Dialog 2: Humor

For our lesson this week, we started out by thinking of some characters who have really funny dialog. Make a list of your five favorites. Then think about what makes their dialog funny. Here's what we came up with:

• absurdity
• personality quirks
• banter between characters
• expressing an unusual worldview
• juxtapositions
• awkwardness
• making unexpected connections
• bringing things back up - running gags
• wit
• cleverness
• surprise

As with any humor, there is no way to tell beforehand what dialog the reader will find funny, and what dialog the reader won't. You have to experiment. Write something funny, give it to ten people, and see if they laugh. If most of them do, keep it. If not, try again.

One thing to remember, if the characters are laughing, the reader usually doesn't.

Writing humorous dialog is an attitude. Let your characters unleash their inner funny.

Keep writing!

Dialog 1: Mechanics and Pacing

MECHANICS

Here's something they don't teach you in school. How to punctuate dialog. When you submit a story for publication they can spot you as an amateur right away if you get your commas and periods mixed up.

"Give me my book," Sarah said.
 I asked, "What book?"
 VS.
"Give me my book." Sarah leaned so close I could feel her hot breath on my nose.
I backed away. "What book?"

To understand how to punctuate dialog, first you need to know the difference between a tag and a beat. A tag is like a label. It just tells the reader who said something. A beat is a sentence. It can stand on its own.

Tags:
Sarah said
I asked
Beats:
Sarah leaned so close I could feel her hot breath on my nose
I backed away

When you pair a line of dialog with a tag, separate them with a comma.
If you use a beat, separate with periods.

PACING

"Give me," Sarah leaned close, "my book." I could feel her hot breath on my nose. "NOW!"

If you want, you can insert beats or tags when you want the reader to feel a pause in a sentence. In this case, since you're breaking up the dialog in the middle of a sentence, go ahead and use a comma even if what follows is a beat. But at the end of a sentence of dialog, put a period.

"What book?" I backed away. "Did I take your book?" I eased the toe of my shoe a little further under the couch to make sure the spine of the book was out of sight. "I didn't see any book here," I said. "Did you?"

You can also break up several sentences of dialog with tags or beats to indicate that a character is speaking haltingly. This is an advanced technique and should be used sparingly. It can get annoying if you constantly switch back and forth between dialog and tags or beats, but it can also be very effective.

And don't forget to put a paragraph break between different speakers. Also, if you have the same speaker go on uninterrupted for more than one paragraph, it is a really good idea to start the new paragraph with a tag or beat so the reader knows you are not changing speakers. 

Keep writing!

How to Not Make Your Characters All Sound the Same

Unique character voices is the topic for today. Here are some ideas we came up with for giving each character a distinct way of expressing themselves:

• Give them a strong personality trait. But don't overdo this, unless you want a cast of caricatures instead of a cast of characters.
• Know your character's age. Adults, teens, and kids all have different ways of talking.
• Think of someone you know and try to have your character say things the way they would say them.
• Listen to a lot of people. Get to know lots of different patterns of speech from different regions, cultures, professions, and backgrounds. Pick the best one for your character.
• Voice comes from who your character is, so know your character!
• Have imaginary conversations with your characters until you know their voices.

To practice distinct voices, we did a writing exercise. Everyone in the room filled in the blanks to the following sentence:

Three ___________ walked into a room and saw ____________.

I collected the papers, shuffled them, and handed them back out. Everyone had to write the first thing each character said in reaction to what they had seen, doing their best to give everyone a unique voice.

My sixteen-year-old son figured out a way to defeat my writing exercise. He wrote "Three vampires walked into a room and saw Medusa's face." Apparently they can't say anything. They're statues. So instead of writing, I captured their final, permanent, stony expressions.