Your dialogue needs a job.

Welcome to the kickoff of the first *official* season of The Romance Room! 

This kickoff episode dives into something I'm extremely passionate about: dialogue. 

Dialogue is the emotional backbone of fiction, especially of the romance genre. 

However, a lot of romance writers think they're good at dialogue, but spoiler alert: they usually aren't. And that's because they're leaving dialogue unemployed. 

Letting dialogue slack off doesn't help you get the job done, it just wastes your pressure word count and stops the momentum of your writing. 

Good thing dialogue is my favorite thing to write and I know a thing or two about putting it to work. 

Textbook for this lesson - https://amzn.to/4u0Y6RH 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Five, six, seven, eight. Writers love writing dialogue. And as a writer myself, I can attest to this. Especially in romance, dialogue is the emotional backbone of a story. So while you're conveying things through the prose, like setting and action and interiority, a lot of the time the emotionality of the story of these two characters falling in love is coming out through the dialogue. But even though a lot of writers love writing dialogue, I don't think as many writers are as good at it as they think they are. Hi, I'm Marjorie Muller, and welcome to the Romance Room. This is your place for all things romance craft and culture, so pull up a chair. You are always welcome here. Today we're talking about dialogue and why your dialogue needs to have a job. Too many writers are leaving their dialogue unemployed. That means then rather than doing important heavy lifting and storytelling, dialogue is just spinning their wheels, wasting precious word count that whether you're publishing traditionally or independently matters. So today I'm going to walk you through the three jobs that you can employ your dialogue to do. I'm going to be using the book Thank You for Listening by Julia Whalen as our example text. This book is phenomenal in many ways, but the dialogue, ooh, it is working. It is working. Julia Whalen did not say you can take the day off, she put her dialogue to work. So we'll be using this as our example text. And then I'm going to talk about a few pitfalls that I see romance writers falling into with their dialogue and how to avoid those. You ready? Let's romance. Your dialogue needs a job. Notice we're not using any sort of equivocating language here. Needs means needs. Your dialogue must do one of these three things in order to be considered for inclusion in your book. If it's not doing these things, chuck it. Get it out of here. You have too precious of a word count to waste time on dialogue that's not working for you and your story, okay? So let's talk about the first job that dialogue has. The first job that dialogue can do is plot. It can move the plot forward. It can recap the plot, it can let us know about what has happened, what will happen, it can talk about the cause and effect of certain things. The plot function of dialogue is the who, what, when, where, why, and the how. It also includes characters discussing history or talking about what has happened before the book or what is up in their backstory. Plot is moving your story forward through the action of conversation. I'm going to take you to page 79 of thank you for listening. I'm omitting some of the intermediary bits that aren't actually the dialogue because I want the dialogue to stand on its own in a way that really highlights just how talented Julia Whalen is at giving dialogue a job. You got an offer, Mark said. Okay? The way he was smiling made her suspicious. What? It's fitting. She knew. She just knew. It's a romance novel, isn't it? Yes, but no. Mark, I'm not being cagey, it's just different. He clasped his hands. You remember June French? Of course, she gave me my start back when I did romance, which I no longer do. She died recently. You're clearly very broken up about it. This passage does three wonderful things for the plot function of dialogue. One, it's telling us about what's happening next. Swannee has just been offered a romance gig in audiobook recording. She records audiobooks, she doesn't do romance anymore. That tells us something important about her history, as does this relationship with June French, the writer, and the fact that June has passed away. So not only is it furthering the story with what event is going to happen next, it's also telling us a piece of the history. The third thing it's doing is highlighting a conflict for the character about what is happening in her life and how it's aligning with who she is. And this brings us to the next function of dialogue. The second job you can give your dialogue is showing us the character. Yes, showing. We don't tell about the character through dialogue. We don't have people say, oh, you're very funny, XYZ. We show the character being funny. And that's why the character function of dialogue is so important for having your characters come to life. While we can see these characters in their actions, and sometimes we do have to tell the reader about how our characters behave, it's also so important to see how they act in conversation. This means that we can see a variety of their reactions depending on who they're interacting with, what information they have, what is happening around them. And while plot is the who, what, when, where, and why and how function, character really depends on the who, what, when, where, and why to show us more about the character and where they are at that point in time. So, pull out your textbook. I'm taking you to page 21. And once again, I am omitting certain intermediary lines in order to get that dialogue across. Chuck, oblivious, stepped closer to Odaku. You're special, that it thing. You twinkle, all mischievous and shit. Mischievous, Swannee said, in that well-trained voice of hers. Chuck looked at her for the first time. That's what I said. No, you said mischievous. It's mischievous. So? Mischievous is a word. Mischievous is not. When I heard those lines in the beautiful audiobook recorded by Miss Julia Whalen herself, I was bowled over. One, because I completely agree. It pisses me off when people say mischievous instead of mischievous, because mischievous is the actual word. If you actually look at the letters, I'm digressing. This passage is so great at showing us just a bit about the character Swannee very early on in the story. We know she's an audiobook narrator, we know she has a background in acting, but this shows us something very important about her character. She is very willing to stand up for herself and what she believes in, even if it's just correcting pronunciations of words. Her job is important to her, and given the context of this scene where she and her friend are out in Las Vegas and some greasy guy is approaching her, she's willing to step in, even if it's to just be an annoyance. Seeing how Swanee reacts to strangers is just as informative as we see Swannee react to people she is close to, whether it's her grandmother or her best friend or somebody she's working with. Dialogue that uses the character function is an elite way of showing the reader about this character, about who they are in the context of their life and in the context of their present circumstances. The final job that dialogue can do is sort of related to character, but more about characters in relation to one another. Yes, the third job of dialogue is portraying relationships. Especially if you're writing romance, the way that we portray relationships on the page is is is so important. It might be one of the most important things. And with dialogue being the emotional backbone of stories, oftentimes, this function is uber important. Have you ever read a romance where you're reading it and you're like, I don't really get why these people are attracted to one another? It's because their conversations are not actually indicative of furthering the relationship. We should see a relationship growing by the way that they speak or communicate to one another in the early stages and how that changes to the late stages and the middle stages, depending on what is going on. This is where so many romances fall flat. Don't tell me the relationship is blossoming. Show me through what they choose to reveal to one another, when they choose to be vulnerable with one another, what they choose to hide from one another. It's all the same thing. The who, what, when, where, and why of the plot comes down and has its impact on relationship too. The relationship is also informed by how characters behave and what their habits are, whether or not they are different around this person they are blossoming a relationship with. And when I say relationship, I'm not just talking about the romantic relationship. I'm talking about everybody that comes into contact with a person. The protagonist has a relationship with the barista they exchange a few words with. The protagonist has a relationship with people from their past, with people they talk to on the phone, and portraying how these relationships change or how they impact the characters and the plot is another beautiful way of dialogue to do the heavy lifting. And now to go back to our text for the day, I'm taking you to the middle of the book, to page 181, between Swannee and her best friend Adaku. You know, more than anything, it's just been nice collaborating with someone. Makes me feel what? Feel what? Like I'm acting. Really acting. And it's made me realize that I miss it. Adaku dropped her chin, gazed solidly at Swannee through the tops of her eyes. This is new. What are we going to do about this? Nothing. It'll pass. It is not nothing. I will not let it pass. They looked at each other. You know, I think you threw in the towel too soon. This dynamic is one of the most fun to read in this book. A female friendship that is portrayed as super supportive while still very human. And what you get through this passage is just how deep this relationship goes between Adaku and Swannee. Adaku knows Swannee so well and has thoughts about who she is as a person, has held back on certain things that she has wanted to say because she wants to support her friend. She is lending an open ear to her friend. Swannee knows she can be vulnerable with her friend, but only insofar as still protecting herself. This is such a great scene to show the push and pull of a relationship. And at the same time, it's showing a little bit about the plot and what's going to come next. And that brings me to my next very important point. Dialogue needs a job, but dialogue can have multiple jobs. And oftentimes the best dialogue is doing a few things at one time, wearing many hats, sometimes all three. You might have listened to one of these examples and gone, well, actually, I think it's applicable to a different function of dialogue, and you would have been just as right. The point of dialogue is that it needs to have one of these jobs, but if it's doing more, that makes it even more valuable to your story, and it makes even more sense to keep in the story. Now this brings me to one of the most major pitfalls of the romance genre, and that is banter. I despise banter. I've got beef with it. And it's not because I don't like characters being flirty and witty with one another. It's because banter has become shorthand for connection. Instead of seeing emotional connection on the page, we're seeing characters cycle through the same sort of back and forth again and again and again until the author has to come in and deus ex machina that this is the time that it makes sense for these two characters to come together and be completely vulnerable with each other and fall in love and yada yada yada. I don't buy it. This is why I tell writers to stay away from banter. I don't think it's a good way to think of writing. If it makes sense for your characters to have repartee like that, to be battling of with wits and with their words like that, then great. We love that. But banter has taken on a completely different connotation, and that connotation is now emotional connection, and that's not working. So if your characters are bantering, don't panic. That banter can be there. But what job is it doing? Is the banter showing us the relationship, how it's changing, where it's started, how it's going? Is the banter showing us about the characters? One has a certain kind of wit and the other has a different sort of intelligence. One is shy, one is outgoing, one isn't moving the plot forward. Are they revealing information that is furthering what is going on or revealing what has been going on in a way that ends up bantering back and forth like a tennis match? People want that bum, bum, bum, bum feeling, that tennis ball popping back and forth. But they will get tired of it if it's not doing anything. So please make sure that your banter is doing a job, just like any other piece of dialogue. Ultimately, what banter is trying to create is tension. And tension doesn't exist because something is funny or easy to read. Tension exists because of pressure. When you make sure your dialogue is doing a job, it is putting pressure on one of these three things. Pressure makes diamonds. Good dialogue makes for emotional breakthroughs, and good dialogue makes for cathartic romance. You want that emotional release. Banter on its own doesn't give you that emotional release. The releasing of tension, the building of tension to the release of tension gives you that emotional release. And that's what good dialogue can do. If your dialogue is working for you, is effective, is doing labor, don't let it be unemployed and using up your word count. You do not have time for that. Your story doesn't have time for that, and your characters are getting sick of it. So if you're coming up against some dialogue that you're not sure if it's effective or not, ask yourself a few questions. One, what job is it doing? Is it doing one or more of those things? Great, keep it. If it's not doing any of these things, cut it or update it to do some work. Two, what is the dialogue changing? Is it changing the relationship, the character, or the plot? Is it moving things forward? Is it setting it back? What is it doing? What is the overwhelming action of this piece of dialogue? Because if you can't come up with that, you're just spinning your wheels, you're just wasting time. And finally, what sort of tension exists by having this piece of dialogue in the story? It's not that every piece of dialogue has to have angst. Tension exists in all forms, in all emotions. Tension spurs momentum. What's going to keep the reader reading? It's your dialogue doing some work, is showing what the story is about. If two people are meeting up for coffee, maybe you don't need to have them saying, hi, hello, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Or if they are, what is it achieving? What tension is coming up? Is it tension about the characters, the relationship, or is it about what is about to happen next? Or is the story just meant to start at a different place? Is that scene just meant to start at a different place? Dialogue isn't just about having fun. It's about doing work for your story. It's about setting up what comes next and honoring what has already come before it in order to make your story really land with readers. Don't let your dialogue just sit there. It's not meant to be a break from the prose for you. It's meant to do something. And if it's not doing something, you don't need it. If you want more of the romance room or of me, Marjorie Muller, you can find me at Ides of Marge on Instagram and TikTok. And you can find the romance room on Substack at margerymuller.substack.com. And if you want to work with me and make sure your dialogue is doing the job it needs to, you can find me at margerymuller.com. Thanks for joining me in the romance room. I really hope you come back. Remember, there's always a seat for you here in the romance room. Take care. See you next time. Seriously, this is the last time it goes.