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Formal Dialogue Example

This document provides tips for writing effective dialogue in 3 or fewer sentences: Pay attention to real conversations to make dialogue sound authentic; develop characters fully so you understand how they speak; and avoid stilted dialogue that sounds unnatural, instead making dialogue flow naturally between characters with their own distinct voices and manners of speech appropriate to factors like their identity, background, and situation.

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Rudy Pascual Aquino
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59 views

Formal Dialogue Example

This document provides tips for writing effective dialogue in 3 or fewer sentences: Pay attention to real conversations to make dialogue sound authentic; develop characters fully so you understand how they speak; and avoid stilted dialogue that sounds unnatural, instead making dialogue flow naturally between characters with their own distinct voices and manners of speech appropriate to factors like their identity, background, and situation.

Uploaded by

Rudy Pascual Aquino
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Formal Dialogue Writing

1 Pay attention to actual conversations. Listen to the way people talk to one another and use those
conversations and patterns in your dialogue to make it sound authentic. You'll notice that people talk
differently when they're with different people, so make sure that you include that when you're writing
dialogue.
Disregard parts of the conversation that will not translate well when written down. For example, every "hello"
and "goodbye" does not need to be written. Some of your dialogue might start with a "Did you do 'this'?" or
"Why did you do 'this'?"

2 Read good dialogue. To get a good feel for the balance that you need in your dialogue between realistic
speech and book speech you need to read good dialogue in books and in movies. Look at books and scripts
and see what works and what doesn't and try to figure out why.[1]
A few writers to check out for their dialogue are Douglas Adams, Toni Morrison, and Judy Blume (these are
only a few; there are lots!). Their dialogue tends to be realistic, layered, and vivid.
Checking out and practicing writing dialogue for screenplays and radio plays is really useful in developing
dialogue, since those are both very dependent on dialogue. Douglas Adams, from the above writers, got his
start in writing radio plays which is one reason for his fantastic dialogue.

3 Develop your characters fully. You will need to completely understand your characters before you can
make them talk. You'll need to know things like whether they're taciturn and monosyllabic, or whether they
love to use lots of big words to impress people, and so on.[2]
Things like age, gender, education level, region where they're from, tone of voice, will all make a difference
in how a character talks. For example, a poor American teen girl is going to talk very differently from a rich,
old, British guy.
Give each character a distinct voice. Not all of your characters are going to use the same vocabulary, tone
or method of speech. Make sure each character sounds different.
4 Learn to avoid stilted dialogue. Stilted dialogue might not completely kill a story, but it can definitely jerk
a reader out of the story, which as a writer, is something you're trying not to do. Occasionally stilted dialogue
does work, but only with the most specific kind of story.[3]
Stilted dialogue is dialogue that only works on the obvious levels and in language no one would use. For
example: "Hello, Jane, you look sad today," said Charles. "Yes, Charles, I am sad today. Would you like to
know why?" "Yes, Jane, I would like to know why you are sad today." "I am sad because my dog is sick and it
reminds me of the death of my father two years ago under mysterious circumstances."
How the dialogue above should have gone: "Jane, is something wrong?" asked Charles. Jane shrugged,
keeping her gaze fixed on something out the window. "My dog's sick. They don't know what's wrong." "That's
terrible, but, Jane...well, he is old. Maybe that's all it is." Her hands clenched on the windowsill. "It's just, it's
just, you'd think the doctors would know." "You mean the vet?" Charles frowned. "Yeah. Whatever."
The reason the second one works better, is that it doesn't come right out and say that Jane is thinking of her
deceased father, but it does lean towards that interpretation, especially with her using the word "doctors"
instead of "vet." It also flows better.
An example where stilted dialogue works is Lord of the Rings. The dialogue isn't always stilted, especially
when it's the hobbits talking, but can get very grand and eloquent (and unrealistic). The only reason this
works (and many people don't agree that it does work!) is that the story is supposed to be in the style of old
epics like Beowulf or The Mabinogion.

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