Dialogue or Dialog
Ruminations on Fictional Talking
Thursday Writing Advice: The Styles of Dialogue
I always spell dialogue incorrectly, writing it “dialog.” This is an accepted alternate spelling that mostly refers to computers and is out of favor. Nonetheless, it has often felt right to me despite being wrong. This, I would say, is the perfect metaphor for the arbitrary nature of the way writers think about styling dialogue in fiction. Sometimes it looks right even you know it’s wrong. But as I’m seeing different styles as a reader and editor more frequently, today I thought I’d dive into dialog, and talk about how people talking in fiction can be handled and what the effects are of doing it different ways.
Conventional Method (US) — Double Quotes
Some light Googling reveals that the earliest quotations started in early scripture and the written word, and the first marks to indicate these kinds of breaks were arrows (>) and dashes (—). It took several more centuries, until the 18th, before the paragraph break was introduced as a helpful demarcation of someone talking. Importantly, the closing quotation to mark the end of a dialogue also came along. After they figured that bit out, only then, about 300 years ago, did the inverted commas that we use today arrive. The first dialogue marks in English were single ‘marks’ (which I’ve arbitrarily put around the word “marks” for illustrative purposes). The UK still uses single rather than double marks to indicate dialogue. In other languages—French and Italian for example—they use guillemets: these little double arrows: « Hello ».
Most would agree that, whether you are single or double inverted comma users, our conventional dialogue styling—paragraph break, indent, opening quote, closing quote, is very helpful for the reader. This is the convention and it feels natural to read because we’re used to it, not because it is affixed, and the majority of causal readers get angry when the convention of double quotes is broken.
The reading effect of double quotes for American English readers is therefore fairly invisible and utilitarian. Simply because our dialogue traditionally starts a new paragraph and is indented, one effect that dialogue does have in the context of a book is to quicken the pace of reading. But writers beware: one of my favorite pieces of advice about writing dialogue from a technical standpoint comes from Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk, who advises to be wary of characters performing ping-pong dialogue as a way to fill space and increase page count.
Dialogue can be an afterthought for many writers, even very good ones, used to give the illusion of movement or immediacy without really adding anything on its own. But the great writers elevate dialogue to its own art, and use dialogue to add textures that only people talking can in fiction. Crime and genre novelists historically have been the best practitioners of excellent dialogue (why, perhaps, literary writers don’t seem to value it as highly on average). Great dialogue isn’t always quite natural speech because, frankly, the way most people talk would be exceedingly boring and confusing to read on the page. Instead, great dialogue is often approximate to how people really speak, heightening speech without becoming fantastical. S.A Crosby is a great modern crime writer to look to for dialogue. He somehow captures how people really speak while also making the dialogue electric, voicey and character-building. I would quote it here but I seemed to have misplaced my copy of Razorblade Tears. Do yourself a favor and go check it out.
Artsy Method — No Quotes
The choice to eschew double quotes has been around forever, especially among the literary set. But this style of dialogue has made a huge comeback as of late. Sally Rooney, an often-used example on Dear Head of Mine, is probably the most well-known current novelist to go no quotes. Whether the wider adoption of no quotes is because of Rooney’s influence, or if she’s just the symbol of a larger shift taking place, is impossible to tell. Some literary critics have ventured that no-quotes style is being adopted because it mimics texting and internet speak. I am highly dubious of this assertion, as it feels like an overly simplistic explanation of any young generation: the internet and cell phones explain all behavior.
More likely, this dialogue formatting is a legitimate style choice for many writers because of the feeling it gives readers. If there is a social argument to be made for why writers are forgoing quotes, it is that the no-quotes style of dialogue communicates a detached feeling, which younger writers are more often reaching for. Here’s a typical exchange in the excellent relationship novel Chemistry by Weike Wang:
Eric has something to tell me. He brings me to the couch to do it.
Are you listening? he says.
Listening.
Perhaps you should see a shrink.
What shrink? I had tossed out the contact information immediately. I had not even entertained the thought of going
Do you think something is wrong? I ask. Because nothing is wrong. I’m entirely happy.
My laugh that follows. It is very manic sounding.
The effect no quotes has is to emphasize a distance between readers and the characters—both by defying the convention of double quotes and flattening dialogue by formatting it in the same way as all other prose. This way dialogue has the same level of remove as reading about a setting or “watching” a character take an action. The effect is affectlessness, as if the story is behind a pane or two of opaque glass. When a writer makes this choice and it goes right it can add to the emotional tone—Weike’s and Rooney’s novels are about difficult romantic relationships and feeling disconnected from others. This style can also add a dreamlike quality with its remove, an effect that works especially well in speculative fiction where the world is not quite ours, or when used selectively in a novel, like when one character is telling a story to another.
No-quote styling can also go very wrong. If the writer misjudges the tonality of their story or misses the mark, flattening the dialogue stylistically also means running a greater risk of dialogue coming out, well, flat. Whereas in double quotes a reader is likely more forgiving and willing to brush past a generic, move-the-book-along piece of dialogue, choosing to go against convention shouts pay attention to this! and nothing annoys readers more than when you have their attention and waste it.
Experimental Methods — Script, Texts, etc.
Writing dialogue in script form or text form are very quasi dialogue style choices. They exist somewhere between dialogue and something like letters or emails in fiction—as they have some of the naturalistic qualities of former while style-wise appearing so differently that readers hardly can read them as speech. The boundary-pushing novel Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is written entirely in the format of a script. While you might think the effect of formatting disappears after a while as you get used to reading dialogue in script form, my experience was that it “sounded” entirely different in my head. Script dialogue reads, to me, as if it were being spoken by actors at a table read, with the stilted pauses and slightly wooden speech that happens when multiple people are reading out loud.
Text messages on the other hand have their own language. Texts get close to how people communicate, like good dialogue, but because texts are a call-and-response type of communication they tend not to mirror speech (even if you do speech to text). In cases like these I’d argue that this is less of a dialogue style and more of a different literary technique entirely.
New Method — Dashes
If no-quotes style is the new wave, I predict that dashes for dialogue will be the new, new wave. Also used in some foreign languages as the primary punctuation for dialogue, I’ve started to see more manuscripts with this style as of late. Like no-quote dialogue, it takes some getting used to. More than no-quotes, dashes actually feel more like texting language, like characters are dashing off thoughts. And I have noticed that writers who choose this form of styling often opt for quite short fragments of dialogue.
Dashes as dialogue punctuation give the impression of quick asides because that is how the em dash (that’s the long dash, not the short one) is often used—a way to add an extra thought to a sentence. I can’t tell if I’m trotting out the same curmudgeonly opinions as most common readers have about no-quote dialogue, but I find that generally dash dialogue has more of a doing-it-to-do-it quality than one that adds an extra layer of style. But this being a relatively new choice for American English writers, it’s very possible I just haven’t read the right novel to convince me of its artistic value. It’s frankly great that writers are still pushing the bounds of style and form. “Just make it good!,” he shouts.
Wonderful consideration for a reader of “traditional fiction” encountering the less rigid forms of today.
Thanks