fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2176 ]

[ SECRET POST #2176 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2176 ⌋

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Notes:

Sorry for late, busy day.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Let's talk about dialogue. Because I love dialogue. But I hate shitty dialogue. The problem arises, however, when I can't seem to find a good way to describe good dialogue. The form that good dialogue takes is, I think, dependent on the type of story being told.

But here's something I've noticed about dialogue on my quest for some good, angsty, non-romance fic: So much of it is bad.

At best, it sounds like the author is regurgitating a pamphlet on suicide/depression/mental illness/poverty/what have you. Somewhere in the middle* you get characters all of a sudden becoming Mr. Talky Sensitivity with a box of intuition in his back pocket. And at worst, you get major infantilization of *somebody*. And it's just GRATING.

* I think I may actually hate the OOCness of Suddenly Sensitive more than all of them, actually. I can hit the back button when a character in despair starts acting like a three year old, because that's just bad fic. But sometimes "Bro, let me now talk at you like I am the Super Best Therapist Ever," hides in really good stories, just waiting to pull off a sneak attack.

So what makes dialogue particularly bad -- or particularly good -- for you, F!S?

Edited 2012-12-18 00:35 (UTC)

Something that's IC and feels like a real conversation you could either have, walk in on, or overhear [with how it plays out, not exactly the actual topic of discussion.]

When it's ooc and/or inconsistent.

Yeah as the anon above said, I think the most important thing is, that it has to feel like a normal conversation.

The last time I was really actively annoyed be the dialog (in something that wasn't a bad fanfic), was when I was "The Dark Knight Rises". I remember sitting in the theater and thinking that no one would ever talk like that. They weren't so much having conversations, than giving speeches to each other.

(Though I have to say, I only saw it in German. It's possible that parts of that came from bad translation.)

It really comes down to OOC-ness for me, which is pretty subjective actually. Like sometimes things feel wrong (word choice, displays of emotion, pet names), even though we don't actually know enough about said characters to know for sure it's OOC. One of the weirdest fics I ever read had, like, pitch-perfect characterization in the narrative, but the minute the characters started talking to each other it was like, who are these people?

On the flip side, I'm not a huge fan of people who overuse canon dialogue and call back to it all the time, especially when it doesn't make sense. I get that it's an easy way to establish authenticity in theory, but I am so done with the phrase "genius billionaire playboy philanthropist" and similar. Oh, "Sour Wolf", that can go too.

Another problem I've noticed is when characters who are a little more...reserved? well educated? idk...get written as never using contractions. Jack Donaghy is a big one: I stopped reading 30 Rock altogether because he always sounded like a robot.

I'm also not a huge fan of writing out accents, despite being guilty of it one or two fandoms ago. Even stuff like "gonna" starts to get to me when it's all over the place.

Don't get me started on dialogue in smut, though, oh god; I get so tired of it. Like, the best smut has character notes in the dialogue, so I should pay attention, but dirty talk is just...guaranteed hilarious to me, even if it's IC.

And I don't know, I like writing dialogue a lot, which may be why I notice it, but in well-written canons (ie, not Grey's Anatomy), characters tend to have very specific, individual rhythms to the way they talk. They're harder to get right, though, so I tend not to be too upset when fanfic gets it "wrong".

Good dialogue just needs to sound right coming out of the character's mouth. I've been giving this a lot of thought lately myself, because I'm writing an alternate version of a character I used to write a lot now. The original version of the character was quite formal, but the new one is much less so.

So when I type out something like 'I suppose that must be the case,' for the new one, it's wrong. (Unless he's saying it in a mocking tone.) He'd say 'I guess that's it,' instead. The new one says 'yeah' where the old one would say 'yes.' The voice isn't right for both of them, even though both are things an actual person would say.

So beyond just being things an actual person would say, it has to be things that specific person, that character you're writing would say. When that changes due to no in-story reason (i.e. it's not the character dropping/picking up an affect deliberately), it's jarring. It doesn't sound right, at all.

A character's voice is part of their IC-ness, so going off it can sound very OOC. I'd say that characters suddenly sounding different, like in your 'suddenly sounds a therapist' example, is very much that. Unless the character themselves would sound like that in that situation, it's bad writing because it's losing the voice of the character. It's like all those shows that would have the characters do something OOC in A Very Special Episode so we can all Learn An Aesop.

tl;dr: Sounding like something a person would say doesn't make it good, it has to sound like something that person would say.

Bad dialog = when all the character sound the same. A 15 year old street rat, punker should not sound like a 75 year old Oxford professor and visa versa. Your characters should each have a voice.

Bad dialog = Everything is too proper. All sentences are full. Nothing is clipped. Even the most stuff shirt will speak in a clip from time to time. Now to have all your characters speak like that, well, that's jarring.

The best advice I have for writing dialog is to speak it out loud. If you are having a hard time spitting it out, get rid of it and start over. I don't care how important it is to the story, how the words need to be just right or how long you've spent on working on it. TRASH IT. It doesn't work. Rework it until you can speak it out loud without it feeling awkward coming out of your mouth. It doesn't have to be in your voice. It can be your character's voice. But you will learn quickly what sounds right and what sounds wrong if you speak your dialog out loud.

My personal rule for dialogue is: Good dialogue should a) advance the plot and/or b) reveal character, and in either case it should sound natural for that character and unique to that character.

Even if what's being talking about is a humongous plot point, if Ron Weasley sounds like he's reading out of an encyclopaedia, then you are clearly not writing Ron Weasley. And you might have more than one high-class, highly educated, pompous windbag, who might sound very, very similar, but they're still going to use slightly different words and phrasing because of their personal experiences.

I've read a couple HP fics recently that had decent narration and the ideas presented were really interesting...but then Harry started speaking and he sounded nothing like Harry. He didn't sound like the narrator either!...but he really didn't sound like Harry. He was too...eloquent and long winded? He sounded more like Tom Riddle than Harry, and they're drastically different. Which was a shame because otherwise those fics were pretty decent.

I don't really think of it as sounding "IC", because depending on the fic, "IC" might not mean a whole lot by chapter ten. Dark Lord!Harry is probably going to sound different than canon!Harry. But it should make sense with what you know of the character you're presented and sound natural for them. Dark Lord!Harry will probably still not sound like he's reciting an encyclopaedia.

I actually read aloud my dialogue, normally once the scene or exchange is finished. It helps to a remarkable degree to hear the words and helps me catch odd-sounding phrases or when the dialogue begins to get too long or OOC.

It also helps if I put myself in the mindset of each character speaking. Like, would a gruff, reserved character phrase that sentence so affectionately? Should I add in any adverbs or adjectives to clarify how they are speaking? I think of how it sounds aloud - the tone, the pauses, etc. - and try to convey that to the reader.

I hate OOC dialogue, but my major pet peeve is probably when authors use dialogue to make characters exposition fairies. Some exposition in dialogue is good, but when one character is telling another shit they already know for no apparent reason other than getting the reader up to speed or dumping a bunch of info in a really inorganic way, it gets tiresome and just comes off as stilted.

When every character sounds the same.

When the speech sounds rehearsed. Like, if the dialogue is there to spell out the theme of the story, and the character sounds like they're speaking at graduation instead of conversing with a friend... that drives me crazy. The only time I like it is if the character is a teacher or mentor-figure who is used to randomly dropping words of wisdom into conversation, or if it's mentioned or implied that they planned out what they were going to say ahead of time.

Spelling grates on my nerves, but unlike the above anon I'm okay with things like "gonna." I'm also okay with using different dialects as long as the words themselves aren't spelled differently.

And the main thing I hate... witty one-liners that don't belong. For the sake of entertainment, I can accept, maybe, one character who thinks on their feet and makes jokes in the middle of a deadly battle with the enemy. But for books like Maximum Ride when every single character is constantly cracking jokes at moments while struggling for their lives? I cannot stand it.

Man, this. In any fic where suddenly one character sounds like Dr. Drew or the 'The More You Know' guy or....whatever. I hate that.

Good dialogue is stuff that sounds like my family/friends are talking. The kind of stuff that starts here but then goes there and there and there, and people are quoting books and movies, and acting like idiots, and insulting each other, and stopping in the middle of an argument to 'pass the potatoes, please'.....

I dunno. Obviously not *exactly* like my family/friends, but that kind of thing.

Biggest pet peeve is when all the characters are written as standing around a room, and with each new (possibly ship-related, sigh) development the writer goes through the list and gives each of them a "witty" comment on it. Especially when they are all written with the same voice.
I can take a lot of things, but I just can't buy 10 people standing around in a circle taking turns with their inane commentary.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2176 ]

Let's talk about dialogue!

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