Talking About Dialogue

Recently, I asked the question, “What would happen if we spoke in dialogue all the time?”

Let me explain how this is even a question, in case you think the things we say in real life would be considered dialogue.

Nope. They’re not. The purpose of normal, everyday language and the purpose of dialogue are not the same. If they were, you’d be bored out of your mind by the first page of your favorite novel.

In stories, dialogue exists to advance the plot or characterize the speaker (or the subject or society or whatever). It’s not to cram loads of background information down the readers’ throats or give us overly obvious foreshadowing about what will happen next or tell the readers things they’ve already figured out. It should feel real without being real, without the “um”s and “How are you”s and totally unnecessary clauses and sidetracks of real life.

How To Talk to People About Stuff

I mentioned in my post on Wednesday that an interesting conversation is like a gift to me. Which, besides being excessively corny, is true. And I had never really thought of it that way before.

This is probably why I love dialogue, first-person narrators, and writing scripts. Forget the action scenes, beautiful imagery, or sensory descriptions. People talking! Woohoo!

As I was thinking through my love of talking with people, I started listing the things that make a bad conversation. Most of them are mistakes I make. I am super good at doing stupid things that I know are stupid. It’s one of my mad skills. (The other ones are writing treasure hunt clues, baking cookies, being bad at sports, and making fun of myself. It’s an impressive skill set.)

Anyway, here are the three that first came to mind. Sure, there are other ways to hijack a good conversation (complaining constantly, giggling at inside jokes, or talking at all at a play or a movie come to mind), but these are some of the more subtle.

Where's Waldo?

You know, the concept of the Where’s Waldo seek-and-finds is so very simple: find Waldo, Wenda, Odlaw, Wizard Whitebeard, and Woof, along with their missing objects. That’s it. Just find them. I mean, they’re wearing bright red stripes, for heaven’s sake (except for Odlaw, who prefers the bumblebee look).

The problem with this, as thousands of children (and college students) have figured out is that everyone in a Where’s Waldo book is wearing red stripes.

I mean it. Suddenly, red stripes are as trendy as…oh, who am I kidding? I don’t know anything trendy to put in this analogy. I don’t even know if the word trendy is trendy.

The point is, in a Where’s Waldo book, people are wearing candy-striped ties, tights, jackets, canes, capes…practically anything you can think of. So your eyes dart every which-way, trying to land on a familiar face and wishing like anything that Waldo had thought to bring a cell phone so he and the rest of his group could stick together for once.

Sabbath Reflections: Coincidence? I Think Not!

You know those stories that span years and have two people's lives intersect in a strange, coincidental ways and sound like they should have an epic score behind them in their dramatic conclusions? This is one of those stories from my life that I wanted to share.

Dialogue is my favorite part of writing. This makes sense – I love talking, I love listening, I love eavesdropping on random strangers. And I love drama (inside the theatre, not anywhere else).

These are a few of the reasons that I wrote a lot of scripts in high school, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Back then, my reasoning went something like this: some of the skits we’re doing for youth group (taken from badly-designed freebie websites) are terrible. Even I could do better than that.

So I did. My sophomore year in high school, I wrote a flurry of scripts for our youth group to perform at different events. It was a lot of fun.

But then, just like I usually do when I start a new project, I got burnt out. I didn’t feel “in the mood” to write any more scripts. So, spring of my junior year, I just stopped.

A few months later, I went to the Kids’ Action Club talent show. (That’s what our church calls our children’s ministry. Although the name might lead you to think so, it is not, in fact, a league of young spies, which is a little disappointing.) The talent show was an annual event, crammed with plunked-out piano solos and badly off-key singing and proud parents who didn’t care.