How do you write dialogue?

How do you write different voices for your characters? Do you plot it out ahead of time, or make it up as you go along? Do you base your characters on real life people, or just compile a list of traits and work from there?

I tend to use verbal tics and catch phrases to distinguish voices, which is sort of like slapping a bumper sticker on a car and calling it unique. What do you do?

You have to get into character. Imagine yourself as that character in the fullest way you can, and write their dialogue as if the characters themselves wrote it. Don't make it too quirky or verbose though, so you don't break your readers out of the story.

One way to push out dialogue is with character building questions amongst others in the setting.

I always visualize the characters I'm using, along with their motivation and mood. After that, I guess it comes natural to me. I always found it easier to write character interaction instead of prose.

As far as how I base my characters, well, I just imagine them and their life stories. I take an almost childish joy in making up backstories about fictional people.

I do try to make them as three-dimensional as posible, though, even if that is not always an easy task.

Listen to other people talking. Pay attention during family gatherings, take notes while sitting in a cafe, and so on. Peope have different speech patterns and ways of expressing themselves, and it goes a long way beyond the 'silly hats' distinguishers of catchphrases and tics.

How do I write dialogue?

One word at a time.

Most dialogue differences are actually quite subtle. Keep that in mind.

How do I write dialogue?

One letter at a time. ;D

I mostly make it up as I go along, but sometimes I build conversations around an idea I had for a bit of dialogue.

Better than I write action a lot of the time. My early drafts tend to read more like scripts and I have to go back and put in things to break up the wall of dialogue and remind readers that the characters aren't just talking heads.

This is probably because I quickly get a very good idea of my characters' personalities and styles of speech and they have conversations with me and with each other in my head all the time. I can "hear" them bouncing stuff off one another more easily than I can "see" them moving about in the space they're in.

I wrote a guide to that once.

It's about comic dialogue, but it mostly works for all types.

I first start with my character. What is their background? Once you have a general idea of their background it will help you answer questions like "Are they down-to-earth or silly? Are they informal or polite? Are they concise or do they speak in purple prose?" At the end of the day, you need to have a basic outline of your character before you can give them a voice. I find that once I have a basic idea of how the characters talk, I tend to talk to my self and switch between the two characters (The second character is a foil to my first character to help me more clearly define the character's voice.) It helps my dialogue sound nature and funny when I say it aloud. One last tip is that you should write scenes you don't intend to include in your story as a means to help you develop the character's voice.

I'll give you an example of how I talk. (There are probably things I don't notice that I do, as well.)

If I'm trying to be polite, my voice will go high up to project "friendly". If I'm NOT trying to be polite, my voice is still pretty high but not as loud because I'm actually soft-spoken most of the time. My voice is also usually "effeminate". When I'm excited, I get loud before I realize I've gotten loud. When I'm joking, I purposefully make myself sound as sarcastic as possible, so everyone KNOWS I'm just joking (because gods forbid I piss someone off unintentionally). When I'm nervously saying hi, I'll say it so softly that the person couldn't possibly hear it (and then I'll feel weird for having been so awkward). I usually speak American Standard English with a lot of contractions, because I want to be clearly understood, but I'll speak African Vernacular English or "Ebonics" when I'm around people who I expect will appreciate it. Ebonics is all about getting your point across as quickly as possible while sounding as fun and "not white" as possible. And, as with other dialects, some words fall out of use as others are created or borrowed from other languages or dialects. So, I might say "on fleek" (which is extremely new to me and of unknown origin) or "ratchet" (which seems to be derived from a mispronunciation (whether deliberate or unintended, I don't know) of the word "wretched") but I wouldn't say "hoodrat" or "the bomb" unless I was deliberately trying to sound more like someone from the 80's or 90's (which I do when I'm "chillin' wit mah bitches"). I might shorten "your" to "yo", but I wouldn't use it to mean "hey you there" because nobody uses the same word for two different things in Ebonics (if you hear someone say "Yo, yo momma hella fat" or something) they're saying it wrong and probably doing so because they don't really understand the rules of the dialect. Anyway, if I'm trying to invoke an Afrocentric feeling, I'll try to imitate a stereotypical African accent (so, I'll say "Ah-(rolling "r") free-kah") because I don't have any real exposure to continental people or the way they speak in real life. If I'm feeling excited, I'll use "cuss" words to emphasize my point (so, I might say "ooh, her hair hella cuuuuute"). Finally, I sometimes use other accents for fun (although, I'm actually pretty bad at them): German, Russian, English, or Chinese.

With all that info, you could probably come up with all kinds of conversations and I might even have a very distinct "voice". A person's way of speaking is a reflection of who they are, which is mostly a reflection of where they come from (in terms of culture, subculture, locality, etc.).

edited 5th May '15 11:44:42 PM by nekomoon14

For me, a sentence is like this: Noun, verb, then sentence in parenthesis. Why? To differentiate a statement from a question, since having a question come before a comma and "X asked" would confuse readers.

Hey, yeah, I'm glad I'm not the only thinks this is funny looking punctuation:

"Blah?" Blah asked.

I feel like as soon as you use any sort of stop - and I count ? as a stop - you've turned the next narrative phrase into an action, not a narrative tag. Like:

"Blah." Blah nodded.

With that said, because it looks equally weird to ask a question and not have a question mark, I have forever restructured my questions to lead with the tag and end with the dialogue.

Blah asked, "Blah?"

And yes, my example's name is Blah. He's just as confused by it, which is why he's asking all these questions.

Here is a bunch of technical stuff I thought up just now. (Because I need to prove to myself that getting a degree in Creative Writing was not a waste of time.)

Prose conveys information to the reader.

Dialogue exists for the characters to relay information to each other. Yes, it's helpful and entertaining for the reader 98% of the time, but you run into things like Cryptic Conversation every now and then, which proves readers aren't the intended recipient of the information. Of course they're not. The characters (generally) have no idea there's someone watching them.

This is the problem with exposition, by the way—trying to have characters relay too much information to the reader instead of too much information to each other.

Every spoken word needs a purpose within the story, whether it's two characters verbally tearing each other's throats out, or comforting each other, or making small talk. Or one character talking to themselves.

A character can be witty enough to put Oscar Wilde to shame, but if their only purpose is to snarkily comment on things rather than take action, it had better be acknowledged. Even if it's acknowledged in story by another character saying "Could you stop being the smartass and help us!"

So, all in all, I don't think "How can I make my dialogue sound good?" I think "These characters really need to have this conversation." ...and then "How can I make it sound good?"

For example, if I've got writer's block and have a scene to finish, I usually write the rest of the scene's dialogue and add on stuff to flesh it out. This is what would happen if I tried to write an entire scene dialogue-first:

Purpose: A character had a dream about another character and is telling them so. This is where characterization and tags comes in. Right now, I don't know who these characters are and what their relationship is to each other. It's the skeleton of a scene.

This is very light, simple characterization through dialogue. I could technically leave it here, but it's not a very good practice. So let's add some nesting material to the eggs of information.

There we have it: a conversation. Not exactly my best work, but it gets the job done when I'm not inspired.

I usually just write what sounds like a normal thing to say in whatever situation I'm writing for.

I've found that it's harder to pick up on two characters sounding exactly the same, so long as the characters are obviously completely different people outwardly. (A justification also helps too - two people from opposite sides of a country might sound different, but two people from the same town won't, and it would be strange if two people in the same interest club did as well.)

Take an adult and a teen in a modern setting. Imagine that they speak and act identically. Realistically, this would easily mean that one of them is anachronistic - the teen has Little Professor Dialog, or the adult is Speaking Like Totally Teen. Actually focusing on this, and explaining why this might happen, would be a story in and of itself.

But that is unlikely, unless you're at one end of the age spectrum trying to write for the other (and I've seen that a few times). What's more likely is, the teen and the adult end up sounding like they're in the same general/generic age and cultural group. This, again, can be lampshaded away pretty easily, but that gets old after a while.

So, wat do?

Take an action scene. One person is a non-com, the other is a trained badass. You don't notice how much the characters sound like each other when you're following action.

But that's an extreme example. The other thing is to watch how many words a character speaks in one go (do they speak quickly?), how they speak (hesitate, then slowly?), what they're thinking when they speak ("I'd really like to get into her pants." "Can I see your trousers?" "Sigh. Stupid waistline..."), what they focus on when they speak (the lame chips or the lame dip at a lame party?), their word choice (whether they go for sensory or literal when they describe something), the topics they speak about (they're not The Dividual, so they're going to talk about different things that are indicative of two people who are not all-knowing and omnipresent), their word and topic order ("the cat knocked the cup over" vs. "my cup! damn cat must've knocked it over"), and then maybe the occasional dialogue tag that indicates mood more than the dialogue itself (Tranquil Fury and Dissonant Serenity actually sound exactly the same if you don't know that that person is The Quiet One).

Etc.

But Funetik Aksent is right out as a rule (though it's an okay exception). It just wastes the reader's time if they can't skim over something that's not an actual foreign language.

Verbal tics and catchphrases are alright, but a little goes a long way. Don't saturate their dialog with it; one tic per few sentences is enough.

Generally, the best way to go about creating character voices is to use the dialog to show their traits. Is your character high educated? Give them a larger vocabulary. Are they highly formal or casual? Those can translate pretty directly into how they speak. Are they too the point in what they say? Are they terse? Are they more meandering, more prone to stream of consciousness?

The important thing is that you want it to run deeper than taking generally written dialog and throwing some quirks onto it. Start all the way from deciding what the character is saying in the first place.

For Rhythmic Pretty Cure, I've got an average Joe, a tomboy, a Moe, a hipster, and a mature and intelligent young lady as the main characters. How do I make their dialogue look the part?

Also, if this question belongs here, how much dialogue would generally be considered a "comfortable" amount? Because I get the feeling the eight chapters I've written thus far are so full of Lull Destruction, it isn't even funny.