Young Writers Society

Hello!

I just had a quick question about writing a phone conversation in a novel. I know there are several different ways you can do it, i.e. just a regular dialogue between the recipients but I don't know how to go about writing a one sided conversation. I found a couple of different options on how to write one, but I would like to know what's the most believable and professional way. I looked at a few sites online but I thought it'd be better to ask someone with more knowledge rather than someone on yahoo answers.

-Nicole

Easy way to figure out how natural it is, is to record yourself or others, see how much is cut off with only one side and write what you hear when you play back the recordings to yourself.

Believable will come from that, and you don't want to be "professional" you want to write like you, to make it fit naturally into what you already have going.

Ah, good question! I used to find this one really hard too, not with phone conversations but with general talking-head conversations, but the principle still stands. There are a lot of really cool tricks you can incorporate. I'm not sure if I'm competent enough to explain it well but I can dish out a load of examples.

Describing the reaction

You can utilise your characters speech habits to vary this one, and it saves skipping back and forth to describe things: "I swear, it wasn't my fault, I just happened to be the only one there... oh come on don't give me that look."

It won't quite fit on the phone, but you can alter it to "was that a sigh? Did you honestly just sigh at me?"

I like this one to highlight the mood behind a long silence. You quickly change topic and react to the other person not noticing: "Then the whole thing collapsed and," she paused for a second, "then a giant tomato jumped out of the bushes. See, you're not even listening!"

In horror stories sometimes what's not said has more impact than what's said, and you can do the same with dialogue: "I got scared and turned back. No, seriously, you should have seen the fangs on them. Stop it, they were really big. Who are you talking- is that Jack? oh come on it's not that funny!"

Summarising

If something needs to be told, but the rest of the conversation is irrelevant then you can just cut out the conversation: "It took half an hour of listening to her rant on about parking spaces to the background noise of kids yelling before she finally dropped the detail that she had, in fact, seen him get into the red car."

You could simply drop the speech marks: The words lingered in the air even after the phone had been put down. Boy turned up late. Teacher was angry. Boy felt cornered and jumped out the window. After that the details blurred. First he opened the window to jump out and flew, then he flew straight towards it and smashed it on his way out. Then he broke straight through the roof, apparently.

Other methods

Embracing newer technologies is one thing, learning to use them in a literary context is completely different. The issue with phone calls and texting is that they're not used so much in literature because the techniques to make it interesting haven't been explored as much as, say, how to make walking through a door seem interesting (with description and suspense and the whatnot.)

Texting for example. You'd have to put more description in, but it would go something like this: Eggs sizzled on the pan. It was his third attempt but he still couldn't get the yolk right. "Is she still there?" He grabbed the pan in one hand and the phone in the other. "Yeh, I'm just making breakfast." Well, trying to anyway. Cooking was never his strong point. "Dude, score!" The egg spat and he almost dropped the pan when he tried to balance it back on the stove. Score? That guy could be a right pig sometimes. "It's not like that, she just stayed over."


That's all I can think of without bombarding with more examples, but if you want more ideas feel free to ask =] Hope this helps!

Thanks so much guys! This really helps