In the last of these brief essays on how to choose the most effective words for your writing, we turn to dialog. We hear people talking all the time. Dialog should be easy to write, right? Then why is it so often tedious to read? Anthony Lane called his recent essay on the writing of Elmore Leonard “Easy Music” (The New Yorker, July 7 and 14), and that’s a perfect title.

Lane’s essay was prompted by C.M. Kushins’ new book Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. Reading Leonard, I learned a lot about writing dialog, mainly, don’t write too much. Most conversations are surprisingly truncated. Reading dialog in which a characters spell out their full thoughts are boring, but it takes a deft hand to make sure the meaning is encapsulated in as few words as possible.

Lane (no word-choice slouch himself) marvels at Leonard’s skill, given what he calls the infinite bandwidths of spoken English. “So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx.” As Leonard himself has said, and this applies well to dialog, “It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.” Strictly grammatical? Less important than impactful and believable.

In general, dialog offers great opportunities to express your own and your characters’ style In fact, you want characters to have quirks in their speech; they help readers distinguish one character and one point of view from another. Yes, your characters can use slang, foreign words—big words too—if they are appropriate to them. It’s how you handle them that matters.

Foreign speech and dialect

Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Crossing, takes place mostly in Mexico. His text is like a course in how to handle foreign words—in this case, Spanish. He doesn’t do ham-handed things like include the translation in parentheses. Or repeat a Spanish phrase verbatim in English. He lets the reader figure it out, but he keeps it simple. Also, he picks words close to their English counterparts, with only a few that may be hard-to-guess. Most readers can carry on without interruption. They get the drift.

Another example from a recent best-seller: An Englishwoman is trying to get information out of a bathroom attendant in Brittany.
She asks, “Avez-vous travaillé longtemps à la gare?”
The answer: “‘Non, Madame, j’ai commencé ce poste le mois dernier seulement.ʼ She explains that she only took the job last month.”

It seems to me much more artful ways could have conveyed what was a fairly obvious answer to what was a fairly obvious question than providing the response verbatim. In fact, after “Non, Madame,” the particulars aren’t that important. That was the answer.

When you want to create characters who grew up in a particular country or US region, you may want their speech to retain some of that local flavor. Likewise the slang or speech patterns of teenagers or members of a particular ethnic group help establish their age or indicate their origins. The thing to remember about representing these speech patterns is: a little goes a long way.

Here’s dialog I wrote for a story set in New Orleans amongst the fictional Perdido biker gang; yes, it’s quite different from what would be spoken in a Tulane English class:
“Didja heah bout the fie-yuh?” a man shouted, bursting through the door. At their blank looks, he said, “Out at Aucoin’s old fahm down near Delacroix.” He said DEL-uh-cwa.
“That’s all unduh watuh out theh, ain’t it?” a Perdido asked.

Once I established this thick Louisiana accent for the Perdidos, I mostly left it behind, with just occasional reminders.

It used to be the case that mis-spellings were used to show a character’s speech was nonstandard or uneducated. That was called “eye-dialect,” and it’s almost always pejorative. (Examples are “wimmin” for “women,” “lissen” for listen; “enuff” for “enough”; the pronunciation is standard, the spelling is not.) Readers used to find eye-dialect humorous, but it went out of fashion decades ago. Even creative spelling meant to reflect the actual pronunciation, should be used sparingly. 

Instead, try to achieve the impression of your characters’ speech by the vocabulary, idioms, and word order they use and the rhythm of their speech. Remember the book Angela’s Ashes? It well conveyed how poor Irish in the countryside spoke almost through rhythm and word choice alone.

Get Creative!

English is a living language. It evolves as needs and habits change. Andwith the creativity of its users. That is, you! We’ve added to it, for a time at least, with widely understood abbreviations like IMHO, ROFL, and BOGO.

Here’s another type of example from a book I read recently: Joe “gently made his way across the lobby.” Hmmmm. “Gingerly” would be more idiomatic, but “gently” expresses the thought quite well. Readers know Joe is impaired by a vicious hangover, and likely can visualize him moving tentatively, “gently.” Sometimes a word, deployed in an unusual way, can really work.

Here’s another one: “The argument sprayed out.” Works, yes? No? If you’ve created a new word or a new use of an existing word and you think it really works, stick to your guns! Use it!!

Character Names

How do you pick the names for your characters? Nick and Jack are great names—short, “manly.” And sadly overused. Jason appears so often in thrillers, you can wonder which book you’re reading. You may have to “live with” your character a while to find a name that truly fits.

Of course your characters’ names should be memorable and not too similar to each other. People may not read your book straight through. You have to help the skimmers, the sporadic readers. In one of her books, popular crime writer Patricia Cornwell named three characters Berger, Bonnell, and Benton. The book was nearly 500 pages long, and I never got them straight.

A name can have intrinsic value. Some cultures believe a name can influence a person’s destiny or character. In the 1800s, thousands of babies were named George Washington Whatever; one of them is my great-great-great grandfather, George Washington Wright. My great grandfather (other side) was Henry Clay Smith. Alas, a distant Tennessee cousin was Jefferson Davis Edwards. Do the names you give your characters influence their sense of themselves? Or what society expects of them? Are they influenced by stereotypes the name evokes? Psychologists believe this can be the case.

The name you pick can have some kind of explicit meaning: Rusty or Robin for a character with red hair is a straightforward example. Pope Leo XIV did not just pluck his papal name out of the air. He chose it, he says, because he wants to evoke his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, who espoused a doctrine of social justice.

When read a book in which a character has an unusual name, I consider why the author may have chosen it. David McCloskey’s excellent spy thrillers feature a CIA operative who trains and oversees field agents. Her name is Artemis Aphrodite Procter. A name that calls attention to itself like that cannot have been an accident! It’s actually brilliant.

You’ll recall that, in Greek mythology, Artemis is the huntress and Aphrodite the goddess of love. The name Procter is pronounced like the word for a person who oversees students, just as this character oversees new field agents, to whom she is fiercely loyal.

How does the novel’s character embody these elements? Quite literally. She has a row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades. Each star represents one of her agents whose murder she has avenged. At the end of the most recent book, she’s in a tattoo parlor, having a tenth star added to the array. Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Love and the hunt. Absolutely.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this ten-part series on the importance of choosing the right words. You can find previous segments on my website, www.vweisfeld.com under the Writers’ First Draft tab. Go now, and create your magic!