Dialog

Today I want to talk about my favorite part of any story or game or movie/tv show. Dialog can make or destroy a story. Dialog can make a character come alive or fall flat. In my book review blog dialog makes its way into my review every time. I think that dialog is the single more important part of character development. The reason I believe this is because what makes a character memorable? Is it the way they dress? Unless everything is on the clothes in a story then no. Is it the way that they solve the murder? Even Mr. Monk was not known for that. No it is the way that the character talked with the world around them.

All of the characters that I love best have unique voices. All of Jane Austen's character can be identified by just their word choice. Now I know that word choice is another blog but that is word choice in the descriptive parts of the story not the character voice. The character can say things that the writer would never say or do in the writing itself. For example character's can and do use contractions. That is fine, follow the character's voice, no matter where it goes. But as the writer do not, and I repeat DO NOT, use contractions in the non-dialog parts of the story. It does not work, it never will. I have read stories where the author has used contractions in a paragraph and I have stopped reading. It pulled me out of the story so fast that my head was spinning from the blood rush.

Now about word choice in character voices. 9 time out of 10 I do not argue with what the author has the character saying or how they say it. But the one time I do this one. When the character uses words that they would not know or use because of their character. But that I mean this- I was reading a steampunk novel not the best one I have ever read but it had potential. Now I had some problems with the plot but nothing too bad so I was going along reading the story until this happened. 'Then you made yummy sounds.' Can you hear my mental wheels locking up? I am not kidding. My head came up, my mouth was open and my mind was just stuck. The problems I have with that word choice are these- The character was a very formal person who did not use any form contractions, the society is very heavily based on Victorian society so the word was not something said, and it was the only thing like that in the whole book. The author did this again and again both in dialog and in descriptive paragraphs.

So be careful about what you say in your writing because you can make or break the whole story by it. Thanks for reading and see you next week.