dialogue

Elsewhere in this blog I’ve advised writers to avoid exposition entirely in first drafts—to write as if everyone was as familiar with your characters and setting as you are, then going back and filling exposition sparingly later. The idea being that you’ll more clearly see when exposition is necessary once you’ve told the story.

That advice still stands, but it doesn’t address how, exactly, to cram exposition into your story when you decide it’s necessary. You could write an entire book on the subject, but here’s one piece of pithy advice you can take or leave: Avoid as you know dialog.

As You Know, I’m an Idiot

As you know is a phrase that works to imply that what’s about to be said is common knowledge:

NPC: What time is it?

Main Character: As you know, I recently lost my watch. That’s a stabbing!

<stabs NPC>

It’s an idiot tag, though; if it’s common knowledge, why is the character saying it? Instead of camouflaging exposition, it actually lampshades the fact that your character is about to vomit up a few paragraphs of exposition. Nothing that follows as you know (or similar phrases) will sound natural in any way.

Worse, you don’t even need to actually use a phrase like as you know. Simply having your characters recite information purely for the benefit of the reader will sound artificial and stiff, no matter what else you do.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily tell you how to get necessary exposition into your story in a natural, subtle way. But sometimes the road to better writing is knowing what to stop doing. After you eliminate all the bad choices, after all, what’s left should be if not an ideal choice at least a better choice.

As you know, this is the end of the blog post.

I have an acquaintance who was trained as a kid to never use the same word twice within a paragraph. It’s one of those rules beaten into her by nuns that she can’t forget, and thus composing even simple emails is a chore of Olympian proportions when we spend hours searching for yet another word that means agreed.

This always makes me think of the posts that go around Facebook and other social media listing 50 alternate verbs or adverbs or what have you, with the implication being that if you keep using the word said for every dialog tag like an unimaginative loser your writing will be bland and dull.

Here’s the thing: Using oddball words to break up monotony won’t stop your work from being bland and dull. It might make it unreadable, though.

Priority: Being Understood

Look, a limited vocabulary can indeed be a problem, but you have to choose your battles. Having every dialog tag be some biazarro word like gawped or emitted (both actually suggested in some of these posts) will make your writing sound amateurish and, frankly, insane. On the other hand, having every character described as attractive will simply focus the reader on the fact that all of your characters are more or less physically the same.

So, yes, some word variety is necessary. But word variety should be the natural result of your own reading and word acquisition. Words you use naturally in your own conversation will flow into your prose and feel natural. Words you search-and-replace into your prose with a list of alternatives will always—always—feel forced and weird. And if a little word variety is necessary, a little also goes a long way. You don’t need 50 ways to say he said. You should definitely never say he keened (also one of the examples from an actual post about this).

Your priority when telling a story, especially in the first draft, is to be understood. To have your plot make sense, to make your characters into believable people. Vocabulary variety should be a natural consequence of your language skills—not a science project where you drop strange new words into rando sentences to see what happens. He importuned.

Writing good dialog means writing dialogue that seems natural even if it isn’t (because we don’t speak the way we write speech), that entertains, and that does a bit of work for the story, or for the characters. Dialogue is an excellent way to world-build, to flesh out your characters, and to get exposition into the story without just dumping it.

That doesn’t mean that every single line of dialogue you write has to be larded with purpose. Trying to make every single sentence spoken by your characters do plot work or offer back story will result in some pretty stilted and unhappy conversations in your book, and trust me: Stilted and unnatural aren’t words you want to hear in reference to your writing.

That’s why it’s important to relax a little with your dialogue. In real life, we have this stuff called small talk. Some people deprecate small talk as a waste of valuable existence, but the fact is it plays a vital role in our lives. Small talk is how we ease into conversations and situations. It grounds us in a universal pool of communication, a common ground from which to operate. So instead of deprecating small talk in your writing, embrace it.

Talk About the Weather

Small talk, humorous exchanges, the sort of chatter that doesn’t do any kind of plot work can be just as revealing as portentous dialogue that is just a series of info-dumps, anvilicious revelations, and dramatic reveals. You can learn a lot about a person from their small talk. You can learn how socially skilled they are, what their sense of humor is like, what they consider to be important.

While you certainly want to avoid lengthy exchanges of meaningless pleasantries, small talk is a great way to inject a bit of humor into your story and a great way to shade your characters with some complexity. If your character is in a tense, action-packed, hyper-real situation from page one the reader can get a little exhausted, and the best way to get your reader to think of your characters as people they care about is to give them a little sense of what they’re like when they’re not fighting demons or hunting foreign spies or solving crimes. And small talk is a great way to do that efficiently.

The urge to make every sentence a masterpiece of tension, drama, and plot twists can be considerable, but that book will read like a parody. If you want the big wham lines to land, you have to get small.

Dialog is one of the most challenging things for writers to get “right,” mainly because “right” is a moving target. Dialog can, after all, accomplish a task—exposition, say—and yet be a Fail because it sounds unnatural, or feels forced, or obviously exists solely to convey information and not as something that real people would actually engage in.

Sometimes even if you’re relatively comfortable writing dialog you get into trouble because your characters only speak when they’re conveying information. This is an easy trap to fall into because it feels concise and efficient, when in fact it’s weird because people love to chatter. Anyone who has ever tried to avoid conversation in an office setting, or when walking home through their neighborhood, knows just ho much people like to chat. No matter how good you are at dialog, if your characters only ever talk about Plot Things, it’s going to be a little uncanny for your readers.

One solution to this is to imagine you’re listening in on your characters chatting while they’re getting to the next scene.

Don’t Skip, Delete

The whole “skip the boring parts” writing advice is excellent stuff, but it’s often more useful to go back and delete the boring parts instead of skipping them in the first place. For example, writing the entire twenty-block car drive that your characters engage in between chapters 2 and 3 might seem like an obvious boring spot to skip—after all, who wants to read about two people driving ten minutes to their destination? But, what if you tagged along on that ride and let your characters chat. No Plot Things, just chatting, relaxed conversation about whatever your characters might be interested in.

It may well turn out to still be a boring part, in which case you delete it in revision. Or, maybe parts of the conversation your record there is actually interesting and fun, and so you keep some of it, or most of it, and delete only the truly boring stuff. Even if you wind up deleting the whole sequence, you will likely have learned something about your characters in the process.

In fact, any time your characters aren’t actively fighting vampires or seducing each other or robbing banks, have them talk. Have them talk a lot. About anything, about nothing, because that’s what real people do, and it can be incredibly useful when fleshing out characters and a universe. The true super power isn’t skipping stuff you assume will be boring, but deleting stuff that has proved to be boring.

Of course, if I’m following the Boring Rule, entire novels I’ve written might be deleted. Shut up.

Dialog is one of the most challenging things for writers to get “right,” mainly because “right” is a moving target. Dialog can, after all, accomplish a task—exposition, say—and yet be a Fail because it sounds unnatural, or feels forced, or obviously exists solely to convey information and not as something that real people would actually engage in.

Sometimes even if you’re relatively comfortable writing dialog you get into trouble because your characters only speak when they’re conveying information. This is an easy trap to fall into because it feels concise and efficient, when in fact it’s weird because people love to chatter. Anyone who has ever tried to avoid conversation in an office setting, or when walking home through their neighborhood, knows just ho much people like to chat. No matter how good you are at dialog, if your characters only ever talk about Plot Things, it’s going to be a little uncanny for your readers.

One solution to this is to imagine you’re listening in on your characters chatting while they’re getting to the next scene.

Don’t Skip, Delete

The whole “skip the boring parts” writing advice is excellent stuff, but it’s often more useful to go back and delete the boring parts instead of skipping them in the first place. For example, writing the entire twenty-block car drive that your characters engage in between chapters 2 and 3 might seem like an obvious boring spot to skip—after all, who wants to read about two people driving ten minutes to their destination? But, what if you tagged along on that ride and let your characters chat. No Plot Things, just chatting, relaxed conversation about whatever your characters might be interested in.

It may well turn out to still be a boring part, in which case you delete it in revision. Or, maybe parts of the conversation your record there is actually interesting and fun, and so you keep some of it, or most of it, and delete only the truly boring stuff. Even if you wind up deleting the whole sequence, you will likely have learned something about your characters in the process.

In fact, any time your characters aren’t actively fighting vampires or seducing each other or robbing banks, have them talk. Have them talk a lot. About anything, about nothing, because that’s what real people do, and it can be incredibly useful when fleshing out characters and a universe. The true super power isn’t skipping stuff you assume will be boring, but deleting stuff that has proved to be boring.

Of course, if I’m following the Boring Rule, entire novels I’ve written might be deleted. Shut up.