So to Speak

Today's post is a "simulcast" of sorts, due to be posted on my blog and on Janie Junebug Righting and Editing, the blog of "Janie Junebug." That's all you need to know, I guess.

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People who've read stories that I've written have often complimented me on the way I write the dialog -- or "dialogue," if you prefer -- between my characters. Janie asked me several months ago if I would be interested in writing a guest post for her blog. Typically, I procrastinated, but finally, here it is.

In the guise of presenting this as a cohesive article, I'm just going to give you a bulleted list of random thoughts on the subject of dialog, in no real order.

• The most important thing is to make your dialog sound real, "real" being defined as true to how the individual character would speak.
• This may sound painfully obvious, but one of the most important parts of writing good dialog is to listen to people, and the way that they talk. Since I'm a nosy little cuss anyway, this has never been a problem for me. I've "overheard" a lot of conversations in my time.
• Keep in mind that people rarely speak correctly. Even educated people will not necessarily talk the way that they write. (This is a case of first learning the rules, and then knowing which rules to break, and why. Don't be afraid to use improper grammar in your dialog, but don't overdo it.) Even a Grammar Nazi like myself, who cringes at the way some folks speak, will often say "can I" when I should really say "may I," or "I don't feel good" when we all know I should say that "I don't feel well" instead. How often do you hear someone say "I will" instead of "I shall," "who" instead of "whom," and "I could care less" when the correct term is "I couldn't care less?" Quite a bit, right?
• Having said that, if your character is a college professor or someone similar, he or she might very well speak using proper grammar. Let me repeat that you should always use dialog that's appropriate to its speaker. When I had a writing partner, we shared a blog on which, among other posts, we had an ongoing serial featuring characters which were idealized versions of ourselves. I usually had to re-write the dialog he'd written for the character based on myself, because his dialog just didn't sound like me. To list just two examples: Once, he posted a supposed email I'd written, in which I used the popular abbreviations "LOL" and "ROFL." Well, I never use either of those (although I do occasionally use "IIRC," and "btw" for "by the way"). And in another post, his original version of my dialog had me using the expression "goddamn," which I absolutely never say. But I digress...
• Even people with an extensive vocabulary don't always utilize said vocabulary when they speak. Personally, I've found that using so-called "big words" in a conversation can often derail the conversation itself if and when the other person or persons speaking to each other didn't understand some word that I used. I once used the term "disparage" when talking to someone who interrupted me to ask what the word meant. I began using the word "motivation" rather than "impetus" for the same reason. I used to get a lot of funny looks when I used the word "impetus." Maybe they thought I was saying "impotent." Anyway, there's also the fact that using certain words might make people think that you're trying to impress them, and they'll resent it. I once heard Jon Stewart use the word "vituperative" not once, but twice, during a single week of broadcasts on The Daily Show. Although it would have been easy enough for someone to discern the meaning of the word from its context in these two examples, I don't think I'd dare use "vituperative" on an everyday basis.
• Real people use contractions. Constantly. Of course, if the character whose dialog you're writing is an uptight, stuffy, pain-in-the-ass kinda guy (or woman), an absence of contractions in his or her speech may be just the thing you're looking for to convey the character's stodginess to your readers.
• Have you ever prepared for a confrontation by planning in detail what you're going to say to your employer, boyfriend/girlfriend, or someone else the next time you see him or her? It almost never worked, right? That's because you may have written a "script" for yourself, but you can't do it for the other person, too. In effect, that means that they're ad-libbing to your script, and they'll interrupt you, or change the subject slightly, or misunderstand something you said and question you about it. Anything might happen, and recognizing that may help you to write an interesting and realistic exchange among your characters.
• Remember that in real life, nobody likes to feel that they're listening to a speech, so one person will often interrupt another, even if the interrupter in question only says things like "uh-huh," "right," "I see," etc.
• People don't always finish their sentences. Sometimes they can't put their complete thought into words, and their voices just trail off.
• No matter how many times you've read that proper grammar dictates that you should never end a sentence with a preposition (a rule which really isn't a rule anymore), people do it all the flamin' time when they converse. In fact, I just did it purposely in my previous bullet point.
• People split infinitives frequently, even though you're not supposed to ever do it. Heh.
• Somewhere along the line, most people got it into their heads that the word "me" should almost always be avoided. That's why you hear things like "The police came to question her and I," when "her and me" is correct. On a related note, I've often heard people begin a sentence with "Her and I," as in "Her and I went to the store." Is that an incorrect usage? Of course it is. The correct expression would be "She and I." Do people make that mistake all the time in conversation? Sure they do.
• With the exceptions of characters who primarily used contemporary slang -- like "Say, what kinda hooey are you tryin' to hand me?" -- actors and actresses in movies of the 1930s and 1940s were often given lines that one would never use in a real conversation. To list only one example, in Now, Voyager, Bette Davis said "Oh, Jerry, don't let's ask for the moon. We have the stars." That's a great, memorable quote, but who the hell would actually say something like that in the real world? Try to avoid things like that.
• I'm going to wrap this up by telling you one of my little tricks, and it applies not only to my dialog, but to a lesser extent, my narration. I use italics to stress certain words. Using italics pretty much forces your reader to read the sentence in the way that you want it read. And the placement of that stressed word is often very important. For example? "Hey, that's my wife!" means something akin to "Hey, I know that woman over there! Boy, do I ever!" And then there's "Hey, that's my wife!" which probably means something to the effect of "Don't kiss her. Go home and kiss your own wife." And "Hey, that's my wife!" no doubt means something like "I'm not married to any of those other women. I'm married to that one." My former writing partner had a tendency to stress words at random, and that frequently made for some awkward reading. Try that sentence this way: "My former writing partner apparently stressed random words, and that frequently made for some awkward reading." Just doesn't sound right, does it? I sure had my job cut out for me when I worked with him!

I'm sure there are several other points that I should have mentioned and didn't, but I think this'll do for one post!

Thanks for your time.