Probably my favorite technique of any good story is the dialogue. This is because dialogue is the soul of a story. It is a very useful tool that gives voice to the characters and is an important element in their development. Simply put, the verisimilitude of a work of fiction is mostly dependent on the dialogue. Unfortunately for many writers, dialogue is one of, if not the hardest part, of writing a book. This is not hard to figure out because as a writer, you must keep track of the many different voices of your characters and ensure that what they utter rings true. Otherwise, you have written bad dialogue.
Gone are the days of writing large narrative chunks which defined the past literary era- I'm talking the likes of Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri. In their days, it was very fashionable to write in long passages full of rhetorics and numbing descriptives. Don't get me wrong, you must still write those-somewhat- but today's reader has neither the patience nor time for those long passages. We live in fast lane now and in other to move your story forward and hold their attention, you must write proper dialogue.
What is a proper dialogue, you ask? I will try and explain it. A proper dialogue is one that you write EXACTLY as it is spoken. A proper dialogue must also be a very realistic dialogue. You have written a bad dialogue if for instance, one of your characters, who's a police officer or detective, while interviewing the murder of a pepper seller's daughter in Ketu-Ojota talks like an American FBI agent! Worse still, the woman, in her replies, could be mistaken for a Unilag lecturer! A listening ear is imperative to writing proper dialogues. There is a way a fifty year old man would say some things that a twenty year old lad will not say. There is a certain way a Nigerian man will greet you that is entirely different to the way a British man would greet. Do you get the picture? An eighty year old granny is unlikely to say, "What's up Abike?"
Dialogue is very important in that it defines the personality of your characters. We gain insights into their personalities through what they say. From dialogues, you can paint the picture of an emotional person, a controlling person, an affectionate person- almost any personality can be well defined from dialogues. A well-written dialogue makes a text realistic. In the real world, people interact and have conversations and this is critical to a successful work of literature such as prose. Nigerian authors, in my view, have yet to fully invest and buy into proper dialogue writing and have quite some catching up to do with western authors when it comes to this literary technique but we are getting there. Times are changing. Authors are experimenting and we can only get better!
Here are some tips for writing proper dialogues.
1. Draw inspiration from your own favorite authors. It is very likely your favorite author is what inspired you to write in the first place.Why not check out his/her style and copy it!
2. Use real life voices from friends and family. This is tricky. You don't want to get sued by someone claiming what you wrote was exactly them but try and imagine how they say things, their reactions to certain emotions and juxtapose them in your own characters. You will find one of your characters who sounds like someone you know!
3. Ensure your dialogues tells the story. I cannot stress this enough. Rather than writing about their emotions in long passages, why not show them through dialogues? That way you are advancing the story and developing their personalities as well.
4. Write exactly as it is spoken in your generation. Unless you are writing a historical fiction where you need to write as it was in that era, you should write in voices that are in sync with your era. Who knows, in fifty years, your book could become a classic!
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