What's so special about dialogue? by Jason Black

Ok, maybe that seems like an obvious question. Duh, dialogue represents characters' actual speech. The thing is, much writing advice is aimed at narrative. But dialogue and narrative are fundamentally different beasts, and you need different skills to write them well. In this post, I'm going to look at the three deep characteristics of dialogue which just don't follow the same rules as narrative.

Prosody

Prosody is the pattern of inflection and intonation with which somebody speaks a sentence out loud. It's how a character delivers a line. Consider this short exchange, intentionally stripped of all prosodic cues:

"Jack got kicked out of school today"

"Really"

You can imagine a bunch of different ways those two people might be saying those lines. Imagine them delivered with intensity and panic. Imagine them delivered calmly and flatly. Totally different, right? Of course, because prosody is utterly essential to understanding the true meaning of people's speech acts.

Spoken with intensity, the implication is that the speakers are surprised at this turn of events. An intense delivery for "really" indicates momentary disbelief, a desire to deny this unexpected, unpleasant news. Spoken flatly, it's clear they're not surprised at all. The "really" becomes almost sardonic, indicating perhaps Jack is always getting in trouble and this is just another in a long line of suspensions. Or imagine the first speaker calm, but the second one intense. Now you get different implications about who these people are. The first one could be Jack's mother, accustomed to these problems. The second speaker's surprised reply implies that he or she isn't part of the family, and thus isn't accustomed to Jack's troubles. A family friend, or co-worker, maybe.

Yet despite being indispensable for understanding, prosody is very difficult to render on the page simply because our system for writing English doesn't give us many tools for indicating it. The rise and fall of our voices as we speak gives color to our language, while our text is black-and-white. One of the few tools we have for rendering prosody is punctuation.

Question marks and exclamation marks are blunt, explicit indications of prosody. The question mark says, "imagine this with a rising tone at the end." The exclamation mark says, "imagine this spoken with intensity, but sorry, you have to figure out which words had the intensity." Those are obvious tools, even if the exclamation mark is a little vague in its specifics.

Punctuation indicates timing, too. The ellipsis (...) is another fairly blunt prosodic cue, indicating a long pause, or a speaker abandoning a thought mid-way through. Don't underestimate the lowly comma, either. It is a versatile tool, and its role as a subtle arbiter of pacing in dialogue is not to be ignored. Even quotation marks are an important cue to the reader to switch their brains into prosody-mode. (Not to mention providing important cues for speaker transitions in conversations, which is why it irritates me to no end when otherwise excellent writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Aimee Bender, and Charlie Huston, decide they are somehow above using them. Prosody is hard enough; why would you not use every tool at your disposal?)

Brevity

Let's face it, talking is s-l-o-w. The number of words per second we can communicate through speech makes dialogue the human equivalent of browsing the web over dialup. So it is natural for people to minimize the number of words they say and maximize the new information they deliver with them. Dialogue is thus characterized by brevity.

In terms of writing craft, the brevity of dialogue leads to two important techniques. One, use short sentences. Sentences with a single clause will predominate. Sentences with two or more clauses are comparatively rare. This is pretty straightforward, and I won't belabor the point.

The second is more of a holistic strategy. It's not about how you write the dialogue, but rather, how you decide what the characters should and shouldn't say: rely on shared context. When real people talk to each other, a prime strategy for economizing on words is not to say anything the listener already knows. Consider this line, spoken from one friend to another.

"I had a good session with my psychiatrist, Dr. Morgan, today."

Does that sound natural to you? I hope not. It's too long and there's too much shared context in it. Even if you don't know anything about the speaker and listener, you can tell that this line is an infodump. If these two friends have the kind of relationship where one of them would feel comfortable mentioning a good session with their shrink, chances are that the other friend a) already knows that the first friend is seeing a therapist, b) what that therapist's name is. All of us--writers, readers, grocery clerks, everybody--make these kinds of inferences automatically, instinctively, and unavoidably, simply because we practice this kind of thinking literally every time we speak to or listen to anybody.

So, a more natural version of that dialogue would omit the shared facts, relying on the listener to understand the context. The dialogue-savvy writer would shorten it all the way down to this.

"I had a good session today."

Notice how the words are solely focused on the new information. The information that is not already shared with the listener. This can give writers fits, because the reader is not one of those friends and thus does not share their mutual context. So how do you convey that information to the reader without infodumping it? You have to find a way for it to be natural to mention the shared context explicitly. You might have the other person bring it up:

"So, how's it going with Doctor, uh ... your new shrink?"

"Dr. Morgan? Great, actually. We had a really good session today."

But be careful; a leading question once in a while is fine, but too many will quickly begin to feel unnatural. Fortunately, there are many ways to introduce shared context. The trick with all of them is this: You imagine the speaker wanting to say something brief like "I had a good session today," but being slightly afraid the listener won't quite know what she's talking about. Ask yourself what the minimum amount of context is that the speaker could add to help the listener out? Once you know the answer, simply trust that your readers--because they're human beings who practice this skill every day--are experts at deciphering tiny context clues.

While the minimum amount that helps the listener in your story might not feel like it's enough to help the reader out, chances are it actually is. And if not, your beta readers can indicate where you need to add more. When in doubt, err on the side of less informative dialogue.

Vocabulary

As an extension of brevity, perhaps it is not surprising that dialogue also uses a simpler vocabulary than narrative. Not by a lot, but it does. Specific numbers are hard to come by (and not much use to writers anyway) but an average person's speaking vocabulary is somewhere between half and three quarters the size of their written/reading vocabulary. Also unsurprisingly, the words you find in a normal person's speaking vocabulary are the most common, workhorse words of our language.

Basically, save your poetic flourishes for narrative. Sure, once in a while a character will say "erudite" or "Brobdingnagian" in dialogue. But more often than not, uncommon words just feel out of place.

The other odd quirk of dialogue is that the types of words, in proportion to their use, is also different than in narrative. As it turns out, when speaking people tend to use comparatively more verbs and adverbs than when writing, and comparatively fewer nouns and adjectives. This kind of makes sense, when you think about it. Speech focuses on new information, which more often than not relates to changes in the speaker's world. New information is--if I may coin some new vocabulary for the purpose--fundamentally more verby than it is nounish. We need to talk about how previous states of affairs have been altered, more often than we need to talk about the particular things in our worlds.

Fewer nouns and adjectives means save your purple prose for narrative. More verbs and adverbs means when in doubt, keep dialogue action-oriented.

Conclusion

There is an irony in writing when it comes to dialogue. Spoken and written English are truly distinct dialects of our language. Yet, while spoken English is clearly our true native tongue--nobody learns to write first--the focus both in formal education and amateur practice on learning How To Write tends to skew people's writing away from their own, pre-existing fluency with spoken English.

When we learn how to write English, we should be clear that we're learning how to handle a different dialect than the one we grew up speaking. Don't let the fact that schools don't teach classes on the rules of spoken English confuse you when you're writing fiction. Those rules often don't apply to spoken English. Trust your own native fluency with the spoken word.