Dialogue - It's Not Just Talking

I often find that one of the main reasons I reject stories is the lack of depth in a project. In other words, the author has really skimmed the surface with the real character development. In most cases, when I say this to an author, they add more sub-plots and story elements which does nothing more, in the long run, than increase the word count. In reality, the easiest solution is sitting right in front of their face - Dialogue.

Too often, many authors miss the real value of dialogue in a story. For most, the only purpose is to have the characters have a conversation with one another. Now granted, dialogue is a discussion, but what the readers can gain from the use of effective dialogue is huge.

When I used to actively do theater, one of the things I did was to spend countless hours looking over the script reading not just what I said to memorize the lines, but to read, the other stuff in the story. I would see what other people said about my character. I would read carefully to see how my character said things to different people in the story. In other words, was there a difference in tone and vocabulary used with the different situations. These small little elements added a huge amount of depth to the character development.

Over the weekend, I worked with one of my authors a new project she was working on. Depth was one of those elements. She found that she had a character that suddenly had nothing major that had to happen in the story. Still, it was time for this characters POV to show up since she had spent a very larger portion on one of the other characters. So we built in a dialogue.

Now I know what you are thinking. "But Scott, you're just having the characters talk." True, but instead of just having the conversation be mindless, this was a chance to insert a bit of that information dump that we try so hard to avoid in the narrations sections. Since this character was new to the surroundings, she had the character bump into someone that has been around for some time. The conversation could now deal with elements of world building, introspection into the other protagonist, as well as some introspection on the characters and his new surroundings. In this short dialogue, we now were starting to understand the GMC of two of the major characters, got a bit more of an understanding of the plot, and did so in a fun way.

Your job during this week is to really look at your use of dialogue. I understand that you probably use all of the elements I talked about here, but look at what you MOSTLY use it for. I think you will be shocked that for many of you, the dialogue you use most of the time is just mindless chatter. It's simply a time for your characters to be together. See if you can make it so much more.

Scott