“As you know, we’ll be discussing stilted dialog” said Howard. “We should do something different for the introduction.”

“Let’s speak our dialog tags” said Brandon cleverly.

“We mustn’t forget to include adverbs” said Dan pensively.

That’s not exactly how it went down, but that’s a nicely stilted object lesson, right? And let me state for posterity that writing it was painful.

What is “stilted dialog?” Who is wearing stilts, and why? More importantly, how can we avoid writing dialog that staggers about on leg extensions?

We offer a few tricks, including heavily re-writing (after first racing to get as much dialog on the page as possible), using turns of phrase that are in-character for the person saying it, and turning exposition into arguments.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, which is currently being read by the Internet reading group One book, One Twitter.

Writing Prompt: This is a two-parter – Start by writing the very worst infodumping maid & butler dialog you can (using an actual maid and an actual butler.) Now rewrite it with the maid & butler arguing viciously. Include all the same information, but make the dialog believable and entertaining.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Stilted dialogue moves like stilts staggering down the street. It doesn’t feel like a conversation, or it doesn’t match the character. People don’t talk in complete sentences. Fiction dialogue represents conversation, it doesn’t portray it exactly (skip the ums, hums, haws, etc.). Give the illusion of reality. Write the dialogue you need, then prune it. Beware maid and butler dialogue, where characters talk about things to educate the reader, rather than because they would ordinarily talk about those things. Consider when they would have first talked about that, then let them reflect on those past conversations. Get your characters into arguments, and let them slip in the information you want as a side issue. Toss the characters into a scene and let them talk.

[Brandon] “This is Writing Excuses season four episode 26, avoiding stilted dialogue,” said Brandon.
[Howard] “15 minutes long,” said Howard, “because you’re in a hurry.”
[Dan] And Dan said, “We’re not that smart.”
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right.
[Howard] Did you say it ironically?
[Dan] No, I said it meaningfully. I said it tiredly.
[Brandon] You were supposed to put in a bad adjective there… or adverb.
[Dan] I know. But it’s like midnight.
[Brandon] It’s not like midnight… it’s… OK, it’s like midnight.
[Howard] Dan said lately.
[Brandon] We are going to avoid stilted dialogue like the one we just…
[Dan] Is braindeadedly an adjective? An adverb?
[Brandon]… had. We’ve had… people ask about dialogue all the time. It seems to be one of their big confusions, their big problems. Whenever we do episodes where we get up in front of the crowd, often there is a dialogue question about it. We got one recently via e-mail or through the forums. So we thought we would talk about it, specifically targeting how to avoid stilted dialogue. This is kind of a strange phrase we use — stilted dialogue. It’s one of these things that we talk about in creative writing. I don’t know if anyone ever really even knows what it means. It’s just a goto… oh, your language feels stilted. It’s kind of like saying this scene is boring. You’re identifying something…
[Howard] Have you seen drywaller’s stilts?
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] OK. When a guy is walking around on drywaller’s stilts, he looks like he’s 8 feet tall because he can reach the ceiling. But he’s not, he’s totally faking it. Stilted dialogue… it’s like wearing drywaller’s stilts, you’re not as tall as you say you are.
[Brandon] Did you just make that up?
[Howard] Yes.
[Dan] Is that different from other stilts in some way? Are other stilts more genuine?
[Howard] Well, I like drywaller’s stilts because they make that ka-chung, ka-chung, ka-chung noise as you walk. Like you’re a robot.
[Brandon] Oh, boy. This is what happens…
[Dan] Awesome. Nobody says your dialogue seems a little mechanical. Your dialogue just shot rockets at me.
[Howard] Your dialogue is a drywaller.

[Brandon] OK. With that little tangent… what does it really mean when someone says this?
[Howard] It means it’s not walking like a person walks. It’s not moving like dialogue is supposed to move. It’s not moving like a conversation, it’s moving like something on stilts staggering down the street.
[Brandon] OK. I identified two things in there. Number one, you said it isn’t talking like a person talks, and the dialogue isn’t moving like dialogue moves.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Brandon] OK. Those are two separate things, but I think they’re both very important things that are part of this whole stilted dialogue thing. All right. So Dan, what makes it… a conversation not move like a conversation should?
[Dan] Well, for one thing, we write in complete sentences. We do not speak in complete sentences.
[Brandon] I do.
[Dan] You do sometimes. But for the most part, if you listen to a conversation… do this, go on a bus, go to a restaurant, listen to people talk. Most of what they say is incomplete. That’s just how we talk. We don’t always have to say, “I am feeling very happy today.”
[Brandon] No, you’re very right. This is one thing [garbled]
[Dan] [garbled] absolutely correct.
[Brandon] It’s a real balancing act in fiction to get that right, because you don’t generally want to accurately portray exactly how the conversation goes. We’ve talked about this before. If you add in all the ums and hums and haws and incomplete sentences, we lose people. [Cough] Excuse me. But [inaudible]
[Howard] Well, and you also lose people if you throw in the abbreviated sentences. When I’m headed to the store, I tell Sandra, “Going to the store!”
[Brandon] Well, see, that might be all right. In a dialogue. That might feel accurate. But if every…
[Howard] If it’s happening all the time…
[Dan] Yeah. The problem is, if she answers, “Why are you going to the store?” And then you answer, “I am going to the store because I need pickles.” Nobody actually talks that way.
[Howard] Well, yeah. Except in children’s books.

[Brandon] Right. The trick in fiction, though… we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give the illusion that it’s real without including all of the clicks and hums and haws of language in reality. We want to have the perfect version of reality without making it seem like the perfect version. Generally. There are some times when people work really hard to accurately display dialogue and it works in their fiction. It depends on what type of story you’re trying to write. But generally, we’re talking about mainstream commercial fiction. In mainstream commercial fiction, this is what we’re trying to do.
[Howard] It’s a representation that’s difficult to catch. I was watching the A-Team movie. There’s a couple of scenes in there where two characters are both talking at the same time at each other during an argument. I realize that I can’t follow all of it. How would I represent that if I were writing it as prose? Well, one approach would be to say they argued shouting over each other and tell it from the point of view of a third character who is only picking up every other word. I don’t know what the right way is to do it. In the film, it was very, very effective. I don’t know how the screenwriter would…

[Brandon] Right. Well, they would probably write he says this and then he says this while shouting over him. You could do that in fiction that way. You could just write it like that. The real question we have though… at least I have… is how do we help our listeners avoid doing this? Howard, you do dialogue really well. Your characters walk this line. I feel that they feel realistic, but they don’t talk like people really would. Howard, how are you walking this line? How are you keeping it from growing too stilted?
[Howard] I rewrite a lot… I rewrite an awful lot. I start by writing all of the pieces of dialogue that I need in order to tell the piece of story that goes in this installment, in this strip. My first… and this is unique to comics, but I think it can be applied in some way to fiction… if it doesn’t fit in the four panels, then I need to change what I’m doing. I’m trying to say too much, I need to prune. As I start pruning, I start applying rules like “in late, out early.” I didn’t need the setup, I didn’t need one of the characters to say, “So what are we going to do now?” I don’t need that, even though that’s a very common sort of phrase.
[Brandon] Well, no, I think that can serve our listeners a lot. I think generally for most writers I’ve met, putting in too much and then pruning down is a better way to go. Particularly for a lot of fantasy writers I know. I’d say one in 10 new writers I’ve met generally are too sparse and need to add. For most of us, get it on the page… get the conversation saying the things that you need to say, and then prune it down so that it starts to actually flow realistically.
[Dan] Well, and one thing to remember is even if you can’t get the back-and-forth banter to flow, if you can get one character speaking to sound very natural, then you can totally fake a reader out. They will assume that the flow of the conversation is natural, even though it’s a little more formalized than the typical speaker would actually be.

[Brandon] Okay. Let’s stop for our book of the week. We’re going to let Dan go ahead and give us this one. Go for it.
[Dan] Okay. My book of the week… this is actually coming in a little late, but if you are on twitter and have heard of the program they are doing called one book, one twitter… it’s basically an Internet wide reading group that is reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which is one of my favorite books of all time. We do have a content warning on this both for sex and for language. There’s not much of it, but what there is, is pretty graphic.
[Brandon] You just gave me a thumbs-up.
[Howard] For those of you not benefiting from the video.
[Brandon] Why did you just thumbs-up me for that?
[Dan] Well, because I know your nighttime proclivities.
[Brandon] Oh, boy. Don’t make us lose our clean rating.
[Howard] Goodbye clean rating.
[Dan] Proclivities isn’t a bad word.
[Brandon] Why do you love that book?
[Dan] Is one of my favorite books because it is about more than its story. It is about America and it is about gods. In very brief, it is… the gods of old are still around. They’re in America. People don’t really believe in them anymore. It’s basically taking the concept of these ancient gods such as Odin and Chernebog and Easter herself and all these old people and treating them as immigrants to the new world. It’s fascinating, the writing in it is beautiful, the characterizations are wonderful. It’s really, really excellent. I recommend it highly.
[Brandon] And Gaiman usually does have very good dialogue.
[Dan] He usually does. That is correct.
[Brandon] How do you like that segue? He really does have sharp dialogue. Okay.
[Dan] That is our audible recommendation for the week. It is…
[Brandon] audiblepodcast.com/excuse to start your 15 day free trial and download a copy to listen to and support the podcast. So thank you.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s dig into this a little deeper. One of the other things that we mentioned when Howard originally outlined what is stilted is the other half of it, where characters aren’t acting like themselves through their dialogue. I think this gives a real feeling of stiltedness. About half the time, when you’re saying, “Oh, this doesn’t feel right,” it’s because the character who is saying it wouldn’t be saying it. We’ve talked about maid and butler dialogue before…
[Howard] Joss Whedon, in the commentary for one of the seasons of Buffy, said that he was reading through a script and realized that… he had other people writing some of these scripts… and he realized this piece of dialogue here… this is Willow saying it, it sounds like something Xander would say. What’s so neat is that Joss was able to recognize his characters’ voices when they weren’t being used right. And he went back to the… he said it’s a great line, but Willow can’t say it. So what do we do? Well, you put Xander in the scene. Yeah, put Xander in the scene in the scene and let Xander say it. So this, at least, is how Joss Whedon, who I believe to be one…
[Brandon] One of the great dialogists.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[Howard] One of the great dialogists. That’s how he solved the problem. If the voice needs to be so-and-so in order to deliver this, then you gotta put so-and-so into the scene.

[Brandon] Yeah, that’s one of the things that’s happening. I see with a lot of newer writers though, one of the problems is that they walk into a scene saying well, this information needs to get known. We need to let the reader know this, so somebody has to say it. They put that information coming out of the mouth of the wrong person. Oftentimes, in a scene like that, there is no right person to spout that information. So either they have to go and add a walk-in character, which we’ve talked about before, particularly in… even in dialogue podcasts, we’ve talked about walk-in characters, or they have to learn how to approach that information from a new direction. I’ve had one student in a class this semester who had a particularly bad problem with this, is every time some people came on the screen, they would do this maid and butler thing. They would talk about things that… it was obvious from the setup of the scene that these are things the characters had talked about dozens of times, and yet they… in each dialogue, would treat it like the first time, and would be covering ground that they should have covered months ago, or that they should never have covered together, other people should have covered with them. In this case, the entire scene concept needs to be changed.
[Howard] I actually find myself in that trap, where I’m putting dialogue in and I know that as I’m putting it in, it’s expository. It’s information the reader needs to have. I go through and I evaluate it and reevaluate it and reevaluate it to determine where is the first time that this conversation really would have happened. Once I determined that, I go ahead and pretend that the conversation happened at that time. Now, when that conversation happened at that time, it affected the universe and it propagated. Somebody else now knows this. These characters now know this. How does it inform their dialogue now and what can I tweak, so that they drop the pieces that I need?
[Brandon] That’s a great way of approaching it.
[Howard] The problem with it, and I see this when people e-mail me and ask, “What’s going on in your comic? I don’t understand.” It’s subtle. It is very, very subtle, but I believe that when the current story is in print form, people will go back through it and read it and reread it, and it will stand up to those sorts of rereadings precisely because it’s subtle.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, one of the best examples that I want to point out of doing this kind of dialogue right is another Joss Whedon. It is from Firefly, actually, from the very first episode. Where he has a situation where the bad guys have shown up, the Reavers. He needs to explain to the audience what Reavers are. Fortunately, he has been smart enough to put a character in the scene who doesn’t know what Reavers are, and asks. Somebody says, “They’re scary. They will rape us. They’ll eat our flesh, and they’ll sew our skin into their clothes.” And then, the key line that makes it all work is, she says, “And if we’re very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.” Which is marvelous, because it makes them scarier, it…
[Brandon] It makes us laugh.
[Dan]… reveals her character. It makes us laugh and makes us scared at the same time. Even though it is essentially an info dump. But he’s done it so seamlessly.

[Brandon] Now, you can always use a walk-in character. It doesn’t always work. One trick that I’ve used that I would… the same thing that I suggested to this student, was to approach this and say… let’s make this instead of a conversation, make it an argument. What about this information does one character disagree with the other character about? Make that little thing that to you originally was just one part of this big info dump… make that thing the argument. Why are they passionately opposed on this thing? As they discuss their argument about it, you can make it feel like something that’s happened before. They’re arguing this for the fifth time, and it’s going to come to a head here. You can then get the information… you can slip it in in non-dialogue narrative dumps. Just a sentence here and a sentence there. Character thoughts. Why won’t he listen? Why can’t he see? Where you can make that information come across.
[Howard] What’s funny is that that also functions… and I hope I’m not giving away any story points in Schlock Mercenary… that also functions as a beautiful red herring. Because people will start looking at that… oh, gosh, these characters are arguing about this piece of technology, that must be important to the plot. They all twig to that, and… no, that’s just how I was telling you about it. Okay, red herring. Awesome. Or maybe it’s a Chekhov’s gun? I don’t know.

[Dan] This is a case where being a discovery writer can be a really big help writing dialogue. Because what I like to do in a situation like this is just toss the characters into a scene and let them talk.
[Howard] Let them talk.
[Dan] Do something like this. Give them something to argue about or find something else, and then the key information will slip in almost unnoticed. Which is a nice bit of smoke and mirrors, and the dialogue feels natural because it’s what your characters want to talk about and not what you want to talk about.
[Brandon] Yeah. Establish who your characters are first in your head. Find out what they would talk about. Reinforce who they are through that conversation and let the info come out in a more natural way.

[Brandon] All right. Howard, you’re waving your hand. Why don’t you do the…
[Dan] Oo! You have a writing prompt!
[Howard] I’ve got a writing prompt. This is a two-parter. Start with maid and butler dialogue with a maid and a butler who are establishing important plot points. Write the worst maid and butler dialogue you know how to write. Okay? It’s an info dump and it’s awful. Now go back and rewrite it. Now the maid and the butler are having an argument, a very impassioned, brutal sort of argument. The same information comes out, only make it not feel like maid and butler dialogue.
[Brandon] All right. There you are. You’re out of excuses, now go write.