Many fiction writers find dialogue hard to write. This is because there is a disconnect between story dialogue and real dialogue; as Fred Stenson says, the “fidelity we seek in dialogue is always an illusion” (Things Feigned or Imagined, Banff Centre Press, 2002). Real dialogue contains pauses, small talk, and rabbit trails, while story dialogue must reveal character.
Dialogue Reveals Personality and Background
Try to consider the types of words your character would use. In one creative writing class, the teacher had the students make a list of twenty of their favourite words. The guys came up with concrete, solid words like “block,” “tractor,” and “wrench,” while the girls came up with softer, mellower words like “flower,” “snowflake,” and “grace.” Take a look at your character’s dialogue, word by word, and consider if that character would actually use a word like that.
The words your characters use can convey much about them and their backgrounds. Dennis E. Hensley, author of How to Write What You Love (Waterbrook Press, 2000), notes that “vocabulary, slang, syntax, grammar, or drawls found in dialogue should reveal a great deal about the person doing the speaking.” This includes the character’s education (high school drop-out or university degree?), background (western Canada or southern United States?), personality (shy or domineering?) and other factors.
Stenson explains, “What is valuable in dialogue, and what makes dialogue so powerful at conveying character, is fidelity and consistency: finding how a particular character sounds and writing that person’s dialogue so that the sound and the other individual flourishes are there.”
Dialogue Reveals Character
In Frank Peretti’s novel Monster (WestBow Press, 2005), one of the main characters has a stutter. She is extremely shy, rather uncertain in unfamiliar situations, and this comes out in her way of talking. By the end of the novel, she loses her stutter. The circumstances that she has gone through have given her confidence and strengthened her character. Her speech impediment thus tells us not only something about her character at the beginning of the story, but also something about what happened to her during the story and how that affected her.
Dialogue Reveals Relationships
Dialogue also gives writers a way to show how characters interact with each other. Best-selling author Penelope Stokes explains that dialogue “puts the relationship between characters squarely out front—showing the interaction rather than telling the reader how the characters respond to one another” (The Complete Guide to Writing & Selling the Christian Novel, Writer’s Digest Books, 1998). A few words of dialogue can convey the tension between a mother and a son or show the devotion between a husband and wife.
By showing the interaction between two people, dialogue also reveals more about those characters’ personalities. Consider the woman who seems extremely sweet and kind—until she’s around her dad. Or maybe a depth of personality is revealed in a man who seems shallow and arrogant, yet calls his mother in a nursing home every evening. Stokes recommends, “Dialogue should be reserved for interchanges that communicate something significant about the characters and their relationship.”
So, as you read fiction and revise your own, focus on what the dialogue reveals about each of the characters and their relationships. Then begin focusing on how dialogue advances the plot.
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