Whenever I write dialogue I find that it normally goes something like this. "Xander, I can't even believe you," he said, grinning. "Well, I have my ways," she said, smirking. Do you have any suggestions for dialogue writing and then showing facial emotions? [if that makes since eek]
Dialogue with facial expression, or any sort of movement, can be tricky to capture. One of the reasons I think it’s difficult is because we, as authors, need to capture near simultaneous actions. With that said, it isn’t impossible. It takes a bit of practice, and the willingness to think things through. If you do, you’ll end up with more realistic dialogue and not just a list of tags with -ing verbs. Here are my tips.
Think things through. No really. What is your character feeling? What are their motives? Are they interacting with anyone else? Think about the order of their actions, too. Do they move, speak, and then have a secondary action?
Moar detail. Capture more detail in their facial expression. Do they wrinkle their nose? Squint? Stare in wide-eyed wonder? For your example, What kind of grin? Smug? Lecherous? Broad? Provide this information to your reader.
“Xander, I can’t even believe you,” he said as a broad grin spread across his face.
Moar detail, (part deux) Use more descriptive words to capture the movement or facial expression. A smile can play or dance across a face if someone is happy or flirting. Or if they’re angry or sad, their face can contort, warp, or twist. Getting this level of detail adds another layer of depth. For example:
A smirk danced across Xander’s face as she glanced up at him. “Well, I have my ways.”
Body language. People speak with their entire body. So you need to capture not only the words, but what their body is doing, too. The phrase, “That sounds fine,” said with arms crossed and brows furrowed is going to convey a very different message than the same phrase accompanied by an approving nod.
Split the movement and the dialogue into their own sentences, like I did in that above example. Not only will you give yourself a bit of breathing room to capture the expression fully, but you’ll vary your sentence structure– which is a good thing. Monotony sucks.
Vary your ‘saying’ tags. Did your character mumble, groan, yell, stutter, gasp, offer, or rage? Instead of hunting down a word frequency calculator, CTRL-F (or CMD-F if you’re on a Mac) and type in those verbal tags, and your machine will find every instance of that word being used. Be wary of using any one word too many times. Switch things up.
Secondary effects. Think about accompanying effects, too. If someone is really yelling, is spit flying from their mouth? Are their cheeks red from a stream of tears? Again, think things through a couple steps.
Use markup sparingly. Markup referring to bold, italics, and underlining in dialogue. While some markup does have a place- capturing an inflection or tone change in a character’s voice without a tag, for example- it’s a frequent mistake for new writers to rely on markup instead of using their words. Don’t take the easy way out.
No interruptions. Throw most of this out the window for quick exchanges or arguments between two characters. You don’t want to tags slow things down…
Unless another character joins in. Then you’ll want to reintroduce tags to make things clear…
Or it goes on for awhile. All conversations, even hours long arguments, have an ebb and flow to them. If you see a long bit of dialogue, it’s time to break it up and get some info about how and why they’re saying things.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. To show you these principles in action, here’s a (draft) snippet from one of my latest chapters in my WIP, Sirens. I’ll put my thoughts in square brackets –> [ ].
“Don’t start,” the Catwoman warned. After the past twenty four hours, she was in no mood to rehash another unpleasant memory. [Instead of just ‘said’, I picked ‘warned’ to better capture her tone. I also provided a snippet of why that tone is relevant.]
“Selina took her hood off after a job,” Harley tattled and shoved a tart in her mouth. [Said would’ve worked, but I knew I could do better. I was debating between ‘interrupted’ and ‘tattled’, but went with ‘tattled’ because it captures her intent. Also, Harley shoving food in her mouth as she’s tattling serves two purposes. One, it reinforces that she’s a chow-hound, but that she doesn’t think twice about throwing Selina under the bus. Tattling is a casual action for her.]
“You take that masterpiece off your head?!” Stytch thundered. [Stytch has a bombastic voice, so thundered works. I also use ‘thundered’ for her character foil, so that’s one way I tie them together.]
“Gordon trapped me in a ninety degree air duct for an hour!” [no tag needed. It’s clear Selina is responding to Stytch]
“I didn’t tell you to wrap yourself in indigo leather.” [again, no tag, because the exchange is continuing. I chose to use the italics to show Stytch’s inflection without adding a tag because I didn’t want to break the flow. Also, that’s the only italics in the whole 4,000+ word chapter]
“She’s not wrong,” Harley sputtered as bits of crust sprinkled on the table. [Harley butted in so you need a tag here to make it clear. Also, I want to reference she food in her mouth, so sputter instead of said makes sense here. I reinforced it by adding secondary action with the crumbs flying.]
Selina glowered and sank back into the chair. Arguing with Stytch and Harley at the same time was as productive as spitting in the wind. [No need for dialogue because Selina’s body language makes it clear she’s peeved, but doesn’t want to continue the argument.]
“Anyway,“ Stytch pivoted the conversation and swept the crumbs to the floor. “He said (scene continues)…” [There’s a lot going on here. First, I thought about how Stytch would move as she swept the crumbs off the table. She’d have to pivot at the waist to get the right sweeping movement. Since she’s changing the subject, she’s also pivoting the conversation so that verb does double duty. Second, it was time to get some different sentence structure in there, and I wanted Stytch to have a slight pause, so I put the tag where it is to capture it.]
One last tip. You’ll need a strong grasp of your character’s motives, personalities, and what is going on in a scene to pull off dialogue like this. If you have weak characters or plot, the dialogue will suffer.
Hope this helps,
-Graphei
