Quick Fiction Fixes – Necessary dialogue
We’re all busy, whether working full-time or chasing/chauffeuring kids around all day. Yet we’re also writers, striving to get our words on paper and then polish it to a sparkle.
This column gives quick fixes for fiction manuscripts specifically for busy writers. Pick and choose what works best for you!
Make sure every word of dialogue is necessary.
When reading contest entries or manuscript for critiquing, sometimes dialogue goes on for too long. This can affect pacing, and it can also disengage the reader if the dialogue isn’t necessary to character development or the plot.
Look through your own manuscript to see if a few interchanges in a scene of dialogue might be unnecessary. You as the writer have a good feel for what’s vital to your voice and the tone, and what might be just fluff.
Sometimes things are needed to set tone, or reveal character, but look through your dialogue to see if anything can be cut. Also see if some things can be combined. Can you sneak in information about the hero’s past while he’s discussing the case with the heroine? Then you can cut an entire scene a few pages later where he talks about his past.
Make sure you keep the tension high, no matter what the dialogue. Combining dialogue from two scenes will often help make one highly charged scene rather than two mediocre ones.
If one dialogue scene is plot driven and another is character driven, can they be combined? Maybe you can have one scene that’s rife with external conflict and at the same time, also tense with internal conflict.
Does a character ever repeat himself, or rehash an issue? Make sure that any repetition is absolutely necessary for the story. Sometimes, a few lines of repetitious dialogue can be cut.
Does a character talk about an issue from his past that isn’t pertinent to the current scene? Maybe it’s not really pertinent to the plot as a whole. Be ruthless and cut it, even if it’s only a sentence or two. You’re trimming the fat.
Maybe a dialogue scene goes into too much detail. Does your reader really need to know absolutely everything that happened, down to specifics? This can relate to both emotional issues and externals. Maybe you don’t need to go into such detail about what she did after her boyfriend dumped her. Maybe you don’t need to go into such detail about the forensics of the crime scene.
Most writers say that anything that can reduce word count will usually only make the story better. Anything that can speed up the pace a bit during action scenes (dialogue) will help glue the reader to the page.
