Your story is a monster. It has a skeletal system with nerves and muscles and a circulatory system. Dialogue: Dialogue is the veins that carry the lifeblood of your story. They are a conveyance system that carry the story: some are aortas in that they are more important where others are capillaries, almost minor enough to be null but just important enough to keep the far reaches of your story alive.
As a rule, dialogue should be/used for the following:
Convey a mood
Characterization or plot setting
Advance a relationship between two characters (positively or negatively)
Remind readers of potentially forgotten events (this should be used as a last resort, a monologue could do the trick as well
Dialogue should always be direct (no need to have a character say, “Oh wow.” or “How neat!” these thoughts can be conveyed through body language or not at all)
When writing dialogue be wary of the following:
Use of dialogue tags.
If you are writing well enough and punctuating well enough you don’t need to say “he said glumly” it should be conveyed in the words you said or can be conveyed through body language. Writing tags this was is the easiest way to be seen as a hack. It’s too expositional, telling your readers what emotions have been evoked as opposed to letting your words carry their own weight. An exception would be sarcasm where the actual tone can’t be heard.
Lack of dialogue tags
This may seem to counter my last point but it is an issue none-the-less. Having intersecting dialogue with NO tags creates a condition called “floating heads” in which the reader does not know who is talking. Nothing will lose the interest of a bored reader more than this, and even veteran writers will find it annoying. This can be negated however with varying diction and speaking patterns. As an example, I cite The Road in which McCarthy uses minimal dialogue tags as
There are only two main characters and
They are more often than not alone.
Large blocks of dialogue
Having large tracts of dialogue without pulling away from the conversation to show the world around your characters will create a nebulous quality to your writing in which the characters appear to be floating through a void. This can be used to your advantage. If you are writing a first person stream of consciousness piece perhaps as your character talks to their lover they could be so engrossed in the conversation that they would forget the world around them. Still, this isn’t the best idea and your piece would be better served with scene setting mixed in as well as body language cues. This can be made more confusing when you emulate the styles of the aforementioned McCarthy or Edward Whittemore, neither of whom used quotation marks (a style which is completely valid, albeit a little confusing to new writers and readers alike.
A lot of the above can be negated with changes in diction as I had previously stated. Doing so will make your piece feel more 3D, allowing you to put address the location of your story more fully without having to spell it out for the reader. This also allows you to distinguish class divisions among your characters: You can have a character who talks with no contractions to emulate “high speech” or someone who uses colloquialisms like ain’t or y’all to distinguish a southern heritage.
Dialogue has potential to be one of the strongest pieces of your story, matched with characterization you can have people quoting your characters for years. Keeping the above steps in mind and remembering your dialogue’s “place” you will have grafted another piece to your writing monster successfully.
