“All talk responds to a need, engages a purpose and performs an action. No matter how seemingly vague or airy a speech may be, no character ever talks to anyone, even to himself, for no reason, to do nothing.” – from Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen, by Robert McKee
Advice you should take to heart, Kristen Lamb says in a new post on dialogue. “The most obvious use for spoken dialogue is that it defines, deepens, and distinguishes each character,” Lamb says. “Dialogue is one of the many ways we can craft human beings with loves, loss, and layers simply by crafting how they speak (or don’t).”
Lamb says vocabulary is critical. “How a character talks can reveal age, where the character is from, belief systems, educational level, background, vocation, interests and more,” she explains. And it all starts with character. Choosing the right characters for your story, defining their arcs, and understanding what they hope to achieve will make it much easier for you to craft unique and intelligent dialogue.
Next, Lamb urges you to pay attention to how real people talk. People rarely address each other by name. If they do, they rarely do it twice in a single conversation. They also don’t tell each other things they already know. They often don’t speak in complete or grammatically correct sentences. This is something you’ll have to finesse, because you don’t want to copy conversational style verbatim, but remember that you have lots of leeway to use slang and sentence fragments in dialogue.
Also, be wary of letting a character pontificate. “In conversation, usually one person won’t speak more than three sentences,” Lamb says. “They CAN, but if we have them go on monologuing too frequently, it sounds weird. When you see you have a lot of sentences, that’s a good clue you might be trying to hold the reader’s brain and are using dialogue to dump information.” Lamb suggests reading your dialogue aloud to find places where you stumble or get bored. If you’re reading to someone, ask if they can tell your characters apart simply by the way they speak.
Finally, Lamb says strong dialogue can save us description. Giving your character a distinct vocabulary and way of speaking will go a long way to creating an image of that person in your reader’s head.
