The Mechanics of Good Dialogue

I once took my car to an insurance evaluator. He walked around it in semi-darkness and immediately told me all the details of every collision I had been involved in. He knew exactly what to look for and how to interpret it.

In the same way you can open a novel in a random page, look at the dialogue, and say with some certitude how well the particular author handles dialogue without even reading the dialogue itself. Good dialogue in a novel can easily be distinguished by its mechanics. Here are three things you have to look for to spot bad dialogue:

a) The emotions of characters are described.

Does the author find it necessary to tell you that John is angry, happy, sad, astonished or surprised after someone said something? Then you are reading bad dialogue. In good dialogue, the author doesn't have to describe the emotions of the characters involved. The words in the dialogue should carry the emotions of the characters to the reader. And the reader will evolve his personal take on the character. Good dialogue allows the reader to feel the speaker's or listener's emotions.

b) Speaker attribution should always be the verb 'said'.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I am sorry,” he apologized.

“I repeat,” repeated Alex.

Does the author say that John enquired, offered, stated, interrupted, cried, yelled, countered, concluded, mumbled, roared, even asked instead of 'said'? Then he is interpreting or repeating his speaker's dialogue and confusing the reader who has his own interpretation. Good dialogue does not require the author's interpretation. It stands on its own. If the author is using words other than 'said' for variety (to avoid repeating 'said') then these words jump out at the reader and withdraw his attention from the dialogue and divert it to its mechanics. The word 'said' is like a punctuation mark. We don't notice it.

c) The author should never say 'how' someone said something.

“Hurry up,” Tom said swiftly.

“I am afraid times are hard,” he said grimly.

When the author finds it necessary to say how someone said something, especially by using an adverb in the form of '-ly' after the word said, then his dialogue is weak. Once more how characters say something should be apparent in the dialogue itself. There are few exceptions of adverbs that cannot be replaced by good dialogue and that's when it is necessary to describe the process of talking itself, for example clearly, softly etc.

Any of these three problems are pointers to bad dialogue. Be careful though—this test can only be applied to modern novels. Like everything else in life, novel writing techniques have evolved for the better. So if you look through a novel written by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or even F Scott Fitzgerald don't accuse them of writing bad dialogue!