Conversations

From the few people who’ve read my books, I always hear the comment that I do conversations between characters well, which I take as a serious compliment. Conversation is easy for me to construct, while others may find it difficult.  My downfall tends to be descriptions, which is why I tend to drift toward Sudden Fiction in my writing. Anyway, back to writing conversation.

My secret to writing conversation begins with solid character development. When developing a story, I create my characters with primary and secondary traits such as stubbornness, righteousness, boldness, submissiveness, intelligence, logical, emotional, intuitive, etc… These basic character traits allow me to set my mind when entering into a conversation by taking on those traits to the extreme in every spoken word or unspoken word.

For example, a person with a primary characteristic of ‘emotional’ and secondary trait of ‘stubborn’ will tend to base arguments more on body language and implied meaning than what is actually said. Also, the character will not think about what is said, but rather respond immediately based on how he/she feels. That character will also latch on to the most impactful word and stick with the feelings that person feels based on that single word. In addition, the person will not be swayed easily, especially with logic. In counterpoint, an intuitive character will realize this and try to carefully steer the conversation away from points that will stir an emotional response.

The point of all this is to think of the character’s every response from these simple qualities. Some people call it ‘keeping in character’, but that is often hard to do effectively, especially when there are many characters in a book. For every book, I create a cheat-sheet of character names, ages, background information on the character, and most importantly, their qualities. If you’re wondering why I do age and background, here’s why: A person’s age indicates the period of time in which they grew up thus providing whether their background was in the ‘free love’ movement or as opposition to a war or even a video game addict from the late 1990’s. All this helps create the picture of who the person is and I can always resume the character easily even if I haven’t written a page of the story in months.

The other trick I use is to write the conversation as it happens within my mind and then go back and add in content and thoughts afterwards, possibly clarifying why a person would respond the way he/she has. A lot of times, after adding this content, I also find that I need to alter the conversation slightly because a response might drift too far away from the character’s qualities or further points need to be added to ensure the flow is correct. The trick is to try to not overthink the conversation between characters, but to just think as the character would naturally.

I hope this helps.

Next Week: Jeremiah Stone