Writing Irresistible Kidlit by Mary Kole

Author:Mary Kole [Kole, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59963-580-4
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

“SAY WHAT?” WRITING COMPLEX DIALOGUE

Just like scene, dialogue must do something. It can’t be talking for the sake of talking. Good dialogue always has layers and subtext. The most important component of dialogue is actually off the page: It’s the Objective of each character as they engage in the scene. If the reader knows what each character wants in the moment—and they should—the scene’s dialogue will take on a lot of complexity.

The word “Hello” gets a completely new shade when I say it to the king I’m about to murder. It transforms again when I’m greeting an ill grandparent. Dialogue reveals character, clarifies Objective and Motivation, and always contains agenda. If you think about your daily interactions, you’ll notice that people don’t usually come out and say what they mean outright. They work around it with different actions and misdirections. The art of dialogue is capturing this on the page.

Just like you don’t want to portray a scene of people engaging in small talk (there’s no agenda or conflict there), you also don’t want to transcribe how people actually speak. If you were to record speech verbatim, you would notice it peppered with “um” and “uh” and other filler words. Dialogue needs to be lifelike—meaning believable—but not an exact transcript of real life. Your job is to take realistic speech to the next level.

Permit me to air a pet peeve here: When you write dialogue, only use speaking verbs. I can’t tell you how many writers make characters “smile” a line, or “laugh” it. Smiling is a nonverbal action! And how do you laugh out an entire sentence? You’d choke! Also, while we’re at it, try only using “said” or “asked” in your speech tags. You might think this woefully unoriginal, but those verbs disappear on the page because readers are so used to them.

It’s those fancy “said” synonyms like “chortled” and “exalted” that are the problem. These take too much attention away from what’s being said, and overusing such thesaurus words marks you as an amateur writer. These verbs convey emotion, and I see them as a lazy cheat, since that’s your dialogue’s job, not the job of your tags. This glares immediately off the page to editors and agents.

When you’re writing dialogue tags, less is more. Don’t use peacock verbs. For the love of all that is good, stop using adverbs, like, “she shouted hysterically.” That’s another amateur mistake because the star of a scene is the dialogue, plain and simple. It must speak for itself. Adverbs in dialogue tags, just like peacock verbs, are a crutch. Don’t go overboard on the action or accompanying gesture. You can’t choreograph every moment of your scene, so don’t even try. Leave gesticulation to your reader’s imagination. Remember that not every line of dialogue needs a tag, especially if your scene contains only two characters.

You’ll see some of our library authors breaking these rules, but that’s because they’re choosing deliberately and using adverbs and colorful verbs sparingly. If your dialogue is

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