What to Look For: Self-Editing Dialogue

This week, Anna and Veronica tackle the common mistakes they see (and, yes, have made) in dialogue writing. 

Strong dialogue elevates stories, giving us character, voice, conflict, shocking reveals, swoonworthy declarations of love, and more. When it comes time to edit your manuscript or short story, you can use the tips and tricks explored in this episode to refine what your characters say…and how they say it. 

For all the lessons from this episode in one spot, check out and download this PDF  (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w3EWQpg0iduOYcgBU4zmbylCJhWowbaC/view?usp=sharing). No subscription or signup is necessary. 

Do you need support with your writing? Check out our coaching and editing services at https://veronicajorden.com/ and https://annaschechter.org/. 

Do you want to know what Anna's reading? Check out her instagram @annaotations (https://www.instagram.com/annaotations/). 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, I'm Veronica, a Gen Xer. And I'm Anna, a Gen Zer. And this is X Wright Z, a podcast fueled by our love of books and the craft of writing.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

We're writers and editors who read across the genre spectrum. And you know how in SciFi characters are on an intergalactic mission to do whatever they need to do? Well, we're on an intergenerational mission to help writers write better stories.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

And as part of our mission, every episode comes with a handout, chock full of key takeaways and tips that you can use for your own writing. A simple Google Doc with no signups or subscriptions necessary. If we can spark your creativity and help support your writing habit, we'll consider this a job well done. Now let's dig into this week's discussion. And I'm gonna, you can't see me doing it, but I'm gonna use air quotes mistakes, right? There, there's some things that we see writers um do, especially if they're just starting out or if it's a rough draft. We see some things that typically we would want to see corrupted. And so that got us thinking about maybe talking a little bit more about common mistakes that we see as editors.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Yeah, and even mistakes that we sometimes make. There are so many possible mistakes to be made. Some of them are probably actually strengths in disguise and are something we might want to harness. Um, but as we were starting to think about mistakes and also helping writers self-edit those mistakes, we started to realize the list could be quite long. And so we decided to narrow in to dialogue for today. Yeah. Because dialogue's a big one.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

If you can get dialogue right, oftentimes, and I'm not gonna say that the rest of the story, obviously, you gotta have a strong plot, but but usually if you can nail the voice of your character, if if how they are feeling and what they are doing comes through in their dialogue, that gives you a lot of wiggle room. So, you know, and I think we've all read stories or we've seen TV shows, right? Like there are some TV shows that come on and the dialogue is just so good. You like, I I don't know about you, but like I've had that conversation often with my husband. We'll watch a show and it'll go to commercial. We're like, gosh, the writing in this is so good. And what does TV do? It's I mean, screenplay is mostly dialogue, right? I mean, if you see, yeah. Or shows where you're like, I feel like they got, and I no offense, don't come for me, but like there are sometimes we've seen episodes where I'm like, they must have had the B writers on this one, because it's just not as good.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

Yes, yes. No, I totally have that experience. I'm always the person who's like, ooh, ooh, they just delivered exposition through dialogue, or oh, wasn't that just a beautifully crafted sentence? So I I totally do the same thing. And you're right. When when we watch TV or a film, most of what we hear, besides the score and the music, most of what we hear is dialogue or it's narration said by an actor. But that is the book of that that's the writing that's in that that really brings film and TV to life. Of course, you've got actors, costume setting, lighting, um, the music, the score, the director. Like everybody is participating. But if the writing of the dialogue isn't working or it's unnatural, it's gonna be rough to sit through that show or that movie. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

100%. And of course, like in writing, we have to do a little bit more work. Like you said, we don't have the benefit of a score. We don't have the benefit of really like, you know, easy visuals or, you know, sometimes even tone and pacing of delivery of a line of dialogue can have a huge impact. So we've got to use some other tools as writers to kind of compensate for that. But I think because we tend to hear dialogue that way, or because, I mean, humans by nature, I mean, some of us are more than others, but we're chatty, we talk, right? We communicate. And that doesn't quite translate, it's close, but it doesn't quite translate to how you would write really good dialogue in um in fiction, per se. So let's talk about some of the common mistakes that we see often in early manuscripts, but really honestly, I think all writers, unless you're really, really looking for these things, will make these mistakes or have made these mistakes at one point or another.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah. And you probably have some favorite books or some very well-renowned books that have these quote-unquote mistakes in them and they're published and they're out there and they do well. So this, these for the most part, are not a never do this, but they can be a signifier that, all right, we got some editing to do, possibly.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, I feel like we always have to have this caveat that fiction is a business of exception. There will always be uh uh you'll always be able to find some book or some story that is an exception to kind of these quote-unquote rules that we talk about, right? So just keep that in mind. All right, so the first one on our list is something called As You Know Bob Dialogue.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

You wanna tell us what it is, Anna? Yes. Um, well, first of all, Veronica and I both like to call it what about Bob dialogue? That's that's something else. Yeah, that is something else. Very funny film, but um, as you know bob dialogue is the type of dialogue where two characters are speaking to each other. They both already know the information, but they say it and they talk about it anyway, because the reader does not yet know this information. So they talk about something that's already known to get the information into the story, get it out to the reader. Right. And the title of this basically comes from if you could fit as you know into the line of dialogue, you might consider if it needs to be there.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Often when you recognize this in writing, it's it can often be very humorous because we would never say some of these things. So, like, let's say you have a character that's having a conversation with their mother and they say something like, you know, mom, I was born at 11.59 p.m. on New Year's Eve, you were there. Like, of course, you know, that's that's kind of one of those things. If you could put, as you know, mom, I was born at 1159, of course your mom knows that because your mother was there, right? So it's it's it's information that often we want to get into the story as a writer. And sometimes we forget that we have other tools besides dialogue. So even though we're talking about dialogue, so if there's information like that, it's very easy to transition into instead of putting it in dialogue, which makes it sound kind of like no one would ever say that, we can convert it into either internal narrative. You can have the character think to themselves, or you can shift into exposition. So, you know, that same part of your book might look like he looked at his mother. He had been born at 1159 on New Year's Eve and he wondered what she'd been doing, you know, or something like that, where you can still get that information in, but you don't have to bring it in through dialogue. I always think when I hear as you know, Bob, dialogue, I think of like, you know, the really stuffy guy, think of like off like an office character, you know, where his tie is just a little too tight and he's like really wound and he's very proper and he just wants to tell everybody the things that they already know, and everybody wants to roll their eyes about it, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Anyhow, that's making me picture, that's making me picture like a little bit of mansplaining in the as you know bob.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

I mean, yeah, absolutely. That that definitely applies. Now, there are some exceptions, um, and mystery is probably the one where we see um this happen the most often. And it's because I would I would say that if you have like a detective or a police officer or someone who is investigating or trying to uncover clues, oftentimes we do talk out loud. We do say things we already know because we're trying to think about them in a different way or we're trying to make connections. So there are exceptions of when you can bring this as you know, Bob dialogue into play. But it doesn't, in that situation, I think you'd agree, it doesn't feel like an as you know. It's not someone trying to prove that they're smarter than everybody else in the room necessarily. It's a rehash of information as they continue to like think through it or try to see it in a different light.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Right. And in the case of mystery, the reader and other detectives or other people involved in the investigation would also already have that information. It's just that we'd be invited into like the deliberating and the trying to process through the evidence type of thing. So it would feel like, okay, we're going back over this info, but because we're trying to piece things together. Right. Um, and I guess another exception is if one of your characters in the conversation does not know the information, um, then it's no longer as you know, because Bob or whoever doesn't know. Right. And I've been re-watching Ripper Street, which is a really great crime drama. And there was an episode that I just recently rewatched where I think the it's I think it was the surgeon who works for the police station and the um inspector. They're speaking, and the surgeon has more information about the deceased and like the job that he did before he died, um, that he's able to share with the inspector, and it it's exposition for the crime and for the character and for the episode that's going to unfold, but it really works because the inspector has less information like us viewers, and we get up to speed thanks to what the surgeon knows. Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

So always exceptions. There's always going to be a situation where there will be an exception. So again, this is not something that's hard and fast, but if you find yourself, especially because as writers, we have we only have so many words that we can use, only so many pages, right? That we can use to tell a story unless we're gonna, I mean, anyhow, that's a whole other conversation. But generally we want to we want to really preserve as much of our kind of literary um uh real estate to tell the story we need to tell. And so often dialogue like this feels like filler. And so if you can cut it or you can use it in a different way, then it saves you some space to focus in on the things. All right. So what about the say almost that it? What about Bob? No, it's as you know, Bob dialogue. From there, let's talk a little bit more about um one of the other things that I see happen really often in dialogue is a mismatch of facial expression or body language to the emotion that is being conveyed through dialogue. Have you seen this, Anna?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

I have, I have, and this is one where it just puzzles me when I come across this. Um, because you know, what a character does and how they look in terms of like posture or gesture or body language and what they say, those two things really do influence the mood of the scene or the moment or the conversation that's unfolding. So when they are very much at odds with each other, it either could be a really cool contrast that's being created, or it's a really jarring mismatch where I come out of the story and I think, wait, why how are they like acting this way when they're saying one thing but doing another? It's kind of like actions and words. Um yeah. And actions speak louder than words. So I they can.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and this is one of those things too, where sometimes we'll see a mismatch and sometimes we'll see an absence of. So, like, you know, if someone has a really strong emotion, again, there's always exceptions. But think about any time that you've had a really big emotion, it typically lives somewhere in the body. Maybe it's maybe it's your throat feeling like it's closing up. Maybe it feels like tightness in your chest. Maybe there are situations where you want to make yourself appear bigger or smaller, or you know, you're you're clenching your fists or you're clenching your jaw, or other situations if they're lighter, like where you would expect to smile, or you would expect someone to to lean back and be relaxed. So when you're using dialogue to convey emotion, which you should, then think about how facial expression, think about how body language, think about how movement, what someone is doing while they're saying that, can actually help to support that emotion so that you don't have to say he was angry. If he's slamming doors and throwing things, it becomes pretty obvious that that's the emotion. And that can make actually your dialogue feel more realistic. Because if somebody walks into a room and slams a door and says something, we're automatically gonna hear it in our head as angry. But if they walk in and close the door quietly and sit proper and fold their hands and say that same line of dialogue, it's probably gonna be missed, it's gonna be interpreted in a very different way. And I think this is a place where you can play with that contrast, as you mentioned, because for some characters, if they got very quiet, there would be that would be a time, uh-oh. You would know. Um, but then there's other work that has to be done in order to establish either a reflection through another character to tell the reader that this quiet means danger, or we have to have set the foundation throughout the book so that we see this pattern of behavior. So we know that when they get quiet, it means, you know, maybe they're angry or it means they're afraid or whatever. So, yeah, I mean, I I really challenge you as writers, when you're writing dialogue and there's a strong emotion that you're trying to convey, rather than leaning into telling, you know, he was angry, she was sad, you know, he was confused. Think about where that emotion lives in the body and think about how if somebody, like if you were to turn the sound off on a TV show and watch a dialogue happen, can you tell what emotion is being conveyed through facial expression, through body language, through movement and things that they're doing? Um yeah. I love that advice. Yeah, I mean, it's so you're right. It is funny sometimes when you see a disconnect between what someone is doing with their body and the dialogue. And I'm like, this it changes everything in a scene, or it can if it's not done effectively.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

It does. And I mean, I think it can be a great vehicle for us revealing that a character is insincere, for example. But if you don't want a character to come across as insincere, don't have them roll their eyes when they say, I love you. If they really seriously mean it, they're not gonna roll their eyes. Or if they're not frustrated yet, they love the person, the body language is going to be different. So this is one, and we'll talk about this again later, where you can lean into expectations when they align, when they're accurate, and also you can play with our expectations because we do have expectations about body language, about movement, and about the words that go alongside. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

I think romance probably does this play really well that immediately I'm thinking about, and don't come for me because I know there are purists out there, but like my favorite version of Pride and Prejudice is the 1995 version. Um, and there's this scene where Elizabeth is standing out in this gazebo and it's pouring rain, and Darcy comes and confesses his love to her, and she, of course, rebukes him. And then there's this one moment where he leans in and you just feel this electric charge between them, and it almost looks like he's gonna kiss her. Like because you know he's so infatuated, but he basically leans in and then delivers this. Well, I'm so sorry I took up so much of your time, and then walks away, and she's kind of left breathless and not really sure what she's feeling. I mean, and so that's a place where you can play with that body language, right? As as if I didn't know the story, if I'd have been watching that scene, I would have anticipated that he was gonna lean in and they were like a modern take would have been they would have like started making out, but that's not what happened. He leaned in and was very kind, like it was this really emotionally charged moment that took a left turn and it was so hugely impactful. So, anyhow, we could we could probably find a million scenes like this. So just be really conscious of how you use facial expression and body language and movement with your dialogue. It's a way to show the emotions versus telling them, right? And then kind of hand in hand with this too is thinking about the length of your dialogue. Um so I see this often, you know, you've got this big tense moment, a battle scene, and characters are having these long conversations about things. And I'm like, really? Like there's bombs going off, people are dying everywhere, and we're just gonna pause right in the middle and have this really beautiful, correctly composed um conversation. There's a mismatch there, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Have you ever seen a situation like this? Yes. Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. That you because it's it's we talked about mismatch of word spoken and body language. Now we're kind of thinking about mismatch of scenario and word spoken. And when you think about a battle scene, you think about high-pace, high intensity, high stakes. There isn't time to slow down and wax poetic about the sky on this harrowing day on the field. And there's not time to necessarily ask questions. Battle scenes are a time to act, they're an action scene. So you might see actions take precedence over words. Right. And I mean, battle scenes also make me think about people's different roles in a battle. So, for example, a leader, unless you are conveying a very nervous or inexperienced leader, is not going to ask questions in the heat of the battle. They're going to issue commands, move forward, retreat, or you know, whatever it is. Right. So absolutely, the there's a time and a place.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

There is a time and a place. I mean, I also think like a like an emergency room would also be kind of a high-tense situation unless it happened to be in this low, you know, between patients. At the same time, if we kind of flip that, if you have your characters going like on a romantic date and they're like having a picnic in this beautiful park and everything is wonderful, and you have one of your characters ask the other one a question and they're answering in one-word answers, that automatically is gonna convey either someone's nervous, they don't want to be there, like, right? So again, not only thinking about how someone looks and where that emotion lives in their body, but think about the delivery based on setting, based on tension in the scene. Typically, the higher the tension, the shorter the sentences, the shorter and clippier the responses. Um, when a scene is low tension, um, then we have more time. And that's, I mean, that's real life. That is one of those situations where I think we can think about real life and apply it to our writing. Totally.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Yeah. And do your characters want to be talking to each other? Do they have the time to talk to each other? Do they have the bandwidth to talk to each other? And, you know, you could have characters who love each other and who are both stressed. And so their conversation is short and clipped.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

But you're gonna show, I'm sure, in other conversations, those more flowing and long conversations to show the connection between those characters.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Yeah. And then again, my mind immediately goes to like, well, what's the exception? Of course, there's gonna be so if you have a character who maybe doesn't like to talk, obviously they are gonna maybe they only answer in one and two word answers all the time. And then as a writer, you're gonna have to use body language, you're gonna have to use facial expression, you're gonna have to use the set, even the setting around them to help characterize how that response is given or how that that dialogue is given, and or on the other side, how it's received.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

This next one is very technical. And it is the new speaker slash actor equals new line. Again, there's going to be an exception, but for the most part, this is gonna be just boom, boom, boom, go for it. When you have a new character speak a line of dialogue, that dialogue is going to go on the next line. Likewise, if you have a new or a different character than whoever was just speaking, do something, you know, pick up a dish and dry it off and then put it away, that is also a new line. Right.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, and the reason we do this is like you can almost think of a new line kind of like um a shift of the camera. We want to, and this is it's really for clarity, right? So if you have one speaker talking and then someone gives a response, does a couple of things. One, it shifts the reader's focus to a new line and it automatically lets them know that someone else now is speaking. Um, and and if you do this really well, you can actually lose a lot of uh dialogue tags. Often, you know, I was taught when I was kind of studying writing that the best dialogue can can happen with zero dialogue tags. And why? Because we're used to people talking back and forth. And the way that you can show, you know, I say something, they say something, is through a new line. Um, it just makes it easier for us to understand who's talking. Um, it shifts kind of that camera angle a little bit from one person who says something to the other person who replies. Um, and it really just does provide a tremendous amount of clarity. Um I'm I'm never confused if you put it on a new line of who responds. Now, the exception to this is if you have more than two speakers. Obviously, then if if you've got multiple people participating in a conversation, it becomes much more difficult because it's not just a back and forth. It's it's it's rotating between different people. And there's a couple of different ways that I think you can handle that effectively. One, obviously, dialogue tags. You can also use action tags so that every other line isn't he said, she said, they said, everybody said, right? Right. Um, the other thing you can do is think about how to structure your dialogue so that you can have maybe two speakers who are kind of your focus for a moment and then add in a third character who jumps into it and added either a dialogue or um an action tag. And now we've shifted, we've shifted to this other person. And then so it's about controlling where the focus is. Um, and not every situation is gonna allow you to do that. Some sit some scenes you're just gonna have to have dialogue tags because you've got so many people talking, and it's the only way to keep things straight.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

That's true. Um, yeah. I've I've seen often that writers like to group things that go together with each other. Right. And so that can mean that if there's a rapid-fire conversation with a really quick back and forth, people will have the he said, she said, we said all in one paragraph, almost as a way to convey the quickness and the closeness of the conversation. I think that that actually has the opposite effect than what's intended, because we can, as readers, we can get muddled trying to differentiate, okay, when did that person's speech actually stop and when did the next person pick up?

SPEAKER_01 24:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

So that new line, it just it I know it separates out the lines, but it actually puts them together in a stronger way where our eyes, even just our actual eyeballs, right, can navigate shorter lines.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

And shorter lines are gonna be interpreted as delivered um quicker. And sometimes it's one of those things like it's gonna look weird. You know, if you if you tend to be a writer who writes longer um paragraphs or longer sentences, and then you have a a very clippy um dialogue, it's gonna look weird on the page because you're gonna have a new line and some and that line may be very short.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Right. And it's I mean, it's gonna help your reader read that with the same speed that the conversation is happening. And if you tend to have longer, denser paragraphs, it's going to be a really interesting signal to the reader, this is happening at a different pace. Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

So I think for me, the biggest, the quickest tip to fix this problem is again, think about where is your camera focused. So every time the camera focuses on a new face or a new body, it should be a new, a new line. And that includes even if you have in like if you switch to like an animal making a movement, or if you focus on an inanimate object where you're adding movement. So like if you switch to a line where it says the sky, you know, opened up and that that is technically the sky is a new actor. It's moving the camera from the face maybe of a speaker up to the sky. So anytime that camera moves, it should be a new line.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Beautifully said. I I that that camera connection, that's really helpful for me as well to think about.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Yeah. All right. So on to what is this? I think this is our third or fourth, fourth thing that we see often. Um, and this one, again, it's a little bit um subjective, but uh when we talk about accents and dialect in dialogue, this is a big one. It is, you know, and and there is no, again, because fiction is is a business of exceptions, there's no hard and fast rule here. For me as an editor, I t this is typically the rule that I use. If as a reader, I have to read it out loud in order to understand what it is that's being conveyed, then it's probably gone a little bit too thick because anytime we have to go back and reread something, or even risk that the reader doesn't understand what it is we've written, we've now pulled that reader out of the story. They've stopped reading forward. And every time that happens, there's a risk that they won't, that they'll just stop reading. Or they'll skip over it and miss it. Right. And I hear a lot of people like, but this is how the character sounds. Okay. Got it. So how can you kind of thread the needle? How can you find a happy medium so that you're sure that the reader can still understand what it is you're trying to say, but still have that flavor of a particular dialect or accent? Definitely.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Yeah, it's it's it's a less is more approach. We we would say pick one to two things. And again, there are always exceptions to that, but pick one to two maybe key words or phrases that your character has that lets us hear the accent or understand the dialect. And also your readers are gonna fill in in their minds as they read. If you've given them a little bit, they're gonna hopefully hear the whole voice in the accent that you want. So, you know, Southern American accent comes to mind pretty quickly for both of us. Um so, for example, if you have a character who has a southern accent, have them say y'all and mama. They don't have to say every single word. You do not have to spell out every single word in their accent or drop G's off of I and G words in every single word to give us some color and some flavor. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

I mean, because if you start off a sentence with y'all, I'm automatically gonna hear the rest of that sentence, probably with some kind of southern twang. Like I'm a I'm an American Idol fan. And so, like one of the judges, he always says, Oh, you're a singer. And I always in my head, I always laugh, not a singer, a singer, you're a singer. And I always, my husband and I always kind of chuckle about that. Now, you know, if that was a word that your character used often, that might be one of the words that you use. But if I heard a sentence, y'all, I am happy to introduce this singer, I'm I'm gonna hear singer in my head, even though it's written singer in the book. So yeah, it is one of those things where you sometimes less is more. And then think about how you can use setting, how you can use action. Um, you know, for example, if a character comes in in a cowboy hat and boots, I'm probably, unless you do the work to convince me otherwise, going to automatically assume that maybe he sounds a little southern, a little cowboy, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:15

This is our other one where you either lean into assumptions and expectations if they are accurate for your character, or you play off of them and lean against them and subvert them and mess with them if they are not accurate for your character. So Veronica's got the cowboy hat and boots character walking in, strolling in. We are going to expect some kind of twang to his accent. All right. What if this character is British? He starts to speak in the Queen's English. It's funny, it reveals something about this character, it's intriguing, it plays against our expectations. Right. On the other hand, a different cowboy-esque character might walk in or saunter in. Howdy all, and we hear his voice from then on.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Right. So, and it is one of those things too. I think once you establish it, I've seen writers that will often use a technique where the first time someone says something, they'll specifically mention, you know, his southern draw made me made me smile. Or like, um, maybe somebody has a French accent in it, and that character might say, Oh, I thought about the summer I spent in France when I was, you know, a teenager. That's he sounded just like the people in the street there or whatever. So you can give the reader a little bit of a hint if you're worried that either you don't want to write in dialect or you've done it, but you want to make really sure that they're hearing that character the way you want to. So you can give them a little bit of exposition to establish that. But then once you've done it, kind of let it go. Maybe mention it a couple of times in the beginning. But then, but I wouldn't expect at the end of the book, if we have a character who has an accent, for it to constantly be like remind us that this character has an accent. Trust establish in the beginning and then trust that the reader will continue to hear that character the way you want them to through the rest of the book.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Well, also think about how we tend to interact with and hear other people's voices. Your first impression, that's the time where you're going, oh, all right, I gotta pay attention because this person is maybe slightly difficult for me to understand, or they're using new vocabulary that I haven't heard that comes from their dialect. I got to listen carefully. That's when your character might also have some exposition about, oh, this French accent is it's it's beautiful, it's sensual, or you know, whatever it is that your character is perceiving. As you get to know that person, as you have more conversations with them in real life, you understand their verbal patterns, how they speak, what kind of words they use.

unknown 32:47

Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

Same can be true for your POV character. They're gonna have a stronger grasp on how characters that they interact with frequently speak. We don't always have to be, it is a pet peeve of mine when an author is continuously reintroducing the Spanish flair of her accent. I'm like, I yes, I remember the basic information about this character. Let them let them speak and be the person that they are. Stop reminding me that.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Right. You know, and one thing I do also kind of want to add to this one too is sometimes you also have to consider your audience. So, like, for example, I have a client right now who is Scottish and he writes, he does have some dialect in his book for certain characters. And I and I will admit, when I first started working with him, I had I struggled a little bit more, you know, to to refine my uncultured American ear to be able to read it and hear what was what was being conveyed. Now, the more we work together, the better I've gotten at it. And I actually can now read it much faster and hear it in my head really well. So, um, but consider your audience. So, like if if you are, for example, writing in the UK, don't but you but your intent is to market heavily in the US, then it is something that you may want to think about. Um, how will that dialect be able to reach the reader? Is it going to turn that reader off? Now that's not to say that you shouldn't write the way that you want to, but it is something to consider. Um, just based on my experience, it is something to consider who your audience is and how you write. If if your audience is really predominantly like in your local area and everyone speaks that way, then they're going to expect to see that dialect. And they're used to reading it, they're used to hearing it, and so they're going to be no, no harm, no foul. But if you want to market that book somewhere else, you may need to take a little bit more time or spend a little bit more thought about how you can make sure that even though it sounds and looks right to you, that other readers are going to be able to receive it in the same way.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

So the next thing to talk about um what goes along with dialogue? Our little dialogue and action tags. Those are our friends, but they can be a little bit of a pain point for people. How many of them to use, what words to use for them.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

If you've been in writing communities, you've probably heard this for a while. Said disappears. Um, it's an easy one to often I think we use it almost like um, almost like a breath beat, because it just creates a rhythm to the sentence, but it doesn't really add very much, right? It it dissolves away. And often that's what we want to have happen, right? We don't want to focus on the fact that he said it, then she said it, then he said it. We just want to hear the dialogue because it's already playing in our head, right? But there are times when using a more distinct dialogue tag can be very effective.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

I think so. Especially if your go-to is said and that's your fallback, something different is going to signal to the reader, oh, this is a serious conversation, or oh, this character is very happy. Um, scream, whisper, mumble, those are some good ones that they have a variation, but and we don't have to think about them too much.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Everyone pretty much knows what it sounds like when somebody's screaming at you, when they whisper, um, when they mumble something. We don't have to think too hard about what that would actually sound like. However, however, if we start to start to use what I call much more exotic um dialogue tags, that can create, again, one of those moments where a reader's gonna stop and be like, what does that actually sound like? I think um growled you can probably get away with. That one is is fairly um common. Um, someone could groan something potentially occasionally, it's okay to draw emphasis. But if it's every other line is some new dialogue tag, that's gonna start detracting from the actual dialogue.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Yes, yes. You don't need your your thesaurus. That's a tricky word to say. I wish there was a different word for it. Um, you don't need your thesaurus to write dialogue tags. You don't need to have characters who are like a group of banshees like howling and screeching in the night all the time, unless your characters are truly a group of banshees howling and screeching. Right.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Um the question is if they're talking to themselves, do they actually hear themselves howling and screeching, or is it just normal conversation? Is it they're just they're just chatting. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

So there's also the possibility that your dialogue tag might create a slight physical impossibility. So laugh, right, you know, she laughed her response. Um maybe can you laugh and talk at the exact same time? I don't know. What about sighing a response? Can you sigh and speak at the exact same time? So you can get into a little bit of, and this would be someone who's nitpicking, but you could get into a little bit of, wait, right. Did she do that at the same time as she talked?

SPEAKER_01 38:09

It's things like, can you gurgle a response? It gets a little tricky. And see, even here is we're kind of pausing. Could could we do that? If your reader is stopping to think about, well, what would that actually be? Can you how do how do you gurgle a response? You've now pulled them out of the story. So have fun with dialogue tags, but don't get too fancy. And if you're gonna pull out one of those million-dollar dialogue tags, make it count and and back up to kind of some of our other things we've talked about. Use think about how you can use body language and facial expression and movement in the setting to help show that can often be more effective than a million-dollar dialogue tag. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

And I also think about dialogue tags that have adverbs added to them. So you know, she whispered flirtatiously. Okay, well, what's she doing? If first of all, if the words spoken themselves, hey big boy, or whatever, right, flirtatious, we're gonna hear it in a flirtatious manner. Second of all, flirting comes with body language. Does she lean in? Is she twisting her hair in her fingers? Right. Maybe show us that instead of the adverb flirtatiously.

SPEAKER_01 39:26

So it's showing us again versus telling us how they delivered it. And again, there's going to be exceptions. Action tags can be really, really impactful. Again, because they show us the emotion through body and through movement, which for me is almost it, it's it's the same way if you're watching a television show, body language, facial expression, and what they are doing with their setting is telling you everything you need to know about their emotion. They never we don't have that, that, that um addition on a television screen that says, oh, they said that, you know, quietly, or they said that, you know, lovingly. We have to see how, how it's conveyed through tone. And because we don't have this that easy visual in writing, we have to think about again, where is the body, what is the body doing? How can we understand that emotion without it actually being said?

SPEAKER_00 40:20

Well, it's it's also the same in real life conversations because people don't always come out and say, I'm having a really hard day today, and my focus isn't good, so I might not, you know, respond very well.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

Sometimes people do say that, some people don't. And but we can feel based on their body language, based on their response time, the length of a response. We can tell, oh, this person's not having a good day, they're tired, they're stressed, they need some space, how can I help? You know, you you pick up on those things. You can allow your readers to do that same picking up on. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

And I often have this conversation with writers, and it really does apply to dialogue. Um, you have to trust that the reader is going to pick up what you are broadcasting. If you have done your job as a writer and you've utilized body language and you've utilized facial expression and you've utilized setting and tone and mood, they are going to hear the emotion that you want them to hear. If you haven't done all of that work, then that's where we tend to feel like we have to tell them, well, this is how it's being said, this is how I want you to receive this. But if you've done all the good stuff to set this up, then you have to trust that they are going to receive it the way that you intended. And this is one of those things that it's if you find yourself getting to that place for when you're ready for beta readers. This is one of those, if you're not sure about yourself, if there's a scene where you're not sure that the emotion is coming through, but you don't want to have to say he was angry. This is one of those questions you can ask your beta readers or ask another writer to read that scene. What do you feel when you read this? And the next one is when we get into internal dialogue or thought. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

Yeah. So this is place the thought into the story versus add a dialogue tag along the lines of they said to themselves. Or they thought. Or they they they thought to themselves, they wondered, they pondered in their minds. Anything that sort of cushions a thought and almost transforms it into a bit of dialogue, it's inner dialogue though.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

So our our consensus was that modern fiction tends to use italics, tends to place a character's thoughts outside of quotation marks and oftentimes not accompanied by a thought tag, if you will. Right.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

Right. In the same way that a new line helps the reader to identify that there's a new speaker, a new actor, when we use italics, modern readers understand that it means thought or internal dialogue.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Right. And another thing with internal dialogue is that you don't want to turn into an as you know, Bob, or as you know, me, myself, and I, with your character's inner dialogue, because we know what we know. Our characters know what they already know. They might not preface their thoughts with, okay, here's where this thought is coming from, unless that's the kind of thinker that they are and that's important to their character. Um, but we tend to know what we know, and we don't tend to preface our inner dialogue with a whole bunch of the whys and the wherefores.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

Right. And when we look at, you know, the the thoughts that are being put into italics, be careful not to confuse internal dialogue with internal narrative, which especially if you are using uh a close third person or first person POV, you can you can use exposition and internal narrative to do a lot of work, but we don't Tend to think to ourselves these things. So, for example, um, let's say you have a character who has stolen a kid's ice cream cone. Their internal thought to themselves might be like, I'm such a jerk. Like that sounds like a very natural thing that we would say to ourselves. What we wouldn't say is, I'm such a jerk for stealing that kid's ice cream cone and kicking his dog. Like we just, I'm sorry, don't come for me. It's just a book. It's not real. Okay, okay, good. Yeah. This this kid needs to learn a lesson. Right. So that's where we've kind of switched over into this, as you know, Bob, like we've introduced information here, but we would never say that to ourselves. But you could easily add some narration in there before things like, um, let's say it's written in first person. You know, I had taken the kid's ice cream cone and kicked his dog and I felt bad about it. And then the next line could be like, I hate myself. That's that's in italics. That's the internal dialogue. It is not the internal thought process. That you can use a different voice, use exposition, use narrative, but we wouldn't say it to ourselves. So that's what we're talking about when you don't want to do that, as you know, Bob, in your thoughts. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Okay. Well, it's kind of it's kind of a showing versus telling. Sometimes we ruminate and we do recount the whole thing that happened in our heads back to ourselves. Right. Think about though maybe is it worth having a scene that shows the kid take the ice cream and kick the dog? Yeah. And then showing us those inner thoughts, not showing us, I hate myself. And the reason that I hate myself is pertaining to the incident which occurred earlier this afternoon when I was unkind to another fellow child and stole his ice cream color. Show us the main event that happened and then let your character think.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Right. Yeah. So really pay attention to the the the specific internal dialogue. Is it something you would actually say to yourself? Or are you just introducing information because you want the reader to know?

SPEAKER_00 46:05

Our last one is short. It's short and sweet. Uh-huh. It is, it's a little, it's a little thing that we pick up on sometimes. And it's characters overusing each other's names in conversations. Once we've entered into a conversation, I mean, like, you know, real life, we don't tend to call people by their name each and every line, unless we have to, unless it's for emphasis. And so your your characters also don't need to say, well, as you know, Bob, and Bob, the sun is shining today.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

I get it. Sometimes we're writing in our in our mind, we want there to be emphasis, or we just we hear a certain rhythm, and so we just automatically put that name in there. But it it kind of comes out as a little melodramatic sometimes. Like when I think about conversations, you might start a conversation, hey Anna, how are you doing today? But then if I if I reuse your name, it's usually because either I'm trying to get your attention or I'm frustrated or I'm angry. I think most of us have had that experience. Like, if our mom called us anything other than sweetie or our or our nickname, if they used our real name, we've done something, right? This is trying to draw attention, or it's trying to get our attention. So just be really cognizant of that. Again, this is something you can watch TV shows or you can just watch dialogue in real life. How often do you actually repeat someone's name?

SPEAKER_00 47:35

Typically, not very often. I think there is a use for people's names in conversation, especially if you feel yourself writing a ton of dialogue tags and you need a little break from it. If it makes sense for your character to say the other person's name, that puts you back into the pattern of Roger said, then Bob said, then Roger. It can be. It could do that. That's but that's not the that's not what we would recommend leaning on.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

Right. Again, so like it's an we're never saying that you can't do these things. Sometimes for rhythm, sometimes for clarity, it you you do want to use a name. But if it's if you find yourself using names back and forth a lot, then it's something to kind of pay attention attention to. Do I actually need it there? Am I actually trying to create emphasis and draw attention to the fact, like, is there emotion, is there an emotion that I'm trying to convey here that maybe I could lean on some other tools, body language, facial expression, movement using the setting, right? What are the other tools that I could use here rather than just continuing to repeat their name? It starts to become a distraction, I think, for some readers.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

I think it can. I think it's also possible maybe to have a character who does repeat names very frequently. And it's actually maybe meant to be something that grates on the other characters around them and even grates on the reader. Again, you'll probably use it in moderation, but enough to develop it as sort of a quirk or a habit that a writer might have. A great.

SPEAKER_01 49:08

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's it, y'all. I mean, again, I feel like we're a broken record, but there are always going to be exceptions. But if you are looking to do some kind of self-editing, if you finish a manuscript or a short story and, you know, maybe you take a little break from it and you want to come back and look at it with some fresh eyes, and you're worried that maybe your dialogue isn't as strong as it could be, or you want to make sure that it's as good as it can be, these are some things that you could look through to see if you can improve, see if you can spot any of these mistakes in the dialogue that you've written.

SPEAKER_00 49:42

Absolutely. I think we could probably summarize the whole episode with a line of as you know, Bob dialogue, which is as you know, Bob, there are exceptions. Always. But here's our two cents. And hopefully it helps you work on some self-editing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

So if you guys have any questions about dialogue, if you've got a situation where you're not sure what to do, um, drop us a comment, let us know, and we'll talk about it. We'll maybe we'll give you an answer. We'll give you a shout-out and give you an answer on how we would handle it. This has been X Right Z with Veronica and Anna.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Thank you for listening. Until next time.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

Keep reading and happy writing.