10 Tips for Editing Dialogue in a Novel

10 Tips for Editing Dialogue in a Novel

by C. Patrick Schulze

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As writers, we all know dialogue is a critical aspect of our novels. Effective dialogue ensures the plot moves forward and exposes your reader to information that creates your distinctive story.

Today, I’m going to offer some tips on how to edit the dialogue in your manuscript so your novel has a better chance to become a best-seller.

Let’s start with the idea that all dialogue must have a purpose. That means, of course, the end result of your edit is not to purge dialogue for the sake of reducing word count. It’s to produce an economy of dialogue, if you will. That is, more meaningful yet succinct dialogue. The secret is not to cut so much of your dialogue you lose your character’s personality, motive or emotional responses. Your goal with editing dialogue is simple to eliminate anything that’s unimportant.

My first tip is to read your dialogue aloud. If you pay attention to how it sounds, you’ll spot most of the examples of your dialogue that won’t come across to your reader. If it sounds stilted, boring, irrelevant or otherwise ineffective when you read it aloud, it’ll sound the same way when they read your novel.

Pay attention to the characters who have the most lines. Do they prattle on with little to say like your obnoxious Aunt Minnie? If a character makes you think of your loquacious aunt, your character will sound worse to your readers.

Estimate of the amount of dialogue in your novel. A rough rule of thumb is to have as much narrative as dialogue. If you’re slanted too much in either direction, you dialogue may well need some work. Should you end up with too little dialogue, your novel may come off as more of an dissertation. Too much and you’re back to Aunt Minnie.

As you work through your dialogue editing process, focus only on the elimination of words. Don’t so much attempt to rewrite your dialogue as simply compress it. You’ll find much of your dialogue can disappear without any effect upon the meaning of what your characters say.
To do this, you write to the core message. That is, when you edit dialogue, rewrite the passage without colloquialisms or descriptive words. See if that won’t tighten it up for you. Just be sure you don’t lose anything of importance in your rewrite.

When you edit dialogue, you might ask yourself the following questions.

What is the purpose of each line of dialogue. If it doesn’t serve a specific purpose, it can most likely be cut from you novel.

Could a specific conversation begin sooner or end earlier without losing any of the dialogue’s meaning? Just as we write a scene as late in the scene as possible, so too, should we start our dialogue as late as possible.

Keep an eye open for “ping-pong” dialogue. If much of what your characters say is back and forth like a ping pong or tennis match, you may need to reevaluate that conversation. That may be the time to cut it back to a sentence or three.

Remember there’s power in a hint of deeper meaning. By this I mean you may try to show a character’s unstated or understated emotion with their dialogue. Here’s your example. A character might say, “I don’t trust your father,” rather than “Your father tried to molest me.” This works quite well when one character describes another.

You may wish to shy away from dialogue prompts, statements that elicit responses. These often prove unnecessary. For example, there’s no need for a character to ask, “Did you see that?” or “Don’t you recall?”

Is there more to editing dialogue? Lot’s more. However, I hope these tips will get you started down the correct path.

Until we speak again, know I wish for you only best-sellers.

C. Patrick Schulze
Author of the emerging novel, “Born to be Brothers”

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Tags: Born to be Brothers, C. Patrick Schulze, Dialogue, dialogue in a novel, edit, editing, edits, novel, novels

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Dialogue, Editing Your Manuscript, The Craft of Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.