The AmWritingFantasy Podcast: Episode 45 – How to Write Strong Dialogue

Writing dialogue can be fun, but also challenging.

What do you need to be aware of?

How do you write strong and meaningful dialogue between characters in your novel?

In this episode 45 of the Am Writing Fantasy podcast, Autumn and Jesper will give you all the insights you need to become better at writing interesting dialogue.

Looking for more? Here are the links to the four blog posts mentioned in the podcast:

https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/who-said-that-dialogue-and-your-writing-post-1-dialogue-tags/

https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-2-adverbs/

https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-3-action-tags/

https://www.amwritingfantasy.com/dialogue-post-4-line-breaks/

And the Emotional Thesaurus.

It's an amazing companion book that any writer will enjoy: https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Thesaurus-Writers-Character-Expression-ebook/dp/B07MTQ7W6Q/

Tune in for new episodes EVERY single Monday.

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Read the full transcript below.

(Please note that it's automatically generated and while the AI is super cool, it isn't perfect. There may be misspellings or incorrect words on occasion).

Narrator (2s): You're listening to the amwritingfantasy podcast in today's publishing landscape, you can reach fans all over the world. Query letters are a thing of the past. You don't even need in literary agent. There is nothing standing in the way of making a living from writing join to best selling authors who have self-published more than 20 books between them. Now onto the show with your hosts, Autumn Birt and Jesper Schmidt.

Jesper (31s): Hello. I am Jesper and I'm Autumn. This is episode 45 of the amwritingfantasy podcast and we are going to discuss ways in which you can write not only believable but also compelling and rich dialogue. Yay. Should be interesting. Yeah. Like, podcast is also a bit of a dialogue. So, guess that works. Yeah, we'll be talking about talking.

It almost sounds a bit weird. I'm sure we'll work it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But dialogue is important, so I'm looking forward to get into that. But, um, but before we get that far, I have to say, I mean we are, we actually recording off schedule right now because normally we record these podcasts on Mondays and today it's a Wednesday because I had to shift things around because this week here in Denmark, the kids are off school isn't a holiday for you guys or it's a school holiday this week.

So, uh, so day off school from school and then, uh, Monday we uh, we tried to do like a family day and just to do some stuff together. So we went to the cinema and watched a movie together with the kids, which was nice. And then yesterday, uh, I after work, um, after I was done with my work day, I done drove and Mike our kids off and delivered them to my mother's place. But that's a across the country.

So I think by us standards, it's not that far. You're in Denmark is a two and a half hour drive each way, which is quite a lot in this country. I drove them there in the afternoon, then I have some dinner and then drove back. So I was back here home at midnight yesterday and then I was up this morning and I think I've been working for 11 hours today, so I can feel it a bit now.

Autumn (2m 33s): It's, as I said, if you get a little loopy or low energy towards the end, we'll know why. But yeah, driving two and a half hours, I think that's sorta like driving across most States. But it's gonna say a Texas, I think it's eight hours across. So you're, you're a smaller state is what they had to be like. Here yeah, I'll, I'll country he is not that big, but that's actually nice when you have to get around.

Jesper (2m 58s): Right. And you don't have to drive that far.

Autumn (3m 0s): Yeah, exactly. No, I think it, I think good, cozy community and even cozy States because yeah, it feels more like, you know, it community. You get to know places really intimately. So I think that's actually a huge benefit. Um, I can't tell you how many as we are driving the last three years am across the entire country. How many times we've met people, you know, from the Midwest who had never seen the ocean or maybe they'd only seen Lake superior, just people who'd never seen the mountains are never seen the desert. And you know, we're actually, I'm really odd, my husband and I, we have seen as much as we have of cross of the United States.

So kind of changes your perspective a little bit.

Jesper (3m 41s): Yeah, and I, I mean for sure here in this country, if you don't travel then uh, you know, outside the country to other countries, then you will never see a mountain. That's just impossible. It's true. I have something, we have something we call a mountain in a, it's, it's base, it's in Jutland in the middle of Jutland and I, th I, I'm going off memory here and I could be wrong, but it's like 250 meters high or something like that. So that's all my own.

Autumn (4m 7s): It's like a hell yeah. That's why every time I sent pictures of the mountains in the Rockies, you're like, wow, that's amazing.

Jesper (4m 17s): Yeah. Well I love mountain. So we went to Greece two years ago. There was mountains outside the windows and also when we went to New Zealand two years ago. I mean, I love that the nature stuff that it's so different from my own country. Here

Autumn (4m 31s): well you make me think when we finally get to meet up in person, we'll have to like make it somewhere in like the Rockies just so you can see some mountains.

Jesper (4m 39s): Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool. All right. Well a huge forest and stuff like that as holds it.

Autumn (4m 44s): Yeah. Yeah. I S yeah, there's so many spectacular places like that glacier NEC national part for anyone who's in Montana. Um, I think it's one of the prettiest national parks of the United States. It is just all inspiring. Astounding. And I have to admit, the first time I saw it was just in the fall, right after a light snow and all the mountain tops were white in the trees, still had some color and it was just like, wow. It was amazing. Amazing. So I cannot wait to some day, get back there hopefully soon.

But it's funny. So you're talking about your week and you know, there's a lot of the readers or listeners will not, but I've been actually helping out at a cafe. It's actually a friends downtown and it's only been open for like five or six months. And here recording this, this is only like mid October. So what's released, you know, much later. But we're just getting into the height of Halloween here in Maine. And uh, we just had this huge festival called pumpkin Fest. And so there's these massive, I think that winner was 1800 pounds am that was the largest pumpkin grown.

So they have these massive pumpkins and they put them all downtown and they decorate them. And there was like lanterns, fish. There's like a dragon. There's Audrey from the little shop of horrors or is hedgehogs? It's just so much fun. But the fun thing is, is I've never, I, you know, I love tea. I'm not a coffee drinker though. My husband is. Um, and then two, I'm a Baker, so they've been huge use of my baking skills, but to be thrown into a cafe setting and trying to learn this espresso machine and what a macchiato is, I couldn't even pronounce machiatto like go of core Tado and actually kind of starting to pick up with some of these drinks are, is really fun and it's humbling.

I think anyone who thinks that they are top of their game and something in life needs to go do something entirely new, a brand new enterprise at least once a year so that you can be a little bit humbled and realize you are, you got, you're not top of everything. You may be an awesome whatever you are. Calligrapher cross Stitcher, cross country skier, I don't know, whatever, you're so obvious. I hopefully a writers if you're listening to this, you may be so, so very good. But it is so humbling to throw yourself back into something entirely new, especially in a sink or swim situation with the housing.

You know all these people coming in from the parade and Oh, it was just a madhouse, but it was kind of fun. I actually managed to keep up with the 20 somethings on work was working with, so that's another humbling experience when they're talking about what they want to major in. You're like, Oh, Oh, Oh, back in the day. Yeah, I don't drink coffee. I then I hopped from what you just mentioned, I don't understand why this was the biggest surprise for me is one of my coworkers said, you've got to try a dirty chai.

I'm like, what the heck is a dirty chai? Because they knew I like T. so a dirty chai is a sh hot chai with a shot of espresso in it. And as far as I'm concerned, tea and coffee should never meet. I have sent back with water. Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Yeah. I've sent back water that had been run through the coffee pot going, I do you know what? Coffee water. I want real water. I am such a tea snob. Totally. Just, yeah, I know. I admit that, but Oh my gosh. Dirty chai there.

Especially I do decaf because I cannot do espressos. Um, but it tastes like kind of like a rich warm pumpkin pie. You don't taste the coffee. It's just makes it deeper and richer. So anyone else out there who is crazy like me and things, coffee and tea should never meet, try a dirty chai or maybe don't because I have to admit now I'm slightly addicted and that's going to kill with me for a long after the cafe. It'll stick a no, just waiting, you know, before you know when all of it, then you will stop drinking coffee as well.

And then you're addicted to that. No, I only drink coffee on, I like coffee on and only decaf again on rainy days because to me coffee tastes like mud and there's just something about money, cold days. And I'm like, Oh, I gotta go for a cup of coffee. It kind of feels like that's the weather, but I have to admit a nice Earl grey as much better in a rainy day.

Jesper (9m 12s): Right, right. Oh yeah. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, yeah, I think we've both have had quite busy, busy times going on. Uh, actually over the past week as well. Not only this week but also last week am I've been preparing notes for our completely free costs that we are going to release probably, I don't know in 2020. So yeah, it's been really busy. But I thought that maybe I should just give a very, very quick like short overview of the modules that I'm currently making the notes for do you think that would be good?

I think that'd be awesome. I know you showed them to me and they, I just cannot wait for this course. It's going to be so awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe I could just do a quick rundown of course for the listener, it's going to take a while before this is done, but, but maybe just as a short teaser or something here. But uh, so module one, we entitle why 2% of authors succeed and 98% don't. And, uh, in that module we are going to share a bit of, of the myth that people believe about self publishing and what it really takes to make it.

And that's followed by module two, which is the mindset that most authors don't understand. Um, and I guess that title pretty much says it. So apart from making you understand how, uh, how you should understand your future career as an author, we also share our top five tips you need to know in order to make it. And that is followed by module three, which is the author platform. Um, and I think our, the platform is like a term that is often thrown around, but uh, but here in this module three, at least, we're going to lay out exactly what it is, how to build it, and how to make it work for you.

Yeah. Fantastic. And module four is, uh, how do online retailers like Amazon actually work? So we're going to talk about the online landscape of bookselling retailers and explain which factors will actually affect your sales. And I think that one module fois is pretty tightly knitted together with module five which is Amazon explains, uh, Amazon explained is what we call it because basically whether we like it or not, Amazon is an incredibly important to all indie author authors and it's therefore really important to understand how the algorithm actually works and how to make your books appear in searches and a lot more so.

And yeah. Also I'm going to share how you can become an Amazon bestselling authors and then maybe your favorite topic, a autumn module six is book covers AA, I love buck covers. Yeah. And they also amazingly important. So we're going to go deep into the topic of book covers in module six and explain everything you need to know about that. And the same can be said about module seven on book descriptions. That's also important. Absolutely altered covid ad and modulate.

I have a feeling that this is one of those where some love it, some hate it. It's about advertising because I mean in, in here in 2019, nobody can make it without advertising. So there's an entire module dedicated to that topic. And then once we have retina or written our books, then we need to launch them. So much in line is gone a share approval, some proven strategies on how to make you book launch is successful. And then module 10 is the cornerstone you can't live without.

Can you guess what that is? And probably remember, Oh shoot, I do remember but now I can't think of no, you say this is a question that wasn't fair of me. It's email marketing, email list that I remember that when now it was just only fitting cause I only just sent out my newsletter yesterday. So all right. Indeed. Yeah. So we're going to share some, some facts about email marketing in, in that module 10 and then of course, and if you have not done so already, you need to get going and get your email list started to today.

Yes. So all of that we're going to give for free and giving all this away for free. This is sad. I know we have been crazy for us. It'd be great. We in the city and I think, I think we are, but I've always said that. So that's all right. Yeah, indeed. I mean, I, I've looked around a bit, um, of, of course we have a, well this is the way we have decided to structure it and what we have decided to do. But if we compare to slightly similar courses, uh, I guess we could call it, uh, I've looked around and they usually charge for about $500 for this type of information.

So, uh, yeah, I dunno, we are stupid or they're going to be mad at us. So yeah. But it's the old still early days and the am but I have my notes completed for half the cost by now. So we are making good progress. Yay. Oh, we go on the internet with the amwritingfantasy podcast. So maybe just a in prolonged nation. Can you say that a lot? Like, I dunno, it works, whatever.

But adding onto, uh, the, the CRE cost that I was just talking about, uh, we also, I shared it, uh, the cost modules on patron as well to our patron supporters and we will got to a lot of nice messages back. That was nice. Yeah, there aren't really excited about this course and I've been, I'm excited about the course, but it's always good. I mean, good to get feedback and find out it's really going

Autumn (14m 52s): to be valuable and really appreciate hearing that. So it makes us more excited to get it done.

Jesper (14m 58s): Yeah, exactly. And then of course at the point in time where you're listening to this podcast episode, those who supports us on Patrion and have already known about this costs, these costs modules that are just yet for several weeks because we do try to maintain a close relationship to the pupil on Patrion and apart from the awesome rewards that we offer in there, we are also, we also share dedicated posts about writing every week. So there's a lot of additional tips and advice that you can pick up on Patrion and we even had our monthly Q and a session recently.

So yeah, go check out patron by the link in the show notes and uh, there's a lot of help you can get there for as little as a dollar a month.

Autumn (15m 41s): Yes. It was really awesome to see the comments on the chorus and actually, because when we're listening to this, while we were recording, it is going to be different from when we launched, but as we're recording this, we only just released episode 42, which was the one where I really gave some personal tips and feedback on how uh, overwhelmed at how my summer was going and the comments of course, Pat the Patriot number has got that early, which was so I got to get that before I hit the general public on Monday. So it was nice to get those like, yes, thank you.

You know, it's so important. But then even once it hit, uh, the general public was a general release. The comments I've gotten back from so many authors and people who are saying, this is not just, you know, authors, but so much of today's life is dealing with being overwhelmed and too many tasks and not knowing how to sort them out. So one, I appreciate all the positive messages, um, with people thanking me for sharing that, but also just wanted to give another shout out to everyone else.

If you're feeling overwhelmed and just struggling, you're not alone. I, I've heard from so many people that if it's not something you're going through now, it's something you've gone through. So, yeah, you know, always reach out, talk to someone, take a deep breath. I used to joke when I was am at my day job and was a manager that if it wasn't life, death or world peace, I was not going to get work worked up. So, uh, you know, reach out to people, keep that in mind and realize that, you know, if no one's going to die, um, if you know you're not going to save someone's life with this news or you know, you're not going to solve all the problems in the world and all Wars were a mill e-stop uh, go, just take a breath.

It's going to be okay to take a few minutes off, a half an hour off a day off and get your head on straight, or at least get back to feeling a little bit like yourself. Don't, don't keep pressing yourself to you. The point of collapse. There's no, there's nothing to be gained in that.

Jesper (17m 40s): No, no. Yeah. I'm not good at that either, to be honest. So I'm listening to you advice here as well. You

Autumn (17m 45s): better, well, I heard you're going to the movies maybe with wife while your kids are away. So that's a very good thing. Executive dialogue yes. This is the, I guess this, this conversation can go in all kinds of directions. Dialogue is so important from a great way to share character stuff. They'll wait. Can't wait to break up the pros in your novel, uh, giving out information and hinting at things.

I mean, it's so exciting and so important. It's an amazingly useful tool if you can get it right. Yeah. Well that's the trick with, with all of the writing stuff really, really is. Yeah. But I think as well when we're talking about dialogue we can get all into, into how to, to write the good dialogue and all that. But, but even before we get that far, I think there is a mechanical point around dialogue to make us well mean. And what I mean by that is that apart from dialogue keeping the story interesting and, and you know, moving, moving quickly for the reader, all those white spaces that appears when you start adding dialogue and the shorter lines that appears on the page.

It did just a mechanics part of that. I don't know if you can call it mechanics, but you know, once you reach pages in a book where, okay, here's a lot of white space there, shorter liner so you can see the dialogue is going on. It just makes for great greater Rita experience. So, so there is that added benefit for for the for dialogue which has nothing to do with writing the dialogue but, but, but I think that's an important point to make as well. I do too. I mean it definitely breaks up the page visually. Just like if anyone writes blog posts and stuff, there's a lot of techniques to making sure you have white space around what you're writing or breaking it up with quotes and things.

Dialogue does the exact same thing. You have pages and pages of prose and plus by following dialogue correctly and having lots of line breaks and the shorter sentences you actually add to your page count. So you know, I know a lot of first time authors and they're like, how many pages is this going to be when it comes a novel and you know, add more dialogue you'll actually get a little bit longer extended page count. Then you might have, if you even despite your word count. So it's kind of fun that way. Right? Yeah, true. Although I would say I don't really care how long it's going to be.

I mean it's, it's as long as it takes to tell the story. Right. That is actually a very good comment and one that they've been debating on the amwritingfantasy Facebook group. I just noticed. So that was kind of very funny. Okay, cool. So I have, I've sort of prepared some notes. So a list of different things that I probably have like 10 different chapters, she or something, but I don't know where do we want to stop street? I'd just to wrap one. And then you, you, you take some of your points as well or how do you want to do it?

Yes. Why don't you, since you are the list maker, why don't we start with that? And I mentioned before we started that is your job. You're good at making lists. Um, I've written I think a series of four or five blog posts that are on the amwritingfantasy website. So I have those and am yes, it's going to be almost like a, it is going to be a little bit like a quiz show. You start with your list and I will chime in with the tips. I've done an ad too. Even the ones I added on the blog post.

Jesper (21m 10s): Okay. Okay. Uh, yeah, so there was no particular order to this at all. This is just a, it's going to go a bit here and a bit there. These are just the points that I noted. The another one to make a and. I think the first one I could start with is that all dialogue needs to have some sort of purpose. You know all the, if you compare to real life, when we start talking to people a lot of the times that you know, at least if it's not like somebody you know really well, you will start talking about plus and trees like a talking about the weather or some ice breaking stuff and all that you need to kill when it comes to dialogue between characters.

Even if they don't know each other, we don't want to read about what they think about the weather and all that stuff. That's really boring. So you need to build towards something called Creek concrete within that scene. With your dialogue so that there is no pointless dialogue that that's really important.

Autumn (22m 3s): I agree. And one of my least favorite pieces of advice on writing doll dialogue is to listen to people talking around you. That is horrible. Have you listened to people talking around you? They usually don't make any sense. They're using like O M G and lots of ums and we're, you know, you can't follow often with writing dialogue you actually need to add in some explanation and it's like jumping to the heart of a personal to person conversation between people who either know each other really well that, but you still need to explain something.

It's totally different from listening to someone if you're sitting at a cafe because there's a lot of pointless dialogue that goes on at cafes. You have to have a purpose and there's a lot of different purposes you could have. It could be sharing information, it could be character building, it could be something humorous there. But there is a purpose and you've got to get to the heart of it very quickly. You can't sit there and kind of beat about the Bush and you know, talk about, like you said, the weather.

What are we having for dinner? Why is he late? Unless of course the why he's late is really important because he just got eaten by an ogre. Okay. So

Jesper (23m 17s): yeah, that's better. Oh, dragon. Oh, try again. That, that actually am well puts me right on the path to the next point that I was, because when you, you know, listening to others or listening to real speeches is indeed, or I was also gonna say that it's a bad idea. First of all, that might be a lot of slang words and you don't want to have a lot of slang words in your writing because Rita's don't understand what's going on. It seems, it seems confusing. So you don't want that. And you also want to kill filler words or at least reduce them to the absolute minimum.

So when we're talking here on the podcast, uh, we have our, you know, speech am, what is it called? Like limit, not limitations, but we have our habits in how we are speaking. Correct. And, uh, either some people say a lot of, um, some people say like all the time or whatever it may be, but we need to kill all that stuff when we are writing. Dialogue and uh, you, you're not supposed to write realistic speeds with a, with a lot of those filler words, but you're more supposed to write interesting.

Dialogue I would say or interesting things that the characters are saying that leads to some sort of purpose.

Autumn (24m 27s): Exactly. I read a book once where they literally had someone instead of writing exclaimed in glee, which would've been fine. They actually use the dialogue and I was like, Oh, this is terrible gig views. Exclaimed in glee, don't use actual descriptions of wheeze or ohms or legs. And I know a lot of people want to add in like some kind of charac characteristic phrase. Well that's fine, but you still don't put it every single sentence. And if you're from the 80s and you remember the Valley girl phase where it was like, um, like this, like that, that's so cool.

He don't need to add that to your dialogue either. A, unless you happen to be writing a really obnoxious teenager and even then please keep it to a minimum just, you know, twice in a chapter. Just show it and that's about it.

Jesper (25m 18s): Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean you can, you can write the am here and there in a, in a revocation if there's a, if you're trying to make a point that the characters really unsure in the situation or something, then here and there it can be okay, but, but you really need to keep it short and you need to let dialogue flow naturally and then get to the point instead of all that blah, blah, blah stuff. So yeah, that's just a, that's just it. Exactly. Okay. The next one, next one. Let me see here.

So next one is that, of course it will. This is a bit of a well almost formatting type of way, but it's also a good idea to make sure that you give each speaker their own paragraphs so that it's easy to distinguish who's actually saying something. Because I don't, dunno in sometimes in books it's not really clear who is saying what and you go back and you reread the section two times to understand who set that. And that is really annoying. So you don't want to do that.

Autumn (26m 15s): No. It can throw the reader totally out of the story cause they're trying to figure out who's talking and who actually has the information. And that's horrible. And I mean this one is so important. I actually wrote an entire blog post on formatting and yeah, if you, every speaker should get their own, you know, paragraph and then a space. And so yeah, you might end up having, you know, three words and maybe a dialogue tiger, an action tag or maybe not depending on how many people are speaking. So you might have three words and then you're hitting the, you know, the paragraph return again for the next person speaking.

That's okay. That's like what we were talking at the top when we first started. It creates white space. It's a visual break. You do not need to make dialogue look as packed as an info dump, which shouldn't be in your novel anyway. You don't want it to look like this heavy prose. It should be this little, you know, almost like poetry, lots of spaces and white and different varying sentence lengths. That's kind of what makes it fun.

Jesper (27m 12s): Mmm. Yeah. And that, that varying sentence length is, it's a good point as well. Um, and especially also don't, don't make the really, really long monologues. Nobody wants to read that either. No. There should definitely even annoying in real life.

Autumn (27m 29s): Here that one is, is, so that is a real life example you can follow, but it's definitely, definitely back and forth. You want to have some play on words and again, that's what makes dialogue fun because its purpose, like I said, it can actually have multiple purposes. So one of them should definitely be, you know, ramping up tension maybe and getting some sparring going and for that you're going to have really short sentences.

Jesper (27m 53s): True, true. And I don't know, this next one, it might sound a bit weird when we're talking about dialogue or the, but it's still applicable and that is don't forget to use silence as well. You know, it can work really well when a character character suddenly just falls silence instead of, uh, arguing that that works really well. I have a character from my dystopian post-apocalyptic

Autumn (28m 17s): Siri is that he is a master. I wish I could master this. Oh my gosh. I tried to channel him all the time, but uh, he just, Jared, he can, he knows that people will just start talking to fill that silence and eventually they're going to reveal what it is he's waiting for them to reveal. He's so darn good. But yes, that is perfect to have one character who is basically controlling the sentence or maybe just he's not, they're not ready to say something. That's fantastic. They can just fall silent.

And I think that is fantastic advice.

Jesper (28m 51s): Yeah. And I think if, if you look at the, maybe the reason why a lot of the time we don't think about writing or writing silence. That sounds really weird. Maybe a lot of the times we don't think about it is because in real life it feels extremely awkward. Now I have am, I've been negotiating contracts and stuff like that with, with clients in my, in my, um, uh, day job thing for many, many, many times.

And one of the things that it is incredibly difficult to do, but one of the things that works wonderfully well is if you're negotiating something and you've sort of, you've made your points and then of course the other party will argue that the, they want something else. A lot of the times it works amazing to just to keep quiet because they can't, people cannot take it that there was just a silence. So they'll stop talking about something and sooner or later they will start giving you something because, uh, well, okay, maybe we can do like this and that and then, yeah, okay, maybe we could, you know, uh, of course you try when negotiate and of course you are trying to make a win win situation rather than a win lose situation.

But, but if they're really not botching anywhere, sometimes it works wonderfully well too. Just keep silent and let them do the talking because they to come up with such suggestion all of a sudden that didn't you have something to work from.

Autumn (30m 12s): I have this visualization of someone going into their like annual review now and their boss is telling them all this stuff and they just kind of sit there like, Oh huh.

Jesper (30m 22s): Yeah.

Autumn (30m 24s): I'm not sure if we're giving that kind of advice right now, but consider a silence the next time you're in a tough negotiation.

Jesper (30m 30s): Yeah. I'm, I'm going to give you like a $20 pay raise and then you just sit there silent looking at the boss. You are you happy with that? Still silence. See how that works. I love it. I have a 25. Is that make you happy? Yeah. Still silence. If anyone uses this technique, please let us know. Yeah, yeah. I would love to hear a story about that. Alright, so the next, next tip, uh, next tip is remember that in many cases actually coaches won't actually say precisely what they're thinking.

And this is also what we do in real life all the time. Um, but if, if you are making dialogue where the characters just laying out exactly how they feel about something and exactly what their plan is, it's, it feels extremely unrealistic

Autumn (31m 21s): and people don't talk like that. No writing either. Exactly. And so many people are not really that self aware. So you're character shouldn't be that self-aware. Maybe they're just like, something's bothering me or I don't think we should go that way. And they're not really articulating why or what their overall plans or overall hopes are. Maybe it should just be, you know, those kind of loose terms. Like hopefully we can make it through the past. If we leave early in the morning, that's better than saying we will get up in the morning and we're going to go to the past and we're going to get through and no, it sounds better if you at least make some possibilities and kind of couch it in those little terms of not quite sure though.

I have to admit, I sometimes also say when you're writing, you know, get rid of those questionable things. You know, people don't do things halfway, but when it comes to dialogue, that's okay. You can have some quasi, I'm not really sure of statements, but when you're doing action, you either do it or you don't do it. Don't do these. Almost get rid of all the almost, unless it's in dialogue then it's okay. Yeah, no, and sometimes as well, people say one thing, but they mean something else.

Um, so that's also something to consider. Absolutely. And it's also, you know, it's great to, if you're on the point of view, point of view, if someone is a very powerful character and a great manipulator, so you can know, you can have them thinking one thing or you know, you could have them really manipulating through their dialogue and that's really fun for the reader to start figuring out that, wait, no, they weren't. They were thinking something else and now they're doing this. Why are they doing this? Curiosity. Oh, that drives readers nuts and keeps them reading.

Jesper (33m 6s): Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Uh, so I have one more. Um, and then you, you can fill in if you have more after that. Um, if you probably have, but um, this one is a, it's one that can really drive me nuts sometimes. The Asar her speech to text.

Autumn (33m 25s): Ah, that's actually what I was going to bring up too. So I know there's this huge advice out there that said, always use said, and I've gotten into a lot of debate about this with other authors. So what do you think? Should you always use said

Jesper (33m 41s): no? Absolutely. I think, uh, I think it's on writing the, if you know the book from Stephen King, I think, I think it's him saying in that book that if you're writing, he said or she said it's almost invisible to the reader because our, I sort of just skims over it. We register if it says he or she, but otherwise we don't really notice it then. And I think there is some truth to that, if that's all you're doing. There was not much variance in your speech, tach and attacks and this should be

Autumn (34m 13s): for. Fantasy. Um, we have a little bit more allowance to use the adverts, the adjectives had in those descriptors, uh, than say if you're a writing, you know, well, okay, scientific something. But it's definitely, I think we're allowed to be a little more flavorful for the our words. And that's kind of fun. I think it's a lot more fun. So yeah, I, I agree the CEDS, you know, maybe 50% if of the actual dialogue tags, which again, you don't need to just use dialogue tags, but definitely like, you know, you don't have to use set 100% of the time.

It's just boring.

Jesper (34m 57s): It is. Absolutely. And. And I think the, the other thing, and this, this is, this is the part that that drives me nuts sometimes is when speech tax I used incorrectly by that one. I mean, is that if you're using the L Y at works, so you're saying, like he said angrily are, she's said sadly or something like that. It drives me absolutely bonkers. There's, I think there's this tendency to use those lly at work because that's how we, we, we think that it shows emotion but in fact it doesn't, we're back to the show don't tell, which I think we've mentioned a hundred times already, but it is just much, much more engaging if you're using the actions and steps, you know, you can describe how the facial expressions that are showing that he's angry or anything like that or maybe a, maybe a tear rolls down the cheek because they're sad or are they slam the door or whatever they do.

But, but that's sort of dialogue tech is a million times better than writing she sets. Sadly. It's like what the, and I was just about to say B

Autumn (36m 11s): I'll do it for you. No, I agree. I think on the blog post on adverbs, I wrote that, uh, you know, the first time the character, the reader here is that the character is angry is because of using anger. You know, shouted angrily, which I hopefully never would've had ever used sheltered angrily. But if that's the first time the reader sees that the character's angry is because you just told them in a dialogue time was an adverb, Oh, you're not doing this right? No, it's not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to be showing the emotion yet you could use shouted instead of said, that's a great one.

But yes, I am the cup against the floor, hit the wall gestures, you know, moving so quickly that they knock something over to show, you know, some kind of emotion. And those are often called action tag. So if you said, I don't know what you mean. And then said as he slammed, you know the cup onto the table, that is an action tag and you immediately relate that whoever is speaking is also doing the action.

So of course this would all be in just one paragraph. And then when you switch to the next speaker, you go to the next paragraph. But those are action tags versus the dialogue tags like shouted, swore, whispered, those are dialogue tags and they're, you know, and you can intersperse, use one or the other. Some people prefer to use one. I think a mix is great and again, if there's only two people speaking and they're alternating pretty regularly, you can go a couple of lines without using any tags. As long as you, you know, either throwing an action tag, you need to make sure the reader doesn't get too confused.

You don't go like six lines with no nothing but definitely like three or four sometimes that is visually fun and makes it go really quick when two people are having a very intense exchange to just skip the dialogue or action tags. As long as it's only two people. Once you throw on the third, you're going to have to make sure everyone knows who's talking.

Jesper (38m 12s): Yeah, I mean a, and of course it can be difficult to come up with new stuff or new ways to express am emotions and all that. And and we can also end up repeating a lot of the same stuff because that's just how we work when we don't think about it. But, uh, I actually wanted to mention, and I can put the link in the show notes to this, but there are some really, really awesome books that you can buy that it's going to help you a lot. And am these are there, it's like a series a but it's written by Angela Ackerman and Becca put Felicia, I think that's how you say it, but it's basically a, you can get like a writers guy, two character flaws, a writers guy too.

Character attributes. Uh, so these are called the negative trot, a treat thesaurus and the positive trait thesaurus and what you can do with these books is that basically just has tons of different uh, uh, like a trait. So I can look up anything like a, I can see, okay, ignorant for example. And then this, uh, I'm just doing it now, of course you can see it, but it'll have, it'll have like a, a whole list of like 40 different associated behaviors to being ignorant.

And then there'll be like 40 different things that you can then use as inspiration on how to show it when it in you know, when writing and how the character might react and how, how they might, you know, what they might do and so forth and so forth. So it's, it's, it's really amazing and it works extremely well, especially when you're in the editing phase and you're trying to make your dialogue tax better. Then use these books as inspiration and am and try to, you know, very your dialogue tax it, it really helps a lot these books.

So I will, I'll put a link

Autumn (40m 2s): to them into the, in the show notes. So if you're interested. Yeah. And are they the ones who also wrote the emotional thesaurus cause I know I've seen that one. Yes. Yes. Those are, they're fantastic inspiration for really enhancing your writing and being able to show emotions other than the heart pump, you know, chest, the heart beating in the chest and the brows. Scrunching there's so much more to emotional. Yes, there's a lot of other ones in there and you can pick some of those tweaks.

And give one specifically to a character that helps with your character building. And I think that's, you know, yeah, it's fantastic. And they're great books. Absolutely. Uh, okay. That's what I ended up my list. Autumn do you have more about dialogue I think I go into a little bit more in the blog post. Maybe we should, you know, link to them or at least tell folks, you know, check out the amwritingfantasy website and look up the dialogue tips there. Cause there's four or five blog posts that we've covered and they actually, part of it is like just taking the same set of words.

It's slowly adding to them so that you can see a dialogue developing into something that's different and more concrete. And that might give you some tips to, to get going. And there if you want more questions on action tags and dialogue tags and when you should or shouldn't use adverbs, that is all posted in there. So that'll help make it a little bit more clear. If you're visual in listening in and want to look at something, they're there. Well, of course we always want to make things easy. So we'll

Jesper (41m 34s): put a link to those articles or blog posts in the show notes as well. So there's a lot of good stuff you can link or you can click in the show notes this time around and check out yourself. So that was all about, uh, dialogue. And the next week we are gonna. We're going to have another amazing episode, so see you there.

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