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Sparks

Karen (Karenika) Grunberg

Spice up your Dialogue

In today's world of electronic communication, it's easy to leave the interpretation to the reader. As there is no annotation on written words, there are unspoken implications to the written format. A net-novice often makes the mistake of sending e-mail using all capital letters. When I receive such a message, I generally try to kindly let the sender know that capital letters imply screaming in net-language. In my opinion, one of the biggest disadvantages of writing to someone, instead of speaking to them, is how much we leave open to interpretation. Imagine the following sentence:

"Isn't that amazing!"

This simple sentence can be read so many ways. It might be conveying sarcasm, happiness, anger, boredom, all depending on how it's read.

When we talk to someone, we hear the way they pronounce the sentence, making it simple to know exactly what they mean by it. In writing, this is a difficult task. There are several ways to leave less room for interpretation. One is to pick your words carefully so they are precisely what you want to say. But, realistically, how often is dialogue that clear? Another common trick is to put the speaker's thoughts in italics after the dialogue. Depending on whom you ask, this is a neat trick, or cheating. Either way, it's hard and confusing to use this trick for each person without running into some viewpoint problems.

Obviously, in a book, where the reader has had time to get to know the characters, the reader will be able to judge what kind of person the character is and interpret accordingly. Even then, unless you mean to leave things blurry, it's difficult to make dialogue to-the-point.

An idea that I've recently been playing with is trying to make the reader hear the conversation. The difference between spoken dialogue and written dialogue, in my opinion, differs in two distinct places: tone and facial expressions. The way the character says a sentence is almost as crucial as the words she says. Therefore, this month's exercise will concentrate on displaying these extra traits to the reader.

Your first exercise is to write a dialogue: plain dialogue with no descriptions and no tags.

"I can't believe you did this."

"I kept telling you I would."

"I know, I know. But I never thought you'd actually quit the job."

"Well, now you do."

"You bet!"

It's a pretty plain scene. All you know at this point is Character B quit his job and Character A didn't know it. Depending on what kind of day you're having and what your feelings about your own job might be, you put emotion into Character A's words.

Now let's take this piece of dialogue and try to show some of the emotion the writer has in mind.

Catherine's eyes shone. A smile spread over her pale face and she wrapped her arms around me. "I can't believe you did this."

I broke free of her embrace. "I kept telling you I would." Her lack of faith was disturbing, but I fought hard not to let my disappointment show.

"I know, I know," she muttered, almost to herself, "but I never thought you'd actually quit your job. My stomach flipped on her mocking tone when she said the word 'actually'.

I felt anger rise to my throat but managed to come out with a weak, "Well, now you do."

Her relief must have masked her insight. She continued in her cheerful tone, "You bet!" and threw her arms around me one more time.

Slightly different than how you imagined? Look at this one:

Catherine glared into my eyes. "I can't believe you did this," she screamed.

I tried to stifle my giggles, "I kept telling you I would."

"I know, I know," she hollered, "but I never thought you'd actually quit your job." She spit out the last word I was in too good of a mood to let her ruin it. I smiled and said, "Well, now you do."

She slapped me across the face as her tears strolled down and murmured, "You bet!"

A completely different scene, yet the same exact dialogue.

The second part of the exercise is to write your dialogue over and over in as many different contexts as you can. Let the reader hear the words, not just read them. Tell us the character's facial expressions, her tone, her movements. Make the scene come to life!

After completing this exercise, go back to your other pieces and try to add some of this sparkle into your dialogues.

As always, make sure to have fun, fun, fun!

Karenika

This month's sparkling ideas are from Aby:

"I think it is a good idea for writers to keep a dream diary; maybe they could get a story idea from their dreams."

"Something else I like to do that helps is act out my stories so I got a clear vision of what I want to write. Acting the story out from different characters' viewpoint helps too. I do this by myself of course; you want everything to be your own ideas."

Thank you, Aby!

If you have any Sparkling Ideas, please email karenika@wvu.org so I can share them with our readers.