Integrating Tone into Dialogue

Dialogue is a key part of any story and it’s usually what readers find most engrossing. They might skim long descriptions, but when they get to someone speaking that’s where they’ll get pulled back in.

What people say and how they say it not only tells the reader what’s going on, it also sets mood, gives an idea of character and provides a natural back and forth that will naturally keep readers engaged.

It helps to keep the flow going when characters are talking, and being able to convey how characters are saying things without explicitly stating it is a very useful skill.

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Interesting Chit Chat

Small talk is boring. Characters who waffle on about the weather and the dream they had last night and their favourite toy when they were a kid don’t hold a reader’s attention for very long.

At the same time, characters who enter a scene, get what they want, and leave can make the story feel rushed and sterile.

There are, of course, plenty of books that use the more rushed approach and it can work very well. It makes it much easier to keep the reader hooked and turning pages. Many bestsellers use this approach, although they don’t win many literary awards.

But we’ve all read books that had long passages of seemingly random observations and conversations that not only didn’t read as boring, but actually added to the story. You felt a stronger connection to the character because of the glimpse into their personality. So how did they manage it when your attempts feel like meandering asides and unnecessary tangents? 

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Decoy Dialogue

Words don’t always mean what the dictionary says they mean. It’s one of the pleasures of speech that we can mix up meanings of words to have completely different intentions, and we can impart that intention with tone, inflection or delivery.

This is something easy to replicate on stage or in movies. Even though a script might have to spell things out, once an actor delivers the line it’s usually obvious.

For novelists this is a little more tricky. Trying to capture the mercurial nature of dialogue on the page can be a lot of work, and often it’s easier to write simple, direct dialogue where people say what they mean in language that has no shades of grey.

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Differentiating Through Dialogue

While there’s nothing wrong with making characters sound different by giving them specific accents, it’s not something you can do for every character in a story. Not unless your tale takes place at the United Nations.

And while giving them vocal tics is useful, yeah? It helps identify them quickly, yeah? It also gets old just as quickly, yeah?

Rather than using how people speak to make them stand out, it is much easier and more effective to use what they say rather than how they say it.

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Dialogue Tags Are Annoying

Most people know how to add dialogue tags at the end of dialogue to identify who’s speaking.

"Look at me,” said Malcolm.

And sometimes instead of using dialogue tags, we use action tags.

“Look at me.” Malcolm waved his hands over his head.

Both indicate who’s speaking, but the difference, although small, is important. The dialogue ends with a comma in one and a full stop (period) in the other.

Not so hard to figure out. But sometimes we don’t want to put the tag at the end of the dialogue, we want to put it somewhere in the middle. And that’s where the fun starts.

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Dialogue Clinic

Dialogue is one of the most important parts of a story. Readers will skim through everything else, but rarely will they skip over dialogue. It’s engaging, it’s fun, it brings a story to life. Plays, movies, radio are all constructed around speech.

Turning functional dialogue into something more, something that rivets and entertains, is difficult. It would be great if we could just listen to people talking and naturally condense it into sparkling dialogue—and some people do have that facility—but for most of us it takes a bit more effort.

The following three areas are key to good dialogue. You can ignore them all and still write engaging dialogue, but it’s a lot easier if you keep them in mind.

1. Saying exactly what you mean is boring.

2. People agreeing makes for terrible conversation.

3. What you say is more important than how you say it.

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What Do You Love About Your Dialogue?

The general advice about writing dialogue tends to follow the same basic precepts. Conflict, goals, move the plot forward, don’t waste time with chit-chat, etc. That is certainly all useful stuff and will help keep the story moving.

But there’s more to dialogue than just getting across information.

People loves great dialogue. In books, in plays, in movies. In real life. Sparkling conversation holds the attention, even when it has nothing to do with anything. People like hearing it. It’s enjoyable to read. But it’s very difficult to write.

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Your Dialogue Is Showing

Whether you are a strong advocate of Show vs. Tell, or you find it an overused instruction that’s oft misused, one thing is for certain: dialogue is always considered showing.

There are some people who don’t really understand why this is so, to them dialogue often seems the very opposite of showing: people telling each other things.

The reason isn’t do with what is being said—the content of speech can be all telling and it would still be considered showing—but because you are enabling the reader to visualise what’s happening in the scene. Someone is talking.

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