# Dialogue



## Pimlico (Sep 13, 2013)

How do you as a writer/reader feel about long stretches of dialogue? Sometimes the story calls for them.

Do you think it's better to simply let the dialogue speak for itself and not try to pad it out descriptively every once in awhile?

For example, to write: "Blah blah blah," he said, sitting back and stroking his beard thoughtfully.

Or is it enough to write line after line of dialogue without such embellishments?

I prefer not adding them, but I find it looks strangely inadequate to have twenty lines of dialogue with no reference to the setting. I almost feel as if the reader might get lost if they're not called back to it once in awhile.


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## Conker (Sep 13, 2013)

Like most things, I find it to be a balancing act. If the scene requires lots of talking, then I assume leave out every little detail of what the character is doing. It can really depend on what the conversation is about though, and how you want the characters to appear while talking. Few details sprinkled in will never hurt, assuming they are the correct details to bring up.


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## Aleu (Sep 13, 2013)

I dunno, depends on what the writer is intending. Sometimes you get lost in the conversation as you would every day. The only thing I'd describe would be the reaction of the character if it calls for it, such as surprise or disgust. I have lines of just dialogue in my story here for example. (Mature for language)

I don't mind descriptives after dialogue if it fits the character, such as one that needs to do things with his hands while conversing. Though if it's all the time with every character...it gets overwhelming.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 13, 2013)

I feel like it has a lot to do with the atmosphere you want to project.  If you happen to write in a very minimalist style, you can leave almost every one of the tags out and have it just be a flow of conversation, but if you want it to help project more of the characters' personalities or what have you you can start adding body language into the mix (nervous tics, things like that, to help flesh out the characters through non-verbal dialogue).  It is very easy to overdo it with the tags, though, so getting the appropriate dialogue/tag ratio is a bit of an art.  Honestly, though, I find that reading the passages out loud is one of the best ways to determine if you're going overboard with either one.  It'll just end up feeling like a pacing issue when you do that, and you can adjust it appropriately.


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## Conker (Sep 13, 2013)

M. LeRenard said:


> I feel like it has a lot to do with the atmosphere you want to project.  If you happen to write in a very minimalist style, you can leave almost every one of the tags out and have it just be a flow of conversation, but if you want it to help project more of the characters' personalities or what have you you can start adding body language into the mix (nervous tics, things like that, to help flesh out the characters through non-verbal dialogue).  It is very easy to overdo it with the tags, though, so getting the appropriate dialogue/tag ratio is a bit of an art.  Honestly, though, I find that reading the passages out loud is one of the best ways to determine if you're going overboard with either one.  It'll just end up feeling like a pacing issue when you do that, and you can adjust it appropriately.


Aye! And reading your dialogue out loud is a good habit to get into anyways, since spoken words should sound natural when spoken.


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## Aleu (Sep 13, 2013)

Conker said:


> Aye! And reading your dialogue out loud is a good habit to get into anyways, since spoken words should sound natural when spoken.



I do this constantly.

Also, does anyone write out their character's accents? I've been wanting to experiment with that.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 13, 2013)

Conker said:
			
		

> And reading your dialogue out loud is a good habit to get into anyways, since spoken words should sound natural when spoken.


Well, not necessarily.  I guess what I mean is, they should sound 'natural', but not 'realistic'.  Because realistic dialogue sounds absolutely horrible when written into a story.  Like... find yourself a legal transcript sometime of witness testimony and you'll see what I mean (with all the 'uh' and 'um' and 'like' intact).



			
				Aleu said:
			
		

> Also, does anyone write out their character's accents?


Ever since trying to read Brian Jacques, I never do that.  It just ends up making everything super hard to read, unless it's pretty mild.  Buh if'n yer storee is writt'n lahk thee-yus, notta' wuhn feller's gonna' be able t' understan' a dayum wuh'd you's is a trah-in' tuh say.  If you know what I mean.  I hate that shit, so I usually just say something like 'he spoke with a heavy southern accent', or something.


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## Aleu (Sep 13, 2013)

M. LeRenard said:


> Ever since trying to read Brian Jacques, I never do that.  It just ends up making everything super hard to read, unless it's pretty mild.  Buh if'n yer storee is writt'n lahk thee-yus, notta' wuhn feller's gonna' be able t' understan' a dayum wuh'd you's is a trah-in' tuh say.  If you know what I mean.  I hate that shit, so I usually just say something like 'he spoke with a heavy southern accent', or something.


Oh I've been just trying to go for mild accent, like just enough to tell so-n-so is English or whatever nationality.
There's only one case I'll be writing where it'll be a heavy accent with slang everywhere and the character being spoken to would be like "the fuck are you trying to say?"

I want people to hear the voices with the accents (lol) but not at the expense of readability.


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## Conker (Sep 13, 2013)

M. LeRenard said:


> Well, not necessarily.  I guess what I mean is, they should sound 'natural', but not 'realistic'.  Because realistic dialogue sounds absolutely horrible when written into a story.  Like... find yourself a legal transcript sometime of witness testimony and you'll see what I mean (with all the 'uh' and 'um' and 'like' intact).


Within reason is a qualifier I feel should go without saying, but yes, within reason. 

There is a middle ground between realistic stutters and jargon and slang and the dialogue of someone like Edgar Rice Burroughs who really shouldn't ever write dialogue since it's so unnatural. 




> Ever since trying to read Brian Jacques, I never do that.  It just ends up making everything super hard to read, unless it's pretty mild.  Buh if'n yer storee is writt'n lahk thee-yus, notta' wuhn feller's gonna' be able t' understan' a dayum wuh'd you's is a trah-in' tuh say.  If you know what I mean.  I hate that shit, so I usually just say something like 'he spoke with a heavy southern accent', or something.


Yet Twain pulled it off pretty well in _Huck Finn_ so YMMV. I haven't read a Brian Jacques book in ages, but I also really liked his written accents...when I was in middle school. Stephen King does it to some degree in his books, and I feel he does a good job. 

I prefer to not do it because I know I simply cannot do it. I'd fuck it up and so it's easier to type "he talked with X accent" or somesuch.


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## Friday (Sep 14, 2013)

There are several ways to handle accents, that I've seen. First is say, "he had an X accent." Second is to explain after they speak a portion of dialogue a specific way in which they pronounced X or Y word. The third is to write it out in the dialogue, but there's little need to overdo it. "Ya'll will begin to understand" will get the idea of a southern accent across better than, "Ya'll wi begi' t' unnerstand," which is much more literally the syllables involved. In my opinion, if the reader has to read the dialogue a second time out loud to understand, it's probably a bit too heavy.


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## Scath-mac-tire (Sep 22, 2013)

I've usually preferred a balance, sometimes over half a page, sometimes under, just depends on what's called for at the time. Usually I like to work details of whats going on in the stretches of dialogue, and it works out pretty nicely.


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## Gnarl (Sep 22, 2013)

I would say that even with all of the dialogue I have written over the years only once have I ever been worried about the persons accent. I would usually handle something like...
"He spoke in a heavy Scottish accent as he shuffled his feet under the table." Unless it is really important to the story I have not found a need for it. I also refuse to use tags like he said or she said. It seems that there is almost always (I would never say always) some other way to handle these issues.


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## Troj (Sep 22, 2013)

You can also use word choices, slang, and grammar to lightly paint a picture of a particular accent, without going overboard.

I find that while you don't want to attach an action, gesture, or tone to _everything_ a character says, you do want tags and descriptors here and there, so that it doesn't feel like your characters are just talking in a white room. It's a balancing act. 

As a rule of thumb, you also want to use alternatives to "said" sparingly and carefully, because they tend to stand out, and can become distracting.


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## Conker (Sep 22, 2013)

Troj said:


> As a rule of thumb, you also want to use alternatives to "said" sparingly and carefully, because they tend to stand out, and can become distracting.


No one told that to Stephanie Meyer


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## Sasya (Sep 22, 2013)

Friday said:


> "Ya'll will begin to understand" will get the idea of a southern accent across better than, "Ya'll wi begi' t' unnerstand," which is much more literally the syllables involved.



... and that is why.  As someone with a southern accent, I cringe trying to read that.

I don't say "Yall wi begi' t'unnerstand." .. I say "Yall'll begin to understand."â€”How people hear it is different, of course, but a lot depends on the listener.  

But especially when it comes to "southern accents", PLEASE don't try to write your dialog phonetically if you don't actually have a clue what the destination accent sounds like.

At any rate, in my own writing I use accent very sparingly, usually by word choice and inflection. 

-Fox


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## Sasya (Sep 22, 2013)

Gnarl said:


> "He spoke in a heavy Scottish accent as he shuffled his feet under the table."



Did he speak in a different accent when he removed his feet from under the table? 

-Fox


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## Troj (Sep 23, 2013)

Conker said:


> No one told that to Stephanie Meyer



Yeah, nobody told her a lot of things .


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## Gnarl (Sep 23, 2013)

Sasya said:


> Did he speak in a different accent when he removed his feet from under the table?
> 
> -Fox


Actually he did! In that particular passage he was making fun of the people who were giving him a hard time.


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## MetaCola (Sep 28, 2013)

It isn't a good idea to depend on using adverbs after "said," I know that much. Line after line of "he said wearily" and "she said in an annoyed tone" makes the emotion seem like an afterthought - if he's happy, maybe he smiles before he speaks, or he might be whistling before he strikes up a conversation. If she's annoyed, she might be half-frowning, or she might interrupt him mid-sentence. It's basically "show, don't tell" applied to dialogue. (Oh, and this point might just be my opinion, but replacing "said" with a verb that is not about vocalizing is just as bad. "That sounds great," he smiled. How do you smile words? "Said" works perfectly well half the time, anyway. I don't notice its repetition unless it's a faster dialogue that likes to tack those tags on each line.)

That being said, it isn't necessary to have an action before or after every line, but consider how they change the pacing - a fast, back-and-forth argument wouldn't have many actions dividing it up (certainly not long, detailed ones), though an idle dispute held over text messages might get the spotlight only every so often as the characters otherwise go about their business. The rate at which the lines are delivered affects how the reader perceives their tone and urgency.

For accents, everyone else is right - though you'll sometimes have to state outright what their accent is, a bit of colloquial writing ("gonna" versus "going to," and a well-placed "y'all") does wonders. Word choice is important as well - a phrase beginning with "I do believe" conjures up a different image and voice than one beginning with "I reckon."


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## Friday (Sep 28, 2013)

Sasya said:


> ... and that is why.  As someone with a southern accent, I cringe trying to read that.
> 
> I don't say "Yall wi begi' t'unnerstand." .. I say "Yall'll begin to understand."â€”How people hear it is different, of course, but a lot depends on the listener.
> 
> ...



Sorry, just noticed this. I live in the south, this is actually how I've heard multiple people speak, but there are actually like ten different 'southern accents' so... Anyways. It was supposed to be cringe-worthy, but said phonetically, it actually sounds out to a legitimate southern accent.

Which is also why you shouldn't sound out an accent phonetically like that, because as you can see, two people who both know what the accent in question sounds like disagree about how correct it is, and would therefore hate every line of dialogue that character speaks. Detracts from the reading.


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## M. LeRenard (Sep 28, 2013)

Friday said:


> Sorry, just noticed this. I live in the south, this is actually how I've heard multiple people speak, but there are actually like ten different 'southern accents' so... Anyways. It was supposed to be cringe-worthy, but said phonetically, it actually sounds out to a legitimate southern accent.
> 
> Which is also why you shouldn't sound out an accent phonetically like that, because as you can see, two people who both know what the accent in question sounds like disagree about how correct it is, and would therefore hate every line of dialogue that character speaks. Detracts from the reading.



Yeah... that brings up an excellent point.  'Accents' are actually mostly just how different people pronounce the various vowels and/or consonants in the language, rather than chopping off letters or inventing new words or whatever (like ain't).  Like, when I hear a prototypical 'Texan accent' (whatever that means), the word 'understand' as in the example here sounds to me like 'uhn-der-stay-yund', or something, because I open my mouth a little more on the 'u', and I pronounce the 'a' like as in 'cat' or 'apple', that sort of sharp wide open-mouthed sound, whereas when I hear the Texan accent the 'a' tends to sound to my ear more that in 'cave' (with the diphthong, though it's slight; I believe that's what they call 'twang').  Also I'm not so deliberate with the 'der', so 'under' sounds like one syllable when I say it.  And so on and so forth.
POINT IS: when you're used to hearing something a certain way, you see the spelled word and that's how you pronounce it in your head, so it's really hard to just nail any particular accent in text.  But this is okay, because it means spelling is standardized for all speakers of the language.  If it wasn't, we'd all be in trouble.


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## Lobar (Sep 28, 2013)

I'm no big city writer, but it seems to me that if y'all want to indicate a fella's upbringing through the way he talks, I reckon there's no sense beatin' your audience over the head with all this phoneticizin' of accents when just a bit of dialect will do.  A few basic mannerisms of the Southern gentlemen's all they need to get the hint, trying to gussy it up more than that is like putting tits on a bull.


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