Do you need a dialogue edit?

Dialogue is a funny thing…

You can take ten people from the same size family, same neighborhood, cultural background, education, social peers, influences and experiences, and ask them to write, separately, the same story. Even something as simple as “a man wakes up one morning and goes to the chemist for headache pills”. They will all write a different style of story with different dialogue.

My point is, everyone writes dialogue differently and “sees” conversations through different eyes.

This doesn’t mean that your dialogue is better or worse than the next person, but merely “different”.

However, there are plenty of examples of bad dialogue. Too much exposition (explanatory dialogue deemed necessary by the writer) is a classic. The worst example I saw was a script someone sent me to review that had lines similar to the following:

character 1- “Don’t you know that between 1939 and 1945 there was a world war in which over 60 million people died?”

character 2- “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know the war was started by Nazi expansionism following from their humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles?”

Makes you want to cringe, doesn’t it?

But leaving comedic answers aside, dialogue edits are one of the most commonly requested forms of editing. “Nice story, good structure, needs a dialogue edit” you will often hear. So what is a dialogue edit? It’s someone’s way of telling you that your dialogue is too long, too wordy, to awkward or simply inappropriate for that section of the story.

Ask yourself the following questions:
1- what does the story want to say?
2- Where is it going to become a story?
3- how do the individual scenes tell that story?
4- what actions, events, and dialogue participate to tell that story?

Imagine a girl has trouble with her father: you want to get across the idea that he never supported her, and do this in a scene where she enters her apartment. There are several ways we can get this across in the story.

a) It is entirely plausible that we come to this scene as she is mid-conversation on the phone, and we hear her side of the story with the contributing words “you were never there for me!”
b) Do we hear the girl play an answer phone message from her father? Yet another apology?
c) Do we hear the same answer phone message from the girls’ mother explaining, yet again, why her father can’t come / commit to the latest event?
d) Do we follow the girl past a family photograph with everyone, then a succession of photos in which her father is consciously missing (graduation, concert performance, award ceremony, etc).
e) any combination of the above?

All these are options to a dialogue scene in which the story is told. More dialogue is not always the right answer.

So before you look at a dialogue edit, consider “do you need dialogue in that scene at all or is there another way you can tell the same section of the story from a different perspective?”

Now onto dialogue. Have a friend or someone you trust read it and let you know what they think. Have friends (actors if you can find them) read out the parts as a live performance (nothing lavish: an evening of wine and pizza will do for that one). If the dialogue sounds awkward or long winded then it’s a good indication you need an edit.

Take each dialogue scene and try to break it down: see if you can reduce the overall length to around half of the existing length: if that doesn’t work, you can build it up again.

Sometimes it may be necessary to get someone you trust to re-write the scene or suggest alterations and, if they don’t give you something you like, don’t feel pressured to go with their suggestion because a third person has suggested a dialogue edit.

However, remember that editing is the writer’s friend, the weapon in your armoury that helps you shape and craft your work to the highest standard. Never be afraid of editing, although too much editing can be a bad thing if you relentlessly edit and never go for submission.

However, be open to the possibility that an edit may benefit your work, and keep an open mind when you engage the advice of others, or embark upon the process.