It is very hard for authors to depict emotion on the page; they spend countless days trying to spin the dialogues in such a way that they sound natural. They write, erase and then write again. That’s where authors spend most of their times. They want to make sure the dialogues sound as natural as they can otherwise they won’t incite the audience and won’t add the wanted emotion and depth to the story. Dialogues play a huge role in the story, with the dialogues you are able to identify with the character and understand what he or she is feeling. You get to see the thought process of the character and what they are planning to do. It is the biggest medium for the author to show what is happening rather than just telling. Had there been no dialogues the story would be bland and it would seem as if we are watching the story unfold from afar, dialogues bring us to the centre of the action. More importantly, dialogues should be natural. They should not sound robotic or the readers will loose interest. The entire point of dialogues is to add more life and depth to the story so your dialogues should depict natural conversations. It is indeed very difficult to do that, despite it sounding easy, once the words turn up on paper they seen fake and unrealistic. However, it is not impossible. With hard work, resilience and proper editing you can make your dialogues sound perfectly natural.
Here are the top five tips that Book Editing Services use that you can use on your journey to editing natural sounding dialogues:
- When you sit down to edit your book, get into character and try to read the dialogues in the same way and emotion you have written them. To check the dialogue you will have to act as the character. Try impersonate the character, understand the situation going on. For example if it is a sad scene and the character is delivering the dialogue in a sad manner, then you need to do the same and read the dialogue out loud and see if it makes sense, sound natural. The biggest problem that takes place here is that our dialogues miss all the natural patterns of speech for example, fillers like ‘ummm’ or ‘oh’ these buy the speaker time to think about what to say. There are more features of spontaneous speech that we skip from our dialogues and if included can give a natural touch to the such as:
False Starts: Here the speaker starts the sentence with something but goes back to correct it and start again.
Repetitions: Humans tend to repeat words and phrases to either make a point or to buy time to think of something to say.
Non-standard Grammar: When we are speaking spontaneously, we loose hold of grammar and often make grammatical mistakes.
If you include these features in your dialogues, they will sound more natural hence when you edit them and come across an unnatural sounding dialogue add these features and read them out loud to see if they sound mono-tone or awkward.
Insert dialogues looking at the situation, for example before venturing on to a sensitive discussion without any back story, its best if you engage your characters in small talk. Small talk is a feature of natural conversation that includes greetings, and other small exchanges of information about each other’s well-being or even the weather conditions. These small talks break the ice and give way to more serious conversations. First you need to build the base then talk about the issue at hand. If you think there is no need for small talk then you can start the main dialogues without it. But you need to make sure that you do not use dialogues in place of narrations or vice versa. Some authors make this blunder and write dialogues in such a way that their characters start narrating the story. This gets very confusing for the readers and they get bored. Similarly, they write the dialogues as narrations. You need to be a good judge and identify what piece of information is better written in a dialogue and which would fit best as a narration. When you edit your dialogues, you can easily break the dialogues if they are filled with information and use it as narration. On the other hand if you think there is a need for dialogue and the narrations seems extra, then you can add a dialogue here.
Avoid the repetition of information in both the dialogue and the narration. They should fill in the gaps and not repeat the same thing over and over again. You should remove the excess information or the repetition; in the professional lingo it is called ‘trimming the fat’. Authors often use echo sentences and repeat the same thing that has been established in the first sentence by writing it in the second one too. Be sure that this does not happen by reading out the dialogues out loud. Similarly, Authors also make a terrible mistake of repeating an entire scene in dialogue from the main character to the one who was not present there. It is a waste of time and repetitive, people get bored thus you must avoid this. You can just include it in the narration is a condensed form such as “Hannah told Sarah all about her fight with Michael”. This does the job effectively and you won’t have to repeat anything.
Dialogues written in isolation without any descriptive tag will not make much sense. For example “Sarah would you please stop shouting”, this dialogue does not depict the emotion or tone it is said with. If we add descriptive tags we give more information to our readers about how a dialogue was said for example Hannah yelled “Sarah would you please stop shouting”. Because of the tag, you get to know that Hannah was angered because of Sarah’s shouting. In addition to descriptive tags you can also add the actions of the speakers that will add more depth to the dialogue. For example you can say Jeremy fumbled with his fingers and said “Do you want to watch a movie with me?” With the help of the action you can judge that Jeremy was nervous. Similarly, if you add thoughts in the start or the end of the dialogue you will make the dialogue sound even more realistic for example: (What if she says No!, Gosh this is so embarrassing) Jeremy fumbled with his fingers and said “Do you want to watch a movie with me?”. This complete dialogue along with the thoughts makes more sense.
Do not go overboard by adding unnecessary information in the dialogue. People do not speak n paragraphs, thus avoid dialogues n continuous paragraphs. It is completely unrealistic. Break it into some dialogues and even fillers from the other person. Similarly do not always try to add descriptive tags along with actions and thoughts. Remember every thing looks perfect in moderation; do not go overboard with it. Have fun editing the dialogues!
Leave A Comment