Welcome to the Wattpad Block Party - Summer Edition III!
Round SIX of this popular event is coming your way the entire month of August 2017 and it's going to be epic! The invites have started to roll out and everyone from your all time favorite Wa...
Writing dialogue is an author's equivalent of tightrope walking. It's all about balance...and of course a little flare. I've heard tons of advice on how to craft the perfect dialogue—often contradictory. I've had missteps in my learning curve (falling from a tightrope isn't pretty. Everyone needs practice. No one does it right the first time!)
My first piece of advice is this: beta readers/critique partners are your equivalent of a net. Don't let yourself face plant. This goes for all aspects of writing, not just dialogue.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
After this, proceeding along the learning curve gets more complicated. I shy away from blanket statements because balance is always the key. But, I do have five rules to share (#5 is the fun one!)
RULE #1 All rules are made to broken
RULE #2 Dialogue should read naturally, the way that people really talk.
The number one piece of advice I've heard about dialogue is to write it how people actually talk. If your dialogue is overlay formal or info dumping it'll read awkwardly (Just the word we want to describe out tightrope act!) If this advice is being thrown at you most regularly, then you need to listen to how people talk.
Example set #1
1. "Hello, Jesse Sprague. I see your hair is blue today. It wasn't on Sunday when I last saw you. I like it."
This is stiff and formal. It feeds the reader facts like a person's last name and pointing out when they last met. Both parties know this information, so neither would be likely to say it.
2. "Hey! Wow, you changed your hair. Seriously, Jesse, I never thought you'd go blue but it suits you."
#2 is more natural. All the same info is there (though no specific date is given for the last meeting it is implied they have a previous acquaintance with the word "changed". However, depending on the character and place in the novel, this might be too long winded.
3. "Wow! Look at your hair! Blue? It's unexpected, but it suits you."
Of the three the most natural and the briefest.
You'll notice two of these examples "work". That is because as I said, nothing is definite in writing. As a writer it is your job to figure out if your balance has shifted too far one way or the other and compensate.
RULE #3 Have you ever heard how people talk? Don't write like that!
Mentioned a little less than rule #2, rule #3 is a direct contradiction. Or is it? As you write more and more and listen to people talk, it becomes apparent that real conversations are boring. When people talk, they often ramble, get sidetracked and use inside knowledge that readers wouldn't understand (and shouldn't be expected to learn.) Now here is an imagined conversation with my brother...And for consistency, we'll talk about my lovely hair (it was that or octopi, don't ask.)
