Another important way to improve your dialog writing skills is to listen to casual conversation. While fictional dialog shouldn’t necessarily contain all the flaws of spoken speech, it should have that feeling to it, of not being stilted or too formal. Also try reading what you write out loud to get an handle on how it sounds. If it doesn’t sound right to you, perhaps it needs work. Best wishes with your writing.

Have a nice weekend.

Cas

Dave, thank you for that quote from Barthelme. I have used a tape recorder now and then, and I find it helps quite a bit with this.

blogdog, no I haven’t read or seen that. Thanks for the tip!

Eric, making speech sound as if it was being translated makes sense to me. I’m struggling right now with exactly how to handle a character’s regional accent (a West Texas drawl). I want it to stand out, emphasizing his different background just a little, but not in such a way that it hinders readability. Requires some subtle tweaks.

Sarah, thanks! I’ll be very happy if anyone else finds that helpful.

Sometimes the dialog move the plot forward, sometimes the narrative. From what I’ve read, you seem to have achieved a good balance between the two.

I realize my characters often sound too alike — or just like no one. I dislike conversations that are too naturalistically rambling, but then I probably err on the side of making them too short to be realistic. The worst thing of all is trying to come up with some “business” to identify who’s saying what and keep the sense of a live scene. I always have to go back and do a global search for nods and sighs and then there are still too many nods and sighs by far. I don’t actually nod or sigh that much. I don’t think most people do but fictional characters are forever nodding and sighing.

I’ve pretty much made a mental note, that the next project I undertake, paying more attention to the kind of dialog problems you mention will be top of my list.

I should note, when Mary and I started the Byzantine mysteries we decided we did not want our characters speaking in a modern idiom. We decided we would pretend as if their speech was being translated from the ancient languages they spoke, and by a rather stodgy translator, thus the dialog is purposely stilted. Or so we claim

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I started the dictation as a way to loosen up, and in the first of the dictated books, Two Against One, there was very little re-writing. Since then there has been more re-writing, and the dictation has been a method of generating material. Plus, it’s a great tool for ‘naturalizing’ the dialogue, which I suppose is a trick, but it’s a trick that works, so it’s OK.

Much good writing is good editing — cutting a word or two, substituting a phrase for another, swapping two lines of dialogue. So, I do that. I learned from my brother Don first, and then, perhaps more brilliantly, from my New Yorker editor Veronica Geng. She was brilliant, I wasn’t. You want to compress the prose enough so it springs off the page; too much and it remains the unrisen biscuit. So the dialogue is a mating of the two — dictation for the sound, editing and compression for the economy.

I never know the characters ahead of time. What would I do when writing if I did? The writing is creating the characters, reflecting on them, going back and changing stuff in the early going so that it seeds what developed later.

We are all modern writers, all afflicted with too much seriousness aggravated by too little talent. I place a premium on ‘charm’, and also ‘grace’, both of which are mysteries in short supply these days, and install them wherever possible in my work. I keep wanting to write a really grim book. Doesn’t happen. Maybe I’m a real life music man, maybe I believe too much. Even the horrible things we do seem wonderful to me, somehow. That explains the ready employ of Jen’s horror stories — I have some sense of the terrifying grief of these grisly murders, beheadings, tortures, and yet their presence reminds me of what it is to be human, of the range of humanness. So in a peculiar way, every unspeakable act is a reassurance.