Veteran Valerie Allen Shares Basics of Dialogue

Valerie Allen has become a regular guest on this SharingwithWriters blog because she is a veteran author who is well versed in all aspects of publishing. She is even a director of several Florida book fairs--all for the betterment of authors. But she also help writers write better!  Here are the basics of dialogue.

Developing Dialogue

by

Valerie Allen

There are no absolute rules about creating good dialogue, but some guidelines help shape a story. Well written dialogue goes unnoticed by the reader because it sounds right. It is not stiff. It is not artificial. It is written to sound as if someone is speaking.

Dialogue has three main functions:

1.  Reveal more about a character

2.  Establish the relationship of one character to another

3.  Move the story forward

Some basic guidelines for using good dialogue include

• Create a new, indented paragraph every time a different character speaks
• If more than one speaker is involved in the conversation use his/her name to clarify who is speaking
• Use the noun-verb form (Valerie said  not said Valerie)
• If it is a statement the tag is said (“Valerie is here,” she said.)
• If it is a question, the tag is asked (“Valerie, where are you?” she asked.)
• Use movement, a gesture, or a tag instead of said/asked (Valerie opened the door. “Here I am.”)
• Use vocabulary appropriate to the age, education, and culture of the speaker, as well as the context of the story
• Write conversation as it is spoken, not structured as standard written English
• Dialogue is primarily about what the speaker believes his/her problems or conflicts to be
• Punctuate so it is easily read without confusion

(George, the alligator bit me.

George, the alligator, bit me.

George! The alligator bit me.)

• Do not have characters continuously address each other by name
• Do not have characters giving each other information they already know; use exposition (Not: Valerie, I remember on your birthday, July 20^th, we went on a picnic.) Valerie likely knows when her birthday is!
• Avoid dialects; use just a few telltale words to give the flavor of the dialect and then return to standard English
• Contractions make dialogue more natural (It's; I'll; We're)
• Use apostrophes for missing letters (don’t, you’ve, goin’)
• Incomplete sentences are common in dialogue 

(“Where are we goin'?”

“Out.”

“Where out?”

“Quiet, or you’re not goin'.”)

Good dialogue should mimic common speech patterns to keep the story believable and fast paced.

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MORE ABOUT VALERIE ALLEN

Valerie Allen, author, playwright, and speaker, writes fiction, non-fiction, short stories, plays, and children's books. She is a popular speaker at writer's conferences, libraries, and community events using her book: Write, Publish, Sell! Quick, Easy, Inexpensive Ideas for the Marketing Challenged 2^nd Edition.   http://Amazon.com/dp/1480043850.Amazon.com/dp/1480043850  

She is a co-founder of Authors for Authors, which supports new and experienced authors with book fairs, book launches, book displays, and writing seminars. Authors from across the US have had their books displayed at two Florida book fairs held in March and November sponsored by AuthorsforAuthors.com

Valerie Allen can be contacted via FB, Twitter, Google+ and at VAllenWriter@gmail.com or ValerieAllenWriter.com

MORE ABOUT SHARINGWITHWRITERS BLOGGER

 Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The multi award-winning second edition of The Frugal Editor; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor .

Craft: Learning from Edgar Allan Poe and Mindy Phillips Lawrence

A guest post today from...

By Mindy Phillips Lawrence

I share Edgar Allan Poe's birth date except for the year. When I began to write in junior high school, Poe’s work fascinated me. He jerked my senses around and sunk deeply into my consciousness, a place where he has stayed. His short story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” is only 2376 words but it astounds you with its building action and macabre ending. If you haven’t read it, shame on you! It’s a masterful bit of writing that is a short story course in and of itself. If you use the points on Dennis G. Jerz’s Web site tips on short story writing to judge it (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/creative1/shortstory/), Poe’s “Amontillado” follows every point.

·        Write a catchy first paragraph

“THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”

Bingo! In the first sentence, we learn that the main character is plotting revenge against his friend Fortunato, which ironically means “good fortune,” for a perceived insult. Poe uses the first paragraph to introduce the murderer, whose name we do not learn until the latter part of the story, and his assumption that he has suffered a wrong worthy or murder.

·        Develop your characters

Short stories should have a limited number of characters. In this case, Poe uses two, Fortunato and Montresor, one who has offended the other. He develops one character through the use of the other, allowing us to also know the storyteller through his statements. 

 

·        Choose a point of view

Poe uses first person, mostly narrative, which allows Montresor to tell his side of the story only. This form of first person is called imperfect first person by some as the mental clarity of the teller is cloudy. He may or may not be telling the truth. His telling of the story unfolds the method of revenge and also gradually reveals the strands of Montresor’s insanity.

·        Write meaningful dialogue

Poe achieves the powerful development of this story with little use of dialogue. Every word he does use in the conversations has a special meaning, usually ironic as in...

“But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The voice said--

"Ha! ha! ha! --he! he! he! --a very good joke, indeed --an excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo --he! he! he! --over our wine --he! he! he!"

"The Amontillado!" I said.

"He! he! he! --he! he! he! --yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone."

"Yes," I said, "let us be gone."

"For the love of God, Montresor!"

"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"

·        Use setting and context

The setting is first in the street and then in the catacombs during Carnival, mostly likely Mardi Gras. The setting mingles the raucous celebration with the impending doom of Fortunato.

·        Set up the plot

The plot in the story is simple: Montresor has a grievance against Fortunato. He chooses murder to solve the grievance and devises a way to commit the perfect revenge. With this simple outline of events, Poe carries us, step-by-step, toward Fortunato’s demise. 

·        Create conflict and tension

Conflict and tension build with Montresor’s description of the relationship between him and Fortunato, the ironic conversation they carry on in which Fortunato means one thing by a statement while Montresor means something completely different. By having Fortunato drunk, Poe obscures any sensibility that his character has.

·        Build to a crisis or a climax

Every line in the story points to the climax. When we learn of the trowel that Montresor has brought into the catacombs, we know his method of revenge. It’s the deliberate telling of each step of the process that both sickens and thrills readers.

·        Deliver a resolution

The resolution in this story is two-fold: Montresor succeeds in bricking Fortunato’s body in the catacomb and for a half-century no one had found the body. A perfect crime! Or maybe not!

If you follow the development of this story and use is as a guide to write your own, you will find the process to be a great lesson in short story writing. Let me know how you come out.

LINKS

Short Story Writing

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/creative1/shortstory/

The Cast of Amontillado

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/POE/cask.html

Amontillado

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amontillado

Study Guide: the Cask of Amontillado

http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides2/Caskof.html

~Mindy Phillips Lawrence–who shares a birthday with Dolly Parton, Dogen, Janis Joplin, Paula Deen and Edgar Allan Poe–is a writer, editor, and artist living in Springfield, Missouri. She is working on both the book and Kindle versions of the Itty Bitty column she writes for the Sharing with Writers newsletter each issue.  It is scheduled for publication in late 2012.

To subscribe to Sharing with Writers newsletter, send a SUBSCRIBE message to hojonews@aol.com.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second ediction of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

This blog post is a bit of a celebration. Apparently this month Sharing with Writers blog was named to Writers Digest 101 Best Resources or something similar. I am being vague because I haven't seen; I've only heard about it from friends who are happy to pass on good news. So, I got to thinking that people might want to know something of the kind of fare they will find on my other blog, The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor at www.thefrugaleditor.blogspot.com. You'll find articles there, questions and answers and lots of discussions on the differences between rules and style choices.

Seven Easy Ways to Keep Dialogue Sharp

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
Author of The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success

1. Keep it simple. "He said" and "She said" will usually do. Your reader is trained to accept this repetition.

2. Forget you ever heard of strong verbs. Skip the "He yelped" and the "She sighed." They slow your dialogue down. If you feel need them, look at the words—the actual dialogue— your character used when he was yelping. Maybe it doesn't reflect the way someone would sound if he yelped. Maybe if you strengthen the dialogue, you can ditch the overblown tag.

3. When you can, reveal who is saying something by the voice or tone of the dialogue. That way you may be able to skip tags occasionally, especially when you have only two people speaking to one another. Your dialogue will ring truer, too.

4. Avoid having characters use other characters' names. In real life, we don't use people's names in our speech much. We tend to reserve using names for when we're angry or disapproving or we just met in a room full of people and we're practicing out social skills. Having a character direct her speech to one character or another by using her name is a lazy writer's way of directing dialogue and it will annoy the reader. When a reader is annoyed, she will not be immersed in the story you are trying to tell.

5. Avoid putting internal dialogue in italics. Trust your reader. She will know who is thinking the words from the point of view of the narrative.

6. Be cautious about using dialogue to tell something that should be shown. It doesn't help much to transfer telling from the narrator to the dialogue. It just makes the character who is speaking sound long winded. Putting quotation marks around exposition won't draw the reader into the scene or involve him more than if you'd left it part of the narrative.

7. And magic number seven is, don't break up dialogue sequences with long or overly frequent blocks of narrative. One of dialogue's greatest advantages is that it moves a story along. If a writer inserts too much stage direction, it will lose the forward motion and any tension it is building.

For more on writing dialogue check out Tom Chiarella's Writing Dialogue (Writers' Digest) and for more on editing in general—from editing query letters to turning unattractive adverbs into metaphoric gold—find The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success (Red Engine Press) on Amazon.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for the UCLA Extension Writer's Program. The first book in her HowToDoItFrugally Series of books, The Frugal Book Promoter, won USA Book News' Best Professional Book Award and Book Publicists of Southern California's Irwin Award. The second, The Frugal Editor, is also a USA Book News winner as well as a Reader Views Litary Award winner and the campaign for that book was named Best Marketing by the New Generation Indie Awards committee. It includes many editing tips on dialogue, the use of quotation marks and more. Learn more at www.howtodoitfrugally.com . This article is available for republishing on the Articles4Writers,Editors page.