Workshop: Language & Tone In Writing

[J Jack]

Hey All,
I just wanted to start a little discussion for a few things I often had trouble with when writing:

Accents
Tone of voice


I just wanted to share some of the things I've learned over time and from workshops, and hopefully you'll all share some of what you've learned too!

Accents

The first time I came across this issue was a novel I wrote in 2008 for NaNoWriMo, a dystopic story of a military squad sent deep into the destroyed city of London to rescue a military scientist. I had a Russian character, but how do you get a Russian accent across without some sort of conversation like this:
"Where are we going now?" he said in his Russian accent.
That's a telling line, not a showing line. So I started up some research.

I learned that Russians who are not fluent enough in English to have lost their accent (which is almost next to impossible, my grandfather is Dutch and even though sometimes he has almost flawless English the Dutch accent does come out on occasion) do several things. They do not speak in contractions, they will substitute words that are not a better match, and often do not use slang terms that are for the more comfortable speaker. So whereas a native English speaker (Canadian or American) would say,
"We'll go that way, it'll be a piece of cake"
a Russian might say
"We will go this direction, it will not be trouble"

Of course, this can carry over to many different cultures. An Australian, for example, might include terms that would be unfamiliar such as "Ace!" which apparently means "Excellent!"
In this case, I believe I have heard the British use the same term, or "Aces!" to mean the same thing.

So it pays to know the slang of whatever language you want your character to possess. If you're writing a fantasy novel, do you want your characters to speak like our equivalent would (think, Game of Thrones) or do you want them to speak an easily understood language that might appeal to a younger audience (think Eragon). You can still use descriptions, but perhaps you'll want to include them in a conversation rather than the 'telling' factor. Names also play a major factor in telling the background of a character, it's much easier to tell a character is Russian when they're named Dmitri Ivanov rather than John Smith.

You might also include some of the character's native language, maybe they're not very comfortable with speaking English yet and slip back to their native tongue in conversation. My grandmother does that when she gets fired up, she'll speak half Dutch and half English.

A quick example:
"It is nice to meet you," Dmitri said softly, shaking Rick's hand.
"Russian?"
"Da, I guess it is easy to see?"
"Actually my mother and I lived in St. Petersburg for a few years, beautiful country."


Tone

Tone is a huge part of what we do as writers, how do you show subtle tones like sarcasm or irritation and avoid a repeating set of spoken lines followed by 'she said with irritation' or 'he said with sarcasm'?

That's a bit more complex, just like text messages and emails that end in disaster because there's no tone of voice given, it's all reader perception, so can a written work fall apart to the reader.

I don't know about you, but I personally hate the words 's/he said' because in my mind it's obvious. It's a spoken line, the fact there are quotation marks mean they are speaking so to me it is redundant to write down 's/he said'. So I swap, but it irks me nonetheless, to other words. I use intoned, whispered, muttered, shouted, yelled, hollered, so on and so forth. I still don't like those, but at least it gives me a bit of a chance to give the reader an insight into the tone.
"Stop it," she said versus "Stop it!" she shouted.
The first one allows a great deal of interpretation, is it a friendly joking tone or an angry tone? The second helps a bit, but we're still missing something. The punctuation and context of the situation is also a huge part.

So for me, I often run into this issue when I write. I love sarcastic characters, the troublemakers and jokester type. I come into a serious scene and they're meant to alleviate a bit of the tension, give a realistic point of view on something.

"All we need to do is get past the twenty or so security staff, through three checkpoints, past the laser sensors, through a six foot steel vault door and a security cage, pick up the three hundred pound item and get it back out."
"Oh is that it?"

Is an example of a conversation (slightly exaggerated for effect) that might take place. So how do you clarify that this character is being sarcastic and not serious, maybe he's arrogant not sarcastic, how can the reader know?

Maybe include a clarification, an extra few words or a different response.
"All we need to do....get back out."
"What, no sharks with lasers mounted to their heads? Angry trolls? Garbage mashers on the detention level?"

Well now the reader might be chuckling, clearly the speaker is being facetious. We're getting that now and there's no need for 'he said sarcastically' to clear that up.

The subtle tones are the ones I find that require more time, anger is fairly simple to get across. Maybe they yell it and knock something over, the reader gets the rage. Sadness, tears and emotional speaking, the reader will understand it.


So, what are your thoughts? I'm still an amateur at this 'writing' thing, so please feel free to bring in any input you have found from your time. I'm going to try to get a few of these workshop style conversations going, tips for aspiring writers on the smaller things. Maybe even a few on major stuff. So get in! Share! I'm totally open to new, this is just what I've learned along the way so if you know a better method do bring it up! I'd love to learn more.

[metalikhan]

A fun challenge, oui? ;D

The little mannerisms of a non-native English speaker are easier when you've actually heard such speakers talk.

You're right about them not using slang/colloquialisms and contractions. Sometimes the wording choice shows their grasp of synonyms is limited.

I'd like a cupcake with a lot of icing.
I would like cupcake with much icing.

Articles (a, an, the) are often omitted, too. I've noticed this particularly among the Russian, Czech and other Slavic immigrants I've known. People whose native language is a Romance language (e.g. Latin-based) seem to do better with articles, possibly because their nouns have genders so the accompanying article has to match (le/la, un/une, el/la, etc).

Metaphors can be ... interesting. "Bloodier than a barbeque" and "bloodier than two vampires fighting over spider" are a couple I've actually heard as well as "hotter than a salamander muffin"(which I still haven't figured out).

If a foreign word is close enough to an English equivalent to be recognizable, you can use it for your foreign character. For instance, a Spanish speaker may say "la reata" or "la riata" but by context or by translation of your English speaker, we know that means "lariat". (BTW, if you use foreign words, don't forget to italicize them.)

Tone & dialog tags

After editing a number of story submissions with a lot of s/he saids, I can honestly and unequivocally say a little goes a long way.
But the other thing I've come across is the disembodied voices -- page after page of dialog with nothing to help the reader keep track of who's speaking or if another speaker joins the conversation. It almost looks like a script rather than a story but it lacks the speaker tag.
Boy: blah blah?
Girl: blah blahblahblahblah, blahblahblahblah.

One of the most useful pieces of advice I got a long time ago was to turn most of those s/he said tags into action. This keeps us engaged with both the characters as well as the surroundings.

Sometimes a synonym works:
"Stop it," she said versus "Stop it!" she shouted.

But that, too, can be overdone. There are editors who prefer the simplicity of "said" over an array of synonyms. You have to research the publication where you want to submit in order to ferret out their preferences.

An alternative (going back to showing action to identify the speaker and keeping the reader engaged with the total experience of the character) might look like this:

"Stop it!" Tiny white lights shot through her vision with the force of her shout. Hands clenched, her fingernails dug furrows in her palms.

Can you tell she's more than just a little excited here? The action details adjusts the level of intensity.

"Stop it!" She listened for a moment, then turned back to the sink. Another potato to peel.

Does that help?

[J Jack]

Excellent information!

Thanks for sharing that.

I do really like the solution to using said by substituting action sequences, that's a much more elegant solution to the issue that I feel has plagued myself and other writers I've critiqued.

I hadn't even considered the omission of articles, but now I sit here and say things with a terrible Russian accent and they sound much more authentic without them. That's a beautiful nugget, especially with how different cultures may transfer to English more easily because of certain aspects of their native language. Very nice.

I totally get the disjointed speaking, pages upon pages of just quotations and you're left reading along trying to figure out who is speaking. I once read a book where I almost had to take notes because it went on for so long and there were three people in the conversation.

Great tips.

[metalikhan]

A couple more little language/accent tidbits.

Sometimes when a foreign speaker is stuck for the proper verb to use, he'll go for the closest infinitive he knows.

Here's an actual written example from a machine manual. What should've been Do not install in direct sunlight was written as Not to place in sunshine spot.

If the speaker isn't certain of conjugating verb tenses, the one he'll most likely use is present tense.

Then I told her go fly a kite.
Then I tell her go fly kite.

Fun, fun, fun! ;D

[newburydave]

This is cool stuff. I bookmarked the thread so I can learn.

SGD
dave

[Kristen]

One thing I've noticed with foreign language speakers (including myself when speaking a language foreign to me) is that the words they substitute are rarely the easy ones like hello, thank you, yes, no. They're the unusual ones, where your vocabulary breaks down.

So for example, if I'm asking a Spanish-speaker for an appointment, I might say "Buenos Dias, senor. Quiere una cita...ummm...como se dice 'Wednesday?'"

Yet writers often throw in the easy ones (i.e. the ones they know), so you get a million TV episodes with Latino characters whose English dialog is liberally sprinkled with "Si senor," when "yes sir" is actually one of the first phrases people learn. I grew up in California and now live in Florida -- both states with enormous Latino populations -- I have friends and relations who are Latino and I can honestly say I've never heard a Latino use si, senor or senora in an otherwise English sentence.

So if you have characters who are speaking a language foreign to them, I recommend having the native-language words they drop into their sentences be ones that are unusual enough that it's plausible that they haven't learned the foreign equivalents.

[Kessie]

I haven't written many foreign characters, precisely because my "ear" isn't good and I don't think I could do justice to it. I like the examples given, though. It's almost as much fun as a bad dub. "All your base are belong to us!"

For dialogue, watch out for overusing anything but "said". I've heard "said" described as punctuation instead of an actual word. But even it can be overused. I've been learning to break up endless lines of said with action beats, which Metal explained earlier.

Using other words instead of said results in really horrible exchanges like Fablehaven had.

"What do you mean?" she shouted.
"Everyone quiet down!" he ejaculated.
"But what are you talking about?" she growled.
"What, what was that?" someone whispered.

And on it went. It was awful. (I think that was round about book 5 or 6.)

For tone, I've found it's better to punch up the dialogue, so the character says crazy things that convey tone, rather than propping it up with tags. Daughter of Smoke and Bone was a stunning example of this. Her dialogue was AMAZING.

[J Jack]

Excellent points Kristen, I'd never even considered that. I did that myself in my first post, a Russian saying "da" when that would be something they would learn early.

You can find a lot of instances in the interwebz with bad translations from products shipped to North America. Those provide pretty accurate fodder for a writer, you can see how they might mess up with things we find simple.

[newburydave]

One of the suggestions that I've been trying to use is to intersperse dialog with action beats which not only reveal who the speaker is but also slow down the dialog and "show" the reader what's going on.

Masses of dialog where people just stand/sit/float around and talk can be as trance breaking as any other kind of data dump. (the "As you know, Bob..." trope and the "sock puppet dialog" trope as substitutions for a lengthy exposition)

A good rule of thumb is that a "mass" of anything is a story killer, even unrelieved action. (I got a crit once that my unrelenting action left the critter exhausted.) If we want our writing to be realistic then I am coming to realize that we have to "multitask our sensory narrative". We should try to engage as many of the sensory input's as we reasonably can into the narrative of every scene.

ie. Some descriptions of a confrontation in a seaside diner on the coast of Maine from one of my WIP stories:

The establishing shot:

"The sun was just rising over Monhegan Island when my new, red F-150 FWD topped the crest of the highway cut where US Route 1c sliced through the southern end of the coastal drumlin. The village of Eastfall, Maine, crowded along the state route on the narrow strip of land between the eastern face of the drumlin and the western shore of Sorrell bay. From the top of the highway cut it stretched out below me like a living diorama at a museum. My parent’s dairy farm perched high up on the shoulder of the drumlin just above the village center.

I watched my dad’s five ton stake bed truck turn off the coastal route onto our farm road. It rolled past the end of Dot’s Lunch, the 1950s style diner that stood across the road from the commercial fishing docks. Trawlers and Lobster boats lined the docks, offloading their catch or loading bait. More bobbed in the bay on their moorings. A cloud of gulls filled the air above the docks and fought for place on the Fisherman’s Co-op roof peak. Their cries mingled with the distant sound of the surf thundering against the north cape’s outer shore and the machinery sounds at the Co-op. The mélange of sound blew in my open driver’s side window along with the ubiquitous shore smell of rotting seaweed. The scene was achingly familiar, but oh so distant from the hell of the battlefield and the man I’d become. I was home; but would home ever satisfy me again? Would it even accept me?"

--------------------

A family scene preceeding the showdown with some dialog in dialect (I'm from Maine so I'm a native speaker on this one):

One thing Marine training had reinforced was that if you don’t confront problems head on they only get worse. Next morning I came down to our kitchen wearing civvies for the first time since Basic Training. Mom was just putting a platter of eggs on the table. Tad, my kid brother, was running out the door with a travel mug, Dad and Suzie, my older sister, were sharing coffee and the paper at the table.

“Mornin’ Johnnie. Tad, aren’t you even gonna’ to stop long enough to say hello to your brother!”

Mom was answered by the slam of the screen door. She turned to me, shaking her head.

“Since he took up with that Marshall girl we don’t see hide nor hair of him, Johnnie; ‘sept for milkin’ and his regular chores.”
She crossed the kitchen and drew me into a hug.

“But, we’re glad you’re back, son.”

I hugged her back and wondered how long it’d be before normal stopped feeling so strange.

“Thanks, mom; but I’ve got to go out for breakfast too.”

I disengaged from her hug and started toward the door.

“I figure I’d better go try to catch up with Thea down at the diner sooner rather than later.”

Suzie didn’t look up from the financial pages but she rattled them.

“Gonna’ go charge the guns again, eh Marine. Don’t expect a warm welcome home from her, Bub. She’s one offended woman, Thea is.”

Suzie was the village’s CPA. She was no nonsense, but with me she’d always been brutally straight.

“She’s offended?! She’s the one who effectively dear Johned me!”

She lowered the paper and gave me the disgusted older sister glare I knew so well.

“Bub, you’ve got no excuse. I told you better than that. You don’t deserve her, so…”

She hoisted the paper back up between us.

“…go on, with that attitude it’s your funeral; but don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Dad folded the local news section and reached for the eggs. He glanced at Suzie and snorted.

“Guess who’s been crying on Sissie’s shoulder, and who’s been giving her moral support. She is right though, you’ve got your work cut out for you if you really want to follow that road any more, Johnnie.”

He glared at Suzie. She rattled the paper again and snorted back at him.

Mom slid into the chair next to him and put her hand on his.

“Ben, don’t stir things up; please. Johnnie hasn’t even been back a whole day.”

He grinned at her.

“Okay, Mary Beth, I’ll leave be; but the dogs ain’t sleepin’ nor lyin’. Looks to me like their circling each other with their hackles up. An’ I didn’t do too bad on the rebound now, did I.”

Mom blushed. He slipped an arm around her and pulled her close for a kiss. Apparently I’d stepped right in the middle of a major family argument. Nobody’d mentioned it yesterday or last night. Well, Suzie didn’t get home till I was in bed and us Mainers don’t borrow drama from tomorrow, so I guess it was best it didn’t come up. I was pretty worn from the trip and still recovering from my injuries.

“Well, I gotta’ go talk to Thea.”

Suzie got the last word in as the screen door slammed behind me.

“I’d wish you luck, Bub; but you don’t deserve it.”

At least she still claimed me as her brother.

----------------

And the confrontation itself:

I watched her through the big windows as I pulled up in front of the Diner. She noticed the strange truck and watched it pull in. When I got out and she saw who it was she turned her back.

There was a northeast storm brewing. The rising wind swept down the bay and along the length of Main Street. It fought me when I opened the diner’s door. When I turned from the door she was writing something on her order pad. She didn’t even look up at me in the big mirror behind the counter.

“Jimmy, we got a customer. Get out here an’ wait on him.”

I looked around as I slid onto a stool. The diner wasn’t very busy, there were only five other customers there this time of the morning. The three local retirees, who hung out and drank coffee all morning, had their usual table by the windows and an early rising late season tourist couple was it. She couldn’t have that much figuring to do on her order pad based on the people here. Back before she’d have been sitting next to me by now.

Jimmy came out of the kitchen wiping his hands. He put a coffee cup in front of me and filled it from the pot under the counter.

“Hey, Johnnie; heard you were back. When’d ya’ get in?”

“Yesterday, Jimmy. How ya’ been?”

“Oh, so, so, Johnny. I’m glad you’re back, man. There’s been no livin’ with Thea since you left—“

Thea looked up and glared at her brother in the mirror.

“—Somethin’s burnin’ in the kitchen, Jimmy. Go deal with it!”

Her voice could have frozen water, or the blood in my vein’s I’d guess was her real objective.

She turned and glared at me. The muzzles of the Mujahedeen’s AK-47s on that ridge in the Stan had looked friendlier than her eyes did right now.

Time seemed to stall as her eyes met mine.

“Why didn’t you write!”

Our words meshed and merged as we both blurted out the same accusation.

“I did!”

Once again our denials superimposed on each other.

We both froze. The corner of her mouth twitched up in a half smile. I suppose mine did too.

“You’re doing it again! How do you do that?”

Our words merged again.

Her eyes sparkled. She giggled, I chuckled and then we both dissolved into gales of laughter. I suppose all the emotion of the past four years came out in that catharsis, it did clear the air between us for the moment. Everyone in the diner was staring at us when we finally caught our breath. She handed me a dish towel to wipe my eyes while she dabbed her own.
I held up my hand to signify that I had the floor to speak.

“You still do it to me, Thea. I was afraid—“

“—that we’d lost the link?”

She grinned at me.

Thea, actually Dorothea after her grandmother, the Dotty who’d started the diner, and I were inseparable growing up. We played together, got in scrapes together, skinny dipped in the ocean together, she taught me to fence when her mom started to teach her, and by the time we were tenish we were finishing each other’s sentences. When we talked to each other sometimes it was like our minds were linked and our words meshed like just now. When we were in trouble for something our answers came out in stereo. We called it our link.

She leaned across the counter and pulled me up off the stool to kiss me. She’d been the strongest girl I’d ever met and now was the strongest woman I knew; but the kiss didn’t last. Instead she pulled away, looked and started to feel my right arm, or the mechanical device that had replaced my right arm.

“Johnny! Your, arm?”

She ran her hand all the way down my prosthesis to my hand and pulled it up. She looked at it with a horrified expression.

I reached over and moved her hand off of my mechanical hand, then pulled off the flesh colored glove I wore. I flexed my obviously mechanical fingers. In the dead silence of the diner the soft clicking of the stepper motors and whine of the servos sounded loud.

“The most advanced marvel of prosthetic technology available; and the Marine corps gave it to me free of charge. I didn’t even have to dicker with them over the price.”

Thea’s gaze flicked between my hand and my face several times.

“You’re making a joke out of it.”

She looked like she was about to cry. I pushed back off the stool and stood a bit away from the counter.

“And look at this, too.”

I rapped my knuckles on my lower thigh. They clacked on the plastic shell of my prosthetic leg.

“I’m almost half bionic. If I turn this thing up to high I can almost leap tall sports cars with a single bound.”

Thea came around the end of the counter, she was crying; and laughing at the same time.

“Oh, Johnnie; you’re totally insane, you know that don’t you?”

Then she was holding me.

“You of all people should know that, Thea; but as far as this goes I’m not crazy. I had two years, well one and a half after I came out of the coma, in the hospital getting used to only being half a man; then two more in rehab learning how to run these things—“

I tapped my mechanical fingers on my mechanical leg.

“—so I see it as a modern miracle. You didn’t even notice I wasn’t whole until you touched my arm, did you?”

“Well, I was so mad… but no, I didn’t.”

“So, you see. I can pass for normal.”

She pulled back and appraised me with a skeptical eye.

“You’ve never been able to do that, Johnnie. What makes you think these’ll help? Did you get a soul transplant, too?”

“Would you still love me?”

“Probably not.”

“Then no, same soul, a little worse for wear; but same same .”

-----------------

Notice that I tried to avoid "he/she said" s and filled in the spaces between with beats that drew in internal thoughts (the current fashion is to not set them off with formatting), other sensory cues and, I hope, revealed the speaker.

Did any of you have a problem keeping track of who was speaking?

Well, my two cents worth

Write on beloved siblings

SGD
dave

[metalikhan]

Apr 7, 2013 13:34:17 GMT -5 Kristen said:

One thing I've noticed with foreign language speakers (including myself when speaking a language foreign to me) is that the words they substitute are rarely the easy ones like hello, thank you, yes, no. They're the unusual ones, where your vocabulary breaks down.

So for example, if I'm asking a Spanish-speaker for an appointment, I might say "Buenos Dias, senor. Quiere una cita...ummm...como se dice 'Wednesday?'"

Yet writers often throw in the easy ones (i.e. the ones they know), so you get a million TV episodes with Latino characters whose English dialog is liberally sprinkled with "Si senor," when "yes sir" is actually one of the first phrases people learn. I grew up in California and now live in Florida -- both states with enormous Latino populations -- I have friends and relations who are Latino and I can honestly say I've never heard a Latino use si, senor or senora in an otherwise English sentence.

So if you have characters who are speaking a language foreign to them, I recommend having the native-language words they drop into their sentences be ones that are unusual enough that it's plausible that they haven't learned the foreign equivalents.

I think it might depend on their level of education, income level, and how much they assimilated into the culture. I heard a lot of Spanglish (Spanish/English) in some areas of Southern California, but in other areas none at all. It also seemed the further north my family moved, the less we heard senor/senora/senorita or si. Laborers (landcapers, janitors, migrant farm workers) were more likely to speak very broken English than office workers or well-to-do tourists coming up from Mexico. (Of the latter, there was usually one or two younger members in each family who translated for the rest of them.)

Didn't hear much of it when I lived in Florida, but the Latinos (primarly Puerto Rican descent) in the area where I was had been there for quite a while. They spoke better English than I did.

Oriental coworkers -- a mix. Some of them seemed to have greater difficulty grasping colloquialisms. **chuckle** I remember trying to explain to one dear lady from the Phillipines the difference between bull, chicken, and horse sh-- ummm, manure. (Not a zoology lesson. )

Russian coworkers -- likewise a mix. Some were quite fluent; others, not so well (so da and nyet were often heard). With them, educational level didn't seem to matter as much as the age of the individual. Younger ones were more adept with their second language than older folks.

That's usually the case regardless of nationality.

[metalikhan]

Apr 8, 2013 9:02:39 GMT -5 newburydave said:

Notice that I tried to avoid "he/she said" s and filled in the spaces between with beats that drew in internal thoughts (the current fashion is to not set them off with formatting), other sensory cues and, I hope, revealed the speaker.

Did any of you have a problem keeping track of who was speaking?

Well, my two cents worth

Write on beloved siblings

SGD
dave

A little trouble, Dave.

I know some editors/publishers do not want to see the dialog in the same paragraph as the quote, but plenty more find it confusing.
I pulled the following from an older thread to show how doing that can be read different ways:

...don't sacrifice clarity. When you have one speaker talking to herself/himself, it's a different matter than when there are more. I 've seen too many stories in which it became impossible even considering the context to tell who was saying what. Often, there was the additional complication of using pronouns for two or more speakers of the same gender s/he rather than identifying them by name.

Consider this camoflaged opening to a short story.
Setting: three friends are in a kitchen, one has a serious problem.

Karen scooted her chair closer to the table.
"Seriously? You think you're a wererat?"
Sally swirled the coffee in her cup.
"It's more than the mess."
Jane reached for the cabinet door.
"You're just inventing excuses for being a klepto."
Sally looked up from her cup.
"There's a problem with the klepto idea."
"Do tell."
Karen's eyes narrowed.
"It's more than the shiny stuff."
"What? The shredded paper? strings? broken plastic? Then you're just a hoarder."
Jane opened the cabinet door, flinched, and closed it quickly.
"No. Hair."
Sally sipped her coffee and set the cup down carefully.
"Hair?"
Jane shivered.
"My hair. Rat hair."
Sally shifted in her chair. Her eyes met Karen's.
"Hair half mine and half rat."

Can you tell who's saying what? Who has the wererat problem?
Just going by the order of the lines can't help. They can be combined in various ways.

Karen scooted her chair closer to the table. "Seriously? You think you're a wererat?"
Sally swirled the coffee in her cup.
"It's more than the mess." Jane reached for the cabinet door.
"You're just inventing excuses for being a klepto."
Sally looked up from her cup.
"There's a problem with the klepto idea."
"Do tell." Karen's eyes narrowed.
"It's more than the shiny stuff."
"What? The shredded paper? strings? broken plastic? Then you're just a hoarder."
Jane opened the cabinet door, flinched, and closed it quickly. "No. Hair."
Sally sipped her coffee and set the cup down carefully. "Hair?"
Jane shivered. "My hair. Rat hair."
Sally shifted in her chair. Her eyes met Karen's.
"Hair half mine and half rat."


Or


Karen scooted her chair closer to the table. "Seriously? You think you're a wererat?"
Sally swirled the coffee in her cup. "It's more than the mess."
Jane reached for the cabinet door. "You're just inventing excuses for being a klepto."
Sally looked up from her cup. "There's a problem with the klepto idea."
"Do tell." Karen's eyes narrowed.
"It's more than the shiny stuff."
"What? The shredded paper? strings? broken plastic? Then you're just a hoarder." Jane opened the cabinet door, flinched, and closed it quickly.
"No. Hair." Sally sipped her coffee and set the cup down carefully.
"Hair?"
Jane shivered.
"My hair. Rat hair." Sally shifted in her chair. Her eyes met Karen's. "Hair half mine and half rat."


Or


Karen scooted her chair closer to the table.
"Seriously? You think you're a wererat?" Sally swirled the coffee in her cup.
"It's more than the mess."
Jane reached for the cabinet door. "You're just inventing excuses for being a klepto."
Sally looked up from her cup.
"There's a problem with the klepto idea."
"Do tell."
Karen's eyes narrowed. "It's more than the shiny stuff."
"What? The shredded paper? strings? broken plastic? Then you're just a hoarder." Jane opened the cabinet door, flinched, and closed it quickly.
"No. Hair."
Sally sipped her coffee and set the cup down carefully. "Hair?"
Jane shivered.
"My hair. Rat hair."
Sally shifted in her chair. Her eyes met Karen's.
"Hair half mine and half rat."

So, the wererat could be Karen or Jane or Sally. Each version also reveals slight differences in the characters' personalities. Even the POV isn't entirely clear.

Make sure your reader can identify who's saying what. If an individual publisher/editor prefers no dialog in the same paragraph as action/description, be flexible enough to revise for that particular one. But bear in mind a great many others may not prefer quotes formatted that way.

The sequence of the action beats aren't always a true indicator of who's speaking when they're separated from the quotes. Be very sure the place where you want to submit accepts this type of paragraph/quote formatting if this is how you normally write. Be ready to adjust it according to publisher preference.

Strive for clarity.

[Christian Soldier]

A big thing I've noticed with dialogue is that it can get, er, unrealistic. I'm not talking about accents, I'm talking about how people speak. An easy way to diagnose dialogue issues is to read your dialog aloud. While you're at it, watch your mannerisms while you do it. You'd be surprised how many beats you can get that will feel natural.

In other words: Don't force your dialogue!

[J Jack]

So very true. I absolutely cannot stand dialogue that feels contrived, but you also have to be careful not to over-correct. Such a delicate balance must be struck.

More interesting points guys, great stuff!

[newburydave]

I avoid trying to write in a foreign dialect unless I have studied the language and had a least a passing mastery of it. That limits me to Northeast US dialects, Appalachian patois, Spanish and German.

Those of you who are European or have spent time there have a distinct advantage with European languages. Since I'm drawn to China and Chinese people for characters and settings I wish I'd studied Chinese <sigh>, missed oportunities.

Write on adelphos agapetos

SGD
dave