Draft with your gut, revise with your head: tips for approaching dialogue

Photo by Harishan Kobalasingam.

In my experience, writers usually feel strongly about creating dialogue, either loving or hating the challenge of building plot and character through seemingly genuine conversation. And more often than not, those feelings are evident in their subsequent manuscripts. Fortunately, although great dialogue may not be easy to craft, the process doesn’t have to be painful.

Of course, there is no single “correct” approach to writing dialogue. The below advice is meant to help authors decrease some of the anxiety around the process and avoid what I have found to be the most common pitfalls in composing naturalistic conversations, including

• exposition dumps;

• overly formal, complex, or otherwise awkward language;

• unnecessary repetition;

• boring, flat, and extraneous passages; and

• out-of-character statements.

Your usage may vary.

Drafting with your gut

A good first draft of dialogue will be focused and feel natural. To accomplish the former, you need to approach your scene with purpose. To accomplish the latter, you want to write from your gut, allowing your characters’ words to pour out of them rather than being forced upon them by the needs of the story.

Before writing a scene, you should have some idea of what its purpose will be and how it will move your plot along. Doing so will give your characters and their conversation a clear destination and path to follow, but also room to experiment and grow.

Once you have a sense for where you want the scene to go, allow yourself to sink into your characters, feeling the drives that propel them forward as well as the histories that weigh them down.

Now, write.

Revising with your head

When you’re ready to revise, it’s time to hop out of your characters’ skins and review the scene from the outside. Here are some key aspects to consider.

Turn up the tension

There’s what we think, what we want to communicate, and what we actually communicate. These three things rarely line up perfectly, and that fact is a primary source of tension in dialogue.

When you revise, make sure you are playing up to this tension. Not only will it keep your readers interested, but it will clue them in to important facets of your characters’ desires and personalities.

Remember, too, that people communicate at least as much through body language and facial expressions as they do through words. Be sure to use your characters’ physicality to either support or conflict with what they say.

Disparities between the perspectives of your characters is another natural source of tension in dialogue. This doesn’t mean every interaction you write needs to be hostile, but you should keep an eye open for places where misunderstandings or contrasting perspectives might occur—especially in ways that are relevant to the plot—and then lean in to those moments.

Refine the rhythm

Refining the rhythm of your dialogue requires both cutting and expanding in the revision stage, and usually involves bouncing back-and-forth between the two.

Tighten your writing by cutting or summarizing any lines that don’t move the plot forward, build character, or establish setting. Strive for phrases that do at least two of these at once.

Cut unnecessary repetition, flabby phrasing, or other extraneous words.

Look for opportunities to add white space. Unless there are strong character or stylistic reasons to have long, speech-like paragraphs, these should be broken up.

Likewise, most of the time you want to break-up complex sentences and simplify vocabulary. Reading your dialogue aloud will help you hear what works and what doesn’t.

Check your dialogue tags. Words like “said” or “asked” should be sparing; the voices and perspectives of well-written characters can do most of the work of identifying each speaker.

If you find you need tags on every line, this may be a sign that your characterization isn’t strong and you need to tweak the dialogue itself to more clearly evoke the speaker’s personality/point-of-view. (That being said, contemporary readers and editors usually prefer accents and vocal tics to be handled like a strong spice: added sparingly for flavor but not laid on so heavily that they overwhelm the actual meat of the scene.)

Dialogue tags should sometimes be supplemented with, or replaced entirely by, descriptions of body language, facial expressions, or interior thoughts. Adding these moments of description can keep passages of dialogue from feeling too thin and provide your readers with important context regarding your characters’ personalities and states of mind.

Similarly, inserting brief descriptions of the setting or surrounding action—especially when it reflects, conflicts with, interrupts, or otherwise affects your characters’ discussion—is another effective way of adding layers and dynamism to a scene.

Check for character and plot consistency

Drafting from the gut can mean that what comes out sounds more like the author than the character. Or worse, we might have our characters say something that seems to work in the moment, but takes them to a place we really don’t want them to go. For instance, if you have a series-recurrent character who up to this point has always been meek or kind or wise, you don’t want her to suddenly become aggressive or mean or reckless unless you have established a very believable reason for her to do so and are prepared to deal with the repercussions of that conflicting behavior going forward.

When you revise your dialogue, ask yourself whether each statement really makes sense for the speaker. If just a line or two sounds off, you will probably want to change those lines. If, on the other hand, the entire conversation sounds off, you might want to either rethink the character or recast the speaker altogether.

Once the first draft of your entire book is complete, you might also discover a conversation that works on its own doesn’t add much to, or even conflicts with other aspects of, the overall story. Painful as this can be, the scene will have to be trimmed or cut accordingly.

Looking for more?

Whole books can be—and have been—written on the subject of writing dialogue. If you’re searching for more in-depth advice than what I’ve put forward here, you might want to check out Crafting Dynamic Dialogue by the editors of Writer’s Digest.

The most misused word in unpublished manuscripts

Photo by Kelly Sikkema.

I’m still nursing my most recent cold-that-will-not-die, so this month’s post will be particularly focused and brief.

Can you spot the problem with the following sentence?

“Her face reflected a deep anger.”

Phrases like this show up all the time in manuscripts, just as they show up all the time in speech. The issue is with the word “reflected,” which we often use metaphorically as a synonym for “showed” or “indicated.” There are plenty of contexts where this swap works perfectly, as in “Her behavior is a reflection of the society she lives in” or “His tastes reflect his upbringing in 1960s Paris.”

The difference between the first and later examples is one of directionality. “Reflect,” at its core, refers to one thing bouncing off another (think of light reflecting off a pond or your face reflected in a mirror). This sense of an outside force hitting one thing and then being cast back is preserved when we say someone’s behavior reflects their upbringing or society. In contrast, when we read people’s bodies as conveying something about their interior selves, we are experiencing that communication not as reflections but as straight lines directly connecting us to those other people through their faces or gestures.

Now, can you find dictionary definitions that would allow the first sentence to pass as proper English? Yes, you can. And I doubt anyone reading the phrase would be confused about its meaning. But good writing involves thinking deeply about language and choosing the words that best convey the ideas you want to express. When it comes to describing the relationship between a character’s thoughts or feelings and his appearance, please take a moment to reflect on the fact that there are many, far better words to use than reflected.

Photo by Dmitry Ratushny.

What is an editor?

Photo by Karen Lau.

“Editor” is a word that gets tossed around all the time, but many people remain understandably confused about what an editor’s job actually entails. The purpose of this long-overdue post, then, is to clear up at least some of that confusion.

Independent or In-house?

There are a couple ways to classify editors, but the first thing to know is whether they are independent or in-house. As suggested by the name, in-house editors work for a traditional publishing house. Their jobs involve both preparing accepted manuscripts for publication and reviewing solicited manuscripts. If you are traditionally published, they will probably be your primary contact at your publisher.

In contrast, independent editors work on a contract basis for writers. These are the people you will typically send your manuscript to before either submitting to agents or self-publishing.

Developmental, line, or copy?

Editors may also specialize in a particular kind of editing. At a traditional publisher, your manuscript should go through three general stages: developmental, line, and copy editing.

Developmental, or content, edits look at big-picture issues and can include things like plot and character development, timeline consistency, and, really, anything that could require major revisions to your book.

Once the general shape of your novel has been solidified, the manuscript will move on to line edits. Line edits focus on language and writing style, including phrasing, clarity, tone, and the general leanness of the text.

The final stage is copy editing. Copy editors are looking at the minute details of punctuation, grammar, spelling, and formatting style.

There can, of course, be overlap between these stages, especially line and copy edits, and editors who identify primarily as copy editors may take a broader view of their jobs.

Photo by Etienne Pauthenet.

Ideally, self-published authors will also either hire multiple editors to handle the different stages of the editing process or else hire one editor for multiple passes. In reality, though, many writers balk at the prospect of shelling out for more than one editorial pass, if they are willing/able to hire a professional editor at all. As a result, some independent editors (like myself) will offer more comprehensive single-pass edits that address developmental, line, and copy editing all at once. The obvious problem with this is that there is no professional follow-up edit to check the subsequent changes or catch anything missed on the first pass. In these cases, the final editing responsibility ultimately falls on the author.

Fortunately, writers in the pre-submission stage should not need the same level of thoroughness before sending to agents or publishers. Yes, you want your manuscript in great shape before sending it off. But once you actually land a contract, your novel will endure many additional revisions, first (probably) from your agent, and then from your publisher. Instead, writers looking to hire an independent editor as a prelude to traditional publication should understand what kind of edits they really need and be clear from the outset about what they are looking for. Doing so will save them time, effort, and, potentially, money.

The in-between

Although independent and in-house editors represent the far ends of the career spectrum, many of us actually fall somewhere in between.

For instance, I am both an independent editor and editor for the indie publisher Drum Tower Press. Whereas an editor at a traditional press would have final say over what edits must get made before a book is ready for publication, my role at Drum Tower is essentially supportive to the author/founder, P. A. De Voe. In other words, at Drum Tower, the author runs the show, taking input from her editor and readers and then making the final decisions about her publications. That power is, after all, why writers often choose to self-publish. But while most indie authors must contract out for editing, the editing at Drum Tower is done by one of its co-founders (me) in-house.

Today’s publishing landscape is filled with a plethora of publishing options, from large traditional publishers, to boutique houses, to scrappy micro and indie presses. In response, the roles of editors have become nearly as diverse. But regardless of the specifics of our jobs, all editors share a desire to polish the author’s work to its finest shine before it enters the broader world, and thereby give that work its best chance of success.