Natural Dialogue, the Heart of Any Great Story

Greetings hobbyists, and welcome the seventh writing guide in this series. This is also your last intermediate creative writing assignment. You're all doing a fine job of killing people and hiding the bodies, and of tracking down the killers and getting interviews with them. But now we need to talk about a real challenge. In this writing guide, we need to discuss the tricky balancing act that is natural dialogue.

Imagine that you've sent off your story to a friend for review, and the first ding you get hit with in the critique is, "The dialogue feels forced and unnatural." You might not really react this way, but for a moment pretend that you shake your fist and say, "How dare they say that dialogue felt forced! I had to work on it for six hours just to make the conversation fit all of my talking points!"

And that's where you're screwing up. Think back to the lesson on interviewing your killer, when I advised you to loosen up and let your killer ramble. You need to do this same kind of mental exercise for every conversation. More importantly, you need to stop talking through your characters, and let them do the talking.

This is going to seem confusing at first, because you may want to believe that in some small way, every character is you. Well, stop that. Seriously, make some of the characters models of your friends and rivals.

Let's expand on that a bit. Think of any conversation with your friends. Did you ever stay on one topic, never wandering or straying into something irrelevant? No, of course not. You might want to talk all day about one topic, but something you say will make your friend bring up a tangent, and then the carefully scripted speech in your head falls apart.

You get even less leeway with a rival, who doesn't want to put up with your crap any longer that they have to. You don't get to monologue or lecture in the real world, unless you're a stand-up comedian or a college professor (or a parent), and even these guys sometimes have to deal with hecklers and unruly students who throw them out of their speechifying. That's what you need to do, throw your characters out of their carefully crafted speeches.

You might hit some of your talking points from one side of the conversation, but you need to imagine that the other character in the scene is one of your friends. Be honest. How long will your friends let you rant before they say "Let's talk about something else," and force you to move on? Answer that question and try to apply it to your fictional conversations.

Don't just sit down and start writing to hit your talking points. Wander around your writing area. Walk while you talk, and act out bits of dialogue between two people. Imitate your friends. Imitate the way that they talk and move, and try to act out their roles. Then, when you're happy that you've got the right line through the conversation, start writing it down.

Now, a caveat to be aware of: you need to think not just about what you're characters are saying, but also what they are doing while they talk. Every few lines of dialogue, you want to break up the talking with some actions.

This isn't just an arbitrary thing that I'm making up to annoy you. Readers have a tendency to let their eyes wander if a conversation drags on too long without any actions. People need to have a mental image of who is talking, and what they are doing while they talk. If they don't have that, they begin searching for where the break in the conversations occur, often skipping over half of your carefully constructed talking points without seeing them at all.

During my early writing efforts, one of my biggest frustrations was having a test reader say, "You didn't really answer this question." I would tell them I did, and then I would flip to the exact point in the dialogue where I'd answered their question. Then they would read it, and say, "Oh...I didn't read that part."

It's a jaw dropping moment, and one that may make you ask, "How can someone read something, but not read all of it?"

But the fault wasn't theirs. It was mine, for writing unnatural dialogue. And if you get hit with a lot of complaints about "missing information" that isn't really missing, then you need to consider revising your approach to dialogue too, don't you?

Balancing actions to dialogue is just as tricky as making dialogue sound natural, and to write a successful story, you need to satisfy both of these requirements. So, your writing assignment this time will be a full page, and it can be a conversation between whichever characters you like. Maybe you have the killer talking to a gun dealer. Maybe you have the cop talking to a suspect, or to their spouse. It doesn't really matter, so long as you focus on making the dialogue sound natural, and you work on creating a clear chain of actions for both participants in the conversation.

The only other thing you want to keep in mind is, somehow, this conversation has to fit into your story already in progress. So try to avoid non sequitur conversations. If you can't make a conversation fit your story, then it's probably not the right line through the conversation, and you need to try again. Anything over two pages is also a failing attempt. Sure, it may sound brilliant to you, but odds are good that readers will start skipping stuff.

When you finish your page, read it out loud, and again, act out the roles, even mimicking the actions of your cast as you read them out. Get into the heads of your characters and make them real. If you strive to achieve this with every conversation, I can promise you that instead of reading, "The dialogue feels forced and unnatural," you'll see, "The characters really come to life in your work!"

And after all, that is your goal as a fiction writer of any skill level, to breathe life into what would otherwise be a flat imitation of yourself. Good luck with those natural conversations. Tune in next time for the first of two final advanced lessons: the short story.