Been practicing dialogues and how to do them in different ways, so here is a dialogue between two people no tags and no description. What i'm looking for is: -how clear is it who is saying what (if some part is not clear or all of it) -Is it hard to follow? -Does it loose pace -how much can you tell about the characters from this dialogue -Is the dialogue believable as well as the characters Thanks in advance for taking the time to review it and i advice every writer to give it a try.
It's easy enough to follow. I can tell you've got a teenage couple here, the girl is pregnant, and they're both freaking out. Very clear on that. It's even clear when the girl isn't speaking, but the guy has several lines of dialogue in a row. I liked that part, because you did a good job of conveying the characters' actions, even without narrative. The boy seems somewhat selfish, as his first thoughts are for himself and how much trouble he's going to be in, without considering that his girlfriend is the one who is actually pregnant. Are the characters a little on the rough side? They swear freely and say things like "So what we going to do?" The pace is good, and I would say that the characters are believable. On the whole this is very good.
Thanks for the review, it was a new approach for me and think its fun to play with and test its limits, wanted to show how much they would be confused, panicking and lost at first while they go through the first shock.
I think you did a good job, it flowed well enough and it was clear that it's a pair of teens dealing with an unexpected pregnancy, some kind of failed contraception. It was clear 90% of the way who was speaking. The snippets below are bits I had to re-read and I wasn't sure who was speaking until I gave it some thought - I think it's because I expected every new line to be a different character, like ABABABAB sorta swap, but clearly it's not like that. Below I've inserted tags to indicate how I understood the dialogue in the parts where I was confused.
it's clear what's going on but about halfway into it, i got lost to who was saying what... really hard without the tags and description, at least for me.
is this a short story?... if not, you may want to ask a moderator to move the thread to its proper section...
Yeah I expected each line to be a different voice too - got a bit confused in the middle because I didn't realise until I read the first review that "he" has several lines in a row. On top of that you could tell they were a young couple, probably teenage but then he says "Mom is gonna make us move again" - have they done this before? If so why is such a big surprise that their contraception failed, again? Also he goes from freaking out to comforting her to freaking out again - when you read the piece it flows nicely - so nicely you don't realise the freak out / comfort / freak out - a short description now again would be better (for me anyway) He changed tack, put his arm round her and softly said "Don't worry..." She pulled away sobbing "Easy for you to say..."
Well to be honest i had no idea were to put it, but it is a short story. @Erebh: That is the point of this exercise and not use any tags or description but make two different characters so that the reader can imagine what is going on based on what is said and how it was said by who. I think its a good exercise as you dont have the comfort zone of using tags and such, you need to clearly draw your characters with just dialogue. Its not easy to pull of thats why i placed it here to review. Wont yet say who said what so not to spoil it for others but will tell you though that you got the parts wrong and that the girl also has two lines in a row at some point.
Okay, first of all I think it flowed really well, but if you're going to try this, it needs to be back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Unless you have a unique speaking voice, having two statements by the same character right after another throws the whole thing off. Here's a tip: Give them names. You can throw in a name sparingly to get people back on track if they get lost. Also, I wouldn't put any references to action. Keep the dialogue pure. This isn't the best conversation for a 'dialogue only' apparoach, because there seems to be a lot of body language going on here, too. Oh, and I do think it's slightly cliche'. If you asked me to write a conversation about two teenagers finding out about a pregnancy, it would go exactly like this. Other than that, pretty teenager-ish. Lastly, call me a perfectionist, but why the horrible formatting? It was the first thing I noticed. Your grammar and sentence structure is all over the place as well. I know you didn't ask for critiques on the SPaG mistakes, but it's what I do. Finally, when a sentence is cut off, use an em dash, (—) when a sentence trails off, use an ellipses (...) But use them sparingly. So here is a reformat, rewrite, critique. (Added names, for example.) Hope it helps! [hr][/hr] "What do you mean you’re pregnant? How?" "Remember that time when we—" "I know how we did it, Janelle. I just thought we were careful." "I thought so too, how should I know how this happened?" "My dad’s going to kill me. Fuck!" "Seriously Ben? Is that what you’re worried about now? I’m freaking out here and all you can think of is that?" "Well you know how he is. He's going to kick the shit out of me." "I can’t tell mom, either. She will just freak out and make us move again. She—" "Shut up! Let me think... FUCK! How did this happen, what the fuck are we going to do? Damn it, I’m sorry didn’t mean to yell, come here." "Don’t touch me!" "Don’t be like that you know I’m sorry. Well, can you at least stop crying?" "I’m the one who’s pregnant and you fuckin' moron, all you can think of is yourself!" "I said I’m sorry, I’m just freaked out. You know how much I love you. We’ll figure out something." "So what are we going to do?" "Well, do you want to keep it?" "Didn’t think about it. All I could think of was how to tell you. I don’t want to be one of those teenage moms. I don’t know what to do. What do you want?" "I don’t know. I’m not ready for this Janelle…" "And you think I am?!" "No, but I don’t want to lose you either. I know dad will make me stop seeing you and who knows what your mom will do." "I don’t want to lose you either and I don’t want to kill a life just cause we're not ready for it." "What if we ran away?" "Ben..." "What? Don’t look at me like that! We both love each other and we always said we hated this place, so what’s keeping us?" "I don’t know. I mean, where could we go?" "We could go south; Uncle Ben always said I could always come to him if I was in trouble with my dad. We could both get jobs and... I don’t know. I’m just scared." "What if he won’t help us?" "I don’t know but don’t worry I’ll take care of us. We’ll figure something out, I promise..." [hr][/hr] There were some parts that needed massaging. Some parts where the dialogue needed something extra so I took reviewer liberty and changed it. Sorry I couldn't point out all the changes, but I hope you won't mind giving it a read-through and notice some changes. Overall, this was a good peice, and well done for a first draft. A little TLC and you've got a nice little conversation here. Cheers! ~ J. J.
@Bimber I got the exercise but it obviously didn't work did it? And as JJ pointed out - it can be very easy if you don't purposely confuse the reader by having the same voice several lines in a row, and as nobody got, even she had 2 lines in a row... hmmm why would you do that?
@JJ_Maxx: Thanks for taking the time to review it and for the tips. Yours looks a lot like my first draft of it, but as i said wanted to test its limits and see how much a reader can imagine whats happening in the background and bodylanguage, thats why i picked the most obvious dialogue as everyone can relate to a cliche, the names i left out on purpose for two reasons one to see how far i can go without them, and using names between two people that are really close makes me feel i'm doing it more for the reader than how it would actually go and be real. Think maybe just adding one of their names in the dialogue would solve the confusion of that section. Like in this one for example, while its not wrong i feel the name slows down the pace for little and strikes me like something that is more for the reader than how it would be. now here the flow is more natural and can totally see name being used. the reason i broke the rule for dialogues as i cant say if something happened in between, so i broke it up into parts to convey that something happened in between and that there was a bigger pause before the next action. Like: (he turns and looks at her and sees her crying)Damn it, I’m sorry didn’t mean to yell, come here.(tries to hug her) Brandon Sanderson gives this exercise to his students, will need to find out how they solved this problem. Loved the additions you made specially the promise at the end was a nice touch. @Erebh: not true that no one got it, 3/5 people got it so far, so its not perfect but it serves its purpose as i can see what to avoid in the future @Everyone: Thanks again for taking the time to read it and review it
I say my wifes name all the time when we're talking, more when I'm apologizing or arguing. I say phrases like: "Come on Steph, I didn't mean it!" or "You know what Steph? I'm done with this conversation!" JJ slams the door. ~ J. J.
While the lack of quotation marks made this quite the bugger to read I thought the dialogue was natural and flowed well enough Just wished I had description of at leas some action but that's me being picky again ._.
Personally, the best dialogue to me is one that is streamlined and doesn't directly tell the reader something. By the latter, I mean that the author doesn't use the character as a medium for giving some information to the reader. An example of this would be a character saying "Did you get the tape from the living-room?" A better way to do this would be "Did you get it?" Then after saying that you would have the characters keep speaking and then the reader finds it they were talking about tape. I felt that your dialogue did too much of this. Here are lines you made, and I want to show you how I would rephrase them and I want you to see if I was able to convey the same thoughts with my words. "You're pregnant? How?" "Remember when we—" (I used an em dash for dialogue when a character interrupts another character.) "I know! But we were careful." "My dad's gonna kill me." "Really? Is that all you can think of? This affects me too!" Hopefully my words helped you in some way.
I think the advice so far is spot on. The only problem I saw is that at some parts the boy or girl speaks twice and I begin to get confused as to who is speaking. For example: Shut up! Let me think, f*** how did this happen, what the f*** are we going to do? Damn it, I’m sorry didn’t mean to yell, come here. Don’t touch me! Up to this point, everything was pretty obvious. I'm not sure who's speaking twice. I want to say the Guy is saying shut up and then he apologizes, but that could be debatable. I think as it has been already written, if you're going to write without tags then each character has to have a clear way of speaking. For example, the girl is overly positive or passive and the boy is verbally active and at some times aggressive. That way even if we sort of get off track, by definition of character, we will be able to figure out who is speaking. You can also do this in terms of gender based slang and lingo. I enjoyed it.
I really liked this exercise, it really challenges how you word things to make the tags and such not needed. There were a few points where I was confused, however this was the point of doing this. You wanted to challange yourself to see if you could pull it off and what you did well and things that needed improvement. Beings how you are the only one who truly knows who spoke when, I will not try to say who I thought was speaking and when. There is some sound advice that I have seen givin by stating names in phrase or by using a slang or term that only one or the other would say. I appreciate you posting this because it gets the wheels in my head spinning, I may have to attempt at this and maybe I'll PM you and we can chat back and forth about such things. I am always looking for new weapons for my arsenal and especially someone of whom can help me to fine tune my sights.
Thanks for reviewing and yeah i agree such exercises can be fun plus you get to learn new tricks. There are other exercises you can add to this one, once you got a clean dialogue after it you can add tags and play with it as you want, for example you can try placing the dialogue in different settings like how it would sound in medieval times or in the future on some starship but get to change just small things about it but not the dialogue... just some ideas
Good exercise, but don't over-use this trick I think your piece was an interesting thing to try, and I followed it without any major problem by reading very quickly. However, while it works as an exercise, I'm not sure this is a good technique to over-use in a 'real' piece of writing. Imagine you sneeze while reading - heck, you'd have to start all over again to figure out where you were and who was speaking! Maybe it's just me, but I don't see any advantage to risking confusion in your readers. The minute they stop and go - what??? - you've screwed up the flow of the story. While you don't need to tag every line of dialogue, I'd say don't let too many of them build up without some sort of extra clue as to who is speaking. You want your reader to concentrate on your piece, of course—but you want them to do more than just keep track of who is saying what.
What is obvious to me: Teens with an unplanned pregnancy Even though both are aware of how babies are made, they both keep asking "how did this happen?" More concerned with how their parents are going to react Weighing several options of running away and not considering abortion Neither one seem to be happy about the pregnancy Some kind of protection was used but never fully explained to be a condom or just birth control The boy lives with his dad and the girl lives with her mother The only person in the dialogue given a name was the uncle Ben Not so obvious: 1. Did this teen couple only have sex one time and get pregnant? It seemed to have been implied by the line Remember that time when we…. Since "time" is singular it tells me they only had sex once. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems that way to me. 2. The boy says his dad will make them move and it kind of confused me because I don't really know what he means by that 3.. Damn it, I’m sorry didn’t mean to yell, come here. Don’t touch me! Don’t be like that you know I’m sorry. These were the lines that made me backtrack and try to figure out who said what. The line before that has the boy talking then comes the line about being sorry and yelling and I assumed it was the girl at first, but she wasn't yelling. Overall I believe this is a typical reaction for a teenage couple to have when finding out about an unexpected pregnancy. I think an extended version of this dialogue could detail the two of them blaming each other for the pregnancy.
I can appreciate what you are trying to achieve here. It does make a good case for why we use tags and descriptors as it is a little difficult to follow. It would be easier to follow if: 1. You used correct punctuation, especially sentence demarcation in each line of dialogue. 2. You used layout to show a change of character, rather than just a new line. Perhaps, TAB one of the speakers. 3. Make the voices more distinct: one angry and swearing, one calm and gentle. I hope this helps!
