Let’s all pretend we didn’t see the clickbait headline.
One of the things that new writers often find most difficult is writing good dialogue. This is because dialogue is hard! A new writer’s dialogue will often be clunky and mechanical. So here are a few quick tips on how to make your dialogue more alive.
Dialogue is character.
What someone says, what they don’t say, and how they say it will tell you a lot about a character.
The difference between what they say, do, and think will tell you even more.
Suppose your character is afraid of stairs. They may well not come out and just say that. Maybe, when faced with stairs, they will lie. Maybe they will try to distract. Maybe they will suggest an alternate route on a spurious reason. Maybe they will tell the truth after all. Whichever option, that will allow us to understand something about their character, and their relationship with whoever else is in that scene.
Dialogue is conflict.
This doesn’t mean your characters need to be arguing or shouting all the time. It means that they each go into a conversation with a particular purpose in mind, and those purposes will probably be in conflict in some way. Your characters will try to get their particular desired outcome while avoiding the other character’s desired outcome, however minor the difference between them might be.
As a result, they will ignore what the other says, they will answer questions with questions, they will talk at cross-purposes, they will try to push their agenda in the conversation, they will try to hide information that the other character is trying to discover, and so on. Not all of these things at once, of course, but at least some of them most of the time.
Dialogue is not a way of passing information to the reader.
The worst kind of dialogue is where characters discuss something not because they need to find it out or understand it, but because the author wants the reader to learn or understand it. Doing that leads to absolutely horrible dialogue.
That’s not to say that the readers shouldn’t learn anything from the dialogue. But they should only learn it if there is an absolutely solid, irrefutable reason for the characters to be discussing it.
Dialogue is not a way of characters (directly) passing information to each other.
It’s tempting to have a character ask another questions and get direct answers in response. But that will turn your dialogue into at best a police interrogation and at worst a lecture. Straightforward question-answer dialogue in anything other than the most trivial situation is utterly dull. (See “Dialogue is conflict”.)
There are whole books on writing dialogue, but if you keep these simple hints in mind, you’ll find your writing taking on a whole new life. And that’s even before you introduce characteristic speech patterns and stuff like that.
Every now and then, you will see someone object to the presence of potatoes in a fantasy story. The argument goes that, because potatoes originate from South America, having them appear in a pseudo-Medieval, pseudo-European fantasy is an anachronism.
And I don’t care.
If you’re writing a secondary world fantasy based loosely on Medieval Europe, let’s be honest, you’re working with a lot of assumptions already. You’re assuming that somehow, on a world with a different geography, geology, climate, history, and pre-history, humans have not only managed to evolve but that they have evolved weapons, ways of living, customs, and diets that are similar to those that evolved here on Earth, in Europe.
That’s stretching credibility to an extreme. But it doesn’t end there. You’re assuming that, for the most part, the same plants and animals (plus some random fantasy ones) evolved also, again despite the differences in the world, even including perhaps the addition of magic.
How about birds? Birds are fucking crazy. How likely are birds?
As most people know, birds are dinosaurs. They are descendants of the very few, small species of dinosaur that survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, when the giant asteroid smashed into Earth and wiped out most life, just like we’re descendants of the small mammals that survived. If the asteroid hadn’t hit, or if it had hit a different spot, no birds. No birds. Your fantasy novel requires an identical extinction event with identical effects if you want birds. That’s not happening.
That’s hardly the only example.
Your secondary world fantasy (and mine) makes no sense at all. It is based on a series of such unlikely coincidences and assumptions that it wouldn’t happen.
And, bearing all that in mind, you’re hung up about this fantasy world having potatoes in a European-modelled region rather than a South American-modelled region? Or the idea that, in that world, there might have been trade in potatoes between those equivalent regions a few hundred years earlier than happened on Earth?
So, no, I don’t care about potatoes in your fantasy. Put them in. Turn them into chips. Add ketchup. Why not?
I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the language we choose when we write fantasy novels, particularly when it comes to the last middle grade I wrote and the current adult fantasy I’m working on. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I’m doing here, so I’m going to lay out my thinking, and you can all tell me if I’m completely wrong.
But first (and this is related), the brilliant translator Anthea Bell died recently. She translated some very important novels into English, but she will always be better known as the translator, along with Derek Hockridge, of the Asterix graphic novels from French into English.
Now, imagine you’re writing a secondary world fantasy (i.e., a fantasy novel set on another, alternative world). In your story you are, of course, writing about characters whose language is not English (I’ll keep saying English because it’s the language in which I write, but assume also any other real-world language). Now, you could write the whole thing in a made-up language (yes, we are looking at you, Tolkien). But that’s not going to get you very far.
Now, obviously the whole thing is made up. There is no fantasy world out there (*sniff*). But we’re pretending there is, and if we’re good enough at it, readers will buy into it. We will accept without having to have it spelled out that what we are reading is a ‘translation’ of whatever fantasy language your Point of View characters speak into English.
This immediately means that you have to make the same kind of choices that translator like Bell and Hockridge have to make when translating a book written in a French. How do you translate a joke or a colloquial phrase? Do you translate it word-for-word to give a feeling of the pattern of the language but risk it losing all meaning in English? Or do you choose an equivalent joke or phrase in English and lose the cultural hints and world-building that the language could otherwise give? Or do you mix it up on a case-by-case basis, dropping in a few fantasy-sounding phrases in between the standard English phrases?
And imagine you’re translating a work from a foreign language that was written in, say, 1400? Do you translate it into period English? Or do you translate it into modern English? How far do you go?
Let’s take the example of a fantasy novel that takes place in a period that is roughly equivalent to the Medieval period. (In other words, somewhere between the fifth and fifteenth centuries.) Do you choose to write it in English that would be appropriate for that period? I think the vast majority of fantasy writers would reject that choice. (Remember, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was published in 1387, towards the end of the Medieval period. The period was well over by the time of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.) Very few readers would be interested in fantasy novels written like that. Writing only using English words and phrases in use by the fifteenth century is out for most writers and readers.
But, at the other extreme, it would be peculiarly odd to pick up a pseudo-Medieval novel and read phrases like “hit the buffers” or “laser-like precision”. Including phrases that obviously refer to technology simply not in use in the period would be off-putting.
So let’s move on to more ambiguous examples. How about the word “okay”, which causes a degree of ear-steam from some readers. Although the origin of “okay” is contested, it was popularised in 1840. Clearly 1840 is far after the medieval period. But are you genuinely going to cut out every word or phrase popularised after 1840? That would leave you with a very dated-sounding language. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in 1836, so maybe you should use that as reference for style and language?
Again, I hope not. That just wouldn’t work for a novel written now.
Where do you draw your line?
For me, it comes down to the type of book you are writing. A funny book, like the Asterix graphic novels, lends itself to a much looser translation. Getting in jokes is far more important than reproducing the exact dialogue.
Also, if you’re writing a grittily realistic fantasy, ironically, you will probably end up using much more contemporary language, because it lends a harder edge to modern ears than more archaic language. If you’re writing a classic fantasy, like most of those published in the 1980s, you probably want to tone back your more modern phraseology, reduce contractions, avoid words that ‘feel’ modern (even if they aren’t). There are plenty of novels like that being written and published right this yea
I’m curious as to what choices others make on this, how you draw the line, what kind of language throws you out of the story, and so on.
(I’ll put a link in the comments to where I link this on Facebook if you find it easier to comment there.)
