Your Characters Talk Funny

     I reread a few old favorites of mine recently and I've noticed one thing in a few of them that makes me absolutely crazy: Characters using each other's names in dialogue constantly.

Was this a writing trend of some sort that I didn't know about? I ask because a lot of authors I really enjoyed have done this to the point where it distracts me from the story. I guess it mustn't have bothered me to this degree back before I started writing seriously, but now? It makes me lose my mind. One book had a long paragraph of dialogue and the hero used the heroine's name three times in that stretch. It was so jarring that I stopped reading and counted.

I've blogged about this before because it really is hugely annoying and it's very unrealistic. Two people alone having a conversation will almost never use the other's name. I promise you this.

If you're a writer, listen to a conversation with only two people present. Listen to as many conversations as you need until it registers. People rarely use each other's names when they're talking unless there are more than two people and someone is speaking specifically to one person and not the group.

Character dialogue should mirror the way people truly talk in some ways—like almost never using names—and not in others. (An example of this is no one wants to read the boring, pointless small talk that's part of real life.) I always do a search for my hero and heroine's names while I'm revising my story and I look for instances of use in conversation. Nine times out of ten, I delete the name. You don't need it.

If you're worried about making it clear who's speaking, do it with a simple he said, she said. Or with movement/emotion:

Mary put her hands on her hips and glared. "If you think you're putting my sister behind bars, you better think again. She's innocent and I'll prove it if it's the last thing I do."

"You go right ahead. We have enough evidence to lock her up for a good, long time." John pulled his hands from his pockets and moved behind his desk.

Rough, but you get the idea.

Don't believe me about how two people don't use each other's names when they're talking? Go some place easy to overhear conversations. Park yourself there and listen.

This will also help you to write different people than what you're used to hearing every day. I've been doing a lot of listening since I moved to Atlanta. I'm being exposed regularly to very many different ways of speaking, of putting sentences together, than what I was used to hearing in Minnesota. There are two men from Tennessee in my department, but one's from the east of the state and the other from the western side, one rural and one urban. They talk very differently from each other and have different accents.

That cube also has someone from New York. Next cube over from there has someone from Boston. Across the hall is a man who's from Greece. My cube mate is from Texas and doesn't have what I think of as a Texas accent. There's also Alabama, California, and many other states represented. I'm learning. This is what a writer does. You listen. You learn. You take this education and bring it to the page when you write your characters—especially dialogue.

And So She Said

Over on Pinterest, a couple of people have posted a picture with a list of words a writer can use other than said. I'm assuming it came from some blog, but I haven't clicked through to check, but it leaves me wondering why any writer would pin this.

There's a couple of reasons why I feel this way. For one, some of the suggestions are just plain bad. For example instead of he said, according to this you could write he laughed. Um, what? People don't talk while they're laughing. Are seriously thinking this is a good construction? "Jane," he laughed, "you...hahaha...crack...haha...me...haha...up." No. Just no.

The other reason I'm not enamored with this pin is the word said disappears for the vast majority of readers. Most will barely know they saw it, but that doesn't happen with other words, especially the more memorable.

In fact, I spent time taking these substitutes for said out of my earlier work before I republished them in ebook format. If a character is constantly speaking in a hiss, I can only wonder if they're part snake. :-) In my defense, I didn't have hiss originally--that got added in edits--but I didn't take them out again when I went through the story before it was printed. The buck stopped with me, so my responsibility. But I had a chance to change it and that's what I did. If you see hissed in the story now, it's because I made the conscious decision to keep it there for a specific reason.

My advice is to use anything other than said or asked sparingly. The last thing I want is to jar anyone out of my story and unusual dialogue tags can do just that. There's a difference between using an "invisible" word and repetition.

Ooh, Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby

My original thought about a blog topic was something along the lines of how much I hate it when the hero calls the heroine baby, but then I reconsidered that. It would just be my luck to riff on that for an entire post and wake up tomorrow with a hero who uses it. It was bad enough that Deke called Ryne babe during In the Midnight Hour At least that started as a way to rile her, but still I decided I'm in no position to blog about endearments.

As I thought about it some more, I realized that the two books I picked up recently that had baby used as the endearment of choice had a bigger problem. The authors of both stories had the heroes calling their heroines that in every single paragraph of dialogue--or darn close to it.

As a reader, nothing irritates me more than characters who use each other's names (or nicknames/endearments/etc) every time they open their mouths. Real people do not talk that way. Not ever. I challenge any writer who's tempted to use the character's name in dialogue to listen to others. Even in groups of five or six, it's rare to hear someone's name and it's pretty much nonexistent when only two people are talking to each other. Like the hero and heroine for example.

It's not just novice writers either. I've seen authors who've been writing for twenty years do it, too. Because I'm so aware of this, not only do I rarely use names in dialogue, I also do a search for both the hero's and heroine's names (and endearments) in my manuscript, and if I see it between a couple of quotation marks, I think about whether I really need it. Nine times out of ten, I delete it.

I pretty much never say anyone has to do anything as a writer because I was nearly driven from writing all together by plotters who insisted I had to use 3 x 5 cards and formulate everything out ahead of time. But this isn't really messing with anyone's process (I don't think) to recommend taking out the majority of name use within dialogue.

Seriously, this is not how people talk:

"Baby, I want you; you're so beautiful."

"But Biff, it's too soon."

"Don't tell me that, baby, I need you."

"I don't know, Biff, we just met ten minutes ago."

"Come on, baby, help me out here."

"Oh, Biff."

You get the drift right? And sadly this example is not an exaggeration. I picked up two books in the last week that did this exact thing.

Have you ever heard anyone in real life talk this way? Now do a search in your Work In Progress. How many times have you used your characters names in dialogue? Delete most of them. Your readers will thank you.