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I recently received feedback from a writing contest entry I'd submitted (no, I didn't win), and while going over the comments from the various judges, I ran across one of my pet peeves.
One of the judges had gone through and done some editing on the dialogue in the submission.
Normally, I'm very open to constructive criticism of my writing. Other people are going to see and notice things that I've missed, and their insights are invaluable in the process of refining a manuscript. What bothered me about this particular instance is that the judge was correcting the dialogue so that it followed proper writing rules.
I receive a great deal of positive feedback on my dialogue, in that many readers find it realistic. This is what I am working towards - having my characters speech sound the way people actually speak. Based on what I've been told, I'm doing a decent job of this. I still have loads of room for improvement, but I'm on the right track.
One of the big aspects of writing realistic dialogue is to not have our characters speak the way our English teachers taught us to write. Listen to your family, friends, co-workers, etc. Do they speak in sentences that follow all the rules of written English? I'm not sure even Professor Henry Higgins (from My Fair Lady) managed that feat. The simple fact is, even highly educated people rarely speak in accord with all grammatical rules. We open sentences with conjunctions, and end on prepositions. We are liberal in our use of adjectives, and creative in our formulation of contractions. Many of us insert expletives with such frequency that others might wonder if we are being paid for each one.
I'm sure I don't need to mention the kind of reception people get, however, when they offer corrections on the spoken English of others. If you tell someone their expletives are excessive and unnecessary, and only serve to detract from what they are trying to say, you're most likely to receive an even tighter string of expletives in reply.
Realistic dialogue is a powerful addition to any story, or to an RPG. The character, whether in a novel or as an NPC overheard by the players in a game, is more believable and life-like when they are speaking in accord with the kind of character they are.
If you write the dialogue of good ol' boy Bubba as if you were writing Professor Henry Higgins, he's not going to sound like a good ol' boy. Conversely, if you're writing a highly educated, somewhat snooty, proper gentleman, you don't want him sounding like he just fell off the Redneck Express. Bubba is going to use things like compound contractions, which have no basis in proper English. "Don't'cha" would fit Bubba just fine, right along with "wouldn't've". Professor Higgins would only utter such words as part of derisive mocking of someone like Bubba, whom he would view as an ignorant savage ravaging the English tongue.
It would be a clumsy error to write in the narrative, "It was six a.m. in the morning," but how many times have we heard someone say something very similar to that? "I got home at ten p.m. at night." Of course they did; it's rather difficult to get home at ten p.m. in the morning, since then it would be ten a.m.
Two of the most valuable tools in learning to write realistic dialogue are our ears and our imaginations. As much as I comment about The Elements of Style, its value in writing dialogue is in making sure we punctuate our dialogue correctly. Listening to how people around us speak gives us a basis for realistic spoken communication, particularly if we're planning on writing characters with a given regional dialect in which we're not fluent. Once we have an idea of how such folks normally speak, we can then imagine our character speaking, and give them their own various quirks. Mary has a bad habit of pausing with "um" frequently, while Sam says "y'know" just as often. We have to tone those down a bit for the written story, lest they become tedious to the reader, but eliminating them altogether strips away the character's traits.
The same applies to writing accents, such as Southern or Brooklyn. If we write the entire dialogue with every nuance of the accents written in, it overwhelms the reader and burdens the story. We need just enough to create the flavor of the accent, and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest. A well-placed "y'all" or "youse" will cue the reader into the basic voice of the character, and it can be maintained with a conservative sprinkling of similar colloquialisms without going overboard.
When receiving critiques on dialogue, consider whether the comment takes into account the nature of the character before revising the story, and when critiquing someone else's dialogue, step away from the grammar books for a moment and listen to the character's voice.
If you strike out words from my dialogue, and I don't agree with you, please don't be offended. It's not that I don't appreciate your feedback or respect your opinion; it's just that I hear my character's voice better than you can.
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