It can be easy or it can be hell

 

My characters are talking to each other. They are a team, so they have to.

Dialogue can be easy or it can be hell.

And how to make them all sound different – more like themselves and not like the other guy. It ain’t easy. The ideal is that you should be able to tell who said what without the dreaded he saids and she saids. Nice work if you can manage it, as someone once said.

I usually get the words down and then add necessary tags so that we don’t get totally lost about who said what to whom. Then I look to make it more interesting and that means adding some action. What are they doing while they have this dialogue? How are they feeling? Is that coming across in what they say, or have I got to resort to telling readers how my characters feel? Maybe I can get away with saying she is angry if I say “her anger rose until it boiled over in a splurge of boiling hot words.” (A bit wordy but you get the idea.)

I like to add northern dialect to some of my characters, but its easy to go overboard with it. I know what they’re saying, and I hear it around me most days but dialect may not carry to the far corners of the world. Sometimes I toss in a glossary at the end and leave it at that.

It’s a balancing act I find entertaining.  Once I’ve done my best shot, I leave it and go back a day or two later when I do a read through. I have to do this. This time I’m glad I did because I’ve found characters talking about something that hasn’t happened in their world. I know it’s going to, but they shouldn’t know about it yet. So easy to get confused with time lines. They almost deserve a post to themselves.