I think I’m a fair writer – I can plot and manoeuvre a reader with some degree of skill – but what I’m really proud of is my dialogue. It’s Make a Move’s major selling point. I know that sounds vain, but I’m okay with that, as I know how hard I’ve worked to get to the point that I can say I’m proud of it. I’ve spent years watching films, TV, reading books and comics, and most importantly, listening to people talking, and I’ve filtered all of that information into a list of what I do and don’t like to hear. Then I took that list and crafted it into a style that’s all mine.

A few people have said my dialogue reads like a comic, which is cool. Comic dialogue has to be lean and efficient to fit in the speech bubbles, and I try to emulate that sparsity.

The way I found an ear for dialogue, and used it to create my own style, was to listen to people talking and break down what they say into two containers: what they want to say, and what they think they should say. Next, I threw away everything in the second container.

Sound Smarter By Talking Less!

Have you listened closely when a witness to an event is interviewed on TV?

• “I was leaving the pub when I heard a scream and the car crashed into the actual wall”. The actual wall? As opposed to what? A virtual wall?
• “Personally, I think it was the wrong thing to do.” Is it possible to have an impersonal thought?
• “The man himself dived in to save the kid.” Good job he didn’t dive in as someone else.

I know these are picky things, but they illustrate my point. All language is peppered with useless, often nonesensical, words (really, kind of, you know) that people use because they think that’s how people talk. It’s a belief that the more you say, the more what you say matters. I think there’s a better way: by all means talk a lot, but say a lot too.

You can see the same thing in book dialogue. A lot of writers need the security blanket of an opening “well” or “so” before they let someone speak. It’s the written equivalent of “um”. It’s almost become an accepted standard – that that’s how people talk in books. Fair enough, but it’s not how my characters talk. My characters convey the information they need to with as many words as they need and no more. The content can be trivial, or apocalyptic; high art or low art. Regardless, it’s delivered in the same economical way. It’s one way in which I created the tone of the book – people talking about epic events in minimalist, almost dismissive dialogue. Yes, it’s stylised, but it has style.

This economy of words is the key to keeping dialogue flowing. By parsing ideas down to their core concept, you can create dialogue that is portable, and once it’s portable, you can mix it up to find beats that bring your characters’ words to life.

An Example

“Freddy stared at her for a second, frustrated. He kept his voice calm. ‘That was a question,’ he said. ‘I now have no more idea of what is going on, and you’ve annoyed me’ – her eyes narrowed, so he eased off – ‘a bit.’”

I love that construction – the strong parenthetic break hiding the end of the sentence, turning it into a punchline. I try to use that technique sparingly as any stylistic tool can become tiresome if overplayed. Identifying tags and actions can be mixed into dialogue to pace the rhythm to perfection, but the spoken content has to be lean and portable. Long, multi-clause sentences just don’t arrange well.

How Much is Too Much?

I’m not sure what percentage of Make a Move is dialogue, but I know it’s a lot – more than the third of the wordcount recommended by some how-to-write books (I learned that rule quickly, and broke it twice as fast). I’ve experimented with a variety of writing styles in working towards something I’m happy with, and dialogue-heavy prose just works for me. I’ve written extended sections of action-description, really digging into the details of a situation, but I don’t find them fun to write, so I’d be a hypocrite if I expected them to be fun to read.

But it’s not just a question of taste – that kind of writing just isn’t giving me what I want, which is something that dialogue can: relationships. All of the stories have been told, and creating an intriguing character is almost impossible, but human relationships can still provide a compelling experience within an unoriginal narrative. How do the characters feel about what is happening to them? Without lines of tired exposition, the only way to find out is when they share their thoughts with each other, and allow us to listen in. Those interactions are the life of the story, the way-in for readers, and suppressing the vitality of those relationships with tired, bloated dialogue will rot a story from the inside out.

Ironically, I’ve said enough.