Talk the Talk: Dialogue Mechanics
Sometime during my first draft of Lucid, I asked a friend who was a screenwriter for advice. It was an open-ended question, and his response was related to dialogue. He said something to the effect of, Have your characters talk the way people actually do. I got there eventually, but it took me a long time. And I didn’t get there because I wanted to live up to my friend’s advice. I got there because my characters are meant to be real people in contemporary times (roughly). They are not knights, hobbits, Captain Ahab’s etc. At first, I wanted how they spoke to sound dramatic. As time went on, the drama felt cheesy to me, and I eventually eliminated all of it.
Below is an excerpt pertaining to dialogue from the developmental edit memo that my editor wrote for me. For any who want to read further, see here for an excerpt from the same memo related to point of view. See here for a summary of the process I went through to hire an editor. And see here for a summary of my (very, very long) editing process that includes some discussion of how I worked with my editor. Otherwise, below are some good, quick pieces of advice related to dialogue mechanics.
One brief, final developmental note. You’ll notice throughout the manuscript that I made some modifications to dialogue—not to the content itself, just to its mechanics and how it was presented. Some of these modifications included:
Removing “and said” when the beat (that is, a description of behavior immediately before dialogue) was a sufficient-enough dialogue attribution. For example:
o She leaned forward very slightly. “Come, Gideon. Tell me.”
o Not . . . She leaned forward very slightly and said, “Come Gideon. Tell me.”
Moving a dialogue tag after the dialogue instead of before it. Browne writes: “Don’t open a paragraph of dialogue with the speaker attribution. Instead, start a paragraph with dialogue and place the speaker attribution at the first natural break in the first sentence. . . . The reader’s ear seems to require the attribution near the beginning.” For example:
o “Take the first stream on the left,” she said.
o Not . . . She said, “Take the first stream on the left.”
Breaking the actions and dialogue of multiple characters into separate paragraphs. This helps to clarify who’s doing and saying what. Plus, placing a string of dialogue on its own line prevents it from being buried within thick paragraphs of narrative prose.
One further suggestion about dialogue mechanics: when a single speaker is delivering a monologue that spans more than one paragraph, consider adding “beats” (or small descriptions of character actions) between the paragraphs. Note, for example, the lengthy monologue from Janet on pp. 66–67 and from Peis on pp. 268–269. It might help to break this latter monologue up a bit by closing out the quotation marks on the first paragraph on monologue and then beginning the next paragraph with something like “Peis paused for a moment and poured himself some tea.” This makes the monologue less overwhelming and helps it to breathe.