189: 3 Tips for Writing Authentic Dialogue

 

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3 Tips for Writing Authentic Dialogue

Welcome back to your big creative life podcast. Thank you for being here. This week's episode is it was inspired by a dialog class that I taught. I think sometime last year, it might have even been a year ago. I feel like my perception of time and how long it's been since things have happened is just totally wrong. But yeah, it was sometime last year maybe, and it was about creating authentic dialog in your novel. And we've done a couple episodes like kind of touching on dialog, but I thought it'd be good to just dive into this, since it's been a while since we've talked about it. And, yeah, I thought the workshop was really It seemed like it was really helpful for the people that attended, and who knows, maybe it's something I'll bring back in the future. But we're going to talk about a few things from that class that I did. I also was reminded of this, this need for authentic dialog for your characters, because I just today, as I'm recording this today, finished the very last scene of edits to my book, and I'm gonna give myself a couple more days to read over it before I send it off to my agent, get her feedback on it.

 

But it's really exciting, because this has been, yeah, we're just, I'm one step closer, but there's a lot of dialog in this novel, like more dialog than anything else I've, I've written, and it's a lot of dialog from a lot of dialog in scenes where There are multiple characters present, it's not like just two characters having a conversation, and I always feel like my dialog is awkward when I'm doing the first draft. I always feel like it's stiff and unnatural and is not at all authentic, and I read it back when I'm editing, and sometimes it needs to be adjusted, for sure, like but a lot of times it's not as bad as I fear. It just feels awkward when I'm writing it. So I guess what I want to say before we get into the tips, is like I with if you're taking the approach that I recommend to writing, which is to focus on getting the first draft out before you go back and edit and to kind of move quickly through the writing process and get the draft out quickly, then you might have dialog that does feel kind of stiff and unnatural, and a lot of this might be stuff that you do in editing. So if it does feel awkward, if it does feel stiff on the first draft, that is more than okay. I really hone in on my dialog in editing. So just know that if you're on your first draft and your characters all speak the same and it sounds stiff, whatever it that's okay. All right.

 

So tip number one, in order for you to create authentic dialog, you have to know your characters. Creating authentic dialog requires understanding who your characters are, because if you don't know much about your character at all, you don't have a sense of their personality. You don't have a sense of their mannerisms, their behavior, what their relationships are like, etc. How can you expect to write dialog that feels and sounds authentic to that character? Now this does not require you knowing every single detail of your character's backstory before you start writing the novel and like doing you know 50 page character profiles and completing a whole like Bible and origin story for this person. I mean, sometimes it really is just knowing a few things about them, but those few things can really give you insight into how the character would speak, what their behavior is like outside of the words that they're saying, what are they doing while they're speaking?

 

That all requires you to have an understanding of who your character is. So that's one of the reasons that I say that my dialog always gets more a little bit better on the second draft when I'm editing, is because, yes, I know my characters before I start, but my understanding of them changes and grows and deepens as I'm writing the first draft. Because sometimes what happens for me is I have an idea of who I want the character to be, and then as I write them, as I get into the story, sometimes I realize that I need to adjust my original perception of that character, and I want to change them to be a little bit more like XYZ, whatever that means. Okay, so that changing of the character my own deepening understanding of who they are shows up in the dialog, and that's why it is a lot of times better. In the second draft. So yeah, it just it requires you knowing your character.

 

Number two, avoid dialog that's too stiff and formal unless it it's appropriate for your character, and that's like a component of their personality. If you have a young person as your character, teenager, someone in their 20s, they are probably not going to speak in a way that is very, I don't know. Let's compare a character who is, let's say, 20 to a character who is 85 like they're probably going to sound different, particularly if you have 220 year old characters talking to each other who are friends, their dialog is probably going to sound a lot different than if that 85 year old is talking to another 85 year old not always. I don't want to make generalizations and say like that's always true, but I mean, just think about most 85 year olds. You know, they're not talking to each other in the same way that 220, year old are talking to each other.

 

And this means one of the ways that this this shows up a lot for me in client work. Things that I notice when I'm editing is it shows up in contractions and very wordy, like overly wordy sentences, meaning most characters, regardless of their age. This is something that's true of characters across the board. Most people or most characters, would speak in contractions. So instead of saying like, I do not want to do this, they would say, I don't want to do this. That's a really easy trick. That's a really easy switch, because having a character say to another character, I do not want to do this. It just sounds stiff. It sounds unnatural when I say it out loud as you're listening, you might be like, yeah, that just sounds off. Now, if the character speaks in a very formal way, and that's part of their personality, maybe they want to come across as very educated. They want to come across as very formal to other characters. It's something they want to project to other people, then maybe it would be appropriate for that character to speak without using contractions, but in all other cases, yeah, it's just going to feel forced and unnatural.

 

So looking at those contractions, do not don't that's a really easy way to fix dialog in your novel to have it sound more authentic and overly overly wordy sentences. That's another way that dialog can just feel unnatural and inauthentic when people talk in the real world. I'm including myself in this. We use fragments, we trail off, we use slang. There are all these things that we do in real life that if you don't mirror that in your dialog, in your novel, it can the dialog can feel forced. Doesn't mean you have to have every sentence trailing off or include tons of ums, and likes to mirror exactly what dialog sounds in real life, but just be thinking about that as a way to make sure that you are kind of closely closely mirroring, maybe not exactly mirroring, but closely mirroring the way people talk in real life.

 

And I want to talk to fantasy authors right now, or authors who are writing in any speculative genre in a world that is not or our own, or some kind of like fantasy sci fi, something like that, you can still mirror the way that people talk in our world, in real life, even if you are writing something like fantasy, let's say, in a world that's not our own, even if, let's say you're basing your fantasy world off of me medieval Europe, which a lot of fantasy does, just because you're basing it off of that doesn't mean that you need to have your character speak like it is medieval, I don't know. times like you don't have to have people speak in a more like historical sound, dated sounding way just because that's the time period or culture or era, whatever that you're basing your fantasy off of, it is perfectly fine and appropriate for you to have your character speak as if it's modern day, as if like present day, as if it's our world. It's perfectly fine to have your character speak that way. Don't feel like they have to speak in a more formal way just because it's something like fantasy or sci fi. Now maybe you make a decision that you don't want to have your characters speak in a way that mirrors our world. That is a completely fine, valid decision. You can absolutely do that. But what I want to just reiterate is that you don't have to just because you're writing something like fantasy.

 

Okay, another tip for creating authentic dialog is to read your dialog out loud to ensure that it feels natural. This is one of the best editing tips. I mean, you can certainly do this while you're writing the first draft. But for me, this is something that I say for editing. There are a couple of. Options for this. Like, you can just read it out loud as you're going through and working on your character's dialog, and you're like, and Something about this doesn't quite sound right. If you read it out loud 99% of the time, you will be able to pinpoint why something feels off. If you hear it there are, you can also turn on the like, if you're if you're writing in Microsoft Word, which is what I write in, just because it's what I use for work. I edit all of my clients manuscripts in Microsoft Word, there's a read aloud feature, which, before anyone gets up in arms, I know is AI, I know, but I think we can all agree there's a difference between using chat GPT to assist you in actually writing the book, versus using the read aloud feature, which I view as more of an accessibility tool. Yes, there's a kind of slightly robotic sounding voice reading it back to you, but that's okay, you still get the idea. I actually have not done that with this manuscript at all. I have not done that read aloud feature. I have just read out loud to myself certain lines of dialog. And also a lot of this book, most of this book, honestly, that I just finished editing, was written by dictating, which was enormously helpful for me, because there was so much dialog in this book, I could say the characters dialog out loud with dictating, and that was a way that it just felt a little bit more natural as I was getting the draft out, because of that.

 

And in editing, I've just said some of the lines of dialog out loud, and kind of like read a little back and forth, because that helps me. I'm able to kind of pinpoint the flow and the the pacing of a conversation too, and that's another really good tip for pacing of a conversation. If because, okay, I'll just, I'll just say, in my own process, when I'm writing a scene that has a lot of dialog in it, I often feel like it is a slog. I feel like it is going so slowly, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, this conversation is taking 15 pages. It's so boring, it's so forced and slow. And then once I go back to read it, it's the pacing is actually totally fine for some reason in dialog heavy scenes, it just feels as I'm writing it, that it's so slow, but then come to find out, the pacing is fine. So anyways, reading it out loud can help you pinpoint the flow of it and almost like the musicality of the back and forth, to see if your sentences are just too unnecessarily long and wordy, or it's the conversation is dragging on way too long, longer than it needs to be. Maybe there's a more succinct way that you can have the conversation be written, or you can have some indirect dialog, which is where, like so and so discussed this thing, but you don't actually like write out the words that they're saying. You just let the reader know the fact that they discussed whatever they discussed.

 

So that's a really good note for pacing too. Is just looking at the flow of the words on the page. Okay, so those are my three biggest tips for creating authentic dialog. Is just knowing your characters really avoiding dialog that's too stiff and formal, because that is one of the biggest things that I note in dialog when I'm editing client manuscripts and then reading your dialog out loud, I think all those things can help. So yeah, I'll just reiterate what I said at the beginning, that if your dialog feels stiff, if it feels like awkward, that's okay. Oh, and one other thing, actually, I do want to add one more tip. Maybe I just got a question about this from? Actually, I don't remember where this was from. Maybe it was on a Q and A podcast or a client. I honestly can't remember. But someone asked, okay, there's a piece of advice when it comes to writing dialog, that all of the characters who speak in your novel should have distinct voices, they should have a distinct style. So when you're reading a line of dialog, you should instantly be able to tell who's speaking it, because each character has their own mannerisms, verbiage, etc.

 

And I think that's something to strive for, certainly, but I don't think it's always necessary. And I just don't think it always ends up working that way because of a couple reasons. First, if you have minor characters who have a couple of lines of dialog in the novel, it's just not necessary for them to have their own extremely distinct, unique way of speaking. Like if it's just a minor character, a supporting character who's there in the background and, again, just has a couple lines of dialog, don't sweat it if you do have multiple main characters, though, I think it is a really good exercise to the video. Stopped recording on my phone. I got an I just got a notification on my iPhone that my storage is full. So I had to go delete some stuff. I have such large files on my phone because I. Take so many pictures and video of my daughter, but then also, anytime I vlog or record clips of something or like these podcast episodes, I just have so much I need to get extra storage on my phone. Anyways, what I was saying is that if you have multiple main characters in your novel, it is a good thing to strive for to have those characters have different ways of speaking, particularly if you have characters who are just very different from one another, which you probably should I mean, you don't want all your major characters to be very, very, very similar to each other.

 

So this is something to strive for, where maybe you have one character who speaks in a way that is just like, markedly, noticeably different from another main character. But again, this is like something where just kind of use your discretion, because if I'm if a character is just saying two words to another character in one scene, like you don't be you don't need to be like, Oh, how would this character say those two words? You know? Yeah, again, I think it's something to strive for, but it's just not something that always matters or always applies like throughout the novel in all cases. But yeah, and this ultimately just goes back to you knowing your characters and knowing how these main characters are different from each other, and often it's not. It's not just about the words that are being said, the order in which those words are said, the actual words themselves, but it's about other things happening outside of the dialog, meaning, what are your characters doing while they're speaking? Because no one just stands perfectly still and speaks for pages and pages and pages without doing anything else.

 

You need to have other things outside of the dialog, the actual words that are being spoken. So what is your character doing? How are they saying those words? What is their tone? What does their body language convey? If it's not the if a point of view, character is noticing something about how another person is seeming as they're talking. All of those things are just as important as the actual words being spoken and also balancing out the dialog with other things. So telling us, showing us how the characters are feeling, what they're looking, what their body language is what their mannerisms are, but then also the other things going on, description, any description that you want to include about the scene outside of the words being spoken. So there are all of these other elements that are equally as important, and those are things that you can look at to show differences in your characters in addition to the words.

 

So just something to keep in mind. Okay, well, good luck with the dialog in your novel. Don't sweat too much about a first draft. Most authors have this problem of having stiff, awkward dialog on a first go. I certainly do so. It's just something to be aware of when you are editing. All right, I am going to go, I think I was going to give myself a couple days to read over my manuscript, but I think I'm just going to go home. I'm at my co working space now. I think I'm going to go home and after lunch, I'm going to read through my book, which I have not done in months, actually. Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to do this afternoon, which is exciting. All right, thank you for listening. Hope this was helpful, and I will see y'all next. Thank you so much for listening.

 

Katie Wolf