TIPS ON WRITING GOOD DIALOGUE PART 2

Here is an interesting way to add nuance to a character’s personality with dialogue. People have different manners of speaking. Some people would rather speak indirectly about something, usually in a bid to avoid confrontation, while others are fine being direct. If your character is scared of offending other people, you can reflect that characteristic in their dialogue. Here’s an example.

Amina yawns. “I am so tired right now. That useless man kept us for over 45 minutes just because we wanted a resit.”

Patricia nods, her eyes darting to the fridge, or more specifically, the top of the fridge where she is certain she left her fresh loaf of bread this morning. “Yes, that wasn’t nice. You must be hungry.”

“I am! Did you cook anything?”

Patricia shrugs. “I already had plans. You know I bought bread last night. I was going to have bread and indomie.”

“Oya na.”

Amina opens her Instagram app and squeals at cat videos, while Patricia counts under her breath.

Finally, Patricia gets up and heads to the fridge. “I am certain I kept this bread here.”

“What?” Amina’s voice is loud with mirth.

“Oh nothing. Just that I kept the bread here, and I can’t see it. I’ll check the kitchen, maybe I forgot—”

“Oh! Was it that delicious agege bread on the fridge? It was yours?”

‘No, the Holy Spirit just dropped it like manna for you,’ Patricia thinks. “Yes. I bought it last night,” she replies instead.

“Eiya, I ate it this morning. No vex. It’s even what held my stomach while that man was advising us as if they told him we don’t have parents.”

There it is. Her bread is no more. As if in concordance, her stomach grumbles. Amina squeals again, grinning from ear to ear and Patricia suddenly imagines those white teeth sinking into her soft bread. She sighs, and plops back on the bed.

“Oh. And it’s already late now: the mai shayi won’t have any bread left.”

“You say?!” Amina asks, still smiling from her cat videos.

Patricia turns away and tries to remove the thought of the bread from her head with Chem101.

Patricia is obviously upset about her bread but she doesn’t say what is on her mind, probably because she is scared of Amina specifically or more generally because she doesn’t like confrontation. There are people like Patricia who will rather chew nails than plainly call out your shit. You’ve met such a person, you’re probably such a person.

(Intermission: I am not such a person, because who goes you? My bread? Also, who eats bread and noodles, biko? I just knew from the start that this Patricia girl was a weird one. I hope carbon chains satisfy her hunger. Mtchewww.)

If you have a character like Patricia, you could colour your dialogue with their way of addressing issues. With the example above, your readers can make inferences about the personalities of both roommates and be right to an extent even when that is their first time meeting the girls.

Bob knows; don’t tell him anything. This is a common mistake of budding writers—they try to give exposition in dialogue (which is alright) but sometimes they do it wrong.

The phrase “As you know, Bob’ is used to refer to dialogue that is on the nose and that serves no other purpose but to inform the reader about something the characters should already know. This kind of dialogue does not move the story forward, unless it is literal and the story(book) is flying across the room and away from an irate reader. Here’s an ‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue:

Mora sighs, her eyes misting in frustration. She glances at John as he walks in. “As you know, our mother has cancer and we are poor. How do we pay for chemotherapy?”

John shakes his head. “No idea. The news of her cancer shocked us when she finally confessed last week. We could ask our rich uncle who stays in Lagos to help us.”

“Oh yes! Uncle Idara. He has a yacht and is married to a senator’s daughter. They must be swimming in money. Let us call him.”

“I don’t have airtime.”

If your dialogue is as ‘informative‘ as this, stand still so that my slippers will give you a likkle brain jiggle. This is a bit extreme, but it is essentially an ‘as you know, Bob’ kind of dialogue. Don’t sigh in relief yet—just because your dialogue doesn’t have the words ‘As you know’ in it doesn’t mean you are safe.

This is an ‘As you know, Bob’ dialogue because both siblings already know their mother has cancer, that they are poor, and that their uncle Idara stays in Lagos and is rich. The only reason it is in their dialogue is because the readers do not know. And that, my friends, is a horrible way of writing dialogue and a major waste of space.

You can fix horrible exposition in dialogue by introducing a character who doesn’t know the information you’re trying to pass, by causing the characters who do know the information to argue about it, or by placing the information within the narrative.

If I was to rewrite this scene, I’d just remove the fluff.

Mora sighs, her eyes misting with frustration. She glances at John as he walks in. “Have you come up with any way we can raise the money for mummy’s treatment?”

John shakes his head. “And to be honest, I’m still in shock that she hid it from us for so long. Just last week I was telling Ighoro that cancer is a scam by the pharmaceuticals only for me to come home and hear the news.” He suddenly sits up. “We could ask Uncle Idara!”

“Oh yes! He must be back in Lagos by now. Let’s call him.” Mora says, certain their uncle would be back in Lagos. Even the Queen of England does not spend weeks lounging on a yacht, talk less of a man whose major bragging point is that he married a senator’s daughter.

“I don’t have airtime.”

Don’t have your characters chat for the heck of it—your dialogue should either function to move the plot forward or tell us something about a character, be it their inner workings or their feelings in the moment.

Because, think about it, why would we care about what characters have to say if their conversation doesn’t clue us in on what they are thinking and consequently help us try to predict their next move? We readers play detective each time we read a story even though we might not realise we do it.

So, if your flash fiction piece is about a girl who speaks with sharks and has to save them from her tribe of shark hunters, a dialogue about Low Earth Orbit, however interesting, should not sneak its way in. I say flash fiction because it has less room compared to a novel-length story, and we don’t know what exactly sharks talk about so the conversation may pop up once or twice in an actual novel.

Wo! The crux of the matter is that your dialogue should serve a purpose.

At this juncture, I will leave you with a few extra tips. Extra short, extra sweet.

Know how your characters think because what they say and how they say it reflects their thought process.

Let characters interrupt each other, or themselves. Conversations are give-and-take and even with wholesome people who don’t cut others off when they are speaking, pauses demand to be filled, even with just ‘m-hmm’.

Your character should not talk for too long before the person they are speaking to says something as well because unless this is intentional you run the risk of making the conversation unnatural.

Like with letting characters interrupt each other, when writing dialogue, you should also have your character interact with their environment. We don’t live in a vacuum, so when your character is speaking, chances are they are picking their nose or clearing their throat or suddenly noticing that their cat looks like a murderer. 

These things break what would otherwise have been a block of dialogue. And again, readers don’t much like blocks of text.

Age plays a huge role in how a person speaks. Colloquialisms differ from generation to generation and people don’t usually swap the colloquialisms they grew up with for newer ones. It’s like a Gen-Z saying ‘it’s on period’ to a baby boomer. 
It makes sense to the Gen-Z, but the baby boomer might be tempted to check for a little spot of red when they hear that.

Whew! This was a long one—took me a pretty while to write it too, so if you could, please share this post so more people can see my tips on how to write good dialogue. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope to see you soon.