Narrative Basics Lesson 4: Speech and Dialogue

Characters need to talk to each other, so stories usually have speech and dialogue. 

But it helps to think of speech as an action. People don’t speak for no reason—people speak to persuade, entertain, inform, frighten, mock, reassure, and so on.

For instance, what are the characters doing in this snippet?

The entire snippet is dialogue. But what are the characters doing with their dialogue?

The coach is pumping up the team. The team are responding to the coach’s energy.

In this lesson, we’ll focus on speech as an action in this way.

Here’s the inspiration image for this lesson, or you can find your own. If you prefer, write about the world around you.

We’ll be writing speech and dialogue, so you’ll need to come up with different ideas about what might be happening in this scene and filling in a lot of details. 

Don’t be limited by what you see. Add whatever detail you like from your own memory and imagination.

Whatever you use for inspiration, take a moment to think about what you see.

• Who are these people? What are their names?
• What's their relationship?
• What's happened up to this point?
• How are they feeling right now?
• What might they both want in a situation like this? What might they be trying to do?

When you're ready, let's get writing.

To begin, here’s a simple action: greeting someone!

There are endless ways in which we greet each other with speech.

Characters can use speech to command other people to do things.

Commands can range in strength from subtle suggestions through to direct instructions.

And the way in which someone gives a command, what they give a command about, and who they give it to, can tell us a lot about the character.

For example, in this snippet, what's the coach doing? Commanding runners to get on the starting blocks. How strong is the command? Is she being clear and direct? Does she expect the runners to obey?

Yes. This is an example of a strong command.

This example is interesting because the "please" is part of the command. Subtle!

Characters try to influence each other through their emotions.

For example, characters can affirm and encourage each other.

Notice in this exchange that Mango protests her mother’s encouragement, but her mother keeps going anyway.

Sometimes characters tease each other. 

In this snippet, kids are teasing Mango Delight about her name.

Teasing is basically about lowering another person’s status. It can be affectionate or mean, depending on the context.

Characters might intimidate or threaten each other.

In this snippet, Mango’s school principal is intimidating her in order to get a confession

• Characters can intimidate each other to make them do something or prevent them from doing something.
• Intimidation can be direct or indirect.
• Direct intimidation or threats can sound a lot like commands ("Put your hands up or I shoot!").
• Indirect intimidation or threats can sound more like questions or statements of information ("Be a shame if you didn't put your hands up.").

In the snippet above, you need to know that Mango has done something wrong, and the prinicipal knows it, to understand that the principal is intimidating her—otherwise you might think she was just providing some information.

Characters often need to coordinate their actions, so they make plans.

Here's an example of two characters making a plan.

To make a plan, essentially one character needs to either ask a question or make a proposal, and the other character needs to give a response.

(If you think about it, making a plan is a specific way of asking questions and giving information.)

Again, we learn a lot from what characters make plans about, who they make plans with, and how they talk to each other.

In this snippet, the characters are clearly friends, and everything is pretty chill so they are planning something minor—but not all relationships and plans are like that. Some relationships might be hostile or excited, some plans might be a big deal, and so on.

Here are some examples that follow similar plan-making patterns.

Characters don’t know everything there is to know about the world. They often need to ask questions.

What characters asks questions about tells us what they think is important.

For example, in the snippet above, Brook is asking about her hair—but she’s not looking for facts about her hair, she's really looking for emotional reassurance.

Often when characters speak, they are giving each other information (sometimes in response to a question.)

When characters share information, it tells us what they do and don’t know. It tells us what they want other people to know, and why they want them to know it.

For instance, in this snippet Mango is giving information about her actions. But why? Because she wants to set the record straight, and defend her reputation.

Characters often tell each other stories. 

In this snippet, a troll called Kalgrash is telling a story about being on the run from humans.

Characters tell stories for many reasons. They want to explain, entertain, impress, warn—even just to fill the silence.

And characters can tell different types of stories: simple, elaborate, long, short, scary, happy, true, made-up.

But stories told through dialogue are different to other stories because they are told in a character's voice, and from their point of view. 

Here are some more examples of stories told in dialogue.

So far we’ve explored the kinds of things characters do with their speech

Now let’s look at some of the mechanics of how we write speech on the page or screen, and blend it with action and tags.

Dialogue punctuation can be super finicky!

Hopefully, that was good practice. If you really don't want to do those exercises, you can skip this page using the table of contents.

One way to write speech is with dialogue, which means writing out exactly what the speaker said

Pay attention to your punctuation when you write your variation below! Look at the examples above for guidance.

When we write dialogue, we often need to identify who is saying what. We do this with speech tags.

Dialogue gives you the detail of a conversation, but sometimes the details aren’t that important—you just want to summarise what was said and move on.

For that we use reported speech.

In this snippet, Mango is summarising what her friend Brook said earlier. She’s not spelling it out word for word.

Notice there are no speech marks or tags in reported speech.

When characters talk, they don’t JUST talk. They do all sorts of other things at the same time: make breakfasts, play with puppies, infiltrate bases, or even just react to what the other person is saying.

So we usually blend dialogue with action.

You can see that action can happen while someone is speaking (she gasped between situps), or it can happen before or after someone speaks.

We all have our own distinctive ways of speaking—from our accents to the things we choose to talk about. The way we talk in real life, our personal voice, is kind of thumb print for who we are.

Writers sometimes like to capture a distinctive character voice through dialogue.

How well do you feel like you know this character? The voice tells you a lot.

What gives this snippet that voice? It’s a combination of word choice and expanded detail. 

Here’s the same snippet rewritten with simpler word choice and no expanded details.

Same info, not so fun!

Here are some examples that expand on the dialogue to give you a sense of the characters.

• For instance, does Gobgap sound like a kid talking big to some lions?
• Does the man in the store sound like a semi-creepy old British guy?

What in the expansions makes them sound that way?

One last thing about dialogue: we can use it to express character emotions.

How are the characters in this scene feeling?

The dialogue helps us feel what these characters are feeling. Each character is angry in their own way: the father angry at his son for getting in trouble at school, the mother and son angry that the father isn’t taking the son's side. 

Notice we don’t need to be told exactly what the characters are feeling (as in, “Son, I am very suspicious of you and that’s making me angry!”) in order to understand them. We can understand their feelings through details in the dialogue and action.

We’re going to try putting everything together in a checkpoint piece, using this snippet from Mango Delight as a model.

But in a dialogue snippet like this, there is lots of stuff happening at once. So let’s examine this snippet from a few different perspectives, and then on the next page you can try to write your own variation.

First, let’s look at the basic structure.

The snippet starts with action, then goes into dialogue with two speakers. (And there are no speech tags!)

What are the characters trying to do with their speech? 

We can boil it down to three main actions.

What about emotions? What are the characters feeling?

And voice? Again there’s a combination of word choice and expanded details to give us a sense of character.

Okay, so now you should have a pretty deep x-ray view into this snippet. Time to write your own version.

Here’s the snippet from the previous page. Write a checkpoint piece using this snippet as a model. 

You need to blend action and dialogue (feel free to put in some reported speech if you want), as well as think about:

• What are the characters trying to do from moment to moment?
• What are they feeling?
• What do they sound like? What are their voices?

There's a new inspiration image below.

“Phew! What a big lesson!”

“I know, right? Who would have thought speech and dialogue could be so complicated?”

“Hopefully it was worth it!”

“I hope so too. See ya!”

“Bye!

Where did the snippets come from?

We used a lot of extracts from Mango Delight, by Fracaswell Hyman, which is about a middle-school girl who falls out with her BFF, and gets into a new friendship that is not nearly as good.

At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendon Kiely, is a novel about two American teenage boys—one black, one white—who get caught on opposite sides of police brutality.

The Suburb Beyond the Stars is part of a strange-cool-weird adventure series called The Norumbegan Quartet, by M.T. Anderson. It's about a couple of friends who become critical players in a gigantic conspiracy/war/game between two ancient alien civilisations.

Where did the inspiration images come from?

The main inspiration image comes from Erasmus Brosdau, a German sci-fi artist who's worked on Metal Gear Solid.

The checkpoint inspiration image comes from Sylvain Sarrailh, a game artist who does beautiful, chewy, colourful environments.

When we were writing the first example, about the clever Gobgap, we were looking at this image from a Thai character designer called Gop Gap (we liked the name, so we tweaked it for the main character). Gop Gap does these great storybook style images that have lots of texture and colour.

And for the examples about Carmen and Eliza and their friends, we were looking at this photo, but we're not sure where it came from.

That's it for this lesson. It's been a big one! 

See you next time.