To whet your appetite for the Writing Dialogue workshop on 13–14 December, I’ve got a lovely freebie Writing Skill for you: Voice Argument. This is a great one for practising writing dialogue in a very free-form way, separating out their voices, and exploring the effects on their characterisation.
So give yourself the writing-gift of ten minutes, grab a cuppa, your pen, and notebook, and curl up to scribble.
To start with, you have two people arguing. You don’t need to worry about who they are; you’ll find out as much you need to from what position they take in the argument. Pick something light for them to argue about, so it’s not too stressful. (Especially if you’re a non-confrontational bunny like me!) For example...
- whether one of them saw a fairy
- when blackberries are best
- the ideal route between point A and point B
or what you will.
Once you’ve chosen the topic, spend five minutes speedwriting just their dialogue: the actual words they speak, not all the "he said / she said" and other bits that go around it. Make it up as you go along and allow their disagreement to generate the content. That’s the wonderful thing about arguments, in writing: once you’ve set up the disagreement, they pretty much write themselves!
Then, once you’ve written for five minutes, pick one voice to make super formal, and the other very casual. If you already have distinctive voices, I’d suggest you change the more formal one to a casual one and vice versa. It’s fascinating to see what happens when we reverse our instinctive choices! Spend the next five minutes rewriting their dialogue, into the two extremes.
For example, my speaker A said:
“No ways! They have to just fall off in your hand or they’re shit!”
Now I need to make that super formal. So…
“Nonsense! If they don’t come away quite easily, they’re simply not edible."
Or I could go right up into the rafters to make it super-super formal:
“I must disagree in the strongest possible terms. The blackberry must yield with not the least particle of force, or it will be entirely unpalatable.”
My speaker B, meanwhile, needs to become super casual. They said:
“But you want some firmness, or they’ll just turn to mush.”
So to make that way more casual...
“Ah, c’mon, they're crap if they’re all squishy like that!”
When you’re done, sit back and reread it. Aloud, if you like: that’s always a great way to hear dialogue. Look at how distinctive they now are. At how the change in register (formality) changes how they come across.
Have fun!
Why this skill?
This is a great exercise for several things:
- Writing dialogue: It's often helpful to stick to just the spoken words, in the first draft, and add the other stuff in later. That way we can really hear the flow in conversation.
- Separating voices: It's common, when we're writing first draft, to start using similar voices for both characters in a conversation. Afterwards, you can separate them out more consciously.
- The effect of voice on characterisation: As well as making the voices distinctive, it makes such a difference to how we see them! Are you more sympathetic to the formal voice's argument, now, because they sound more educated? Or less so, because they sound pompous? And so on.
If you want to develop your dialogue skills further, the Writing Dialogue online workshop is on the weekend of 13–14 December
(10am–12:30pm UK time). It's live on Zoom, 16 places max, and you can join from anywhere in the world. Click
here for the details and to book now.
