[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] ums and aahs . They also tend to interrupt the person
speaking to them, so that sentences are cut short in mid-flow.
If fiction writers were to include this sort of dialogue in their
stories, no one would read past the first piece of conversation.
In fiction, each character must have their say in their own
instantly recognisable voice.
In order to produce realistic dialogue, therefore, you have to
develop a good ear for listening to how the people around you
speak and an ability to transfer their voices onto the page in
an acceptable way.
ACTING OUT A SITUATION
One method of developing realistic voices for your characters
is to act out the situation you wish to portray.
Recording the speeches
You can do this by imagining it in your head or by speaking
the words out loud to hear how they sound.
You may prefer to record all the dialogue so you can play it
back at your leisure and ensure that each character has their
own distinctive way of speaking.
88 / CREATI VE WRI TI NG
Use the method which works best for you but make sure that
if one character says, Hello, how are you? , the response is
I m fine, how are you? and not something entirely unrelated.
Communicating with each other
Remember that the purpose of writing dialogue is to get your
characters communicating with each other, not talking
directly to the reader.
The technique of having one character saying something,
whilst the other talks either to themselves or to the audience
about something completely different is best left to script-
writers who have the advantage of the visual and aural
dimensions to explain what is going on.
Having a conversation
One useful method of bringing your dialogue to life is to
choose the pair you most strongly identify with from the list
below and write a confrontational conversation between
them:
dissatisfied customer/unhelpful shop assistant
unreasonable traffic warden/irate motorist
disinterested hospital receptionist/frantic patient
officious train guard/exasperated commuter
harassed shopper/pushy elderly lady
angry homeowner/selfish neighbour.
If, by now, you are in a flaming temper, calm yourself down
by reading what you have written. The dialogue should be
wonderfully realistic and vibrant.
WRI TI NG REALI STI C DI ALOGUE / 89
Putting the speech in context
The vocabulary your characters use conveys more than just
personality, it also gives an idea of their age, social status and
relationship to one another. Read the two examples below
and see if you can tell who the characters might be:
Example A
You re not going out tonight. I won t let you.
You can t stop me, I m old enough to do as I like.
You re not so old that I can t give you a clip round the ear.
But I ve got to go, everyone s going.
Example B
You re not going out tonight. I won t let you.
You can t stop me, I ll do as I like.
If you go I ll kill myself.
Don t be a fool.
Altering the vocabulary
The characters speaking in Example A are most likely to be a
parent and child, probably a teenager.
In Example B, we have an entirely different situation. Here
the characters are clearly lovers, heading towards a break-up
in their relationship.
In essence, it is the same conversation but the things the
characters say, the vocabulary they use, the way they
speak, are quite different.
He said, she said
Take a look at the following passages and decide which you
think works best:
90 / CREATI VE WRI TI NG
Passage A
You know I hate fish, he said, Yet every week without
fail, you insist on trying to make me eat it, he complained,
throwing down his knife and fork in disgust.
Passage B
You know I hate fish. He threw his knife and fork down in
disgust. Yet every week without fail, you insist on trying to
make me eat it.
In fact, both passages work perfectly well but in Passage A,
the words he said and he complained are completely
superfluous.
Combining action and dialogue
As we saw in the previous chapter, characters are not static.
They move from place to place, wave their hands around,
shrug their shoulders and stamp their feet.
Their facial expressions change, they have endearing or irri-
tating mannerisms and their body language can tell you
almost as much about them as the way they actually speak.
A combination of action and dialogue, as demonstrated in
Passage B above, will bring far more realism and life to the
characters than a string of he/she said s.
Standing alone
For short passages, good dialogue will stand alone without
any action at all as you can see from the following conversa-
tion between a customer and a shop assistant:
WRI TI NG REALI STI C DI ALOGUE / 91
I bought this toaster yesterday and it doesn t work
properly.
I see. What s the problem?
It burns the toast.
I see. What would you like us to do about it?
Give me a replacement of course.
I ll have to get clearance from the manager but she s at
lunch right now.
OK. I ll wait.
There is no problem understanding the situation. We can
easily tell which one is speaking and the dialogue flows per-
fectly well.
Within the context of a story where we are familiar with the
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