Talking about dialogue
10/2010
Anon
1. What is difficult about writing dialogue?
2. Why use dialogue when writing?
a. To speed things up
b. To show what your character is like through his/her own voice.
c. To keep the reader's interest (i.e. a break in continuous prose.)
3. Where do you get your ideas for dialogue?
a. Everyday life
b. At the bus stop
c. On TV
d. From your own head
4. How does the way people speak in everyday life differ from that seen on the page? Try to come up with three ideas and write them down.
e.g.s
a. Varying the speed of speech
b. Speaking over one another
c. Slight pauses for emphasis or thought
d. Slang or dialect is not in dialogue
e. Quality of intonation
f. Overlapping speech
g. Verbal tacks (‘Guess what?’ or ‘You know’)
h. Varying volume
i. Incomplete sentences
j. Use of shorthand phrases
5. What do you think about writing in dialect?
a. Tom Leonard’s poems.
i. You can write everything phonetically
ii. You can write some words phonetically
iii. You can ignore it altogether
6. Layout
a. Traditional? (speech marks, new lines and tags)
i. N.B. Only use tags when necessary (don’t use them every time someone speaks)
b. Dropping the speech marks
c. Using dashes/indents?
d. New line or not?
e. Italics?
7. Short exercise
Imagine that you want to show that one of your characters has just discovered his/her partner is having an affair. Imagine the last line the character before your speaker has just said is ‘I saw him/her in the Italian restaurant last night. They were kissing and holding hands.
Write your character’s response to this. You may write from a male or female perspective.
