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Good dialogue gives the illusion of
real speech, but is not real speech. Real speech is repetitious, often boring
and frequently has no real purpose. Your dialogue should be none of these
things. It should however, mimic the pace and rhythm of everyday speech. This
means you are free to use incorrect grammar, contractions, and incomplete
sentences. When you are out and about, listen to the way people talk and how
directly connected their speech pattern is with their character, background and
station in life.
Good dialogue gives the illusion of
real speech, but is not real speech. Real speech is repetitious, often boring
and frequently has no real purpose. Your dialogue should be none of these
things. It should however, mimic the pace and rhythm of everyday speech. This
means you are free to use incorrect grammar, contractions, and incomplete
sentences. When you are out and about, listen to the way people talk and how
directly connected their speech pattern is with their character, background and
station in life.
Let’s look at a short exchange from
Of Mice and Men:
“You seen that glove on his left
hand?”
“Yeah. I seen it.”
“Well, that glove’s fulla
vasaline.”
“Vaseline? What the hell for?”
“Well, I tell ya what-Curley says
he’s keeping that hand soft for his wife.”
That’s only 5 lines of dialogue without any narrative voice,
but even in this brief piece of conversation we get some understanding of the
two men speaking. This dialogue is good because it does several things; it
moves the story forward, and provides characterization of both Curley and the
two men speaking. Dialogue should have at least two functions. If the
conversation doesn’t move the story forward and set the tone, or convey
necessary background information and develop character, or some mix of those
things, then eliminate it.
While
good dialogue must do several things at once, you should be careful of forcing
too much information into the mouth of a character. Remember you are trying to
give the illusion of real speech. If your doctor said, “I love being a doctor.
I think going to an Ivy League school with a really strong premed program
shaped the way I treat my patients,” you would probably look at her strangely.
It sounds fake. This type of
speech is a regular fall back in movies of less-than-stellar quality. It is the
easiest way to get the viewer up to speed. If for example two doctors are about
to perform a surgery to transplant a human brain into the skull of a monkey,
one doctor will describe the procedure to the other doctor. This of course
makes no sense, since both doctors who are operating on the poor monkey would
already know what was going to happen. Don’t let your writing sink to the level
of a low-budget Hollywood film.
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