Good stories are driven by strong, engaging characters, and dialogue is one of the most important parts of how your characters express their thoughts, feelings and ideas. As the main way in which people communicate with each other, dialogue is also critical in establishing character relationships. Finally, it can help the reader understand the action, even in the most high-octane, action driven stories.
This course will aim to give some pointers on how to make your dialogue engaging and effective. Storytelling is an art, not a science, so while this course may offer advice, they’re more like guidelines rather than actual rules. In written storytelling, there are two separate aspects to this: the lines the characters actually say (spoken lines), and how you actually put that into the written word (narrating dialogue). This course focuses on engaging storytelling technique, not technicalities of grammar, which can be found elsewhere.
This section is about the words the characters say. It’s equally applicable to written storytelling as it is visual and audial. You might have a lot of different reasons to include dialogue, but if it doesn’t feel like the characters would believably say these things, it’s going to feel clunky and awkward to read.
As a writer, dialogue is the best tool you have for imparting information to the reader. You can summarise the political situation behind a war in a couple of paragraphs. But have a couple of characters talk about it and suddenly you can explore both characters’ personalities, their attitudes towards the war, and also to each other through their interactions. Do they agree? Do they disagree?
This is how a lot of stories start. You need the reader to know what’s happening, and a conversation is a safe starting point. But proceed with caution. Your dialogue still needs to ring true to the characters. Even if your objective is to impart information to the reader, it still needs to sound like real people talking to each other. Avoid having characters tell things they already know. Usually, it takes more dialogue to tease the information out, but generally leads to a smoother story.
Consider the following line of classic ‘as you know, Bob’ dialogue:
“As you know, Bob, our mother died last year without a will and it’s been a hell of a year fighting over her inheritance with our stepsiblings.”
There’s a lot of useful information here that the reader should probably know. But Bob’s brother wouldn’t need to remind him of this, so it’s clunky and awkward. You could try instead something like:
“So, Bob, what did the lawyer say about the house?”
Bob can then go into delivering more up-to-date information (which is now believable, as he spoke to the lawyer), complaining about the stepsiblings getting a share of their inheritance, etc.
When groups of people speak, they don’t take turns in a set pattern. Smaller conversations break down, people drop out of the conversation until they have something to say. So avoid the pattern of A B A C A D, or A B C D A B C D where it feels like characters are just taking turns for the sake of having something to say.
There are three roles in a group dialogue scene: leader, follower, and opposition. The leader is the one with the plan, often in a Star Wars story, this is actually the official leader of the team. If there’s a leader there should be a follower, one that supports the leader’s plan. But stories are driven by conflict. The opposition criticises the leader’s plan and creates tension.
Andor, which thrived as a dialogue-heavy show, uses this structure to great effect. One of the most surprising things about the show was how it took the most boring possible premise, staff meetings of ISB middle managers, and repeatedly made gripping scenes out of it. The most straightforward example of this technique in an ISB meeting is the scene (below) in which Dedra Meero presents her theory and plan to Colonel Yularen. Meero is the leader. She’s presenting her plan, she does most of the talking, and the story hinges on whether or not she’s persuasive. Yularen is the opposition. He’s doubtful and his lines are all testing Dedra’s idea. Major Partagaz is the follower. He takes more of a back seat in this scene.
However, this structure can also get a bit stale in longer discussions. An earlier scene shows one way to cope with that. Initially, Blevin is the leader and Meero is the opposition. Partagaz is the follower, more proactive this time as he gives Blevin a series of opportunities to make his point. But towards the end of the scene, Meero changes the subject and starts pushing her theory about the rebellion as the conversation’s new leader. Supervisor Lagret jumps into the conversation as her new opposition. In a long conversation, roles could change several times.
This three-way interaction can serve as a versatile framework for any group discussion scene, consider who is the leader, follower and opposition.
People rarely say what they really mean, and subtext rewards the reader for ‘reading between the lines’.
“I am a Jedi. Like my father before me,” remains one of the most important lines here, and is a fantastic example of subtext, the message behind the words being that Darth Vader isn’t truly evil and still has light inside him.
Using subtext gives the reader something to work out. It’s ‘show, don’t tell’ applied to dialogue.
Although you want your dialogue to feel natural, cutting unnecessary words from dialogue (unless the character is needlessly wordy as part of their character) can add power to the words that do matter.
But wait, don’t I want my dialogue to sound like real speech? Yes, you want it to sound like real speech, but you don’t want it to actually be the way people talk. In real life, speech is filled with “uhs,” “ums,” “likes,” and tons of repetition. All of which can get annoying to read.
In The Anatomy of Story, John Truby says dialogue is, “highly selective language that sounds like it could be real.” It is, “always more intelligent, wittier, more metaphorical, and better argued than in real life.”
This section is about getting those words on the page and applies purely to written fiction.
Dialogue tags are words such as exclaimed, replied, declared, stated, etc, queried, answered... We have a lot of options here. but really ‘said’ is all you need in the vast majority of cases. Or none at all.
If possible, avoid these altogether. Jerry Jeninks’ NY Times bestseller, The Last Operative, did not contain a single dialogue tag, and the editor didn’t even notice. Consider the following example from Jerry Jenkins’ excellent video on writing compelling dialogue:
“I’m beat,” John said tiredly.
vs
John dropped onto the couch. “I’m beat.”
We don’t need a dialogue tag, because it’s obvious from the preceding action who is speaking. We don’t need the boring adverb ‘tiredly’ because we’re shown his tiredness through his actions. The main purpose of a dialogue tag is to make sure the reader knows who is speaking, Character actions and voice should make that clear enough. If your characters all have such similar voices that the reader can’t tell them apart, there are bigger problems with the dialogue structure.
If you do need dialogue tags to make sure your reader knows who is saying what, ‘said’ is usually all you need. ‘Said’ is such a common word that the reader will gloss over it and it allows the dialogue to take centre stage rather than your thesaurus.
Sometimes, it might be important that a character shouts above blaster fire, or whispers out of enemy earshot, and in that case, these words can provide a valuable description of how things are said. But most of the time , when your characters are just speaking, words like ‘stated’, ‘replied’, ‘answered’, etc add nothing to the story.
Dialogue is full of silence, whether characters have no idea what to say, or lots of things they want to say but hesitant to say them. Silence can add a lot of drama to a conversation, but how do we actually write silence into a scene?
Describing things that aren’t happening can feel weak and clunky. If a character doesn’t respond, resist the urge to tell the reader ‘but he didn’t respond’. If you don’t say they did, the reader will know they didn’t. Try showing that he didn’t respond by having other things happen instead of his response.
Focus on what is happening. Considering this example (credit Jerry Jenkins).
“Well John,” Mary said. “What do you have to say for yourself?” John clenched his jaw and stared out the window. Mary tapped her foot impatiently. “I’m waiting.”
Here, it’s clear that John didn’t answer, but this is being shown through concrete details of his actions, which crucially do not contain any lines of dialogue. We get a feel for how long has passed too, or at least long enough for Mary to feel impatient. Don’t tell me about things that aren’t happening. Show me things that are.
The Star Wars universe has a lot of languages, whether they’re assigned to a particular species, e.g. Twi’leki, or a culture, e.g. Mando’a, and before long we build up a lot of languages on our character sheet. Some of our characters might have strong accents and we want this to come across in our writing.
Seeing large amounts of text in a language you can’t understand is not engaging or interesting to read. If a large amount of dialogue is spoken in a foreign language, summarise what was said rather than just dump a load of unintelligible letters. One effective way to get the actual language across is using individual words.
Consider the following, from a Gold Nova-winning fiction from Aay'han Agrona Beviin.
“Don’t be a stupid di’kut.” The words only fueled the rage Aay’han experienced.
Do I know what a di’kut is? No. Does it matter? Also no. It’s some sort of insult, that’s obvious from the context and that’s all I need to know. This comes across so much stronger than writing the whole sentence in Mando’a and then offering a translation.
Also, consider the point of view character when describing a language. A Mandalorian being spoken to in Mando’a probably understands what is being said and a summary is appropriate. If the point of view character does not speak Mandalorian, the meaning is not known to the character (or the reader) but they hear some aggressive-sounding unintelligible noises with a lot of harsh consonant sounds.
No one in DB stories has a ‘British accent’ because Britain doesn’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Instead, maybe refer to someone as properly spoken with an aristocratic lilt. That way it fits the universe and also actually gives some description of how they speak.
For stronger accents, you may wish to alter the spelling of words to show how they’re said. Exercise caution here. Lots of words spelt incorrectly can be disruptive and annoying to read. This works best if it’s limited to a few words, and done consistently, and with care taken to make sure that the word is still easily legible.
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