Mastering Dialogue in Writing

Show Notes

• Dramatic Dialogue
• The Road 
• Bad Batch 
• The Cruel Prince 
• Malazan 
• Travis Mayweather 
• Name of the Wind
• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians 
• Guinea Worm Etymology 
• Charles Chesnutt 

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sofia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris. With me is…

Bunny: Bunny

Chris: …and…

Oren: Oren.

Chris: Now, as we all know, this is episode 468 of the Mythcreant Podcast, a podcast where we talk about speculative fiction, writing, and storytelling. We are the three hosts of this podcast, and we cover the topic of each episode using a loose discussion format.

And as you know, we start with an opening meta joke that is quite bad.

Oren: “It doesn’t really bother me.” He shrugged.

Bunny: I do know this. That is very astute observation that my fellow podcast host Chris is making currently.

Chris: But have we asked ourselves: What does a podcast mean? We live in a society where podcasting is more than discussion; it is our very being that we give to our listeners.

Bunny: Between podcasts, I go to my box and sleep.

Oren: Chris, you can’t just say what a podcast means. That makes me feel angry.

Bunny: I’m feeling the very similitude of this conversation.

Chris: Yeah, this time we’re talking about dialogue mistakes.

Bunny: Perhaps the number one thing that I see gotten wrong.

Oren: I don’t know if I have mistakes to discuss so much cause this is way beyond what I normally do as a content editor. I mostly have complaints.

[Chris laughs]

Bunny: Look, that’s what we’re here for.

Oren: I have things about dialogue that I don’t like, and I wish they would stop.

Bunny: That’s on brand.

Chris: Yeah. I do think that when people are starting, the dialogue is the thing that is fussiest. And if you don’t do things the way they’re meant to be, the way people are used to, that is what is most noticeable and most grating.

Bunny: It’s very squishy.

Chris: However, there is one thing that’s more obvious, which is if you don’t have paragraph breaks.

Oren: [laughs] Yeah, that’s a tough one. Not having paragraph breaks is gonna make it real hard for any editors or beta readers.

Chris: But then I would say after paragraph breaks, the next biggest thing is dialogue. So, since dialogue is very fussy, let’s cover some of the things specifically that people do wrong.

One of the things that I opened with was exposition in dialogue. Which is very noticeable and it feels very unnatural when the characters say things that they don’t have a reason to say because they all know.

My advice is just not to use dialogue for exposition. I don’t know why this is a thing that people use so often. Other than that, in visual media, it is used because they don’t have narration as an option for exposition. They don’t have as many options, so they resort to stuffing their dialogue. But if you’re using a narrated medium, if you’re in written work, then you shouldn’t have to do that. You can put it in the narration instead. And only use it if a character actually wouldn’t know that information and would actually say it that way for reals.

Bunny: I wonder if people do that because they’ve also been told that big block paragraphs of exposition are bad too. So they’re like, let’s break it up. Let’s put it into dialogue.

Chris: That would make sense. There’s a lot of overreaction to exposition dumps in paragraphs for sure.

Oren: From my experience, that’s exactly why they do it. It’s because people have an understanding that too much exposition is bad, but exposition is necessary.

At the same time, a lot of people are trying to solve the problem of their story needing too much exposition by fiddling around with how they deliver that exposition when the issue is that the story is too complicated.

Bunny: Or that they’re trying to get all their exposition out in one place rather than introducing it naturalistically.

Oren: That too.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you should never put dialogue in exposition. I think there are times when that makes sense.

Most often, of course, if the protagonist or your POV character doesn’t know the information. But sometimes you can work a bit of exposition into dialogue, even if it’s something that the protagonist does know. It needs to make sense that they would say that. It needs to feel natural.

But you also have to understand that if the exposition would be boring as narration, it will be boring as dialogue. Making it dialogue doesn’t make it not boring.

Bunny: But it makes it snappy and in scene.

Chris: It’s not impossible to make it sound natural and come up with a reason for somebody to say something that they already know, but I just see writers all the time try to make it natural and fail.

I just think that if the exposition goes wrong in dialogue, it’s going to come off much worse than a narration where people usually have a little bit more latitude. We don’t expect narration to actually be a realistic stream of consciousness on the part of the viewpoint character.

Bunny: [fake coughing] Ulysses. [fake coughing]

Chris: [laughs] So you can get away with a lot more narration than you can in dialogue.

Oren: Yeah, that’s true. People are much more likely to notice if there’s an issue.

Bunny: The umbrella to this is just that it’s hard to make dialogue sound realistic. Realistically, people don’t walk up to each other and say, “Hello, friend. Don’t you know that I’m your friend?” “Yes, I know that you’re my friend. What good friends we are!” And then just go on about their lives like that. That sounds pretty unnatural.

And honestly, looking at the transcripts of these very podcasts, I see why people do that, right? I see why they filter out all of these filler words and backtracks and run-on sentences like the one I’m speaking right now.

But the problem is that they overcorrect in the other direction, just make it sound stilted. So that’s what, in my opinion, makes dialogue so difficult. It’s that you have to sound natural, but not too natural.

Oren: Yeah, and it’s also an issue of you want your dialogue to sound like something people would say. But beyond the stuff that Bunny talked about of filler words and whatever, in conversations, a lot of the conversations people have are not things that merit a place on the page.

If two friends meet, they might chat for a while about stuff. And that could take 10 minutes. You don’t want to have to put that in there, of casual talking, unless that relationship is really important to your story.

Chris: Right. Definitely, small talk almost never should be in your conversations. It’s better usually in most cases, if you can’t come up with a natural way for two characters to greet each other without being like, hi, how are you? Good, how are you? Then you should just skip forward a little bit to when they’ve been talking for a while.

Bunny: Yeah, you could just say they greeted each other. That’s a perfectly fine thing to say.

That said, small talk can be great for if you want a conversation to be awkward. [Chris laughs] I will say that. You can certainly highlight these characters being uncomfortable with the way that they make small talk. It’s a cliché to go, oh, the weather today. Am I right?

Oren: Yeah, and you can also use that for furthering a relationship between two characters. So there are options.

It’s just that if you look at conversations in well-written dialogue, they’re almost always much shorter than conversations would be in real life. Just cause we’re skipping over a lot of stuff that people would say to each other for whatever reason but isn’t worth putting on the page.

Chris: People do not talk to each other very efficiently.

Oren: Um, there’s a reason why podcasting is a casual format and if we really need to deliver information in a very efficient format, we use an article.

Bunny: Yeah, I think what Chris told us at the beginning, it’s just that you should be reading this in an article. We shouldn’t be talking about it. This is bad dialogue guys.

[Laughing]

Chris: There’s all the labeling, attributing tagging issues that dialogue needs. Which—

Bunny: Okay, I’m gonna revise my earlier statement. That’s the thing I see done most wrong.

Chris: Okay, so what is your biggest pet peeve with the labeling and tagging?

Bunny: Oh my God, this is an easy one for me. My biggest pet peeve far and away is when people tag dialogue using nondialogue verbs. So instead of saying, he said, she said, they said, sometimes they shouted or whatever, they’ll say, he smiled.

“Hello,” he smiled.

Or

“Good to see you,” she bounced up and down.

Chris: To clarify though, this is specifically when people use the punctuation that comes with a tag, right? Because without hearing the punctuation, that actually sounds fine. But what people are doing is they’ll be like,

“Hello (COMMA)” she (LOWER CASE) smiled.

As though she was smiling the words.

Bunny: This is an important clarification.

Chris: Somehow her smile formed those words.

Bunny: If you end it in a comma, it’s gotta be a speaking verb. The verb is the manner in which you spoke. If you say something or you shout something or you whisper something. You can’t smile dialogue. You can’t jump dialogue.

“Hello,” he punched me in the face.

No, you can’t punch-me-in-the-face dialogue.

Chris: [laughs] I can understand how this happens because dialogue, punctuation can feel a little confusing and complicated. And also, I think people would just get in that habit of adding that comma and then writing the next line without thinking about what’s actually going on there.

But yeah, if you have a verb that does not actually mean speech in some way, you gotta start a new sentence. So, you get a period and then she smiled is a different sentence.

Bunny: Yes. Tag dialogue with actions all you want, just please, for all that is holy, put a period or some punctuation that’s not a comma at the end of the dialogue.

That is admittedly very trivial, but that is my pet peeve. Easy.

Chris: That’s understandable. My pet peeve, I talked about this before, is created by that often-repeated guideline to start a new paragraph when a new person speaks. And unfortunately, that’s just wrong. Or at best, simplistic.

Cause what people will do is they’ll put an action by a character and then they’ll hit, then they’ll be like, oh, that character’s about to speak and they haven’t spoken before. So, then they’ll paragraph break. And so, that person’s line of dialogue is on the next line, and then they’ll put an action by the next character on that same line. And then when that character’s about to speak, they’ll hit a paragraph break.

So, what you have is an action by one person on the same line as a line of dialogue by a different person. So, the action labels, the action tags, action labels are all wrong and make it look like somebody different is speaking.

Bunny: So like:

Amy jumped up and down. (PARAGRAPH BREAK)

“Hello there!”

And that’s Amy speaking, but…

Chris: Yes, exactly. And then:

Tim waved. (ON THE SAME LINE) (PARAGRAPH BREAK)

“Why? Hello, Amy.”

Bunny: [laughs] This is A+ dialogue, by the way. The only thing wrong with the dialogue is the punctuation.

Oren: So, it’s not that it’s wrong to say you should make a new paragraph when someone new is speaking. It’s just that is not the only time you should do it.

Chris: Well, no, I would say that if you follow it, literally, which many people are doing, it is wrong. Because if you put an action by that person and then they speak and they haven’t spoken before, a new person is speaking.

Bunny: So, the rule should really be: Clump dialogue.

Chris: Right. The rule is: The characters should alternate paragraphs. And you should put all of the actions, the body language, the movements, the dialogue from one character in the same paragraph together. And then the next paragraph should focus on a new character.

Oren: That totally makes sense. I just wanted to clarify, because if we hear that the rule that you should start a new paragraph when a new person is talking is wrong, and we’re not specific about what that means, what we’ll get is people saying that they should put the different dialogue speakers in the same paragraph.

Chris: It’s just the wrong guideline. Or you could just say it’s simplistic instead.

But I think that people say that, but they actually mean that you should group all the things for one character in a paragraph together. But then they say this rule, and those two things are not really the same, right? And so, anybody who’s literally following this rule is gonna end up putting breaks in the wrong places.

Bunny: So, the real rule is: Keep it clumpy.

Chris: Keep it clumpy. That’s one way to say it.

But this is another thing I see a lot where one person will be speaking, but then another person will have a body language. They’ll shake their head or whatever. And then since only one person is speaking, they’ll put the dialogue from the body language from the other person in the middle of somebody else’s speech.

Oren: “Hello.” He raised his gun. “Goodbye.”

And the hello goodbye is by the same person, but that’s not the person who raised the gun. In the same paragraph. That is so hard to read.

Bunny: Okay. That’s impenetrable.

Chris: Right? That’s the kind of thing that people do when they follow this guideline. Because that’s what it seems to say. It’s that you should always do a new paragraph when a person who speaks when they haven’t spoken before and then otherwise not do it.

Bunny: What about you, Oren, what’s your pet peeve?

Oren: Well, this isn’t a mistake, really, cause I can forgive mistakes. This is a thing people do on purpose, which I can never forgive.

[Bunny and Chris laugh]

And that’s not using quotation mark.

Bunny: Oh, oh. That’s gonna be contentious among the snobs.

Oren: I’m sure there are people out there who haven’t learned the rules of grammar enough to know they’re supposed to use quotation marks. That probably happens. I doubt that they have finished a novel manuscript, so I don’t interact with them all that much.

Most people who write a manuscript understand the basic uses of quotation marks, so this is not a mistake. This is a thing people do on purpose when they get famous enough. I hate it so much.

There are quotes about how if the writing’s clear, you don’t need the quotation mark. And guess what? Without the quotation mark, it’s not clear, my friend.

Chris: No, it’s a very bad idea because it requires extra brain power. Even if you can tell by looking, that still adds to the cognitive load, and that means that your reader has less brain power to use for just appreciating the story and understanding other aspects of it.

At the very best case scenario, if you look and can look and tell, it still just takes extra focus and effort to do that.

Oren: It also distorts the dialogue because to try to make the dialogue stand out as not just narration, because of course, that’s the reason what quotation marks exist, right? It’s because without quotation marks, you can’t tell the difference between dialogue and narration. If you’re trying to separate your dialogue without them, the dialogue ends up sounding really weird because it always has to start with a new pronoun or something.

I noticed The Road did this when I tried to read The Road. The way that McCarthy would try to set off his dialogue would be by having it start with an I pronoun a lot. And it just sounded really unnatural.

Bunny: That’s some very unnecessary hamstring I must say.

Oren: It is, and you know there’s a simpler way and it’s to use quotation marks

Bunny: But Oren, what about italics?

Chris: In some cases, italics are okay. Again, if we’re writing speculative fiction, we can have, for instance, characters telepathically talking to each other. And if it’s not in huge blocks, sometimes it may be a good convention to indicate when they are talking telepathically by using italics instead of quotation marks.

And in a scene that might matter, because maybe people are saying things that the third person who is present can’t hear, and it’s important to distinguish that.

At the same time, the only thing about italics, is they’re a little bit less easy to tell visually than double quotes. But also, it’s a little harder to read. So, if you have an entire paragraph in italics, you’re just making things harder for readers.

Oren: If we were starting from scratch. It’s not like the quotation mark is magically the best way to indicate dialogue. There might be a better symbol for it. There might be a better way to offset dialogue. I don’t know. I’m not a conlang creator.

But I know that it is better to offset your dialogue in some way, then to not do that. Because otherwise you can’t tell the dialogue from the regular narration, and it’s important to be able to do that.

I’ve tried to figure out like, why do writers do this? And I’ve looked up lists of reasons and they include things that are just wrong. Like claims that it’s easier to read really pretentious stuff, that it forces the reader to consider the writer’s prose with greater care. And it’s like that. No, it doesn’t. It just means, I don’t know what you’re saying. You are being less clear and your prose is bad, so I don’t know what you want from me.

Bunny: I wonder if it could come from poetry a little bit. I don’t see a lot of quotation marks in poetry, but then a lot of the authors who do this aren’t poets. So, I don’t know.

Chris: I just don’t understand what the benefit is for removing quotes, other than posturing.

Bunny: That’s a big one, Chris

Chris: I don’t see how that enhances the reading experience to just leave them out. All it does is make things harder for you and for them. It would have to have some benefit to justify why it’s making things harder. And now I’m like…

Bunny: it makes you probe the author mind.

Oren: So one thing that’s been occurring to me recently—since I don’t think we want to talk about quotation marks forever—is the difference between making dialogue that makes your villains sound cool and evil, and making dialogue that makes your villains sound goofy, like they’re talking evilly on purpose.

Because there’s a line there somewhere, and I don’t know where it is. I just know there are some characters that I read, and that evil dialogue, it’s like, yeah, that’s great. That’s what an evil person sounds like. I’m super into this. And then other characters, it’s like, ugh, why is he trying to sound evil? Such a poser! And I don’t know what it, I don’t know where that line is. I can’t find it.

Chris: I would stick to the typical recommendations that we have for villains, which is make your villain polite.

Bunny: But sometimes you just want a villain that smashes around on snarls and stuff.

Chris: If you writing a comedy?

Bunny: Yeah, a barbarian villain or something. Barbarian in the D&D sense, not Germans.

[Oren laughs]

But if your villain is doing something really mundane, like eating an apple. Unless you want the apple to be like deep and symbolic or something, you don’t need to have them say how much they enjoy crunching the flesh or whatever. If that’s the sort of thing you’re discussing, Oren.

Oren: That is what the more exaggerated version of it. Sometimes it’s just that in the tone of voice. Sometimes it’s the dialogue itself.

I was really annoyed on Bad Batch, the Star Wars cartoon, where when one of them goes evil, it’s the one that sounds evil. The one who talks like, I’ll eliminate every target. Yeah, I guess that guy’s evil. He sounds evil.

Bunny: That’s the villain.

Bunny: This sounds related to one of my pet peeves, which is lines that are overly dramatic. Like trailer lines, lines that you think the actor said, just so it could show up in a trailer. I’ve got one from the Cruel Prince, which I did a Lessons post on recently.

[dramatic voice] “I’ve seen many impossible things,” the man said. “I have seen the acorn before the oak. I have seen the spark before the flame. But never have I seen such as this: A dead woman living. A child born from nothing.”

And this is just a guy who shows up in a suburb and like knocks on somebody’s door.

Bunny: [laughs] I’ve never seen things that logically come before other things.

Chris: [laughs] And I see that a lot sometimes when it’s just… gosh, it’s your first scene, your first chapter. Why are people making grand speeches?

I think one of the things about it is that normally people talk about the particulars of their situation. And when they start talking about some deep philosophy or some grand message that their situation is supposed to represent, that’s when it gets really weird.

Or maybe a character that senses the nearest protagonist and dispenses deep, wise life advice. Like in Malazan there’s a guy who’s like, oh, you shouldn’t wanna be a hero kid, or something like that. And it’s like, how did you even know? That I don’t think he told you that.

Bunny: He’s got you, the protag.

A little pet peeve for me is dialogue on a similar note, that’s just there to remind you that this person is unusual. I call it the Can-you-tell-I’m-from-spaaaaaace dialogue.

Chris: [laughs] Yes. Yeah, so I’ve definitely seen this.

Bunny: I feel like Star Trek does that a lot. Like I’m an alien. Look at me, reference aaaalien things.

Chris: Yeah. I actually mentioned this on my post on dehumanizing species or cultures. Because it usually comes with a group that is been reduced to a gimmick.

Oren: Yeah. Although they do it with some of their human characters too. That was a running joke for a while on enterprise, that Travis, the helmsman, he’s been in space. And every time he’s in a conversation in the early episodes, somehow, he brings up that he’s been in space before.

Bunny: “I met Johnny.”

“Oh, who’s Johnny?”

“Johnny Cash!”

“Oh goddammit.”

Oren: Part of the issue was that character had nothing to do. And so they were trying to come up with something that would make him distinctive and somehow—I’ve never understood how—they couldn’t figure out a way to make the fact that he has a lot of space experience and no one else does relevant.

It doesn’t sound like that would be hard. That would be easy to bring into the plot, but no, they could never figure out how to do it. So instead, he just mentions that he’s been in space before.

Chris: Reminds me a little bit of The Name of the Wind, where there’s this guy who shows up. I can’t remember what he is called, but he’s just like a tinker or something. He just brings things and does sell stuff. But he speaks only in rhyme and refers to himself in the third person.

Bunny: That’s certainly a shtick. I guess.

Oren: Look, I might accept a character who speaks only in rhyme if they were a magical fairy. If you tell me a person does that and it’s not part of a bit they’re putting on, I’m gonna call nonsense on that.

Bunny: There was a recent line of the space talk and in a movie I watched recently, a very bad movie, called Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Which is now going to end up in the show notes. So, I’m sorry about that. And it’s a line, the villain says this, which also qualifies under the villain dialogue.

But it’s “Me, Voldar, hiding in a dirty cave like a speckled Mars worm.” He’s from Mars, you know?

Chris: Okay. That’s very colorful.

Oren: You know the Mars worm.

Bunny: You have to—you see—he is from—he’s from Mars—from space.

Oren: I saw three Earth dogs across the road earlier today.

Bunny: Me sleeping in the pillows like a tabby Earth cat.

Oren: Don’t get me wrong, sometimes things do get named after places in ways that don’t even always make sense. So that does happen. Like the Guinea worm, that name doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s because it’s associated with the country of Guinea, fairly or not.

But at the same time, it sounds pretty silly without any context.

Bunny: It sounds very cute, and that is not a cute worm. I will tell you. Don’t look up Guinea worms unless you’re morbidly curious.

Chris: So, while we’re talking about characters speaking in weird ways, I think it’s good to mention that you should not write accents into your dialogue. So, use standard spelling. Do not spell words how a character pronounces them.

So for instance, if you’ve character who has a Scottish accent, do not try to change the words. To reflect a Scottish accent. At best, it’s going to be annoying. Because it’s gonna be constantly distracting people as they try to pay attention to the story and read the dialogue. And often it will make things harder to read.

At worst, it can be offensive, right? There’s a good chance that a Scottish person would look at that and be like, that is not how we speak. And it can feel very stereotype-y.

Bunny: So historically, that sort of thing has a lineage from plantation narratives. It’s very racially charged, especially if you use it for a person of color. Because there is a long legacy of these plantation narratives where a white person will go to a slave and then the slave tells them a story in this extremely exaggerated, colloquial, spelled out dialogue. And that’s just no, that’s just no bueno.

Oren: Yeah, and don’t get me wrong, I work with authors who have their own dialect or their own accent that they want to represent in fiction. I’m not gonna say they shouldn’t do that.

Chris: If somebody’s writing their own dialect in there, I’m not gonna tell them don’t do that.

Bunny: Yeah. And there was actually a mixed race author on the turn of the century who did basically a bunch of takedowns of that plantation style of narrative. Charles Chestnut. There we go. Yes.

Oren: And I recently read some stories by a Jamaican author who chose to spell out the main character’s accent. Which was her own accent, and all the power to her.

Now, as someone who’s not an expert on languages, I could not tell if that was authentic. I don’t know what a Jamaican accent would be spelled. I barely know what one sounds like in real life, not from tv. So, your average reader may not understand, but I just wanted to make sure we understood the nuance here.

But I generally agree if this is an accent that you don’t have, I would do not try to spell it. You will almost certainly get it wrong.

Chris: Yeah, instead just describe how the character has that accent.

Bunny: You’re probably okay if you throw in a couple of flavor words, though. Like you’re writing a pirate, and they say aye sometimes.

Chris: Well, is a pirate accent a real accent?

Bunny: I mean, there’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Oren: How to make a character distinct without making them silly or cartoonish is a whole other thing. We’re talking about dialogue mistakes right now. I don’t know if we have time to get into that.

Chris: I think the gist is that language is very difficult, right? Most of us are not linguists and not to try to take on more than you could handle. And certainly if you’re putting in an accent that’s not yours, you are representing a different group of people and taking off, taking on something that is very difficult.

If you’re trying to distinguish your fantasy group, I would generally discourage doing anything weird. I think it’s more likely to come off as silly, than it is to come off as, oh, cool. They speak in a different way because of this is their culture.

Oren: Yeah, I would generally agree with that.

Chris: I think one last thing that’s worth covering is just how much narration you have in between lines. Because in a lot of cases that will slow things down and make it so that it feels like the character is having a deep think.

In the middle of a conversation that like should be going pretty fast, dialogue is very timing sentence sensitive, so it’s not the best place to have your character contemplate the world.

The other issue that I do see is that if it’s too long between lines, it’s really easy to forget what the previous line is. If somebody asks a question and then you spend two paragraphs on narration, you cannot expect your readers to remember what that line was from two paragraphs ago.

So if you’re not sure, if you have a legitimate reason in your story for a little time to pass between when somebody, for instance, asks a question and then answers it, you almost might need to recap the question a bit. And not rely on your readers to remember that.

Bunny: Yeah. I can’t even remember what’s happening in the same conversation when someone talks for a while.

Oren: All right. Hopefully we can remember what happened in this podcast. Cause I think we’re at the end of our time.

Bunny: What a segue.

Chris: And as you and I both know, Mythcreants is supported by our patrons. So, if you found this episode useful, you can support us at patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Then there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel.  Finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.

We’ll talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself, by Jonathan Coulton.​