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19. EDITING DIALOGUE, Part 1

© Sherry-Anne Jacobs

Getting good dialogue is very important for many reasons, so it’s obviously one thing you’ll pay particular attention to when you’re editing your work. Some writers find dialogue easy, others find it more difficult.

You can improve your dialogue writing skills by simply listening. Wherever you are, listen to people talking, whether it’s small groups, individuals or snatches of conversation in crowded places like shopping centres.

You can also improve your dialogue editing by reading dialogue passages aloud. That way you get the rhythm of the speech and see whether it sounds natural. (This is also a good way to check your punctuation, by the way – if you pause automatically at one point, then maybe there should be some punctuation mark there.)

There are several things to beware of when writing dialogue.

1. ACCENTS

When you have a character with an accent, whether it’s a foreign accent in English, or a regional accent, establish early on that this character has an accent, then be very sparing with any attempt to show the accent. In my first attempt at writing SALEM STREET I tried to show the Lancashire accent exactly. When the book was finished I set it aside for a while and when I came back to it, I had trouble reading the regional accent speeches myself! I had to go through the story, changing the accents (true as they were) back to fairly standard English.

2. REALITY

In real speech we often use broken sentences and we supplement what we are saying with body language, props eg showing somebody an object, pointing things out. There are all sorts of other clues to meaning. Try recording someone’s real speech without them knowing it and you’ll see! But we can’t do that in novels. We only have the words on the page. So ironically, you can’t aim to be too realistic if you want your reader to understand what your character is talking about.

3. EXCLAMATION MARKS

I still use too many of these. It’s one of my personal needs when editing: take out most of the exclamation marks. Let the words speak for themselves. Yes, you do occasionally need an exclamation mark, but not nearly as often as you might think.

4. TAGS

Speech tags like ‘he said’ or ‘she asked’ are necessary sometimes. But please don’t use them all the time. And don’t try to find convoluted ways to avoid them – ‘said’ is one of those common words that can be used quite often. You can also vary your way of indicating who is the speaker by simply realising that sometimes it’s obvious and you don’t need to do anything, while at other times using an action can show which character is speaking, and even to whom.

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