Great Dialog

I admit to being bored during the recent NCAA finals. The game was not particularly heated and the commercials were down right annoying. My son and I ended up watching the greater part of the Adams Family movies. I was struck by brilliance of Wednesday’s dialog, both the writing and Christina Ricci’s delivery.

Amanda: Hi, I'm Amanda Buckman. Why are you dressed like that?

Wednesday: Like what?

Amanda: Like you're going to a funeral. Why are you dressed like somebody died?

Wednesday: Wait.

When I first started writing the one thing I worried about most was writing believable dialog.  My chosen genre is young adult fantasy. I suppose that makes sense since the only part of my young adulthood I want to remember are the fantasies.  The problem is I spent so much time trying to distance myself from others in middle school and trying to be someone I wasn’t in high school that I had no clue what, if anything, was normal.  I worried my lack of normality would prevent me from writing believable dialog.

The first time I had a group critique my work my top question was, “Is the dialog believable?”  They surprised me by unanimously saying they liked it. I didn’t believe them.

I went hunting for some more reasonable instruction on writing good dialog and found this article.  To my astonishment it described exactly the experience I had when writing.  When I knew what my characters were thinking and what their background was and where the story needed to go, the words flowed onto the page with ease. 

At times I would get to a point where I couldn't write.  I needed the character to behave a certain way.  I knew they would behave that way because that was what I needed, but I couldn’t write.  I couldn’t continue the conversation because I didn’t know WHY the character would behave that way.

To resolve that issue I ended up exploring my story and my characters in greater detail.  For example, I needed a particular character to stick around because she played a key role later in the story but I just couldn’t finish writing the scene.  The problem was that I knew the most powerful characters in the scene would never let her stay.  So, I had to find a way to change something in the back story or in the character interactions.  I ended up writing a complete back story on one of the most powerful characters in the scene and developed an undisclosed side story that resolved the entire issue (In fact, I like the side story so much I hope to reveal it as back story in the follow up book).  Once I understood the characters the scene became a cinch to write.

I agree with the article.  If you want to write good dialog you have to really know what’s happening inside the head of each character and you have to know where the story is going.

BTW

I haven’t forgotten about the writing challenge I posted.  Try as I might, I couldn’t cut a 2500 word piece down to 800 without killing the feel of the story.  It’s at 1378 words and I intend to post it later this week.  I have an unwritten back story in mind that I think will fit in the 800 word requirement so we’ll see how that goes.