Top Five Deep Dive: Tips and Tricks for Mastering the Art of Compelling Dialogue

Hello, lovely listeners, welcome to episode 45, a top five deep dive into drumroll, please. Dialogue here is something interesting, and how dialogue kind of? We've been thinking about dialogue here at Writers with Wrinkles. I have been adding the transcripts for these podcasts into the podcast notes so you can see a link there in the podcast notes that will take you to the transcript of this show. What's really interesting about that is obviously it translates everything that was said exactly how it was said, and all you need to do is read a little bit of a transcript from any podcast to see that the way that we write compelling dialogue is not how we speak when we're talking. It's a completely different medium that it's going through. You're in a conversation with somebody, you're feeding off them. When you're writing dialogue for the page that goes away. So I think this is very well timed, because I was looking at the transcript for our last episode and I was like I don't make any sense. I'm like some kind of idiot because my words are just like gobbled up, it's like word salad, and I think if you went into edit the transcript you would just cut everything out. You just cut it all out because most of it doesn't make any sense, but when we're talking makes total sense.

You know, it would be lovely, because I walk around and I feel like I'm always saying the wrong thing. I wish an editor could just follow me and just edit me as I go, Like Lisa. No, we're going to cut that out.

Well, if we could have like a rewind button, and it was like I don't know 30 seconds, so enough for you to go back and like stop what you were going to say, think of something else to say and then go forward. I would love to have that Like just a little life rewind.

I need a seven second delay. It's what I need.

From your life. I kind of love that. That would be so funny. It would be when you'd be like glitching all over the place. Right, somebody on my life, somebody did a delay and if you did a little delay and they were like compounding on each other and then suddenly you're falling through like a space time continuum hole and you're, you're screwed.

You know it's, I can't, and I'm somebody who laments about everything. Like I will say, I said something to Beth yesterday and like hung up the phone and then immediately started lamenting about it and I'm like, oh my God, that kind of sounded mean. I can't believe I said that Like I've lamented about what she said to me.

Oh my God. She told me that I always spell people's names wrong. And the truth is I do always spell people's names wrong and I it's sad because I try so hard not to screw up names. I grew up with a name that everybody spelled wrong, so I understand that pain, so I make an extra effort and it's almost like by making the extra effort I mess it up, because I do mess it up a lot.

I actually called you the queen of misspelling people's names.

It didn't feel mean. I felt like oh yeah, oh God, what I do now is put up these people's names. I'm so sorry.

I was at the Taco Bell drive through. I was getting some tacos for Ali and I was like I have to call Beth. I can't stand it anymore. I was mean. And so like I'm trying to talk to you and apologize to you while I'm like talking to the lady at the drive through and I'm like I'm so sorry. She's like it's okay, you know, and I'm like, no, not you, not you.

See dialogue can be confusing. Well that's just you did call me. You called me. It was like a series of very short phone calls where you called me and you told me I was an idiot and spelled everything wrong, and then you said I have to dry my hair. And you hung up on me and then, like however many long little while later, you said I'm really sorry that I called you, whatever.

I didn't call you an idiot. Now, that would be too harsh. I called you the queen of misspelling.

That was my loose translation of it. And then you called me and said, I'm really sorry, I gotta go to my dinner. And then I was like, okay, it's almost like you didn't need me for either of those conversations.

Well, you know what? That is also my life, the internal dialogue that goes on with me. Like I have that going on.

I didn't need you. Is your internal dialogue more like dialogue on the page or dialogue that you find in a podcast transcript?

It's a little combo of both, and the thing is that I will also use my hands when I'm having an internal dialogue and, you know, ollie will just look at me and he's like you're talking to yourself, aren't you? And I'm like I am.

Anyway, today, dialogue we're gonna solve all of your dialogue problems. So you come across as brilliant and not scattered, and dialogue's important because that is your character getting to actually speak, so important to get it right. So, number one, everything your character says has to have meaning. So avoid long-winded speeches that a person would never give, or excessive exposition or explaining in dialogue that a person would never say. Cut out anything that doesn't advance the plot. It can't be like idle chit chat. You don't want that. Anything your character is saying should reveal something about that character or contribute to the atmosphere of the sea. And this is like an art and it's gonna take practice. So be open to feedback and revise, revise, revise, and every time you revise it will become more engaging and true to your character. Another thing to remember, sort of adjacent to this, is that as you go along in your story and you get to know the character better, the dialogue will be more suited to that character. It'll be more true to that character's voice. So you might find that when you go back to revise, you're changing a bunch of the dialogue upfront and less toward the end, because you have figured out over the course of writing this manuscript who this character is, so that's number one.

That's a brilliant tip.

I feel like it's so important because how many? I read a book recently and I can't remember what it was, but the last like three pages was the main character talking and explaining what had happened, rather than yeah, it was a mystery and literally a three page monologue. That was supposed to be the character talking but was like just so wrong. Like, first of all, I should have known all this stuff during the book and, second of all, it just was telling me things that I never would have been able to figure out and it was just like a brain dump. I almost felt like the author wanted to finish, just wanted to be finished and be free of the book. So they were like, okay, I'm gonna just vomit all this up and leave. We've all been there, I know. But like, usually you change it before you hand it in.

Well, that's when somebody one of my beta readers is like oh, I don't think so. Okay, number two pay attention to character voice. Do they use slang, dialect, regional? Are they growing up in a bilingual household where they pepper their language with words in Spanish or French or Mandarin? And also remember age, education and cultural influences for and on your character. Whatever sets them apart, be authentic and consistent in how your character speak. If all your characters sound the same, your dialogue needs another pass. Pro tip read your dialogue without tags to see if they sound different.

That is so important. How many times have you read a book where, if there was no dialogue tag, you would have no idea, yeah, what's talking? But super important to make sure they are Distinguishable from each other. And that once you've said, okay, this character is from the Midwest and they say pop instead of soda, that you keep that going, that it's consistent.

Yeah, and I think I this other tip I heard at a conference one time and it's it was that nugget that I I took away was the first line of Dialogue that a character speaks whether it's the main character or secondary characters should really set the tone for who they are as a character and how they, how they come across in their dialogue.

That's a really good one, and again, when you get to the end of your book, you may end up changing that first line of dialogue because you feel like you have your arms around the character way more than you Did when you first started out. A lot of times I write dialogue and I'll just read a note. I'll leave a note for myself that says you have to fix this because it's not doing what it needs to do. But I need to move on and then come back to it. So those are important things to pay attention to. Number three Mix your dialogue up with narration. Long runs of dialogue, like pages of it, can be Disorienting for your reader. They forget where they are in time and space there's. You lose track of who's talking. If you have three people, that's a disaster because you can't even say, okay, this was this person and now this is this person, but who the heck is that person? It just gets very confusing and, again, anything that's confusing throws your reader out of the book and you don't want to do that, and I think you can allow gaps and Put some action in, or you can put in something that they did. Did they, you know? Are they walking down the street, does somebody trip over something in the sidewalk? Something to interrupt the endless dialogue and To give the reader more of an insight into the scene. Also important Leave things unsaid. Human beings are really bad at saying exactly what they need or want to say, so make that come across on the page. Leave those blanks that the readers can fill in.

And also just this kind of reminded me of something is that if you have dialogue going with more than two characters, then you need to do tags, because if there's more than you know, a lot of times you can skip doing the tags if you have two people going back and forth, but if you have three people you need a tag for each one so that people aren't like who said that. So keep that in mind.

It's the worst if you have to go back and figure out that's like a, that's like a buzzkill. That's a good thing for beta readers to look at. Is there logic in your dialogue? Does it make sense? You can tell who everybody is if you're not tagging every single line. Yeah, so important to make sure you have your ducks in a row for that.

Or else they'll quack at you.

We don't want that. If the ducks are quacking, go back and rewrite it.

That's like the new rule of thumb. Everyone should have like a little rubber duck on their desk now. Okay, rule number four edit and trim. Repeating the word said over and over can pull people out of the story and make for dull writing, which is never, ever a good thing. I'm mixed up every once in a while and I cannot stress this more once in a while, but don't overdo it. Consider replacing the word said with a more descriptive verb. Keep it light. Avoid long speeches. There was a book I read and I'd read the first in the series and loved it. It was so funny. And then the second book came out and everything was he says, she says, he says, she says, he said and I was just like, oh my gosh, what happened? That's all it was. I was like back and forth with a dialogue and I just put down the book and I'm like that did not happen in the first book. It really pulled me from the story and I was so excited to read that story.

It feels really flat. You know it feels really flat If you've just got back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and nothing to break it up and no other descriptors and no other scene details Really important. If you see a page like that, you have to change it because even if you're absolutely convinced that it's perfect and works great, it doesn't work great.

That's a hard truth right there.

We're here to tell you you're delusional. Get over it. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, all right. Number five listen to real conversation. So pay attention to how people speak in real life. You strap on conversations, take notes, listen to podcasts, interviews, etc. Real dialogue is way less polished than what we see in books, around the screen and capturing the nuances of everyday speech can make your characters feel more authentic. But again, remember, it's not going to mimic real speech exactly. You don't want to do that, but you want to. If you can catch a turn of phrase that you think is very telling or, in exchange, that you think is funny, capture the essence of that, but not word for word. I am an absolute professional eavesdropper. There's nothing I like better than to sit next to a bunch of people in a coffee shop and just hear what they're saying, because sometimes people will say really catchy phrases that stick in your head and you can steal that in its entirety. But again, you're not going to record the conversation exactly as it was and use everything, so you're picking and choosing what you've overheard that's going to work in dialogue that's written on the page. I love to listen to teenagers and their slang because oh my. God, yes, changes so quickly. I literally had a moment not that long ago where the where my 16 year old said something to me and I did not know what it meant and I couldn't figure it out from context. I really had that moment where I thought Is it a good thing or it's a bad thing? I couldn't tell the difference. I mean, and I feel like the words that they were using even six months ago are gone and they've been replaced by other ones, like it's so fast. But again, that's also a risk that you take with slang that by the time your book comes out it will be obsolete. So I would say, use it sparingly.

I agree that's also good advice and that just happened to me and I said something in my book about, you know, somebody taking cuts. Well, my editor's like what does that mean? I've never like, I've never heard about that Like and so taking cuts in line. So I'm thinking, is that like California? Is that regional? So those are things also that you have to be aware of. Like, is this something universally that people are going to understand?

And I guess when you were like I've never heard of that, like you've never heard of cut seas, taking cuts of what Like, cuts of meat, cuts of slices of cake, I don't know, cutting in line, cutting in line.

So anyway, I'm like I guess I'll just cut that.

You're like so much cutting. Sometimes you can figure it out, though, from context, and then it's kind of fun because you feel like you learned something new, but sometimes it just still doesn't make sense. So I think you need to be aware of where it's placed, and if a reader is not familiar with one of those regional type things or you know a dialect type thing, then they're not going to get lost, especially if it's an important detail. If it's kind of a throwaway, then it's not so critical.

But that was one battle. I didn't care about fighting All right, that's our five.

We have a bonus. This is kind of a bonus. This is just, I think, practical that you should read widely and study the works of authors who write dialogue. Well, find somebody who you think is really good at it and there are tons of authors who are really good at dialogue and just study how they do it and how they lay the dialogue out on the page, because you can really use that as a guide when you're getting started and trying to figure out how to do it.

And that's something I do often If I'm stuck when I'm writing a story, I just put my I just, you know, close it up and move on to reading. And that always like I as I'm reading, I'm reading, I'm really studying how the author is doing stuff. It's funny because somebody the other day just said you know, I want to start writing middle grade. You're like, where do I begin? I'm like you begin by reading tons of middle grade and you know, maybe get paperback so that you can take notes and highlight and like study it like it's homework. And that's the other thing is like, you know, if you take a highlighter pen and kind of highlight the way they do things, you can really see how the pasting lays out, how the tension lays out. And that's something that I've always done is just like study other authors work, and that's where I've picked at most of my writing tips.

Yeah, I think that's really super important. Like that's probably the most important thing you can do is to read lots of books in the genre that you want to write in, because it's going to be instructive. You can also read screenplays for dialogue.

It's a little different.

It's a little different because you're not in somebody's head, it's only what you can see. But screenplays are pretty good at the dialogue, delivering the thing that you can't put in front of the camera. So there are some things that you just can't put in front of a camera. So those are the things that the dialogue is responsible for getting across in the story, and so it's very, very focused and every word is critical. So it's they're fun to read, just to kind of get a sense of how it's done in that universe. It's definitely different than book writing, but it can be a good companion to your exploration of writing dialogue.

I've never thought of doing that before, and that is a really good idea.

You can basically get any screenplay you want if you just Google it. They're all out there and some of them, some of them. You can find a PDF that has notes from either the original writer or the production, like. It's essentially just a photograph version of a script. These are usually like from the 1980s or 70s, but you'll see, like, where they've made changes, where they've edited it. It's super fascinating. Okay, so now everybody can go off and write brilliant dialogue. You're welcome. All right, that is all for our dialogue lesson today. We hope that you will find this helpful and we will be back next week with New York Times bestselling author Eric Geron, whose books include the Hocus Pocus Spellbook, poultry Geist and Bye Bye, binary. Okay, can I just tell you that when I saw the cover and the name for poultry geist, I was like beside myself laughing.

You know it's so funny. So I saw that, like when his, I think, on Twitter I'm still calling it Twitter when that book came out, I'm like, oh my God, that is brilliant. And so he had like a giveaway for it. And, just like you do with everyone, I'm always just like oh, boosting. And I wasn't even thinking like oh, I'm going to win this, I was just doing like a boosting. I know I get like a thing saying you won poultry geist. I'm like you won.

I never win any of those things. I don't either.

Well, it's not like I'm like I can't believe he picked me, like that's. You know, I was like all excited, awesome. So I have an autograph copy of his book, which is it's adorable. And then he also has the graphic novel the Fry Guys coming out with my publisher, andrews McMeal Kids, and he is we're going to be talking about graphic novels writing and pitching, because I'm really fascinated by that whole concept of like not being an author illustrator, but just being an author of a graphic novel.

And that we haven't touched on that at all, and graphic novels are huge. So this is going to be a super interesting conversation and we're obviously very excited to talk to him and I hope you guys will tune in to that one coming next week. So until then, happy reading, writing and listening. Bye, lisa.

Bye Beth, bye guys ACIENT.