Effective Dialog

"Words-
so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary,how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

                                            --Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the part where I envision a few "Mwhaha's", but that's only if you're considering using your words for evil. Hawthorne makes a pressing observation with this quote, noticing how the construction of our words serves a purpose and a specific one at that. We worry about our writer's voice or our character's point of view or the goals we wish to convey within each scene all for the purpose of intriguing our audience.

Back in the good 'ol days, words were meant to communicate not just feelings but everyday things. Certain forms of poetry, for example, weren't just meant to woo courtly lovers; they could also express one's gratitude for an invite to a party, one's distaste of what another said about them the day before.

Words can do anything, more so if you know what to do with them.

I'm a fluffball addict. I like to flourish and type until every last word rounds my point. That has the potential to work in some instances where emotions run high or tension tumbles through run-on after run-on, but there are other times when the reader will start begging you to put them out of their misery.

Do it. It's really not that hard and it's kind of gratifying.

Let's take dialog, for instance. Those words probably hold more than any other cluster of diction throughout your piece. Not only do they reveal the voice we mentioned earlier but they reveal a character's habits and characteristics, how they interact with others. Dialog serves as the catalyst to get the story moving and my story had finally seemed to collapse under the weight of all those words.

So I decided I needed some help from this:

The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass has many great tips for cleaving away the unnecessary weeds of your manuscript so that it can prosper in a greater light. Out of his many great chapters, one happens to be on your character's voice which--as I mentioned before--stems from passages of clean-cut dialog.

Clean-cut. Tight and meaningful, not bogged down by fits of pointless action.

The chapter suggests that the writer take a passage of dialog from their manuscript and strip it of its tags and its surrounding action. Then the chapter has the writer form each line into back and forth insults. Then lines of 1-5 words. Then a passage where only one character speaks, the other reciprocates with an unspoken response like a shrug, an expression, an abysmal nothing.

I tried each exercise for at least two of my passages and noticed how effective it had been in speeding things along and moving my scene from one point to the other. Best part? I didn't have to sacrifice my characters' interactions and, in turn, their personalities.

Words hold so much power when used in a proper context and in this case, when practiced to perfection. I suggest you find this book and make it your literary bible for the longevity of your manuscript. You won't be disappointed!