Fiction-Writing Boot Camp: How to Write Natural, Believable Dialogue

1. Intro: Welcome back to Fiction Writing Boot Camp With me, Max, or you might know my pen name, Emma Tate. Today we're going to be talking about dialogue. Over the course of this class, you're going to learn how to write realistic, believable dialogue that fits with the general vibe of your story very quickly. My credentials, I'm an anthropologist, which means that I have a whole college degree in observing people, interacting and talking, and listening to speech patterns. I have written multiple ethnographies, each of which examines conversations and speech patterns. I've picked up a lot which has influenced my fiction writing so, so much. Speaking of which I wrote, I read way more than the average human should. I've been part of many, many playwriting and fiction writing workshops, all of which centered almost entirely on dialogue. If I'm being honest, I read and write a lot of fan fiction, a lot of romcoms. I watch a lot of really soap television. All of that gives me a lot of insight on what not to do. I know what's good and what's bad, because I'm willing to consume both. I have done heavy lifting and compiled a whole course made up of how to write great dialogue, as well as listed out all of the pitfalls for you to avoid. Over the course of this class, you will learn how to write dialogue that is true to the characters who are speaking it. To develop characteristics and idiosyncrasies that make sense for your characters and for the world that they inhabit. Make it so that your readers will know who is speaking, even if the line is introduced without labeling the speaker. It's the power of dialogue. We also go through common mistakes, which I will lovingly call fanfictionisms or CW. Pretty little liarsisms. You'll learn how to juggle many character voices in one scene, ensuring that nobody gets lost in the shuffle. How to write internal dialogue or writing from multiple perspectives. In the same work, your final project will have you utilizing all of the techniques and knowledge that you're going to pick up over the course of this class. By the end of it, you'll have a full scene with well written dialogue that you can use in your work in progress or use as a prompt to start a new project. Thank you for watching. Let's get into it. 2. Writing Character And Why It's Important to Dialogue: First things first, let's talk character. The first thing you're going to do is build a mantra for each character out of the following questions. This is really good when you need to get to know a character very quickly. Maybe it's the first time that you're writing from their point of view. Maybe it's the first time you've ever started working with this character. To begin with, you're going to build this mantra out of these questions. One, what does this character fear? Two, what does this character want? Three, what is this character willing to do to get what they want? And does it involve facing number one? Then this is something that Victoria Schwab does, which I really like. You take an object that represents that character and you build that into how you write about them and how you define their movement. One of the reasons why I think character is a really good first focus. You can't write dialogue until you have a grasp on who is saying something like always. This will sound familiar to you if you've taken more of my classes, you have to think through your question words. Who is speaking and to whom. What are they trying to communicate? Why are they saying what they're saying, Where are they? And what external circumstances surround this conversation? When does this conversation take place in the general scheme of the plot? How do they go about communication in general? You can break that down to verbal, non verbal. Is there touching? Are there gestures? Then this is really important. How do you want to describe that? I like to think of this as becoming a simple viewer, like you're watching the scene play out on TV, or like you're explaining it to somebody who's visually impaired. Once you know who you're writing, then you have a much better sense of what they're going to say. It's easier to know what's going to come out of a character's mouth if you have an idea of what they want, what they're willing to do to get what they want, and what is stopping them from having it. Because those things sound an awful lot like incitement action, reasoning, why all of which add up to plot those things make up who this character is, why they are, where they are, and what they're trying to do. Also known as a driving force, which is central to knowing how they're going to move in your story. Let's go back to the bit that I'm borrowing from V Schwab here, which is the physical object. The reason why I like that and have started implementing it into my own writing is that it's a simple, easy way to keep track of your characters. And it's a really neat way to inspire a little bit of foreshadowing. At least for me, it helps keep me from using the word said too much. Let's look at an example. You could say, I'm nervous, Marjorie said. Or alternatively, you could write, Marjorie fiddled with the buttons at the wrist of her oversized shirt. I have a bad feeling about this in a line. All by itself, you still know that Marjorie is talking. It works like a dialogue tag, without having to really be one. You get this really great visual representation of Marjorie as an oversized shirt with too many buttons. Which doesn't do anything helpful for you as a one off. But if you keep having that imagery repeat through the story, it gives you a really good sense of where Marjorie is. Maybe at the beginning of the story, she is an oversized shirt with too many buttons. At the end, you're really representing her with something that is much more tailored and structured as a garment goes. Representing her with the garment without having to do too much of that heavy lifting. Obviously, none of this is necessary. But this exercise, building that mantra and adding the physical characteristic, is one that I've always found helpful in figuring out how to set up the way that characters operate in any given space, or whether they're alone or in a group. I think it's really great for narration, particularly if your narrator is unreliable. Because what is narration, if not a conversation between the narrator and the reader? As always, I've got some examples of how to do this really well. Wab is my go to for looking at character and writing characters almost as a character study rather than a novel. The Shades of Magic Series does this particularly well. I also really like to point at Rainbow Raul, particularly Fan girl. Above all, Case Mcquieston handles dialogue through representation of character brilliantly. And everybody should look at their work for more examples of that. 3. Accents, Part 1: Worldbuilding: Let's talk about accents, how they work, how you represent them. We're going to talk about fantasy, world building first. As a teacher, I would love it if everybody sticks around for this portion, but if you're like exceptionally dedicated to your work as a contemporary Rom com writer or a hardcore nonfiction person, you could probably skip to the next lesson. I'll be okay, It's fine if what you're interested in is really just how to represent accents or vocal idiosyncrasies on the page. This bit dives a little bit deeper into what it is to have an accent and why that's important to world building. I'm going to really pull on that anthropology degree for this. If you think that that's interesting, please by all means stick around. The reason I want to focus really hard on this is because very few things bother me in fantasy land as much as, oh, hey, they're dumb, make them southern, they're a thief, great cockney elf, British like, come on, Get more creative than that. I think a better question is why does this character speak the way that they do? For example, here in the United States, it's because European colonizers came and settled in various places. Here in the South, the accents never really left because the towns were significantly smaller. Travel between them was harder. A lot of those accents never really modernized in the same way. There have been studies done where a record containing an Appalachian dialect was sped up, it was understood by the audience as British. Likewise, one where a British accent, also speaking English, was played very, very slowly. It was understood by Americans from the South as intrinsically southern. That's how accents work, They evolve and they stick, and they function around the kind of words that people are saying, places that they're learning them from. This is the thing that you have to think about if you want to imply accent and you're building your own world. Did someone colonize someone else? Did they bring an accent with them? Did they bring words or societal organizations with them? How does that play into the way that they interact with the world around them? A few examples here, the word saints, particularly if you're using it as an interjection, immediately tells you that the people that you're dealing with have a religious system with multiple, probably dead important people. You probably need to define what the word St. means as well. The phrase, oh my heck, probably tells you that whoever wrote this piece grew up Mormon, using the name Jesus tells you that the piece of work you're dealing with is Christian or has Christianity in it somehow. Then curse words like the ones that I'm going to put up on the screen here are absolutely ubiquitous. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise, but they are ubiquitous because we consider them polite. Saying them out loud is a societal taboo. That's the thing that you need to be able to write around as well. Harry Potter gives us Merlin's saggy left bulk, which tells us that Merlin is a semi mythological figure, but it is sacrilegious to say something like that about his anatomy, which is why this is being used almost as a curse word. You can do so much. That is legitimately interesting here in terms of interjections, curse words, expressions of reverence. If you just put a little bit of extra thought or effort into your world building to this end, I do think that it's important to remember that you can have a little bit of creative license here. If I'm writing a brand new from scratch piece of fantasy work like right here I wrote this, this is fantasy, then I'm never going to call a French braid French in a piece of fantasy literature. Likewise, I'm not going to use a word like champagne. But that's because for both of those, there are really easy substitutes. The ones that I would argue are stronger descriptions. Instead of a French braid, I could say a complex braid sweeping pieces from the crown of her head into an intricate plot or sparkling wine, sweet and cold on the palette, but warm as it slid down his throat. I think that descriptions, those substitutes, end up allowing for more specificity that fits the world better the more I work with them. That said, I will make substitutions for words like Hell or Jesus Christ as curse. In general, I really like working with some in world things like what constitutes a curse or a bad word, because it tells you so much about what is considered important or taboo in the world. Great examples here for things that I think maybe should have been subbed out in literature. I love Sarah Jams. She gets stars taken off because I refuse to believe that a character in her medieval most women are illiterate. C sections are not available. World is talking about lactic acid in the context of mansplaining a workout to women that I consider a world building fail. If we're talking about how to do it right though, no one does this like Brandon Sanderson or Patrick Office that said, I will give neverwere by Neil Gaiman an honorable mention. And Undone by China Ville an even bigger one, just because they get so creative with it. With every one of those, there's just such clear attention to detail in every step of the world building that makes the dialogue feel natural. And it's because of things like accents, societal taboos, societal pieces of reverence and hierarchy that are lined up and explained to the audience so that it makes sense. 4. Accents, Part 2: Vocal Idiosyncracies and How to Write Them: All right. Accents part two. We're going to talk about vocal idiosyncrasies and accent notation. There's three main ways to do this. Each one of which I'm going to represent with a different author for the purposes of this conversation. The first is the Brian Jock method, which I'm going to call it that because I really love the redwall books. As a kid, most people probably encountered this as the Mark Twain method or trainspotting. If you ever read the redwall books as a kid like I did, then you already know where this is going. The prose, there is always something like 70% dialogue. Even if you don't know who is speaking, you do always know exactly what species of animal character is speaking. Yes, for those who didn't read it, these books are mostly about little woodland animals with their own happy functional society. The reason why he breaks down these accents phonetically for us is so that we have a very solid sense of the demographics in the books. Moles. They tug their snouts like their noses in different scenarios, usually as alternatives to shaking hands or agreeing with someone. It's a polite and courteous gesture. They have all of these really cute little vocal cues like R or boy Oki or burros. Certainly not. Or Tour as it was, but that's TWU, thank you is always thank well. They're consistently villains in the books, but if you have something that is a weasel or a fox or a rat, they're going to communicate with, Get off, turns into Gero, get into Giron, get out, turns into Got. There's a lot of yes and ouches and generally questionable grammar. This isn't really regionally specific, but it does lean into generally low class and uneducated. Has I think they were meant to sound like film typical Royal British Army officers. And looking at it as a historian, I would say specifically bomber pilots, they all sound like they've got this real good British breeding and schooling. But it's really, really over the top. It's lots of Watson good chaps and all pals. I think that the intro to Huckleberry Finn, bouncing back to Mark Twain a little bit here, puts it well in this book, a number of dialects are used to wit the Missouri ***** dialect, the extremist form of the backwoods southwestern dialect, the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four modified varieties of this last, the shadings have not been in a haphazard fashion or by guesswork, but painstakingly and with the trustworthy guidance and support of a personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it, many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. This method, the Brian Jock method, the redwall method, trainspotting, whatever you're going to call it, boils down to giving your reader as close to a perfect phonetic guide to how each word is pronounced as possible, with complete and total utter disregard for how the words should be spelled. This is great if you're trying to show a variety of accents. And if the accent is the point, as Twain puts it, in case your reader might otherwise assume that the characters are supposed to sound alike. This method does keep you from having to say, oh right, he said, in a swaggering Irish rogue, or she sounded southern. But if you are going to do this, I think that you do have to be very familiar with what the dialect you're writing is supposed to sound like. Otherwise your reader may well end up just deeply confused. Regardless of your intentions, you might have been better off just putting it in the dialogue tags or the character introduction after all. The next author that I want to talk about is RF. Kuang who wrote Babble In Babble. Nearly everyone speaks with a thoroughly prim and proper British accent. If they have a regional accent or a foreign accent, it's generally well hidden or immediately relevant to their character's history. In which case our narrator, who is himself foreign but lives in a very prim and proper British society and has adopted those vocalizations, clocks it in the first moment that that character is introduced. And it's usually never mentioned again, but there's a plot reason for it in a book where imperialism features really heavily into the plot. It is advantageous for our main characters, particularly students who are at a school together to sound the same. They're trying to fit in with each other, with the school, with the world around them. Because of that, they're trying to reduce their foreignness most of the time. She also does this with the Poppy Wars Trilogy, where distance from the Capitol City in some ways dictates social class. She doesn't really go into what sounds foreign or low class, She just tells us that our protagonist starts out with a regionalized low class accent, eventually drops it the longer she spends in the Capitol City at this military academy to the point where it is effectively gone. And she vocally blends in with everyone in that Capitol City by the time the first book is done. That's noted by a character from her hometown later on in the series. It's all very neatly done. Everyone sounds alike, which means that you have to pay attention to what they're saying, not how they're saying it to figure out who's who, that leads me to vocal idiosyncrasies. Blake is the best author at this that I can think of hands down. It is 100% bear with me because she started out as a fan fiction author because I don't think that a publisher would have let her get away with some of what she does. And you can see the difference between what she's written under that pen name versus under the other name that she writes with under the name Olive Blake. As a fan fiction author, especially, she can write pages and pages and pages of chapters that take place entirely through dialogue, providing not a single tag to tell her readers who is speaking and when. We would still be able to figure it out because the characters are so well developed that you know exactly who is speaking. Simply because you know exactly what each of them would say. It generally comes down to what they want or what they care about. This does translate towards her more traditionally published works later on as well. The character who's worried about propriety at all times talks about appearances. The character who harbors a secret desire to break away from society and start a fashion line is carrying on a casual little side conversation about hemlines. The character who is hopelessly in love with fashion girl is cheerfully and enthusiastically agreeing with whatever she says every single time and occasionally chiming into another conversation on the other side of the room. The two star crossed lovers are arguing about rules or fate, or destiny. The consistently slightly drunk comic relief friend is in the corner cracking one liners about all of these different conversations and side pieces. By the time this chapter rolls around, we, as the readers know all of this about each of these characters, we can follow the dialogue based solely on the words being spoken. It's brilliant, it's really hard to execute because it relies so hard on knowing who your characters are, equally importantly who they are to one another. It means really sitting there and doing the character work. You have to get to know your characters and get to know their dynamics with one another. But when it's done right, it pays off really, really well. 5. Dialogue Tags: Let's talk about dialogue tags. I think that most of us who have taken creative writing classes have been told at one point or another by a teacher to never use the word said or says, because it begins to feel pedestrian and over used. And there's always a better, more specific word. I'll be honest, I don't think that that is true all of the time. Often said is the word that gets the point across quickly and simply and effectively. It's utilitarian and we can use it, and that's okay. That being said, so to speak, said is not always the most specific. Specificity is almost always our friend. Yes, we can use words like yelled, or shouted, or discussed or whispered, but I think we can do better. Let's go back to the Marjorie example from the character portion of this class. What I said then was, instead of, I'm nervous, Marjorie said you could write, Marjorie fiddled with the buttons at the wrist of her oversized shirt. I have a bad feeling about this all in a line by itself. Like I said before, you still know that Marjorie is talking, talking about her works like a dialogue tag without having to be one. This description gives us a solid visual representation of Marjorie through that object comparison to the oversized shirt. This thing works really well if you have that object comparison. Marjorie is the oversized shirt. But it doesn't have to be If a description of a character doing something is in the same line, functioning as a standalone paragraph, especially as what the character said. Nothing that anyone else is doing is up there. It's pretty clear. You can have a sentence like Ethan shrugged. I don't know what Marjorie is up to. We know Ethan is the one speaking this sentence. And this action tag lets us know that Ethan is vaguely indifferent about it all. And it just works. Or you can say something like the high ruler of all evil, leaned forward, baring his teeth, go do whatever you want. He's not indifferent. We get a very clear visual of what the high ruler of all evil is like. He's a little rude, he's a little teeth forward, generally violent, probably because of the teeth forwardness for the moment is pretending to be indifferent courtesy of those words. But we know from the action that he is only pretending. It's all in the dialogue tags or lack thereof. I would also note that sometimes if you really have your character work done well to the point where you don't need names to identify who is speaking, you can get away with no tags at all. Simply put the dialogue by itself and that really comes down to character. I do think that you can play around with formatting a little bit here. Format and narration really play into the tone of your story. A fantasy book will have longer sentences with so and so roared the leader Ted or brandished. Then a Romcom will. We'll also usually be in third person limited point of view. A Romcom or a romance will be an alternating first person or third person limited point of view. You'll run into more words like smirked and grazed skin and sultry whisper. In general, what I think it comes down to is this, use whatever verb you want. But if you're trying to write with any specificity, one that does not require an adverb, A character can speak softly, but what's the point of that? If they can mumble or mutter, or whisper, or drop their gaze to the floor, a character can say something loudly, but I don't really see the point of that. If instead they can shout or demand or declare. All of this being said, I would avoid trying to shift to vociferated or warbled. If that doesn't fit, just avoid the adverbs. Don't make it way too complicated for yourself and keep your dialogue tag consistent with both your genre and your narrating voice, and you will be absolutely fine. 6. Common Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them): Okay, common mistakes. I promised you guys that we would talk about the what not to do, and here we are. In general, I do refer to these as fan fictionisms just because that's where I've come across. The majority of them, however, many of them have made their way into real books that made their way to real publishers. And actually got published and put out into the world and sold millions of copies. First and foremost, the one that I want to talk about is over expositioning things. The place where this really shows up is real book that sold an awful lot. I like to joke that this was the bulk of my issue with the book Divergent. I have many issues with that book beyond that, but this sometimes works like you have two characters sitting in a kitchen and one says, Tracy, my sister. How long has it been since I last saw you while our parents were divorcing? The character responds. It's been 13 years since we went off to separate countries and totally lost contact. It's been 13 years since I've seen you. In what world are two real human beings saying those words to one another? If that information can be conveyed in literally any other way, do that instead. I love some good exposition through dialogue. I do think that a lot of the time it's a useful tool. Sometimes it is better to just summarize. Another issue that I come across a lot is length of speech. As you're writing, I think it's a good idea to keep an eye on how long your characters are talking. For we as people have a good idea of how long is too long to go, not on. We pick up when we've been going for too long and maybe no one's listening or they're starting to lose interest. Characters don't have the ability to pick up on that unless we tell them to as authors. My suggestion for dealing with this is to read things out loud. You don't have to do the funny voices or anything. But reading it out loud will give you a realistic sense of how much time a paragraph actually takes up. And that gives you a sense of how long your characters have been speaking for. I also think that it's important to keep things consistent for each character. You can look back at all the previous lessons in this class where I've really gone hard about character work and vocal idiosyncrasies. Prim proper characters generally will not break down using the word every other sentence. That's not to say that they can't curse, just make it mean something when they do. Because at that point, if it's out of character, it should pull attention if they make that shift. I like to think of each character's speaking style as a vocal fingerprint. Think really carefully about each character's unique voice and make sure that any departures from their usual ways of speaking are conscious decisions that won't unnecessarily confuse your reader. Formatting. Formatting. Formatting. Formatting. A lot of beginning writers do not know how to format or punctuate their dialogue. The result can be confusing and hard to read. Most of the time, it's customary to start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes. This in turn, helps your reader keep track of who is speaking. If you are worried or concerned or you think that you might have it right, it is always best to double check. Most universities have a free online style guide and they're not that hard to find. Just look up a simple source formatting guide to know how you're supposed to be punctuating and line separating and generally spacing out on a page what you're writing. It just makes the overall product so much more polished and professional. 7. Course Wrap Up and Final Project: It's Project Time. Project Time is my favorite part of every single class that I teach. It's time to take the skills and the thought processes that we've learned over the course of these past six lessons and put them into use. We're going to do the entirety of this exercise using two characters and two characters only. This will keep it relatively simple then you can always go back and repeat all of this for a larger cast of characters. Later on, step one, you're going to fill out the character sheet, which is included in the notes for this. For each of your two characters, you're going to come up with that mantra for each of them, what do they want? What do they fear? What are they willing to do to get what they want? Then you're going to put the characters into any setting that would enable them to meet and have a conversation. That can be a bar, that can be the middle of the woods, that can be a dance at a fancy ball. Then you're going to let them talk, you're going to figure out why are they there? How did they get there? If that's relevant, what do they want and what do they want from each other? How do they feel about each other? You're just going to let the conversation direct itself, let it flow as naturally as you can. If you feel stuck, you can always redirect back to basic questions. Who are they? What do they fear? What do they want? What are they willing to do to get what they want? What's in their way? What does their conversation sound like? You want to challenge yourself even more. You could try to do this as a conversation that your narrator is overhearing from behind a door. Your narrator is not one of those two characters. Maybe your narrator can't see what's going on, which forces you to use no visual tags at all. Or to make this easier on yourself, you could try transcribing a scene from an episode of TV, preferably something that is totally similar to what you're trying to produce in your writing. Maybe don't use One Tree Hill. If what you're working on is 1,000 page long epic fantasy, your plan vibe is less teenagers, love triangles and angst, more hobbits bred and dragons. But you get where I'm going with this. It'll help you practice the skills without necessarily having to commit to a full project. Good luck with the writing. Please, please post the results of your project. I can't wait to see how they turn out by.