Creating Realistic Characters: Part 5

Dialogue. Talking. Musing. Conversations. These things are so simple to accomplish in real life, and yet so difficult in print. Why?

With the kids, I am going to talk about myself first, because being open with my students makes them comfortable. I ask them what they notice about me, and almost every student observes that I talk in complete sentences when given the choice between phrases and sentences. Yes, I do talk in complete sentences. This is directly related to my heritage, and to my relationship to the Autism spectrum.

They also notice that I often communicate with gestures, facial expressions, and body positions, rather than with words. That is directly related to teacher training. When I ask them if they are familiar with “proximity management” and then demonstrate how it works on some unsuspecting student, they all laugh.

I then follow that with a demonstration of “tone” using various inflections and word choices on volunteer “victims”. We subsequently practice an exercise where the students have to converse first in complete sentences, and then in phrases. They have to “act out” a scripted conversation with a table partner, and then they need to read a sentence using different tones for their deliveries. After all of that, we are ready to start the two-day session on dialogue.

Day 1

The kids have now seen the three primary aspects of dialogue: words, action, and tone.

We begin with the reminder that each new speaker begins a new paragraph, and we look at several exemplars from various novels to remind ourselves of dialog formatting and punctuation. Next, I tell the kids they are going to have their unlikeable characters ask for magic of some sort from their god character. They are going to write one paragraph. Often, they balk. 

“Ishtar, I ask you to grant me the power of flame spells to defeat Arg the Destroyer,” said Borok.

That is one paragraph if the god then replies.

“You have not yet proven yourself, human. Why should you be trusted with flame spells?” replied Ishtar.

We examine the sample sentences and discuss how they can be improved.

I tell the kids they need to find five different ways to have their unlikeable character ask for flame spells. They can use action beats to replace dialogue tags. I remind them to use the dialogue to reveal the character’s desire, personality, and to ideally expose something about the rationale driving the request. Here are a few examples from the exercise.

“Ishtar!” Borok drew himself to his full eight-foot height and loomed over the goddess. “You know I must have fire spells to defeat Arg the Destroyer. Give me the power!”

“Beautiful Ishtar,” pleaded Borok, “your strength and power are unmatched. Grant me the power of fire spells to defeat your nemesis, Arg the Destroyer.”

“Arg the Destroyer uses elemental air.” Borok paced, rubbing his forehead with his hand. He stopped and struck the stone wall. “I have it! Ishtar, grant me fire spells to turn his tornadoes against him.” Borok’s face crinkled into a wild-eyed smile.

They follow this with five possible responses from their god character.

Day 2

After looking at the work from the previous day, I see several things we need to cover in today’s class. Nearly every student used the name of the other character in every dialogue sentence they wrote. 

We start the day by examining passages from several novels. I tell the kids to find places where the author had the character speak the name of another character. There are very few of these incidents. They tend to occur when the speaker needs the attention of the other character, when a point is being stressed, or when possession is indicated.

Next, we revisit using action beats instead of dialogue tags. Only a handful of students tried writing action beats, so we spend about 15 minutes revising the sentences from yesterday to use action tags and remove names where they are not needed. The kids start to get excited when they see their own sentences moving from wooden statements to interactive dialogue.

Finally, we talk about descriptive adverbs. I believe they have their place in writing, particularly when used to convey where or when. The tricky aspect is when they are used to tell how something is done. Telling works well when the author is writing about normal everyday interactions the reader needs to know but not experience. Showing is the default narrative style in modern writing. 

We examine passages from Dickens (David Copperfield) and Wells (The War of the Worlds) to see how adverbs were used before the advent of cinematography. Now, these overly descriptive passages are unpopular, but the kids quickly understand why the authors wrote the way they did given the worlds in which they lived. The final task is for the kids to review their dialogue passages and integrate them with one paragraph of preceding narrative and one of subsequent narrative.

At the end of the period, we review the reasons for using dialogue in the first place: to reveal character, to move the story forward, to add conflict and tension, to impart information, and to show character relationships. The students will spend the next three days designing a plot for their myths.

Accordingly, the next three lessons will examine how to create a plot for a myth.