Don’t Keep It Real
Realistic dialogue in fiction.
Firstly, there’s no such thing. Not in fiction, anyway.
Here’s some realistic dialogue for you:
‘Anyway,’ said Kate, ‘what I was saying was…Shit! Did you just see what that idiot did? Didn’t even put his indicator on. Yeah, back to Jemma. Well, she’s just too…I mean, the other night, Friday night, or was it Saturday? No, it was Friday. Saturday? All right, Saturday. So, she comes over, all upset about Alison breaking it off…no, sorry, not Alison. That was the last one. I can’t keep track of it all. Amanda, yeah, Amanda. You’ve met her. Yes, you have. Don’t look like that. You have. You met her at Kuletos. I was there when you met her. The one with the long hair. Anyway, as I was saying…’
Can you imagine a whole novel with dialogue like that? You wouldn’t get past the third page. And you’d cheerfully murder Kate by page two. This type of dialogue is unsustainable for story writing. Dialogue in real life is fragmentary, often non-linear, and frequently interrupted. Dialogue in fiction is never totally realistic. It is stylised and therefore unnatural but if dialogue is carefully constructed then it shouldn’t draw attention to the artifice of the construction.
Research into people’s behaviour in bookshops has found that when readers pick up fiction and flick through the pages they are looking for dialogue. Why? Dialogue tells the reader about what’s happening. Dialogue gives us a clue as to the type of conflict that the narrative contains. We might pick up a book and flick through to a page where Julie is breathless. She is speaking rapidly. Why is she speaking like this? Is she nervous? Is she running late? Has she taken drugs? Is she feeling guilty and trying to cover something up? Why is Mick so angry on page 17? Why is Juanita arguing with her mother on page 76? Readers are interested in people speaking. Conversation is the key to learning many things about personality and motivation.
Dialogue can be realistic up to a point. When I’m working on an interview, I have to go back through the sound file and the transcript and edit all those ums, ahs, hmms, coughs, sighs and anything that disrupts the flow of the content. You couldn’t listen to a podcast where the speaker was heavily coughing every two minutes. You can’t read a novel where everyone speaks like Kate. I once read an American novel written in toddler-speak. It was like pulling teeth, even though it was done in a clever way and sent a poignant message about poverty in that country. However, that sort of writing is rare.
What you can do to make your dialogue ring true is to take some of the conventions of speech. Listen to people’s speech patterns, the tone, the pace, and type of language they choose. A reader can tell a lot about a character by the way they speak and the way you depict the scene and the emotions that accompany the action. There are many elements to consider such as:
Do they use figurative language? (It’s time we buried the hatchet, John)
Do they use tag questions? (It’s a dump, this place, isn’t it?)
Do they swear a lot? (Fucking George. He’s a selfish fuck)
How’s their self-worth? (In my opinion…)
Do they use euphemism? (How’s your life in the bedroom?)
Do they use long sentences or short? (It sucks/It certainly doesn’t live up to my expectations)
Make sure your dialogue serves a purpose. Does it reveal something the reader needs to know? Does it move the scene along? Does it move the plot along? Does it drip-feed some important information that the reader needs to know? Does it contain information that is partly revealed now so that the rest will be revealed later?
Play around with conversation. Write it in different ways. Write from different points of view and different tenses. Write it from the perspective of a snob, a homeless person, an art critic, a student, and any other person you think of. If you write ‘realistically’ you won’t have much of a novel. You’ll end up with dialogue like Kate’s.
So, remember - don’t keep it real.