Dialogue is one of the hardest and yet most satisfying job that a writer does while he/she types away at the keyboard or scribbles with pen—their choice. It is in these spoken words by our characters that we develop them in ways that thought and action can never do, showing their readers how they react to catastrophes around them, or how much they love someone, etc…
Delving deeper into that, you have emotions. Your reader must know how he/she says what—but how do you express it? How do you express what your character feels and what he/she emanates while they speak? Anger, love, aggression, blind hatred—the list goes on. There are many emotions to choose from!
The answer to me is inside the dialogue.
As an example, look at this short excerpt of dialogue below.
“Is he dead? He looks dead, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes people act dead and really aren’t dead. Have you checked his pulse? When are the paramedics going to arrive?”
Okay, that might be a bad example, but you get the idea. In that excerpt, you don’t see any emotions. The character is a drone, saying the lines but not feeling anything. In order to have things seem emotional at all, it is necessary to add some sort of tagline at the end to explain to the reader that yes, this person is upset.
Another example, but using a different style of dialogue.
Oh my Go—It’s blood. What happened here? W-w-w-where is the body? Is everyone else okay? W-where are the paramedics? Someone do something!
You see, putting emotion into your dialogue does help some things here. For one, I at least can tell that this person is very, very nervous. His/her hands are probably shaking. Notice the stutter? She/he is scared out of her wits, too. Then they begin to freak out, etc…
Now this doesn’t mean that from now on you are free to put taglines such as he said throughout every story for the rest of your life and no one is going to kill you for lack of emotion… but it does help you pour the emotion into the words.
After all, it should be the dialogue—the words—themselves that tell the reader how the character is saying them, and not the tagline afterwards.
What do you guys think?
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