by Mike Klaassen

Created on: February 12, 2010

Dialogue is a literary device that mimics real speech, according to Renni Browne and Dave King in Self-Editing for Fiction Writers;  “. . . dialogue is an artificial creation that sounds natural when you read it."  John Truby, in Anatomy of a Story, puts it a little differently: "Dialogue is not real talk: it is highly selective language that sounds like it could be real."

But why shouldn't writers just duplicate real speech in their fiction?  The problem with real speech, according to Joseph Hansen, in The Writer (October 1976), is that "Real speech is often full of tangled syntax, repetitions, hesitations, and unfinished sentences.  Writers like John O'Hara, known for their lifelike dialogue, never wrote any such thing.  If they had, no one would have read them."

More recently, William G. Tapply, in The Writer (October 2008) expanded that observation: “Most everyday conversation is filled with hesitations, repetitions, interruptions, half-finished sentences, verbalisms such as "um" and "er," elements of regional or ethnic dialect, and habitual words and phrases such as 'dude' and 'listen' and 'you know what I mean?' If you transcribed it, it would be unreadable, or at least deadly boring."

So, if replicating real speech in fiction is undesirable, how should fictional dialogue be different?  Susan Bell, in The Artful Edit, provides a clue: “We need to edit a character’s speech so that it walks the very thin line between artifice and documentary.”  Nancy Kress, in Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint, offers some insight into how this is done: “Fictional dialogue differs from real-life dialogue by being shaped through compression, understatement, or emphasis." 

Dialogue is made to sound real on a multitude of levels:

* Words

* Sentences

* Punctuation

* Colloquialisms

* Full capacity

WORDS

WORD CHOICE.  Tom Chiarella, in Writing Dialogue, notes that "You can create strong dialogue by concentrating on word choice.  When creating dialogue, diction rules.  Good diction lends precision."  According to Browne and King, "Another way to make your dialogue more natural is to weed out fancy polysyllabic words unless the use of them is right for the character." 

UNNECESSARY WORDS.  Evan Marshall, The Marshall Plan for Getting Your Novel Published, suggests that you "Comb your dialogue for sometimes-unnecessary words like yes, no, oh, well."  In The Marshall

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