Say What?
Writing Realistic Dialogue
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Writing realistic dialogue is essential. It serves numerous roles within a story. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it is perhaps the most important tool in a writer’s toolkit. Radio plays and low-budget stage shows have proven that you can tell a compelling story with almost no need for description. There are countless highly effective dramas told with no props and little or no sound effects, just characters talking to one another. Now try and think of a tale with no speech. They are few and far between.
Dialogue tells us so much. Characters can verbally tell us what took place. It can convey the emotions that they are experiencing. The interactions between multiple people during a conversation can tell us what is happening, with no need for us to use our other senses – imagine eavesdropping on a conversation in the next booth in a café. You can’t see who’s speaking, yet the tone of the voices, the pitch and the cadence can tell us what they are feeling and allow us to determine the relationship between those involved. Listen to the dialect or the use of language and you can infer their age, their education level, their class (which we in Britain are so obsessed with), their upbringing, or where they are from. Similarly, as speakers, we can modulate our language and accent to influence the impression we wish to portray or to match the situation.
And so dialogue should be something that all writers take great care with. In this series of posts, I am going to focus specifically on the language we use inside the speech marks. I will be posting a separate article about dialogue attribution- the stuff outside the speech marks, about who is speaking and how they are saying it.
Characterisation:
Dialogue tells us about the characters. Who are they? The most obvious thing here is their vocabulary, and the way they structure their sentences.
Get the region right: Different people use different vocabulary. Part of this is dialect – the specific words and the way they are used in different parts of the country/world. At its most basic level it can mean using the correct word for an object. Bread rolls are a terrific example. Travel up and down the UK and what the locals call these varies enormously. Most Brits will understand what you mean by a bread roll, but can be baffled when somebody in Manchester asks for a barm cake or a local in Coventry asks for a batch. The question is whether you, as a writer want to use these local terms for your character and if you do, how much you are willing to explain what you mean to non-locals. If you have an omnipotent narrator, you can do this by using the more common term immediately after the character uses it in dialogue.
Warren looked at the menu above the deep fat fryer. He only had a couple of pound coins in his pocket.
“I’ll just have a chip batch,” he said.
His stomach rumbled as he watched the server split the soft, white bread roll, slather it with margarine and shovel chips in.
Another example that can catch folks out is the use of shortened terms for mother.
In large swathes of the UK, you call your mother “Mum” or “Mummy”. In the United States, the term is more commonly “Mom” or Mommy”. Yet this is also how some parts of the UK Midlands (especially Birmingham and the Black Country) refer to their mother, although the accent tends to make it sound a little different. If you want to be accurate, your Brummie characters should use this term. In the North of England and Northern Ireland, “Mam” or “Mammy” is more common.
When I see a character talking about their Mam, I’m already starting to make assumptions about where they are from. If they call her Mother when addressing her, I may assume that they are more formal or perhaps quite posh. If they call her Mummy, I will usually assume that they are either very young, or again, quite posh.
Of course, you can’t tell a whole lot about a person from a single word, but if you pepper a few of these throughout a person’s speech, you can portray a person’s background quite easily. On the flip-side, if you have already told the reader where they are from, then you should try to ensure the dialect is consistent.
Getting this wrong can take a person right out of a story, and is a great way of signposting that the writer is not from that region or country. If you tell me that a character is a proud Scouser from Liverpool, they aren’t going to use Cockney rhyming slang!
The same goes for foreign languages. If you have a character speaking in a foreign language, then you have two choices – render it in the original, then provide a translation – OK for short sentences, but can break the flow and be frustrating for long stretches. Or have your characters speaking in English, but sprinkle in a few words for flavour that readers can interpret from context.
Tom Clancy and his ghost writers are very good at this. His globe-trotting thrillers often have Russian or Chinese or North Korean generals deep in conversation, which is rendered in English but with appropriate curse words or terms of address in the original language. Anyone reading or watching Scandinavian crime dramas will usually be familiar with yes, no and thank you by the end of the story.
The caveat:
Be wary about overdoing this. If you are writing for a broad, mainstream audience, you need to balance the need for authenticity with readability. A very well-known best-selling author was recently castigated over their use of dialect that some felt was verging on parody. Doubtless it was accurate, but many readers found it baffling. Much of my family is from England’s West Country; for fun, they sometimes text each other in Devonshire dialect. I struggle to understand it; my partner who comes from a completely different part of the country hasn’t got a clue!
Next week, I am going to focus on age, background and education level.
Until then, what tricks do you use to make dialogue realistic for your characters?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Best wishes, Paul.
