Home » SMART TALK 101: HOW TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS BETTER CONVERSATIONALISTS

SMART TALK 101: HOW TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS BETTER CONVERSATIONALISTS

March 1, 2025 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

By Christina Hamlett

For as many conversations as we chatter in or listen to every day, capturing that same rhythm and realism in a project for page, stage or screen is no small challenge. Too often the result is characters who (1) all talk in exactly the same voice, (2) talk more formally/rigidly/eloquently than normal people, or (3) talk too much. It’s easy to forget that although life can play itself out in real time, the words within the finite space of a novel, play or movie can’t afford to be wasted, especially in dialogue.

PURPOSEFUL PATTER

The goal of dialogue in any fictional context is to accomplish one or more of the following:

Reveal layers of character.

Advance the plot through foreshadowing or by obstructing/resolving the core conflict.

Explain events from the past.

Articulate feelings that can’t be conveyed through physical action.

Example: Your protagonist says, “I’ve been terrified of the water—even wading pools—ever since I saw my cousin Stewie drown in the Seine when I was a kid.”

This line:

Reveals vulnerability;

Suggests that water will make an unbidden appearance somewhere in this story and force the protagonist to confront childhood fears;

Explains the source of the fear, in addition to establishing familial and geographical connections; and

Expresses what could otherwise only be delivered as a flashback.

When you start putting words in your characters’ mouths, it’s critical to eschew “glacial gabfests” in which the point of the conversation takes a long time to make itself known. While reality frequently ensnares us in rambling How-are-you/I-am-fine/What-do-you-want-to-do?/I-don’t-know chats which are socially polite but sans substance, your audience for fiction is impatient for something interesting to happen. Make it so by deleting any banter which just exists to fill space.

YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?

In order to quickly bring readers and viewers up to speed on relationships and backstories, one of the most common mistakes of writers uncomfortable with penning dialogue is to forget their characters are actually supposed to be talking to each other. Instead, they use dialogue as a contrivance to deliver information that the characters themselves already know.

Example:

“Well! If it isn’t my cousin Bob from Dubuque! How have you been, Bob? And are you still involved in that telemarketing campaign to sell crawdads to the Asian market which my ex-wife, Maris, told you five years ago at a party in The Hamptons would be a good investment so you could send your three children—Margaret, Lionel and Bobby Jr.—to prestigious colleges?”

This especially applies to The Party Syndrome herein writers introduce every character entering a room for the first time to everyone who’s present. Unless it actually is a party where such introductions would be natural, find ways other than dialogue to tell your audience who your players are. Stay mindful, though, that the human brain is wired to process and remember only three things at a time unless the content is frequently repeated. If, for example, you introduce each of 25 new characters plus their detailed backgrounds just once in your opening chapter, your readers will retain less than 19 percent of it and have to keep flipping back to see who said what.

Another aspect of the Too Much Information scenario is to either have characters converse in lengthy Q&A speeches or deliver ongoing streams of soul-baring monologues. Think of your fictional conversations as a tennis game with snappy volleys of disclosures, reiterations and interruptions back and forth. If, however, Player A contemplates the ball aloud for 10 minutes every time it comes to his half of the court and Player B then responds in kind with another 10 minutes before lobbing it back, it’s going to be a tedious snore-fest.

Same with monologues. A monologue is like The Big Speech which wins actors their Oscars. Your characters are only entitled to one big speech in the whole story and, thus, it should be the defining moment readers will talk about long after they’ve reached the end. If your character constantly talks in chunky paragraphs and full pages rather than bite-sized sentences interspersed with action, your readers will respond, “Oh no, not again!”

THE DANGER OF DIALECTS

Playwrights and screenwriters are especially guilty when it comes to the habit of writing “phonetically illustrative” dialogue for foreign characters so actors will know how to pronounce their lines authentically. They may think they’re being helpful but the results typically look like this:

“Par doe-nay mwah, miss-your, but vare eez zee trenn stayshun zo I ken buy za teeket to Pair-ee?”

Was that annoying to read or what? From the actors’ viewpoint, it’s also insulting since it suggests they’re incapable of mimicking a perfectly plausible French accent after all those years of drama classes. Why not simply type:

(with French accent)

Pardon me, monsieur, but where is the train station so I can buy a ticket to Paris?

Even worse is when novelists resort to writing dialects and accents as if they were an extended phonics lesson. Not only does this slog the pacing of the story but it also forces readers to concentrate more on the pronunciation of individual words and phrases instead of focusing on the flow of emotions being evoked. No matter, for instance, how well intentioned a writer is in capturing the full texture of a Scottish brogue – “Aweel, ‘g’awa tae Glasgow finever ye micht, quine, ‘n’ nivver fash” – it becomes cumbersome when spread over the course of too many pages. Besides, most readers can “hear” an accent in their heads even if it’s not spelled out for them.

Equally problematic is the challenge of maintaining dialectic consistency from start to finish. A character who says “Wha’ the dilly yo, homeboy?” in Chapter 3 isn’t going to say “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced” by Chapter 4. The easiest solution for identifying such discrepancies is to read these characters’ individual lines aloud as if they were one continuous monologue.

IT’S OKAY TO SAY “SAID”

When I was a young aspiring writer, I had a strong aversion to the use of “said” in a story. My justification? It was blah. It was uninspired. It was pedestrian. Why use “said” when there were so many other words in the English language that were much more expressive? Throughout high school composition classes, my characters squeaked, pontificated, reflected, mused and accused. As if that weren’t enough to spice up their conversations, I was generous in my deployment of adverbs. After all, who’s going to make for a scarier villain – the one who “growled menacingly” or the one who said, “If you don’t give me the map, I’ll kill you”?

Ironically, the quest to find complicated replacement words for simple standards such as “said, asked, told, replied” isn’t just time-consuming; the replacements can sometimes become a head-scratching distraction. There’s a popular Regency romance author, for instance, whose characters (regardless of gender) don’t “exclaim” when they’re excited; they “ejaculate.” (Just because it’s in a thesaurus doesn’t mean it’s always going to be a smart fit.)

Nor is it necessary to say “said” along with names/pronouns at the end of every dialogue exchange; if there are only two people conversing, readers will figure out that they’re taking turns. This also eliminates the common mistake of characters repeating each other’s names excessively, as in:

MARK

How are you today, Christina?

CHRISTINA

Just fine, Mark. And you?

MARK

Great, Christina. Thanks for asking.

CHRISTINA

You’re welcome, Mark.

Have your characters ever delivered a line with a modifier having nothing to do with human speech?

“Sure,” she smiled wistfully.

“Yep,” he grinned.

“Get out!” glared Damon ruthlessly.

“Whatever,” Eddie shrugged.

Although emotions can be conveyed through facial expressions and body language, words of dialogue require the production of sound and a corresponding verb that delivers it. Translated: You can’t “sneer” a line but you can say it “with a sneer.”

SOUNDING IT OUT

Stand-up comics have long known that words containing g’s, k’s, p’s and q’s are funnier than other words, especially if they’re coupled with repetition and shuffled letters (i.e., bass ackwards). Romance novelists rely heavily on words that begin with sl’s, sm’s, wh’s and plenty of oo’s (literally and figuratively) in the middle. One needs only to observe the lips/tongue action intrinsic to these combinations to see why they’re so often used. On the flip side, technical writers prefer multisyllabic words favoring b’s, d’s, r’s and Latin suffixes. There’s an off-putting hardness and complexity to scientific dissertations because—well, quite frankly, they’re not supposed to be easily understood by non-techie people.

In concert with these common patterns is the power of short-vowel sounds versus long-vowel sounds. Consider the difference, for example, between a character retorting, “Now you’re just getting nasty” and “Now you’re just getting mean.” Though both of them ascribe inappropriate behavior, the “á” tone in the first one is harsher and delivers more punch than the more soothing “ee” sound in the second.

Have you ever noticed villains communicate more slowly and seductively than those trying to thwart them and that they often embroider their speech with analogies to classic literature, philosophy and antiquities? They have the luxury of an adagio pace because they (1) usually had an ample headstart and (2) assume they’re too smart to get caught. Meanwhile, the good guys are operating at prestissimo because their lives and Western Civilization depend on it. This manifests in shorter words, shorter lines, and a lower level of abstraction.

If you’re writing dialogue for live performance, you have three more things to watch for: (1) Sentences so long that actors can’t take a big enough breath to deliver them; (2) Too many “s”s or combinations that create tongue-twisters; (3) Phrases that look fine in print but spoken aloud convey an unintended meaning; i.e., “Running Bear will keep you safe” or “I’ve detected life on Uranus.”

CONCLUSION

It’s no small coincidence that “listen” and “silent” contain the same number of letters. There will be times in your plot when it’s the words left unspoken which can deliver a thunderous volume of content about your characters’ personalities. By using silence rather than feeling compelled to fill every page with chatter, you’ll be training your target audience to listen even more intently to what you—and your fictional players—have to say.

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Former actress and theatre director Christina Hamlett is an award-winning author whose credits to date include 52 books, 274 stage plays and squillions of articles and blogs. She is also a distance learning instructor who teaches online classes in playwriting, screenwriting and cozy mysteries. www.authorhamlett.com.

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