Writing Tips while I put off making breakfast

I need to make breakfast, but that requires getting up, so I'll use my brain muscles instead of my leg muscles to tell you more about writing dialog or whatever.

Okay! So. Dialog. Hm. A lot of people have pointed out that my dialog is very natural sounding, which is great that it comes across that way! It's important to me that everyone sounds like a person! I don't think it's really too hard to get more natural sounding dialog, so I'll try and walk you through my process as best I can. I admit that I don't think very hard about it because it's just the way I write :).

By now, you've probably noticed my normal writing style here and in my comic blog posts is pretty...informal. I'd go so far as to say my writing is kind of inelegant and goofy, but I'm not a very formal person in real life either. If you ever attain any sort of sweeping inspiration from whatever I'm writing, just know it's unintentional lol. I write and talk to the lowest common denominator, I guess, because I know I'm smart and I don't particularly need to prove it by sounding like a highfalutin asshole. (Note: I didn't realize that highfalutin is one word, and that it's not some angry Southern jargon for overly intellectual dicks...today I learned!)

Anyway, when you sit down to write dialog, reeeeally think about how people actually talk. Maybe sit down and watch some shitty reality TV and take notes. If you've got a character talking and talking for paragraphs...that's not real life. If you have a conversation between say, three or more people, it's not unusual that any of them will never complete a full sentence. As humans, we anticipate what people are going to say, we interject, we add on and talk over each other. This is a studied linguistic phenomenon. That's maybe not plausible for your actual writing, but it's something to keep in mind as you're writing.

For our examples today, I generated a random writing prompt from some thing online, so we've got a football player drinking wine in a storm. Okay, whatever.

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STEP ONE: Keep it short.

Most people don't speak in very long sentences, and if they do, they tend to ramble. Don't be afraid of putting some really useless little chunks of dialog in there, because it shows that someone's thinking. 

My football player is going to be named Bill, and he's stuck inside with the power out, drinking wine with his friend...what's a white guy name...Sam. Sure. See if you can figure out who's who and what's going on from dialog alone. 

"Oh...Okay, wow...this is shit. This is really shitty stuff."

"I mean, yeah. It's been sitting in your fridge for a month since you opened it." 

"Does white wine always taste like piss?"

"Maybe? This one does, but we either drink this or the vanilla extract. Would drinking rubbing alcohol kill you?"

"God damnit. Fuck. This is...it doesn't matter. God...fuck everything."

"Look, I know the power going out is inconvenient, but...do you have a flashlight? We could play Monopoly or cards or something..."

"It's not...I don't care about the stupid power. My whole god damn future is totally screwed, man."

"Is this about your leg still?

"Yes. Yes, it's about my fucking leg, Sam."

Okay! So apparently Bill is kind of a pissy asshole and Sam ended up being comedic relief. That happens every damn time I write anything, so oh well. If you're me, you end up needing an outlet for all your one liners eventually.

I guess, theoretically, you could write all that without all the gratuitous cursing, but whyyyyy would you. It's just very normal that adults curse, especially when they're frustrated and slightly tipsy from terrible wine. The longest sentence in that passage was only 13 words, I think. And note, you don't even know they're talking about wine initially. Human beings already know what objects they're talking about in a conversation, so you'll get a lot of "its, those, these" etc that are totally unqualified or unidentified. Sometimes that sounds okay, sometimes you need to go back and clarify things a bit anyway. There are a lot of choppy, seemingly useless phrases sprinkled in there, which...I guess is stylistically something I'm used to doing, but it helps show frustration, hesitation, etc. You don't have to spend all your time describing how your characters are feeling if those emotions come across in the dialog. 

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Step Two: Exposition conversations

"Okay, but I have all this exposition I need this character to go over, so it HAS to be long, even if it's unrealistic." 

No it doesn't. It reaaaaally doesn't. I don't bother reading like, 90% of comics because I fucking hate seeing word bubbles that just go on and on and on. If you're word bubble is more than 5 short lines stacked on top of each other, just...stop and cut it down. A big, wordy bubble is a sometimes thing, not an always thing. You can get exposition in smaller chunks as part of an actual conversation much more effectively than you can as a huge block of text:

"Okay, so...your leg. I still don't actually get what happened, Bill. You were fine with retiring."

"Yeah, I thought I was. But like...So, there's this marathon thing the local firefighters put on every year, right?"

"Yeah, to raise money for sick kids or something."

"Cerebral palsy?"

"I think so? I never went."

"Yeah, so I get invited as a guest. They're like, 'you've been such an inspiration to this town! We watched you win the playoffs for Purdue! We want you to support our cause!"

"Sure, that sounds...I mean, it's cool they asked you."

"I couldn't make it up the stairs. Five stairs onto that stage and I was grabbing that handrail like I needed Life Alert. I'm at a marathon, a fucking marathon...All these fit assholes and I can't make it up five stairs."

Anyway, blah blah blah he's mad about his bum leg. You get the idea. If I kept writing this scene, I'd probably shove a flashback in there somewhere to explain how his leg got hurt while playing college football, but the general idea is that instead of a GIANT block of text, I broke it into a conversation. Is a lot of it useless? Maybe. Does it still tell you who these randos are, as people? Yeah. You write to SHOW, not TELL, and you shouldn't need to tell me who your characters are. I should be able to hear it in their voices and see it in their actions.

Depending on the scenario and the medium you're working in, you don't always have the luxury of lengthy back-and-forths like this, but even in my comic, I try and spice up any exposition as much as possible. You need to know the background of things to enjoy the story, but it shouldn't be me holding a gun to your head to keep your attention. Long, rambling passages filled with fucktons of information don't keep your attention. 

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Step Three: Character Voice

I...do this by default. I don't think a lot about it. Once you start developing your characters and getting to know them, their voice should be fairly obvious after awhile, and their dialog should flow out of your brain pretty easily. If you look at your page, and the lines of dialog could be swapped to any other character and not change in tone or meaning...ya fucked up. You've got cardboard people saying cardboard lines. 

LISTEN TO HOW PEOPLE TALK. Sure, some people are intellectual as fuck 24/7...but if you write every character like that, your reader is going to want to punch them. 

As soon as I started writing Bill up there, I knew he was frustrated. He's probably been frustrated his whole life. Bill doesn't stop and think about his words carefully, he just says them. They come out...in some order. He pauses and jumps around. He's angry and a little drunk. His "voice" should reflect those things. 

Sam...seems to be trying to diffuse the situation while also giving Bill a chance to talk it out. He's not mad, but he's hesitant. He's getting in some jokes. He might like a lighter mood, but he's going to roll with it. His sentences are a bit longer, not as much stopping and starting, but he's not betraying his feelings here.

I've got a new witch character I'm introducing in HTBAW pretty soon, and as soon as I started picturing the scene in my head, I knew she was going to have this very lazy, kind of flighty talking style. She's aloof and kind of an airhead, but only on the surface. If she tried to threaten someone, it'd come out more like "Yeah, okay...like, don't try it. That's cute, the claws are super cute, but like...it's not gonna work. I like the idea, don't get me wrong, but you are just way underestimating the situation or whatever." And see, I love that. It's obnoxious. I can hear her voice in my head. She's either got a Southern accent or a Brooklyn accent, I can't decide. I like Southern accent better, honestly. But either way, she sounds like she's high as a kite and it's great. 

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Step Four: What do I do with all these feels?

Look, people are ridiculous. We don't say things plainly, I'd say...the majority of the time. People are awkward. Under everything that seems plainly obvious about someone, there's always layers and layers of other random shit they're dealing with or have dealt with. 

What I mean here is, avoid giant passages where someone spews their Very True feelings all over other people. There's a reason that an overly-honest crying jag with a friend is an occasional treat and not an every day occurrence. (Unless it is for you, in which case, your friend should charge you for therapy.) 

Take, for example, Supernatural: a show that is simultaneously super emotionally constipated and overly, awkwardly emotionally honest. At the end of a lot of episodes, you'll have Sam and Dean hash out...whatever weird shit they've manufactured between them. Usually this is a five minute conversation while leaning against the car, after which they might hug it out and Dean complains about chick flick moments. Cool. Rampant toxic masculinity aside, that's also completely weird. 

In my experience, for the sake of appearances, people don't communicate their feelings about anything unless their are stakes involved. There's a reason that communication in a long term relationship takes effort and commitment...you actually have to fucking talk to the other person. You gotta use "I" phrasing and put your emotions to words. It's weird and everyone hates it, but that's because our lizard brains hate processing emotions. "I feel disrespected when you leave your laundry on the floor in the bedroom. It would help me feel like you appreciate the work I do to keep the house clean if you put your clothes in the hamper." 

FUCKING WEIRD. But when your marriage is at stake, you overcome the burden of being an emotional cave person and try and express yourself. Normal dialog doesn't call for this kind of shit, though. If your characters are unrelentingly dropping all their feelings on each other, especially if they barely know each other...Stop. Find another way. Make getting to those real emotions like pulling teeth. Make it torture.

"Okay, so you couldn't make it up the stairs, but...they didn't ask you there to run a marathon. That wasn't personal. They just wanted to celebrate you."

"They wanted to celebrate a guy who doesn't even exist anymore. That guy is dead. Now there's just me, Bill, a dude with a fucked up leg. Just Bill, a guy who hobbles around with a cane and sells shitty cars."

"Yeah, but that's football. That's...you're not the only guy who played football and ended up retiring before their time because of injuries."

"I had dreams, man. I was amazing. I was going to be somebody."

"So? Bill, fuck your dreams, okay? Fuck them. You tried. You gave it a shot, and it didn't work out, but you tried. Most people don't even bother trying anything. People have dreams that don't work out every day, but trying...trying anything! That's worth a lot fucking more than just dreaming." 

"I sell. shitty. fucking. cars. That's not who I was supposed to be."

"You sell the crap out of those shitty fucking cars, because bum leg or not, you haven't half-assed a thing in your life. That's who you are, Bill. You don't fucking give up."

"...Maybe."

"Look, you didn't even give up on this terrible wine. You opened it and then left it in the fridge for a week like it might taste like something better than swamp water. You have faith in shit, man."

Okay, I kind of ship them now. But there ya go. Does the scene have emotion? Sure. Is it spewed out at you in a giant soliloquy? No. I let it get a bit lengthy, because a good rant has its place and time, but they're still speaking in fairly short bursts. My point is, overall, people don't examine themselves very closely very often. They should, but they don't. And as a result, they're going to talk around their actual feelings in most situations. Some characters will be more open, some are going to be more closed off, some...will barely register who they are and their impact on other people at all. (I find that kind of flightiness actually really fun to write, because I run into that kind obliviousness on such a regular basis that you stop taking shit personally.)

Anyway, let your characters talk around things. Let them skirt the issues and come to understandings that don't need to be verbalized. Let their actions speak in place of their words. You'll end up with much stronger characterization and way less boring dialog.

Small note: one of the best examples I saw of this was in His and Her Circumstances, which I never finished watching, but it came out in '98 or so. The two main characters really like each other, but they're both upholding these crazy perfect personas at school and are struggling with who they really are and their feelings for each other. Instead of talking it out or desperate confessions, there's this adorable scene where they reach out and lock fingers in class. It's this tacit confirmation of their emotions, but they don't say anything out loud. I don't remember much else about the anime, but I remember that scene, because the whole story up til that point made that small action stupidly poignant. That should be the aim. The audience should know how your characters feel, but they shouldn't have to be told explicitly.