By Shannon Donnelly

Great dialogue can make or break a novel.

This view may stem from growing up watching a lot of 1930’s screwball comedies. Zingers fly with rapid fire and everyone talks. A lot. But the importance of dialogue really sank in when I wrote A Proper Mistress. I went for a lot of dialogue in that book and it went on to be one of my best selling romances.

We all know great dialogue when we read it—and the best dialogue seems effortless. But good dialogue takes work, sometimes needing multiple edits and thinking it over and totally revising a scene. It also takes a few key ingredients.

1) Give Your Characters Unique Voices.

Can you tell who is talking without any tags to make this obvious?

You have to get your characters talking in order to find their voices. And each character needs a distinct voice.

That means some folks use contractions, some don’t. Some have specific phrases they like, some use colorful slang, some swear. Some characters show up right away, and others are shy.

In the Regency, Proper Conduct, I didn’t get the heroine’s voice until about page one hundred! Once I had it, I had to go back and revise the first hundred pages to put her voice back in as it should be. Before that, it was just putting in any old dialogue and faking it (you can do that in early drafts).

2) Make Your Dialogue Better Than Reality.

Readers do not want chit-chat. We get plenty of that in real life. Fiction has to be better—that means bigger, too.

You need to dramatize without going over the top to melodrama, or if you go over the top, pull it back. Study movies with great dialogue.

Study the dialogue of your favorite writers. Take the dialogue apart and see what it is you love—and use that in your own writing.

3) Layer Meaning.

Subtext is where we say one thing but mean another. There’s more going than is readily apparent.

A wife may say: “Darling, do you think we should paint the kitchen?”

But she really means, “I’m tired of living in a pig stye and I’m one step away from killing you with the butcher knife.”

• Let your characters avoid answering questions
• Change topics, and let them meander.
• Above all know how each character lies to themselves and to others. And trust your reader to be smart enough to pick up on the subtext.

4) Beware Accents, Ye Olde English, and Slang.

Watch these, and make sure you opt for clarity over everything else. This is where a reader can help you find out if you have just enough, or too much and need to pull back, or not enough flavor.

One to many “mayhaps” can throw me right out of a story. Same goes for cliché Scottish accents. When in doubt, go for telling the reader, “She had a lovely Scottish burr.” And leave it at that.

Do your research for local dialect and slang. A guy from Georgia will swear differently from a Jersey girl. Nail this. There are readers who know these things.

5) Overthinking Internal Dialogue.

 Remember to give great lines to your characters to “say” (not just to think).

Internal dialogue can be a wonderful thing. Writers like Mary Balogh are masters at it. But a lot of thinking can slow your story’s pace, particularly if a character thinks and thinks and thinks about the same thing. Know the type of story you’re writing and what works best for your characters and your story.

6) Make your Tags Invisible.

 Don’t trip a reader with awkward tags that clunk. Things like “he shouted miserably” and “she wailed” need cutting. This is a sure sign you’re trying to prop up weak dialogue with tags that hit the reader over the head.

Instead make the dialogue stronger. Or give your characters stronger actions. Show your characters expressing emotion through their words and actions.

7) Give every named character a star turn.

 Too often characters are put in the story just to make the plot work. Turn this around. Think about how every character can have a wonderful moment in the story.

In A Proper Mistress the hero’s dad gets a terrific little speech to give his son after the hero has lost his girl—dad doesn’t want his son to make the same mistake he did. In Burn Baby Burn, a secondary character, Marion, gets to verbally kick the heroine’s ass to get her head straight that her working partner needs to be something more. These star turns round out the characters and make the overall story stronger.

8) Use Clean Punctuation.

Commas go inside quote marks and are used when the tag is part of the same sentence (action modifies the dialogue). He said, “I know how to use a comma.” And not: He said. “I know how to use a comma.”

Put in a period when the action is its own sentence. He gave a sigh. “I wish more folks knew how to use commas.” And not: He gave a sigh, “I wish more folks knew how to use commas.”

Cut the double punctuation!? It’s the mark of a writer who is still learning. And get a copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style so you know exactly how to write dialogue and internal dialogue so the reader gets into the story instead of being stopped by clumsy writing techniques.

9) Punch it!

 This is more than dramatizing—this is going for great lines. Let your characters express their emotions in words. Let them pour their frustrations out, their anger, their fears, their happiness, but do it in character.

Do not just put plot exposition into a character’s mouth. If it takes all day, come up with wonderful lines for your characters. This means you want to KNOW your characters—know the type of words they would use, and how they would use them. Think of every character as being played by a favorite actor. What great line can you give that character which would make that actor come over and kiss you?

10) Never stop developing your writer’s ear.

Pay attention to conversations around you, to how people talk, to local accents, to phrases used. Read widely and watch lots of different types of movies. Look for the words that sing in dialogue, and words that clunk. All that will help you write better dialogue.

Do you like to write dialogue? What gives you the most trouble? Is there a trick you use that isn't mention here?

About Shannon

Shannon Donnelly’s writing has won numerous awards, including a RITA nomination for Best Regency, the Grand Prize in the "Minute Maid Sensational Romance Writer" contest, judged by Nora Roberts, RWA's Golden Heart, and others. Her writing has repeatedly earned 4½ Star Top Pick reviews from Romantic Times magazine, as well as praise from Booklist and other reviewers, who note: "simply superb"..."wonderfully uplifting"....and "beautifully written."

She’s at work on her next Regency romance, a sequel to Lady Scandal, and will be bringing out the next book in the Mackenzie Solomon Demons & Warders Series, following up on Burn Baby Burn and Riding in on a Burning Tire.

photo credit: Marc Wathieu via photopin cc

By Laura Drake

I don’t know about you, but I can’t write a book without secondary characters. Yes, I’ve read books without them (or ones where they had tiny roles), but I can’t write that way.

I mean, where would The Lion King be without the hyenas? Where would Westley be without Fezzik? (or Billy Crystal as Miracle Max - Love him), or, for that matter,  Hamlet without Yorik?

You get the idea.

Yes, secondary characters can be enjoyed for their comedy, their loyalty, or their stupidity…but other than entertainment and to fill word count, why include them?

As Outlets

A secondary character can allow your protagonist to talk. You know that dialog is waaay more compelling than thoughts, right? It also allows you to slip in backstory in an interesting way, because it’s natural to talk about your history with a new friend. The reader gets filled in at the same time as the secondary character, and hopefully it deepens the relationship between your protagonist and your readers!

I’ve written forty pages of a Women’s Fiction novel, and I’m stuck. I’ve written myself into a corner. My heroine is awesome. She’s independent, loyal, stubborn and isolated; trusting no one. Seriously kick-ass.

But.

She can’t spend the rest of the book, thinking. Even doing and thinking is Boooring. It would help for her to have a friend, or a sidekick to talk to, to reveal her backstory, to show her personality. But she’s too closed off to do that!

Since I haven’t solved that puzzle, the book sits unfinished (well,  that and other book deadlines). If anyone has any insight into this dilemma, I’d love to see it in the comments!

As Mirrors

An easy way to show more about the protagonist is to have a sidekick who contrasts; someone pretty much the opposite.  In The Sweet Spot, Charla is an old-fashioned ranch wife who wins blue ribbons at the county fair for her peach pies, only wants to care for her family, and what is within the four walls of her home.

Bella, a brassy transplanted New Yorker with a chip on her shoulder and a closet full of badass black, becomes her friend.

At first, they clash (conflict is good, no?) But it turns out that, under the surface, they have a lot in common. They become friends, teaming up against the judgment of the narrow-minded women of the town.

As Depth Charges

Secondary characters add depth to the book. In Nothing Sweeter , the hero is an old fashioned rancher, set in his ways, who has a moral compass chipped out of stone. Think Marlboro Man with an attitude.

His brother, Wyatt, is gay. He left home at eighteen and never has never returned to Colorado, until his father dies at the opening of the book.

Trying to show the brothers’ intricate relationship was a real challenge. Max loves his younger brother. But his lifestyle is so foreign – so opposite his experience and values - he’s also been glad not to have to deal with Wyatt in his face all those years. That’s no longer an option, since they both inherited the land and all the bills that came with it. They have to work together.

It was an intricate dance, to show them as humans. To show Wyatt without stereotype, and Max without making him look like an ignorant hick. Only my readers can tell me if I succeeded, but you can see how a relationship like this could deepen a story.

As Reader Glue

Secondary characters are great sequel/series fodder! In my small town Widow’s Grove series, the only character to appear in all four books will be the owner of the Farmhouse Café, Jesse. She’s the town matchmaker who looks like a ditzy blonde, until you find she’s a math whiz who gave up an MIT education to marry her childhood sweetheart.

I just finished book #2, The Reasons to Stay, and a Delta Force Sniper with jail time in his backstory who befriended a ten year old gangster wannabe is going to be the hero in book # 4. Yeah, there’s an easy arc.

The point is, readers fall in love with those secondary characters, and would run out to buy a book that starred those characters.

So what do you think? Do you use secondary characters in your writing? Why? Who are your faves?

The second in Laura's Sweet on a Cowboy series is out! Here's the Publisher's Weekly review:

“The second entry in Drake’s Sweet on a Cowboy series (after The Sweet Spot) is another character-driven contemporary western with more heart than heat. Rancher Max Jameson, stunned by the unexpected death of his father, is determined to keep the family spread in Steamboat Springs, Colo., despite pressure to sell to a greedy neighbor. His brother, Wyatt, tries to help out, though the sibling relationship is strained due to Max’s discomfort with the fact that Wyatt is gay.

Bree Tanner is scarred physically and mentally after being wrongfully convicted of and imprisoned for her ex-boss’s shady financial dealings; now exonerated and free, she decides to start over by helping to raise rodeo bulls on the Jameson ranch.

Max’s tough exterior masks relatable fear, his relationship with Wyatt is handled gracefully, and Bree’s genuine shame about her past makes her sympathetic. While Max and Bree’s romantic relationship is secondary to their internal and interpersonal struggles, complex characters and some fun full-riding scenes balance out the seriousness.”

by James Preston

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand. -- Sun Tzu

First, thanks for having me back.  I really enjoy these opportunities to talk about our work.

About this entry --

If you have a first draft and wonder what to do next, this is the essay for you.

If you don't have a first draft, this is the essay for you because reading it will relieve some of the worry about your first draft not being perfect. (Hint: it probably won't be and that's ok.)  It will give you permission to drive on to the end.

I wanted to find a nifty segue between "Thanks" and Deconstructionism but it eluded me. Maybe I’ll find it in the revision of this essay, which leads me to what I want to talk about today.

Welcome to:

The End Of Deconstructionism

In the past I have talked about adapting screenplay structure to genre novels -- Hook, Twist, Plot Point One, Midpoint, Plot Point Two, Dénouement.  And I talked about the joys of 4" x 6" cards, each of which has something happening.

All of that sounds very mechanical, and in a way it is. It is the craft part of what we do, similar to someone learning to run scales on their way to being a jazz pianist.  It is deconstructing the process to produce a better product, or to make producing that product easier for you.

Remember Romancing the Stone? It begins with Kathleen Turner sobbing as she types "The End." The impression given is that she bundles the manuscript up and ships it off to her editor. Ah, don't we all wish! For most of us it's not quite like that. You have come up with interesting people to write about, presented them with problems that they must solve, guided them to an ending of some sort. In other words, you write a book, or at least a first draft. You get to the fabled "The End."   Hopefully you love it, love it enough to know that it needs work before being exposed to the public.

First, stop and congratulate yourself.  Of the literally millions of people who say they want to write, only half actually start, and less than half of them finish.  Really. I can footnote that.  Congratulate yourself.

Okay, don't get carried away with congratulations, because you are probably not done, unless you are some kind of mutant genius like Isaac Asimov who, when asked now he could write so many books, reportedly replied, "I type seventy words a minute and I never revise." Most of us revise, some more than others.

One of my problems revising is that I tend to look at a micro view. "Gee, that sentence sounds lame," or "That dialog is flat."  That is only part of revising. Another important part is the macro view.

Art . . .

And craft.

For the first, you're on your own.  For the craft part, for the macro view of your work, there are some techniques that might help the deconstruction.

One type of analysis I have found helpful is simply figuring out where all of your characters are in each chapter. Literally. Where they are and what they are doing. All the characters in each and every chapter, whether or not they appear in the chapter. In fact, this is especially important for characters who are not on-scene in the chapter.

It will tell you if you have logical flaws like Betty has to be in the casino in Chapter Three, but she is still in Los Angeles at the end of Chapter Two and there isn't enough time for her to drive to Las Vegas. The easy way to do this is with a chart, with characters' names along the vertical axis and chapter headings along the horizontal.

Do you begin to see how this kind of analysis reveals plot holes, particularly those of the “who knows what when” variety?

From television, a series that shall remain unnamed suffers from so many of these issues that if the actors weren't wonderful it would be a laughingstock.  Here's just one. A woman's son is kidnapped; the kidnappers (who are all psycho killer nut bags and the mother knows that) call up and say, in effect, "Meet us secretly, away from the police, and you can see your son."  She says, "Why, sure, Mr. Chock-Full-O-Nuts, I believe every word you say," and eludes the FBI by going out the back door of a coffee shop to meet the kidnapper. The agent knows this, he is in the coffee shop when she runs. Later they track her and Mr. CFON down in a warehouse, break in the front way and and . . .  Spoiler Alert! They run out the back door!  And the FBI agent is surprised! When in the preceding chapter, er, scene, he saw her do the same thing.

Again, the writer has to keep track of who knows what when.

Here's a sample from Chapter One of Pennies For Her Eyes, the newest Surf City Mystery.

(On the page) T. R. Macdonald is home, standing over the washing machine, folding his girlfriend's underwear.

(On the page)  The aforementioned girlfriend is in the living room, working on her dissertation.

(Off the page)  The young skateboarder girl T. R. will have to help is at a skate park.

(On the page) The people invading T. R.'s home are on his boat dock.

(Off the page) The real villain is setting up a fake laboratory.

And so on . . .

Since Pennies For Her Eyes is my book, I had a pretty good idea of where all these folks were in Chapter One, but I still learned things about my characters doing this again. I didn't know until I wrote this essay that my bad guy spent that evening making an empty warehouse look like a place where weapons of bioterrorism were cooked up. Creating this list, this mechanical, laborious task, gave me a wider view of the world that exists around the words on the page.

So here's your assignment:

Take one chapter of your current WIP and complete this exercise. You already know what the on-screen characters are doing, so concentrate on those who do not show up in the chapter. I think you will find this allows you to know them better, and makes them more real, with lives beyond that which you show. I also think that, like me, in some cases you will list a character's name and draw a blank. Think about it. Where were they? What were they doing?

Send us a comment.  I'd like to hear what you find out, and I think the readers of Writers in the Storm would, too. Good luck!

And this does mark the end, at least for now, of my thoughts on deconstructionism, the mechanical aspects of our art, in other words, the craft. Next time, no more running scales. Next time when to just roll with it or, as Stephen King once said, "Just flail away at the damn thing." Until then.

To connect with James:

He can be reached at james@jamesrpreston.com

and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Surf City.James or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/james.preston.50999