Third, give them challenges, both inner and outer. This adds tension, and also gives a chance for readers to see how they react to and overcome these challenges. Don’t make things too easy for them.
Fourth, show us what they think and feel about things. We learn about a character by how they react and how they think, and your story needs both aspects to give a reader a deep connection with a character. We need to see their internal challenges and reactions as well as their external ones.
But don’t spend pages on inner monologues or character thought processes in an attempt to deepen your characters; a lot of thinking with nothing actually happening can soon become tedious. Instead, pepper your action with the character’s internal reactions, but also make sure you don’t repeat internally what is actually obvious from the action.
Characterisation is deepened through strong dialogue, particularly the use of subtext, and through writing descriptions from a character’s point of view. So don’t think of characterisation as something you do separately to the other elements of your story. And remember that your central character should grow or change in some way because of the events in the story; without this kind of character development, a book can seem somewhat pointless.
Dialogue
Everything after this point in this book shouldn’t concern you when you write your first draft. When writing that first draft, just write. Don’t care about how badly you might be writing. The important thing is to get your ideas down. Don’t let these guidelines break your flow. The idea is that you write with your creative mind, then edit with your conceptual mind. Both are important, but creativity must come first. Remember that these are not rules to bind you, they are tools to help you improve your writing at the self-editing stage.
And now to dialogue:
We learn a great deal about characters from how they talk and what they say, and if our dialogue is stilted, unnatural, or incorrectly phrased for the time frame, it can ruin an otherwise good book. Many books about fiction writing go into dialogue in detail, so rather than repeat what others have said, I’ll just point out the things that I often see lacking in dialogue in terms of the focus of this book, which is line editing. So when you edit, check the following:
Ground Your Dialogue
Occasional reference to body movement and scene interaction is important in dialogue. Don’t have long conversations with no facial expressions, gestures or description of settings.
Without these, characters become disembodied talking heads. Using them grounds your dialogue in the scene and helps character development. It also breaks large areas of one person speaking into more digestible chunks. You can also occasionally use body movement before someone talks to establish who is talking.
Example:
‘When are you going to see your father?’ Sally asked.
Could be:
Sally took a deep breath. ‘When are you going to see your father?’
An example in the following section shows why we need to ground dialogue.
Keep Tags Simple
Stick to simple dialogue tags like ‘said’, ‘asked’ and ‘replied’ with the occasional ‘shouted’ and ‘yelled’. Forget what your primary school teacher may have told you about avoiding using ‘said’ too often by using alternative words; there are more skilful ways to do that.
One mainstream publisher I did a workshop with said that when she received a manuscript, she opened it at random, and if she found that the author had a high number of tags or had used anything other than ‘said’, she rejected the manuscript without reading further. Why? She said it indicated that the author didn’t know how to write.
Fancy tags are very obvious. ‘Said’ goes unnoticed. Replacement words, such as ‘remarked’, ‘commanded’, ‘agreed’, ‘argued’ and so on stick out—my pet hate is ‘opined’. Since it’s not a word in common use, it jumps right out at you. Fancy tags are distracting; they remind the reader that they’re reading and thus take them out of the story, and you don’t want that.
Example:
‘Get out of here now!’ he commanded.
‘Get out of here now!’ he said.
It’s obvious from the exclamation mark and the words themselves that the sentence is a command. The word ‘commanded’ is unnecessary and cumbersome.
Whatever you’re trying to communicate with your fancy tag should be said in the dialogue itself or by the actions and facial expressions of the characters. The way to avoid using too many ‘saids’ is to avoid using tags altogether.
Cut Unnecessary tags.
Readers must know who is saying what. It’s very confusing if you get to the middle of a conversation and can’t remember which character is talking, and it’s particularly annoying if you have to go back to the last indication to find out. This can happen easily during conversations where one character speaks for a long time and where the character’s voices aren’t immediately different.
However, your desire to make sure that the reader knows who’s speaking shouldn’t always result in a dialogue tag.
Cut dialogue tags completely where it’s obvious who’s speaking or where you have action as well. The action is sufficient to tell the reader who’s speaking if you use the character’s name or pronoun.
Overwritten:
‘We’ve got to get away,’ John said.
‘How? We’re stuck here,” Mary replied.
‘I think I know a way,’ John said.
‘The only way out of this place is past those guards,’ Mary said.
‘Shut up and follow me,’ John said, setting off towards the shed.
‘You’d better be right!’ Mary retorted and stumbled after him.
Revised:
‘We’ve got to get away,’ John said.
‘How? We’re stuck here,” Mary replied.
‘I think I know a way.’
Mary shook her head. ‘The only way out of this place is past those guards.’
‘Shut up and follow me.’ John set off towards the shed.
Mary stumbled after him. ‘You’d better be right!’
Where you do need a tag in a line of dialogue, insert it as early as possible. This stops the reader having to read to the end of a long sentence to find out who’s talking.
Example:
‘Yes, I will eat the dog, but not until you whip the cream for dessert,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will eat the dog, but not until you whip the cream for dessert.’
But do use tags when they’re necessary. Just because only two people are speaking doesn’t mean that the reader won’t forget which voice they’re ‘listening’ to after several exchanges without some indication of who is speaking. Underusing tags is as inadvisable as overusing them.
Take a look at this version of the above example:
‘We’ve got to get away.’
‘How? We’re stuck here.’
‘I think I know a way.’
‘The only way out of this place is past those guards.’
‘Shut up and follow me.’
‘You’d better be right!’
A great deal is missing from this dialogue now. It’s ungrounded, related to nothing in the environment, and though John says ‘follow me’, nothing indicates that he’s actually moved.
Try to vary the way in which you tell readers who’s speaking. Use tags, actions, gestures and facial expressions, but again, don’t overdo it. Where only two people are speaking, an attribution at the end of each character’s words is unnecessary and can simply slow the pace down and frustrate readers who just want you to get on with the story. It’s all a matter of balance.
Dealing with Information
People don’t actually say everything they think. They keep a lot to themselves, but some beginning writers don’t understand this important point, and they have their characters spill the entire contents of their mind in a scene. This can easily happen when you have information that you want the reader to know and you’ve decide
d to deliver this information in dialogue. No matter how you deliver it, an info dump is always an info dump, and having a character say the information will not disguise that fact unless you break it up as I suggested in the section on grounding your dialogue.
When the point of dialogue is to express information, instead of having one character simply tell the other all the information, have one ask questions of the other, or have them interrupt occasionally or ask for clarification, which then leads the person expounding to go deeper into their topic. This will make it much more natural.
Also consider argument; having one character disagree with the other and the first try to convince them has much more tension and is therefore more interesting than a straight exposition. Perhaps someone is talking about a political situation. Perhaps you want them to give a rundown of the society as part of your world-building—though it’s far better to write so the readers can see it for themselves as the action progresses, rather than having to be told. Let’s say that character 1 has explained the double dealing of the government to character 2. Rather than having character 2 simply listen passively, put their reaction in to break up the other’s monologue.
‘That’s so two-faced! They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’
‘What? That’s just the way governments are. They always have to juggle factions.’
‘Maybe, but they should stick to what they promised, or at least not do a complete shift away from something they said was important.’
‘In an ideal world, yes, but in reality, it’s just how it is. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just telling you what happened.’
‘Okay, fine. Go on, then.’
You could also have the first give incorrect information that the second person could correct.
Consider a situation where one character is telling the other a story in which someone ran over a dog. Character 2 interjects:
‘I thought James ran that dog over, not Lilly.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was in all the newspapers. I’m pretty sure he was driving and she was just the passenger.’
‘Okay, but either way, she was upset and that’s why she got into an argument with Bill.’
Adding these kinds of elements will help break up long passages of dialogue and make it much more interesting. It will put life into it.
Also consider carefully whether:
The reader needs to know all this information, and if they do:
whether it needs to all be delivered here;
whether any of it can be shown through description of events as they unfold, which is preferable.
The character being told needs to know all this information, or might already know it.
Generally the reader needs less information than you think they do, and if a character would already know something, then don’t have another character tell them.
Subtext
As I said before, people don’t actually say everything they think. In dialogue, less is often more, and is usually more realistic. If you want the reader to know what a character is feeling, you can write the character’s thoughts as thoughts, if you’re in their POV—they don’t have to express them to the other character. Of course, if you’re not in the POV of the character whose thoughts you want to communicate, then you don’t have the option of writing out their inner thoughts; but in either situation, you can use their expressions, actions and gestures to communicate how they ‘really’ feel about the conversation.
I say ‘how they ‘really’ feel’ because people do sometimes say one thing and think another, but body language can indicate what they really think. Noting this kind of detail creates subtext in the dialogue, and that makes it interesting and real.
When you use a character’s tone of voice, facial expressions, actions and word selection (e.g. do they say ‘concerned’ or ‘pissed off’?) to hint at their real thoughts, the other person can also read and react to the body language. This makes much more interesting reading than laying it all out there.
Here’s an example of dialogue with subtext from Lethal Inheritance. Ariel’s mother has a baby wombat in her arms and she’s feeding him from a doll’s bottle while she paces up and down their living room.
Two red spots, like fiery eyes, penetrated the darkness and raised goose-bumps on Ariel’s arms. A very large dog? More likely that stupid kid from down the street with laser pens. But the red spots disappeared too fast for Ariel to be sure she’d even seen them. She leapt up and pulled the curtains. The creepy feeling disappeared, but she’d have words with that kid at the bus stop tomorrow. He had no right skulking about in their garden.
The wombat sucked on in a steady rhythm but Nadima stopped pacing, her knuckles white where she gripped the bottle. Had she sensed something too? ‘I think we should leave early,’ she said.
‘What?’ Ariel’s spoon stopped an inch from her mouth.
‘The camping trip. Let’s leave tomorrow morning.’ Nadima plonked the now empty bottle on the bench.
Ariel lowered her spoon. ‘No way, I’ve got training after school tomorrow. There’s a race coming up, remember? I’m planning to beat Molly Gainsbrough in the eight hundred metres.’
Nadima pursed her lips, hugged the wombat tighter and patted his back. ‘You’d win the fencing medal if you went back to it.’
Ariel grimaced. ‘Give it up, Mum, I’d rather run than stick a blade in someone.’
Nadima sighed. ‘Fine, we’ll go Friday.’
‘Why?’
‘We’ll make it a long weekend. We could both do with the extra day.’
Ariel frowned. What was going on? Her mother never let her skip school. But why complain? ‘Fine. Where are we going?’
Nadima stared into space and began rocking the wombat like a baby. ‘Somewhere new. It’s a surprise.’
‘New? What’s new within a two hundred kilometre radius?’
‘You’ll see.’ Her clipped tone signalled the end of the conversation.
In this excerpt, Ariel’s mother indicates that perhaps she knows more than she’s letting on. Our clues are:
… her knuckles white where she gripped the bottle, and Ariel’s wondering, Had she sensed something too?
‘Let’s leave tomorrow morning.’ Nadima plonked the now empty bottle on the bench. She didn’t place the bottle, she plonked it, giving a sense that she’d made a firm decision. You could also read a slight sense of frustration in the action. Is this a decision she didn’t want to have to make?
Nadima pursed her lips. This tells us that she’s not happy with her daughter’s focus on the athletics meet;
… hugged the wombat tighter and patted his back. There’s a sense here—remember the bottle—that the wombat is a surrogate child, and this action suggests that she fears losing her daughter;
Nadima sighed. ‘Fine, we’ll go Friday.’ The sigh indicates that though she thinks it’s a bad idea, this isn’t a battle she’s prepared to have. This tells us something about her relationship with her daughter;
‘You’d win the fencing medal if you went back to it.’
Ariel grimaced. ‘Give it up, Mum, I’d rather run than stick a blade in someone.’ This is an example of information being hinted at rather than fully explained. Instead of telling the reader somewhere that Ariel used to be pretty good at fencing, this little piece of dialogue suggests it. It also suggests that Ariel had given up and her mother wasn’t happy about that. Why? This is a bit of foreshadowing; the fact that it’s there indicates that it’s important somehow, and that makes the reader wonder why. It adds to the sense of mystery;
‘Fine. Where are we going?’ Nadima stared into space … What kind of place when thought of makes you stare into space? This suggests that there’s something strange about this place. She also says that it’s a secret, which adds to the mystery;
… began rocking the wombat like a baby.Nadima is still holding the wombat and rocking him ‘like a baby’. She’s holding onto her baby, re
inforcing the idea in point 4;
‘You’ll see.’ Her clipped tone signalled the end of the conversation. This reinforces the idea that Nadima knows more than she’s telling and that, for some reason, she isn’t ready to tell her daughter. She’s cut the conversation short. Ariel, and the reader, will just have to wait.
Readers are not going to analyse your subtext like this, but the information is there nevertheless, and they absorb it as they read. This scene could have taken place with the wombat in his little bed, but I had him in Nadima’s arms to create this subtext. Nadima is right to want to hold onto her baby; the rest of the series tells you why.
I have no doubt that there are much better examples of subtext in dialogue, but being my writing, I know it well. The point is, would it be as interesting if:
Nadima had actually said to her daughter that she senses something outside and that she thinks they should get out of the house in case it is what she thinks it is;
Ariel had said that was a great idea, instead of trying to convince her mother to stay;
Nadima had told Ariel where they were going and why it was a bit of a strange place;
Nadima had told Ariel why she should go back to fencing.
These are all things that we will discover as the story goes on, so there was no need to lay it all out for the reader up front.
So ask yourself what you want your characters to communicate, whether they would actually say all that and whether or not some of it can be communicated non-verbally as a subtext.
Write How People Speak
People often talk in short sentences and phrases, rather than in long sentences with big words, so write your dialogue the way they speak. Modern people also use contractions often. They are much more likely to say ‘I’m’ than ‘I am’. Read your dialogue out loud to see if it sounds natural.
The Elements of Active Prose Page 6