Crafting Realistic Dialogue Part One

Currently, I am working on revising and editing my WIP, Curses of Lavender. I have gone through the messy rough draft and have done some serious developmental editing to ensure my plot is flows in a coherent and engaging way. Now that I have a sturdy foundation for my book, it's time to dive into the nitty gritty details that makes books all the better.

One of those nitty gritty details I am focusing on is dialogue.

I used to have the problem where my characters' dialogue wasn't distinct enough or unique to their personality. I could pretty much copy and paste dialogue and just change the speaker tag. It was that bad.

During my early edits when my WIP was a stand-alone, I went through and changed little things like whether they said:

• "They are"

or

• "They're."

Little details like that are good to note, but they don't make a character's voice unique.

So then, I dove into their personalities and thought about how their experiences would make them talk, react, etc. in conversation.

For example, I knew I wanted one of my characters to be very passive and unsure. Another, I wanted to be blunt and brutally honest, yet also secretive when it came to his own emotions.

That's great and all, but how on earth do I go about adding that into your book? What is passive and unsure? What is brutally honest? How would you identify it in a way that it can come across in your book?

For me, it was a puzzle and nothing felt quite right. Why? Because the characteristics I want to apply to their personality are

1. Too specific AND

2. Too vague

Yes. They are both at the same time; I can't limit my character's speech to be only passive and unsure. That limits what she can say. It is also hard to determine what range of passiveness I want, and how I want to translate that into her speech.

You must be thinking: that sounds like a dilemma. How on earth can you remedy that?

Then, it hit me.

Last semester, I took a linguistics class. The very last unit was about pragmatics. In that unit, we learned about how people speak. More specifically, how context and society influence how we speak.

In this blog, I will go over some of the things I learned and how I applied it to writing.

There was a very interesting idea we discussed in class. It was the paradox of speech allowing people to have the freedom to express their thoughts, but also be required to speak in a certain way that society deems acceptable.

Why is this?

It is because of our face; not your literal face. In linguistics, face refers to the image you present in public. There are two types:

1. Positive face

2. Negative face.

Positive face is the desire to be liked.

• Don't think in terms of popularity, but the desire to be seen in a positive light when viewed by society.

Negative face is the desire to be left alone.

• Don't think of being anti-social, but the desire to not be interrupted in whatever flow you have. (Think of people who ask you questions when reading a book or writing. Your negative face is the desire to not be disturbed.)

The reason we cannot be free with our speech is because we are constantly trying to "save face." This means we are trying to keep both our positive and negatives faces up, while also not impeding on someone else's positive or negative face. We do this through politeness.

Politeness in linguistics is not the same as we may use it in everyday life. We think of politeness as letting someone go ahead of you, holding the door open, offering to help, etc. Linguistics focuses politeness as more of a face saving act. By doing these "polite" things, we are helping our positive face, which is our desire to be seen as kind, friendly, helpful, likable, etc.

To take it a step further, we use politeness to avoid face threatening acts (FTA). A FTA is when we impose on someone else's face. Like in the example I used earlier, if someone asks a question to someone who is reading, they are imposing on the other person's negative face. That is a FTA. FTA's are considered impolite or rude. If we perform an FTA, we are hurting our positive face, which is why we tend to avoid them.

How do we do that? Sometimes, it's unavoidable, but you can definitely lessen the effects.

Let's say we forgot a pencil. There is a person next to us that has one. We want to ask them for a pencil, but worry about impeding on their negative face. How do we solve this dilemma?

The answer is politeness.

There are certain ways we can be "polite", most of which lie in the way we execute our question.

If you say to the person: "Give me a pencil." you can be seen as impolite and rude, as you are impeding on their negative face.

However, if you instead ask: "Could you lend me a pencil?" or "I'm so sorry to bother you, but could I borrow a pencil?" then you are using politeness to acknowledge you are impeding on their negative face and mitigate the effects of doing so, which in turn saves your positive face.

What about maintaining your positive face?

Let's say you want to ask your friend to go to the movies. If you ask them and they say no, it will hurt both people's positive faces.

So, typically we ask: "Are you busy today?" If they say no, then we launch into our invitation, knowing the chances of them saying no is less. If they say yes, then we save ourselves the embarrassment of being shot down, and save the other person from having to say no, both of which threaten their positive faces.

You might be thinking: this is great and all, but how will it help me with my writing?

Let's cover one more thing first.

Direct and indirect speech.

Direct speech is when you do not use any "politeness".

• You state what you want.

• For example, in the pencil scenario, you would ask: "Give me a pencil."

• In the movie example, you would say: "Let's go to the movies." Or "Do you want to go to the movies."

Indirect speech is when you use "politeness" to save face or acknowledge that you are intruding on someone else's.

• Indirectness would be the examples I used above to save face.

Another example to really distinguish the two:

If you want someone to close the door, here are the possible responses.

Direct Speaker:

• "Close the door."

• "Please close the door."

* Note -- directness doesn't have to be 100% commanding. You can add general terms of politeness into your statement and still be direct *

Indirect Speaker:

• "Can you close the door?"

  • This is indirect because the "can" is asking is someone is capable of closing the door. I am sure someone has commented on this when we ask: "Do you have a bathroom" or "Can I use the bathroom" We may get a response like: "Yes we have a bathroom." or "I don't know, can you?" That is because the "can" acts as a barrier to help save face, yet it also mitigates our directness.

• "The door is open."

  • This is the most indirect because you aren't even asking a question.

  • Indirectness works because people implicitly understand the rules of politeness and interpret it in the way you mean—usually...

Now that we know about our faces, how we can keep them and avoid threatening another's, and know about direct and indirect speech, we can start applying this to our dialogue.

• Some people are more direct speakers. They care less about saving face or being "polite" and are up front with what they want.

• Some people are more indirect speakers. They care about saving face and being "polite" and may use words or phrases that distract from the true meaning/their true wish.

Just like people are different, your characters are, too. Think about their personalities and determine how they would approach a social scenario.

Earlier, I mentioned I wanted one character to be passive and unsure. I said it was hard to hone in on what exactly that meant. Thinking about it in terms of face and directness, couldn't I say that my character is worried about saving face and through that is indirect? Wouldn't applying those concepts make her appear passive and unsure, rather than confident and sure?

Thinking about it like that gives me a lot of direction when crafting her responses.

Instead of answering "yes" to a question, which is directly stating what she wants, she would probably say something along the lines of:

• "If you want."

• "I'm not sure."

• "Maybe."

• "What do you think?"

• Etc.

This dialogue will make her come across as passive and unsure without me having to sit there and rack my brain for ways to do so.

I can do the same with my brutally honest character. If he is brutally honest, he probably doesn't care about saving face or about threatening someone else's and is probably also very direct.

He would probably say, in answer to the question:

• "Yes."

• "Yeah."

• "That'd be great."

• "I'm down."

Or maybe even:

• "No."

• "That's a stupid idea."

• "I don't want to do that."

Being direct and brutally honest will make him not worried about stating his opinion or answering in the way he wants to.

Characters don't have to be this cut and paste, either.

• What if you have a character who is direct, but also worries about saving face or not threatening another's? They would most likely be direct when answering, but also cautious of other's feelings and tone down on the bluntness.

• This can also be vice versa; what if they don't care about other's faces, but worry about their own? They may be blunt or careless when approaching other people, but be wary of their own face.

Also think about gender. Men may be more inclined to be direct and not worry about face-saving, while women may be more inclined to worry about face-saving and be indirect.

Maybe you want to break the stereotype and make the man a softie and make the woman confident and uncaring. And, like I said before, mix it up. See what their personality is like, dig into their past experiences, and see how those would influence their directness.

Think about age or rank.

• To a parent or teacher someone may be more polite and less so with a friend.

• Or, if you want a rebellious character maybe they aren't.

Think outside of your character's typical responses. Would anything change how they would normally respond?

• Does your character have an issue with somebody? If so, that might alter how they speak to them and whether or not they consider their face.

• Do they have a crush or an idol? Wouldn't that make them more indirect and conscious of their face?

• What about their mood? Happy, sad, angry—all of it can influence how they speak.

To go one step further to create some interesting dialogue and tension:

What if you have one character who is direct and one who is indirect.

• Does the direct character understand the indirect character when they are being indirect?

• Does the indirect characters think the direct character is being rude when they state things directly?

• How does a character's own tendencies or way they see the world shape how they think of another character who doesn't think the same way they do?

  • Will someone who doesn't care about saving face be considered snobbish and rude?

  • Will someone who cares about saving face be annoyingly nice?

  • Will this make it hard to complete the task if the way they think and talk gets in the way?

There are so many possibilities.

Don't overwhelm yourself. Start with your character's core and then build outwards to see how they would react in different scenarios, with different people, when influenced by different moods.

I always find it so hard to keep track of all the many little things I need to do in my book. Instead of trying to remember all of it, I am trying to break it down into bite-size pieces that are more manageable to keep track of and execute.

This is one way I am attempting to break down dialogue, and I hope it has either helped or inspired you.

There are so many other topics I want to talk about concerning dialogue and applying what I learned from my linguistics class, but didn't want to overwhelm you with too much in one blog post. If this was helpful or interesting, be sure to lookout for the other installments I will do.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to leave it in the comments section.

Happy writing!