Dialogue is a very temperamental animal. If you don’t get it right, you risk spoiling an entire story.
I spend a lot of time eavesdropping on other people’s conversations – and make no apology for it. Take the time to sit in your favourite coffee shop, or better yet, go to the mall. Pick out some interesting looking people and …. listen in! Seriously.
This is not something to do for five or ten minutes. You need to sit and listen intently for as long as possible. I generally order a nice long drink – of hot chocolate! – then take it all in. Usually over a period of an hour or so.
Take note of the way unsuspecting victims – er, people – speak with each other, and also the way they talk to people of other age groups. More often than not, it will differ greatly.
Notice how the forty-something mother of three uses a totally different language to the forty-something professional sitting not far away. And the nineteen year old male, along with his late-teen friends, will have a language all of their own.
People of varying occupations will speak in another ‘language’ too. For instance, lawyers will use legal terminology, whereas police officers have their special lingo.
Don’t let your hairdresser character speak like a police officer, and don’t let your office girl talk like an animal trainer, or a mechanic, and so on. Each occupation, and each character, needs to have their own unique language, just as teenagers do.
This is called ‘talking the talk” and needs to be spot-on to ensure credibility with your stories.
Each one of your characters should be instantly recognisable simply from the words or phrases they use.
Your teenager might say:
“Man, that is sooo cool!”
Whereas a young mother would probably say:
“That’s great!”
A lot of writers get very confused between ‘dialogue’ and ‘internal thoughts’. Let me simplify the concepts for you.
Dialogue is where the character is actually speaking. “Boy it was hot today!” But ‘internal thoughts’ are what the character is thinking. For example: ‘Could it get any hotter?’ These internal thoughts are generally shown in a story – in the published form – as italics.
Your story would thus read as: “Boy it was hot today!” Joe wiped the sweat from his forehead. Could it get any hotter?
When writing dialogue, think seriously about who is speaking, and what ‘language’ they would use. Make sure internal thoughts are also in the language of the character. Getting it wrong could mean the difference between getting published or not.
Cheryl Wright is an award-winning Australian author and freelance journalist. In addition to an array of other projects, she is the owner of the Writer2Writer.com website and the Writer to Writer monthly ezine for writers. She is also the author of a series of ebooks for writers. Her romantic suspense novel “Saving Emma” was released January 2005 by Whiskey Creek Press. Check out Cheryl’s website: http://www.cheryl-wright.com