?I?ve never in my life written anything more difficult than these conversations full of trivialities. This scene at the inn may take me three months for all I know. I could weep sometimes, I feel so helpless?.? Gustave Flaubert
In my last post, I blogged about my fear of description but I also have concerns about dialogue. My biggest worry while writing dialogue is how to give my characters a distinct voice, one that sets them apart. So that when they talk the reader will automatically recognize each from his/her unique voice. Sometimes I even feel that most of my characters, if not all, talk in the same way. I once spoke with my creative writing tutor and expressed my concern, and to illustrate my point, I wrote a piece involving different characters and lots of dialogue and showed it to him. Here?s what he said:
?Dialogue is a very direct, effective way to establish character. People almost never talk in stiff, and scripted way. They speak in a more natural, undefined, spontaneous way. As a writer you should strive to make your dialogue more natural. Also dialogue should be character-specific: everyone talks differently, with a signature style. The author?s characters, when they speak, must be distinguishable from one another, singular in how they use words. You should strive to make each voice unique, so that if we heard only the voice, we could guess who was speaking.?
?Voice makes character,? says novelist John Leggett.
I took my tutor?s advice and went back to examine my piece, my writing. To start with I read the piece out loud and realized that my characters did not talk the way real people talked. In some cases the dialogue was unnatural and stilted. In some places, what my characters said was irrelevant to the story and did not move the plot forward. In some cases they used dialogue to reveal their emotions and this stopped the story from being effective. And even though Elmore Leonard once said: ?All the information you need can be given in dialogue,? I had forgotten that too much information can sometimes be harmful to the story. It stops it from being credible. And in the words of Anthony Trollope:
?The dialogue is generally the most agreeable part of a novel, but it is so only as it tends in some way to the telling of the main story. No character should utter much above a dozen words at a breath- unless the writer can justify to himself a longer flood of speech by the specialty of the occasion.?
In real life, not all people are outspoken. Sometimes even emotion is conveyed better through what they don?t say. And as Dorothea Brande said:
?Of course you love to write dialogue, just because you do it well. But don?t you realize that if you can?t do straight passages and transitions smoothly you?re going to get a jerky story? You?d better make up your mind, I should say, whether you want to write fiction or to specialize in playwriting. Either way, you?ve got a lot of work to do.?
ChK
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Source: http://chichikir.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/i-could-weep-sometimes/
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