Welcome to this lecture headed “DIALOGUES AND NARRATIVES”. We will be discussing all about dialogues and narratives. Enjoy your lecture.
Basic Dialogue Format for Narrative
When characters speak, their exact language ought to be in quotes, and the reader ought to know who’s speaking, leading to the following rules:
Each speaker obtains his or her own paragraph; a return and indent. This mimics real dialogue, representing pauses and so on.
Attributions (“He said,” “She said” and variations) ought to be used, but not too much, and varied so they’re not repetitious; they can be used at the beginning of quotes, in the middle, or at the end.
When attributions are overused, they get in the way; the key is that the reader ought to always know whose speaking.
Always make use of a comma after attribution (She said,) when introducing a quote.Example:
When I was eight, my father dragged me into my bedroom after I lit a folded pile of his shirts on fire. I sat on the edge of the bed, not looking up, my hands folded mannerly in my lap.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“You lit my shirts on fire, boy? Where’d you learn that?”
“Daycare.”
“What? Daycare? You learned how to light shirts on fire at daycare?”
I froze and looked up the ceiling, trying to backtrack. I actually learned how to light matches by watching him light his pipe, but I couldn’t tell him that.
“A kid brought matches one day. I told him matches were bad.”
“I’m calling your daycare.”
“No,” I said. Okay, I screamed it, and he scowled at me.
“Tell me the truth, lad.”
I took a deep breath and let is slide out: “I hate your shirts, Dad.”
Narrative modus operandi: Dialogue, Pacing, Description and Reflection
We have provided below techniques to get the audience connected and keep them reading, including dialogue, pacing, description and reflection. Try some of these in your next narrative essay!
Keep Your Story Moving
There are specific things you can do to make your story enthralling for your readers. You can make use of these techniques for just about any form of writing, but it works the very best when you’re writing narratives, which is an additional way of saying writing stories.
Today, we will talk about four significant techniques you can make use of to keep your readers turning pages right to the end of your story.
These include dialogue, which means writing conversations; pacing, which means how fast your story unfolds; description, which merely mean describing something (a person, a place, a feeling, a situation and more); and reflection, which means personal conclusions or explanations about your story.
Dialogue
Sometimes it is good to be a dialogue detective. Try sitting on a park bench or at a table in a coffee shop, and I make notes of what people say as they pass by to obtain ideas for writing dialogue for your stories.
Good dialogue makes it appear like people are actually talking, but it’s something more, because you are required to select things to say that move your story along. Dialogue can assist you comprehend characters. It can create interest and make your story move faster.
Still, don’t be tempted to write dialog like this:
‘Hey, wazzup?’
‘Nothing much. You?’
‘Nothing.’
?and so on. Instead, write conversations more like this:
‘Oh, no! My bike has a flat!’ said Jim.
‘Hey, don’t worry,’ said Susan, ‘I’ve got a toolkit right here.’
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ said Jim. ‘I’m supposed to be at band practice in thirty minutes!’
Observe how this conversation puts you right into the story? You understand a lot about the characters just from reading the dialogue.
Here are a few pointers for formatting your dialogue in your story:
Make use of quotation marks and put punctuation inside quotation marks.
Begin a new paragraph for each speaker.
Typically use ‘said’ instead of more flowery verbs.
Make the dialogue appear like something that someone would say in reality.
Pacing
Pacing means how fast your story opens up. It is annoying to watch a movie or read a story that just goes too slowly? Below are two real, concrete ways you can control the pace of your story.
If you’re writing a short story and not a novel, you don’t have a lot of pages to tell your tale. Thus, you have a tough task in front of you: cut away extra words.
Most of us make use of too many words when we write. Let the story sit for a couple of days and read it aloud. Any time you see that you wrote an idea twice, or with more words than you require, bravely delete the additional one.
Another way to control the pacing is to mix it up. This means that you make use of short sentences with active verbs for scenes with intense action, while you make use of longer sentences with more details with description, for slower scenes.
Description
When it’s time to write those descriptive scenes, you can control the pace by the words you pick. When you choose a noun, which is a person, place or thing, choose words that are definite and concrete.
Definite means an exact word, like ‘dachshund’ rather than ‘dog.’ Concrete (in narrative writing) means making use of the five senses: see, hear, taste, touch and smell.
Dialogue in Narratives
There are two types of dialogue:
direct and indirect diologue
Direct dialogue is speech using the character’s exact words. In this case, quotation marks are used.
Indirect dialogue is a second-hand report of something that was said or written but NOT the exact words in their original form.
There are a few rules to follow when writing direct dialogue in your narratives:
1: Make use of quotation marks to specify the words that are spoken by the characters.
For instance: “Help me!” exclaimed the little girl.
2: Always start a new paragraph when the speaker changes.For instance:
“I am coming home,” Sue announced. “I am really tired and can’t work anymore.” “Okay, I think you should do that,” her husband agreed.
3: Ensure the reader knows who is doing the talking.
4: Use correct punctuation marks and capitalization.Example:
“May I buy a new pair of sandals?” Uche asked her mom.
Observe that the quotation marks are outside the end punctuation of the quote; the rest of the sentence has its own end punctuation.
If the quote is not a question or exclamation, use a comma and not a period before the second quotation marks.
“I bought a new jacket yesterday,” Tracy said.
Balancing Action, Narrative and Dialogue in Your Novel
The majority of times, we want to balance our scenes with the use of three elements of fiction: dialogue, action and narrative.
This is one reason you want to put your character in a scene with other characters as often as possible.
Scenes that intertwine together these three elements engage the reader at an emotional level much more efficiently than scenes that are only dialogue, merely narrative or merely action.
Keeping talk in the foreground
Being aware of when to merely focus on one element is as significant as learning to interlace them all together. Is it ever a good thing to produce a scene with solely dialogue? Solely narrative? Merely action?
If you want to emphasize a specific character trait in your viewpoint character or focus on something particular that the characters are talking about, you don’t want the scene in a mess, the reader distracted or the tempo slowed by action or narrative.
You know how from time to time when someone is telling you a story, the setting, the other people around you, everything just kind of fades away, and you’re goal is only on what the other person is saying? This is what it’s like when you cut away action and narrative and leave just your characters’ spoken words.
A scene wouldn’t have the same impact if the author had woven action and narrative all through the dialogue. When a part of a scene is only dialogue, we obtain the full impact of the action and how it expresses itself in his life. When you isolate a character’s dialogue, if the reader is paying attention, he’ll become privy to the character’s personality and motives in a way that’s not achievable in the woven scene just because there’s too much going on.
Pacing your scenes
Pacing is most likely the most widespread fiction element to pay attention to when considering when and when not to interlace dialogue, narrative and action. If you’re producing a fast-paced conflict scene between two or more people, you may do well to consider only dialogue, at least for parts of it.
In Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, the young perspective character, Dolores, is fed up with her mother, who has been grieving over the loss of her baby for more than four years and has acquired all kinds of obsessive-compulsive disorders, the most recent being an obsession with her new parakeet, Petey.
Dolores has before now been narrating a lot of this, but now it’s time for her to act out her feelings. In a scene of dialogue, the author quickly shows what Dolores has taken pages to tell us:
I hated Petey—fantasized about his flying by chance out a window or into the electric fan so that his hex over Ma would be broken.
My not kissing Ma any longer was a conscious decision reached one night at bedtime with the purpose of hurting her.”Well, you’re miserly tonight,” she said when I turned my face away from her goodnight kiss.
“I’m not kissing you anymore, period,” I told her. “All day long you kiss that bird right on its filthy beak.”
“I do not.”
“You do so. Maybe you want to catch bird diseases, but I don’t.”
“Petey’s mouth is probably cleaner than my mouth and yours put together, Dolores,” was her argument.
“That’s a laugh.”
“Well, it’s true. I read it in my bird book.”
“Next thing you know, you”ll be French-kissing it.”
“Never mind French-kissing. What do you know about that kind of stuff? You watch that mouth of yours, young lady.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” I said. I clamped my hand over my mouth and stuffed my whole face into the pillow.
As you can observe, this passage is very efficient without a bunch of narrative bogging down the moment.
The dialogue here illustrates Dolores’ true attitude toward Petey, but more significantly, it shows her feelings toward her mother.
This is dialogue at its most potent. It can take the central character pages to tell us something in narrative, while a scene of dialogue can speedily show us through that character’s own words said out loud. Narrative explains, and dialogue blurts out.
Comparable reasoning applies when writing scenes with only narrative or only action.
You want to focus on something in your character’s mind or describe something that would only sound artificial in dialogue, thus you make use straight narrative.
Or the action needs to drive the scene forward because it’s intense and emotional, and your characters just wouldn’t be talking during this time.
Every so often, as in real life, there’s just nothing to say at the moment. Always, always, always allow your characters to lead you.
Striking A Balance
There are no hard-and-fast rules about when and when not to merge dialogue, action and narrative. To interlace them together well is to find your story’s rhythm.
But there are a few questions you can ask yourself about your story, particularly in the rewrite stage, that can assist you know which elements are most efficient for a specific scene, and which might be better used elsewhere.Ask the following question:
Is the story moving a little too leisurely, and do you need to speed things up? (Make use of dialogue.)
Is it time to give the reader a few backgrounds on the characters so they’re more sympathetic? (Make use of narrative, dialogue or a combination of both.)
Do you have numerous dialogue scenes in a row? (Make use of action or narrative.)
Are your characters continually confiding in others about things they ought to only be pondering in their minds? (Make use of narrative.)
Equally, are your characters alone in their heads when my characters in conversation would be more effectual and lively? (Make use of dialogue.)
Is your story top-heavy in any way at all—too much dialogue, too much narrative or too much action? (Sloting in more of the elements that are missing.)
Are your characters providing too many background details as they’re talking to each other?
(Make use of narrative.)
Whether we’re making use of dialogue, action or narrative to move the story forward, any or all three of these elements are doing double duty by illuminating our characters’ motives.
Thanks for reaching to this point marking the end of this lecture.
Your Lecture Master:
Mst. Ugonwanne Joshua
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