Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch: When I’m reading submissions, I’m often struck by how quickly awkward or stilted dialogue can derail an otherwise good piece of writing. I probably should be less surprised—writing dialogue is one of the places where I struggle as a writer as well. Writers are, often by nature, thinkers, and this can stand in the way of creating characters who speak like, well, actual people. But writers can (and should) accomplish much more than just rendering natural conversations on the page.
Strong dialogue forwards plot, it demonstrates the nature of relationships, and it also (paradoxically) highlights what characters can’t or won’t say to one another. To offer some guidance to writers like me, who often agonize over characters conversing, I’ve constructed a list of some of the most common dialogue mistakes I see in submissions and some suggestions for overcoming them.
(note: I feel like it’s important to say that there are not RULES to writing fiction. For every suggestion, there’s a writer who can accomplish a brilliant piece by doing just the opposite.)
Mistake #1: Exposition through dialogue
Example: “Don’t you remember, Honey? We have dinner with your boss tonight, and he said if things don’t go perfectly, you’re not going to get the big promotion!”
Exposition is the background information within the piece about events that might have taken place before the story even begins. Sometimes it is necessary to convey this material, but when exposition occurs in dialogue, it can come across as forced. This can happen due to lazy storytelling—having a character just say what’s going on is easier than working that information into summary—but it can also go unnoticed because we hear it so often in other media. Watch any big blockbuster movie and you’ll find it (and if you want to be annoying at parties, I encourage you to shout “Exposition through dialogue!” at the screen). A character will explain the background to a haunted house or superheroes will remind each other about some earlier happening so the audience gets a not-so-gentle nudge to direct them to a plot point.
Suggestion: Try to picture your stories as a reader would experience them. Have a trusted friend read them to you. Use a text-to-speech website to have your story read by a British robot. Imagine them as captions to a movie. Once you are searching for it, exposition through dialogue is easy to find.
Mistake #2: Characters always telling each other exactly what they mean
Example: “You’re always going on and on about my promotion and it’s driving me up the wall!”
I’ve written before about my love of first-person narrators, part of which stems from how close that point of view gets to what it means to be a person. People are messy. It’s one of the things that makes the written word so great. But due to this messiness, people (and therefore characters) don’t often say what they mean. They talk around things, obfuscate, or lie. When I teach dialogue to my students, I often have them go out into the wild and simply listen. They always have a good time doing this and come back to the next session ready to report wonderful and strange things they overheard in elevators, in line at restaurants, or on the street. There’s mystery in it. Who were they talking about? How do these people feel about each other? What do they mean, exactly?
When I get a submission that’s lacking entirely in subtext, I feel removed from the world of the story because it’s not a true rendering of conversation. It’s not how people talk. If a writer chooses to make characters entirely forthright, they miss out on an opportunity to build suspense or complicate the plot.
Suggestion: Try writing a scene where the characters are talking about one thing (the weather, what’s for dinner, etc.) but they’re really talking about something else (the state of their relationship, the future, etc.). What’s going on under the surface of the conversation. What are these characters avoiding saying?
Mistake #3: Using dialogue when summary can get the job done faster
Example: Almost any telephone call.
One of the most common issues I see in my submission queue is unnecessary dialogue. I’ve read so many phone calls and family dinners that don’t propel the plot forward or give us a new understanding of the ground state or minds of the characters. While real-life conversations can be mundane, in works of fiction and particularly in works of short fiction, there’s greater pressure on dialogue to be contributing to the whole. Every word counts.
In part, dialogue is special because it’s physically set apart from the rest of the story: new piece of dialogue, new line. This raises the stakes by creating authority, by showing that what the character has to say is worth directly reporting. It’s important to get their words exactly right.
Suggestion: Ask yourself what the dialogue is adding to the story overall. Can you get away with summarizing it? Or cutting it altogether?
Mistake #4: Dialogue from children is too cute
Example: “You are the prettiest mommy in the whole world!”
Children are some of the most difficult characters to write because they can easily come off as too smart, too mature, too wise for their ages or worse—way too adorable. Inhabiting the headspace of a child is tricky because it’s been so long since writers have been children, and the kneejerk instinct is to swing way too far to one extreme or the other.
This isn’t nineteenth-century fiction where children are too pure for this world (and where being too pure for this world often gets you an old timey train ticket to death). Kids are complicated. They have rich interior lives and thought processes and should be rendered as such.
Mistake #5: ALL CAPS FOR EMOTION
Example: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
The actions and words of your characters should get across their emotions. If you’re feeling compelled to hit (PUNCH!) the trusty caps lock key, think about the context of your character’s words. Consider adding an action (while remembering that your first idea is often the worst idea or changing what they have to say to contain greater subtext.
Looking Forward: Suggested Reading
For realistic child narrators, try out ZZ Packer’s brilliant short story “Brownies.” It does an amazing job of rendering the inner complexities of children (of course, the first-person narration adds layers to this effect because the speaker is telling the story from some point in the future. Her remembrance and the subsequent telling is key).
Many people will suggest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” to teach subtext, but I think Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” also shows characters talking past one another in a way that’s sublime.
And for those caps-lock activated writers out there, you might consider reading George Saunders’s “Home.” It’s a powerful story that’s based almost solely in dialogue, and Saunders reveals the family dynamic and tensions masterfully through their conversations.
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