Listen to people from that part of the world: If the character that you are writing is from somewhere different from where you come from, then making their dialogue sound authentic can be a challenge. An easy way to ‘tune into’ their modes of speech is to find video or audio clips of people speaking on YouTube. Or listen to programs on local radio – this is far easier these days, now that the BBC Sounds app archives programs from regional stations. Shows with phone-ins can be very useful, although you need to be careful to make sure that ‘Brian from Sutton Coldfield’ was actually born and bred there, and didn’t move there from Liverpool ten years ago for work.
Ask advice: Sometimes you just need somebody to tell you if what you’ve written is authentic. Social media can be a terrific tool for this. Depending on whether or not you want your dialogue snippets to be visible to the world (you probably don’t want the denouement where the killer is revealed to be out there), you can ask for feedback from native speakers by either posting the lines of dialogue and asking for native speakers to give their thoughts, or putting out a request for someone to contact you privately. You’d be amazed how helpful people can be – folks hate it when their region is portrayed inaccurately and are usually tickled pink if you put them in the acknowledgements or name a character after them!
Do you have any suggestions about how to write authentic dialogue?
Feel free to comment here, or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul
