Snappy Dialogue by Mar Preston
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If you have trouble
with dialogue, read your piece aloud. Then quiet yourself. Fall into a daze of
non-thought, then listen within to your characters talking to each other. See
if you can “hear” them. What kind of words do they use with each other? Are
they slangy? Terse? Colloquial? Profane?
·
Imagine everyday
conversation. How do they talk about needing new tires for the car? A kid’s bad
spelling test? You can learn about them by “listening” to them in quiet
moments within yourself. After all, that’s where they live, isn’t it? They
are you. They aren’t you.
·
Charge right into a
passage of dialogue. You don’t need greetings, chitchat, comment on the
weather, or compliments.
·
Supporting
characters can show doubt or disbelief about your main character’s goals or
plans in the curl of a lip, a snort. “Yeah, well …” has a wealth of meanings.
·
Watch out for
passages of retelling something that has already happened or commenting on
events that are happening instead of showing them. Exchange exposition for
confrontations between players, arguments, teasing, and misunderstandings.
·
Give some of the
lines to somebody with a different POV. Save up a witticism for here.
·
Examine the visual
impact of your dialogue sections. Tense dialogue contains lots of short
sentences, fragments and white space. Watch out for dialogue that goes on for
pages (unless you’re Robert B. Parker or Elmore Leonard, and none of us are).
·
If you’re building
to a toe-to-toe confrontation, don’t do it over a four-page argument scene.
Break it up. Take a phone call. Interrupt the gathering storm with an
announcement that dinner is ready. You’ve built an expectation that this isn’t
over yet, and your readers will stick with you to see who prevails and what
happens in this confrontation.
Mar
Preston is an award-winning Public Safety Writers Association author of six
“How to” EBooks on “Writing
Your First Mystery”, as well as seven police procedural novels. This
excerpt is taken from a new one called “Writing Suspense in Your Mystery
Fiction,” finished, but as yet unpublished. Stay tuned.
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