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John Baker's Blog

Reflections of a working writer and reader

The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain. George Buchanan

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— Learning to Write XXIX

There are a few people who can hear the individuation of different speakers. We have all heard mimics, people who can detect and transmit these differences almost immediately. But most of us only pick up the substance of a conversation. Even strongly marked differences between different speakers are rarely heard well enough to be reproduced.

Try writing down a paragraph as spoken by someone with a foreign accent. Or write down five or six sentences spoken by someone in your family. In both cases you will find that your listening ability is limited to grasping the meaning of what the speaker says and to more or less disregard his or her way of saying it.

In writing dialogue you will probably never write verbatim, as it is spoken in real life.

But nevertheless, listening for the melody, the tone of the spoken word always forms the basis on which written dialogue is built.

We listen; and then we transcribe. Try it, listen to the conversations around you, on the bus, in the supermarket, around the supper table. Find somewhere quiet and write it down, exactly as it happened. Do this over and over again. You may never use these bits and pieces of writing, but don’t worry about that. What you will be learning is how sentences are spoken in real life and what must happen to them when they are transcribed to the page.

Transcribing spoken dialogue into written, successfully, is one of the most important of a beginning writer’s conquests.

You will quickly realise that talk recorded exactly as spoken is redundant to the point of absurdity. On the page it cries out for compression. As it is, uncompressed, it blocks the narrative and leaves no room for anything but itself. It is composed of repetition, hesitation, slurred vowels, ers, ums, pauses, over-emphasis and quickly tires the reader’s eyes and mind.

As a reasonable writer you should be able to reduce it by two thirds without loss of effect.

There are other tasks to come to terms with if you want to write good dialogue. Work on compression for now. In my next post I’ll elaborate further aspects of this subject.

Table of contents for Learning To Write

  1. Learning to Write I
  2. Learning to Write II
  3. Learning to Write III
  4. Learning to Write IV
  5. Learning to Write V
  6. Learning to Write VI
  7. Learning to Write VII
  8. Learning to Write VIII
  9. Learning to Write IX
  10. Learning to Write X
  11. Learning to Write XI
  12. Learning to Write XII
  13. Learning to Write XIII
  14. Learning to Write XIV
  15. Learning to Write XV
  16. Learning to Write XVI
  17. Learning to Write XVII
  18. Learning to Write XVIII
  19. Learning to Write XIX
  20. Learning to Write XX
  21. Learning to Write XXI
  22. Learning to Write XXII
  23. Learning to Write XXIII
  24. Learning to Write XXIV
  25. Learning to Write XXV
  26. Learning to Write XXVI
  27. Learning to Write XXVII
  28. Learning to Write XXVIII
  29. Learning to Write XXIX
  30. Learning to Write XXX
  31. Learning to Write XXXI
  32. Fictional Character
  33. How Many Plots Are There?
  34. Making Metaphors
  35. Four Walls and One Passion
  36. Writing a Novel
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