Common Dialogue Mistakes

There are a lot of common dialogue mistakes that are easy to make if you’re not specifically trying to avoid them. The following are the vast majority of them.

Too Much Repetition

“Where did you put that suitcase?”

“What suitcase?”

“The one you had with you earlier.”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that suitcase again.”

Repetition can sometimes be a problem in description, but it’s all the more noticeable in dialogue.

Overly Formal Speech

“Where were you last night, John?”

“My phone died. Anyway, I’d love to tell you, but I don’t think you would believe it!”

“I’m sure I would. Please tell me. I want to know.”

“Okay then. I went to see Susan last night.”

“Why? You know nothing good will ever come of seeing her.”

If you take note of the above dialogue, you can probably guess the context fairly well. These are young people, friends, both men, possibly college students… but all of this information is in WHAT is being said, and not HOW it is being said. The dialogue feels false. When people write novels without picturing how their characters would actually speak, we are often left with extremely formal dialogue that serves only to progress the plot. Let’s see how two college students might actually talk.

“Jesus, where’d you go last night? I tried calling you like ten times!”

“Sorry. My phone died.”

“You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit… I saw Susan.”

“Oh… Well I guess that explains that.”

Characters That Repeat Catchphrases

When it comes to dialogue, you should have a pretty broad definition of what a “catchphrase” actually is. It doesn’t always have to be a common expression. Anything that shows a character’s way of thinking can be a catch phrase, and sometimes, they can be extremely small.

If on page 12, John says, “It’s not a big deal,” nobody else can say that for the rest of the book! If he says, “It’s like I told you before,” when explaining something, nobody else should be allowed to say that either. If it’s too much work making sure that catchphrases don’t overlap, you could always try not having them! Seriously. Nobody will miss them anyway!

While it’s true that almost everybody at some point in their lives uses these expressions, that’s not an excuse for your characters to use them. Remember, characters are not people. This brings us to our next point.

Mimicking Real Conversations

In writing classes, you are taught to go out and listen to people talk – to record their conversations on busses and in coffee houses, to transcribe and to study them… While it’s useful to know how people sound in real conversations, it’s important that you don’t mimic them too closely. Here is something that could very well be an actual conversation.

“Hey.”

“Hey. How are you feeling?”

“Better. I still have a bit of a cough but my lungs feel clearer now – and I actually slept a bit last night, so that’s good.”

“Yeah, that’s great… Did you see that game last night?”

“No, I didn’t catch it. Was it good?”

“It was pretty solid. I mean X can’t throw worth anything, but the rest of the team carried him.”

“What was the score?”

“24 to 21, XYZ TEAM.”

Et cetera… et cetera…

This conversation could go on for twenty pages before anybody actually said anything worth hearing. You simply don’t have that kind of time. Certain mannerisms can be mimicked, but the flow of the conversation, and the importance of each individual line of dialogue has to be intensified in order for a story to work – and don’t listen to anybody who tells you differently!

Allowing Characters To Tell Us Their Emotions

The most common way that authors try to get out emotion in dialogue is by having a character comment on another character’s emotion: “Why do you look so sad?”/”Don’t raise your voice at me. I had nothing to do with it!” This kind of pandering to the reader (the audience) isn’t needed. If your dialogue contains enough emotion, it will come out. If a character says, “If you take one step out of that door we’re finished!”, it can be assumed that the character is angry. You don’t even need “she yelled” at the end of it to make it work (and in fact, it might be better without it.)

There are exceptions. Sometimes characters have a heart-to-heart, and they might be able to say their emotions to each other in a powerful way that moves your readers. Even here, I would recommend never using this for singular emotions. “I just feel angry at everyone,” should be avoided because, if you’ve done your job, we should already see this when John goes to the supermarket or Marie goes to work. It should read more like, “All my life I’ve gone around trying to feel as little as possible, but when I’m with you I don’t care about caution anymore. We’re meant to be together. I know you feel it too.”

Writing “Said” Or “Replied” Too Much

When a conversation begins, it is helpful to know who said it. Also, if the conversation contains more than two people, sometimes, for the sake of clarity, you might find yourself writing “he said”, “she said” or “John said” quite a few times. That’s okay. It’s better to be clear than to remove an extra one or two of these pointers (also known as dialogue tags or dialogue attributions). What is not considered okay by the publishing world, is having full conversations filled with unnecessary pointers.

“Speak softly,” he said. “They might hear you.”

“Who?” John asked.

“Who do you think? The Briarlings!” He paused to scratch at his throat before continuing: “They lurk wherever things worth hearing are being whispered.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to speak louder then?” John asked, confused but still whispering.

“If you speak too loudly, even worse things may hear,” he said.

The above dialogue is delightfully confusing and humorous… It is also fairly clunky. If you’re honest with yourself, there is only one place that really needs a pointer at all. If, however, you think the strange man scratching at his throat is worth including, then do it as an add-on to the traditional “he said”.

 “Speak softly,” he said. “They might hear you.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? The Briarlings! They lurk wherever things worth hearing are being whispered.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to speak louder then?”

The strange man stared at John as if he were a fool.

“If you speak too loudly, even worse things may hear.”

Flippant Dialect Use

If one of your characters speaks with a Cockney accent, keep in mind that you don’t have to write down every single word variation. That can be extremely distracting! This might seem like surprising advice given that certain writers (such as Steinbeck) have made their careers by writing out incredibly accurate dialects in easy to read ways; simply put, however, most modern readers don’t have the patience for dialects. It’s more important that your character uses common Cockney phrases such as “Pop the boot” when asking someone to open the trunk of a car. This is because, having that character say, “Excuse me. Could you open the trunk?” is dishonest. So, as a rule, if he says “’Ello!” write “Hello!”, but if he says “’Ease bleedin’ buggas”, write “These Bleeding Buggers.”

If you are adamant about writing in a dialect, be careful to read a book that contains a character who speaks with your chosen accent. I would also recommend that you either use the dialect in a short story, or with a minor character in a long story. 300+ pages in a code that needs to be deciphered will put off a publisher quicker than you can say, “This is going to cost quite a lot of money to edit.”

Expositional Conversations

“Since the dawn of time, earth’s creatures have lived in relative harmony. That is until mankind came along, expanding like a virus through the land, using its tools in ways no creature had ever before seen.”

“But you said yourself that we’re no different than animals.”

“I did say that, but I was referring to our physiology and our position in the chain of evolution, not to our interconnectedness with nature. You see little Billy, we alone of all creatures consider ourselves outside of the rest of nature… and that, ultimately, will be our downfall.”

In the above dialogue, little Billy isn’t a character. He has no life, no personality, and he fundamentally lacks the thing that makes all characters great: relatability. Never use your characters as a device to get out the information that you want. If you can’t use their unique personalities to say something, it doesn’t belong in your story.

TIPS

Never Say Goodbye

This is something I learned from writing screenplays. Characters in movies NEVER begin conversations with “Hello.”/”Hey, how’s it going?”/”Good. How about with you?” In Hollywood, when a character answers the phone, they immediately begin speaking – and it’s always important! Conversations begin and end with, “We have the money.”/”Good. Be at the warehouse in ten minutes.” It should be (essentially) the same way in a novel.

Mix It Up

One of the most famous lines of improvisational dialogue in the world comes from none other than Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. When Han Solo is being lowered down to be frozen in carbonite, and Princess Leia says “I love you,” for the first time, Harrison Ford was supposed to respond with “I love you.” Ford didn’t like that. He knew his character was cocky, and would be glad that Leia finally admitted that she loved him, so instead he said “I know.” Millions of viewers around the world consider that line to be one of the most iconic in all of Star Wars.

What can you do to go against expectation in your dialogue?

Writing Prompt

Write an 800-1500 word conversation between two characters in a setting of your choosing. Make the characters polar opposites from one another: a nun and a hooker, an old woman and a young boy, a civil rights activist and a member of the KKK, a supermodel and a balding 400lbs man et cetera… Pay attention to how each character might speak. Do a little research if necessary. Make sure that each character is important in the conversation, and that the conversation is anything but predictable!

How To Read Like A Writer

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

-Ernest Hemingway

In thinking about how I personally learned the craft of writing, it’s hard to minimize the impact of books. For all the classes that I took, and all the seminars I attended, the simple act of reading is responsible for easily 85% of what I’ve learned. At first glance, this might not make much sense – there are lots of prolific readers out there who aren’t remotely good writers – but that’s because not all reading is created equal. The better acquainted you become with the craft, the easier it is to see devices for what they are, to spot the sentences that make a work sing, to notice the strengths and weaknesses of characters… in short, to read like a writer. The following are things you can do to start yourself down one of the most important journeys in any writer’s career, and they are available to you anytime you pick up a book.

Slow Down!

In high school we learn to read things as quickly as we can. Individual sentences don’t matter. A teacher will never ask “What color was Hester Prynne’s dress in The Scarlet Letter?” They ask instead, “What important decision did Governor Bellingham make, and how did it affect the plot?” This trains our minds to look for plot points when we read. It’s great if we can get through a work of fiction and understand what happened, but in reading for events, we lose so much of what brought those events about. Reading isn’t a race! It’s better to understand a single book on a deeper level than finish three books in a row without taking the time to study them.

Guess Where It’s Going

Many writers, myself included, do this subconsciously. If you don’t at first, that’s okay. For now, do it consciously. Put the book down in-between chapters and ask yourself what you think will happen and why. You might find that you’ll not only get better at predicting plots, but you’ll get better at seeing devices such as foreshadowing, that move the story forward from behind the scenes.

When Your Emotions Become Affected, Question Why

If something strikes you, either because it draws you in or is completely unrelatable, take a second to scrutinize it. Is the language bare and direct or filled with a preponderance of vernacular that enthralls you? Is it the characters, the plot, the dialogue or the description that caused you to feel something? Particularly when we become excited, the tendency is to rush through the words. If you’re overtaken in the moment, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t speed through a section – but make note of it and read it again later when your mind can better focus on what it is that makes it so thrilling to read. Can you incorporate their styles in your own writing?

Only Read The Best Fiction

People don’t like this advice. Whenever I tell this to writers, they respond with a list of their guilty pleasure books, telling me how fun they are to read, even though they know they’re terribly written… My advice to anyone considering becoming a writer is this: don’t read any books that you wouldn’t have been proud to write. If you see yourself exclusively as a science fiction writer, what could you hope to get out of a horror? If you want to write like James Joyce, why are you reading Nora Roberts? When you make the choice to become a writer, you should be aware of how your entertainment affects your writing. As writers, we are constantly drawing on the things around us, whether we know it or not. This means that the mere act of reading Twilight could, theoretically, damage your prose!

Don’t Put Writers On A Pedestal

Writers are human. If something bothers you in a book by Dostoevsky or Hemingway, don’t give that writer the benefit of the doubt. It’s quite possible they’ve made a mistake! Millions of readers every day are convincing themselves that when they get confused reading Faulkner, it’s because they read the passage wrong, or because they weren’t alive during the same time period as the author… many of these things may be true, but sometimes, even the best authors make mistakes. I’ve caught misplaced commas in Steinbeck and instances of passive voice in Fitzgerald – these things don’t detract from the excellence of these writers, but it’s important that you see their work, however excellent, without rose-colored glasses. By convincing yourself of their abilities, you risk misleading yourself in your own work. If you think it’s okay for Victor Hugo to go on a twenty page rant about architecture in the middle of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, then maybe it’s okay for you to depart from your own story to talk about the history of the town that your story is set in. If you think Proust’s 150-page-long chapters are okay in his work, why not do the same with yours? Don’t put aside your critical mind. I promise you, even your favorite book has flaws.

Don’t Ignore Grammar

Yes, this is coming from an editor – I’ll give you that. Even so, too many writers ignore things like punctuation and sentence structure when they read. I recommend that instead of skipping over punctuation as if it doesn’t exist, you occasionally study its placement. This might not sound particularly exciting, but at least until you become a master of grammar yourself, it might help you to see how your favorite authors handle it. Do you tend to use more or less semi-colons than your favorite author? How long is his/her average sentence? Given that the best grammar is practically invisible, it’s all the more important to pay attention when it doesn’t seem like there’s much to notice.

Don’t Worry About Books Losing Their Allure

Does following the above advice ruin the time you spend reading? Absolutely not. Knowing where something is going means you’ll be surprised less often, but it will make you all the more appreciative when an author does surprise you! When you’re reading as a writer, you’re “chasing the dragon” of literary fiction. Instead of just reading and accepting the world an author tries to paint, you look beyond their portrait and at the colors themselves, and the act of truly understanding a work of fiction makes it all the more beautiful.

Writing Prompt

The following is the opening to Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. What do you like about it? How is it different from your own writing? Is there anything you can learn from it?

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .

Look for positive things. Did you notice the powerful opening sentence? Did you notice how Pynchon alternated the standard order of things as in “Above him lift girders old as…” instead of “Old girders lift above him, old as…”? Did you notice that Pynchon is describing a character as “he” without giving his name in order to increase tension? Did you note the interesting way “soon” was separated by dashes? When you read “Only the nearer faces are visible at all”, did you notice how everything in this Third Person Present never leaves the eyes of our character? How about negative things? Did you notice the considerable use of the word “But” in the first paragraph? Whatever your stance, did you notice how Pynchon occasionally strings on sentence fragments, such as the following: “But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.” It’s okay if you didn’t immediately take these things in. Reading as a writer takes a lot of practice at first.

On Seeking Originality

It's important that your work be original. Even if you're a fantastic writer, you don't want to be in a situation where the entirety of your success depends on your flowing sentences and your ability to evoke emotion – you want as many things in your favor as possible. The fact is, most people when they go to write, write the kinds of stories they know. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you want to write about a incessantly-brooding detective or a couple that breaks up over a misunderstanding only to resolve their differences at the end, you need to make sure there is enough originality in other areas. Why? I've had new authors ask me several times before, "If my story makes people feel good, why do I need originality?" It might be best to answer that question with another question: "If I'm shopping for a novel, why would I choose a familiar story written by a new author over one written by an established author?" I wouldn't. To that end, here are some ways to make your writing, your plot and your characters as original as possible.

Avoid Clichés

Every cliché is a missed opportunity. If you're describing the skin of an angel as "white as snow", you're missing an opportunity to show off your talent by giving an original description. Think of Clichés like microwave meals – it’s fine to have one every now and again, but too many in a row isn't healthy for you. Let's say you're writing a comedic farce, and you're describing a character that has never seen the light of day. Which is better, "He was white as snow," or "He was as white as an albino's armpit?" By choosing the second description I have maximized the humor of what might already be a funny section, and I have created something original... Dibs.

Avoid Traditional Plot Devices

A lot of things fall under this category, so I'll give a couple examples.

Having a lead character who is fully good and hardworking who simply falls upon bad times.

There's a lot of things wrong with this: it promotes the victim mentality, it's inhuman (everybody makes mistakes at times), and it's expected. It also leads to a very obvious polar shift: the victim takes control of his life, their life circumstances change for the better, and also the unfortunate phenomenon where, as your character becomes happier with herself, the circumstances in her life changes (thus proving that all our problems ultimately have to do with our own self love). Remember, honesty is an absolutely vital ingredient in any great fiction. Give your characters depth and your story will have depth also.

Completely Wrapping Up Everything

One of the reasons to avoid side-stories (as I was talking about in my last post) is to save the readers the excruciating pain of having everything wrapped up at the same time! When it comes to endings, many authors feel like they need to touch on every single loose end in their entire novel. A classic example of this comes at the end of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series. The last thirty pages of Inheritance, the final book, are filled with expositional dialogue explaining certain important tidbits, and ridiculous events that put a pretty bow on everything. Throughout some of the last pages in the entire series, a side-character who had previously sworn revenge on Eragon's brother for the deaths he'd caused by leading a village to victory against a horde of evil, tracks the party down and decides that his revenge is best served by giving his brother a scar on his hand instead of killing him... By the time I got to this section of the book, I barely remembered who this character was! Did Paolini really think that this tidbit was important enough to be placed in the final pages of the novel? Probably not. It's my belief that he felt people would judge his writing if he left any stone unturned. Hollywood has programmed this into us. It's not uncommon in movies to have two or three main characters that all get what they want in the end, satisfy their desires and live happily ever after. My advice is this: wrap up everything you can without forcing it on the story. If it seems unrealistic that all three of your main characters get what they want, maybe only one does. So, what if you realize at the end of your saga that three books ago a minor character had sworn to get revenge? If there is no way to bring it back without it taking focus away from the main message of your novel, just let it go. Sometimes when people go on crazy adventures, people swear to kill them. It happens.

Avoid Stereotypes

Planning on writing about a corrupt politician? Unless there’s something else far more original in your story, I recommend you don’t. Stereotypes are the equivalent of character clichés. Using them is the equivalent of inserting a paint-by-numbers picture into a great work of art, and they are even worse than clichéd description because they will not go unnoticed by the average reader. Here are some stereotypes I recommend you generally avoid:

The whore with the heart of gold.

The hardened war veteran with a soft gooey center.

The cut-out 50s housewife of your main character.

The completely average person destined to become a hero.

The damsel in distress, incapable of even trying to save herself.

People who are given a superpower and cry, “But I just want to be normal!”

The villain who lives only to cause destruction.

The doomed-to-die, random, last-second addition to a cast of main characters.

People who are close friends with famous people. (Or who meet famous people when travelling to the past… Just because you’re travelling to the 50’s doesn’t mean you’ll bump into Elvis.)

People who sit around in foreign countries speaking English.

Ignore The Lie That There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

Isn’t it odd how nobody who has ever written a great story has ever said this? I hear this expression all the time from family members who have never written anything, and on websites written by people who teach writing instead of writing themselves. You know who doesn’t believe this? Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Orson Scott Card, Kazua Ishiguro. Don’t be fooled. If you delve deep enough, you can say that every story is the same. After all, every story has characters who stand up against conflict… but these arguments are irrelevant. It’s like trying to say that humanity is no different than algae because we both have DNA. The building blocks of a good story might be the same, but that doesn’t make the story itself any less unique. Allow me to create an idea, on the spot that has originality. Let’s see…

Concluding a twenty year lease of his soul to the devil, a man regains his humanity only to find himself on death row for a series of murders he barely remembers.

So what are the chromosomes, or rather, the building blocks of this story? A pact with the devil is certainly one of them – and by itself it isn’t particularly original. The second is the amnesia trope – again, not particularly original. The third is the need of the man to discover his situation – see any detective story ever written… Yet, combined in this way, we are left with something that is at least fairly original. Let’s say that instead of a man, I make the character a woman. Then, instead of a pact with the devil I make it a pact with the US Government to use her body in any way they saw fit in exchange for fifty million in cash. Instead of death row, which doesn’t leave much room for character interactions, I make it a level four security prison… This is starting to sound quite original to me! What if, I factor in an entitlement personality? Instead of having her be incredibly remorseful for her part in the deaths of these people (as is tradition), I make her angry that she isn’t living on an island in the Bahamas. She simply doesn’t care about the deaths of these people… This leaves tons of opportunities for character growth!

Remember, the lives of most people have the same building blocks, and yet our lives are often quite different. Some of us are law abiding citizens, while others are rapscallions of the highest order. Some of us are dating married women or men, while others join convents or swear off love to become monks. Saying there is nothing new under the sun is an excuse to be proud of lazy or aggressively mediocre works of fiction. Whatever anyone says, always seek originality. Otherwise, what are you bringing into the world with your words?

Writing Prompt

Write a 500-1000 word short story. Make the topic as original as possible, and make sure the piece is devoid of a cliché of any kind! When it's ready, click the contact tab and send it my way!