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.

Write your best novel by writing YOUR best novel

Photo by Trevor Cole

There are many reasons to write. Maybe you have a specific story or idea wriggling away inside of you that just needs to get out. Maybe you want to put hard-earned writing skills to use. Maybe you simply need to write, the way others need to run or draw or play. But wherever your motivation originates, chances are you ultimately aspire to some kind of social recognition and economic reward for all your work.

In the hope of achieving these goals, most people will at least consider writing to suit their imagined audience. Some aspects of this impulse—when it comes to articulating clearly, building a well-rounded world, creating complex characters, finding an original concept, and understanding how their work fits into their chosen genre—are necessary concerns that truly can determine a novel’s success.

Crucially, however, all of these useful concerns revolve around how to best bring your ideas to life for your aspirational audience. None of them are about pandering to fads or other assumptions about what an audience may or may not want. Making that particular leap from trying to best communicate your ideas to your audience to trying to write content for your audience can be a deadly one, as it typically results in a story and characters neither the author nor the reader will care about.

So, if you are considering writing a novel with a female protagonist because someone told you that’s easier to sell, but you have no particular interest in writing a female protagonist, then don’t write a female protagonist. Same deal when it comes to race, sexuality, ability, non-binary identities, and non-European cultures.

Likewise, if you don’t enjoy reading or writing romantic or erotic subplots, don’t force one into your novel just because many readers like them.

If you want to write literary fiction but think you have a better shot at getting a YA horror novel published…well, maybe see how drafting the YA novel feels. Sometimes genre experimentation can lead to great and unexpected experiences! But if it just isn’t working for you, get back to your real passion and don’t look back.

Trying to force yourself or your characters to follow one of these “trends” will almost always come across as inauthentic, if not insulting, to your readers. But if you are writing what matters—truly, deeply, matters—to you, then your book has a real chance of resonating with an audience who cares about those things too.

Focusing on your own ideas/concerns/perspective is especially important in your first draft, where the core of your novel is formed. From there, your readers, editor, agent, and publisher may suggest you incorporate additional elements to better round-out your story, world, and characters. This is the point—when you have specific feedback available to guide your craft and the basic elements of your vision are already well-established—at which stretching beyond your initial comfort zone and pushing into the realm of the unconsidered and non-personal is most likely to benefit the final novel you will ultimately share with the world.

So just remember: When building your novel, always write for yourself and to your audience.

This is not to say you shouldn’t take specific feedback or the realities of the field to heart. But at the end of the day, good books are honest books, and that honesty has to come from you.