Dialog in Stories

[Namb]

I wrote my first CFNM story when I was 12. I'm 77 now. Back then, my stories were mostly narrative in nature and sounded more like a news report.

As my writing style developed, my stories increasingly relied on dialog. For me, setting the stage to be believable is important. Also, I rely heavily on emotions that can be brought out through conversations among the characters.

My characters are typically middle school aged. This is the age of change in the characters' bodies and when modesty is firmly set in. There is enough doubt about their bodies and they have not quite had to time to feel comfortable with their bodies.

The writing challenge is to make the conversations between the characters sound believable, "Oh say, Stephanie, that is the most charming blouse that you have there. Would you be so kind as to tell me where you purchased it?" doesn't sound like a conversation between 12-year-old girls.

However, my grandchildren live on the other side of the country and I rarely see them. My neighbors do not have tween children. I do not live near a middle school. I have no idea how pre-adults speak.

I totally avoid using the jargon they speak. "Chill out!" or Groovy" or "Sock it to me." might have worked back in 1969. So unless I am writing a "period piece" set in that era, I don't use them. The best I can do is avoid overly stiff use of grammar.

If this is you, how do you deal with trying to sound like a young person?

P.S. One trick I did learn is how to deal with foreign accents: I know enough of Brit-Speak from relatives who live there to use that jargon. I do not misspell words to attempt an accent, but I do use the grammar. Word order counts. Instead of "Is your cousin coming?" I say, "Your cousin, she is coming, yes?" It works for various languages.

[superevil7]

I always feel like dialog (or is it dialogue?) comes easiest to me, along with feelings. Describing action is always the hardest thing for me to get right.

I guess what I do is just try to stick to simple language, and imagine what I'd say or the people I know would say in response to the other characters. I don't purposely use slang, besides the words that have gone really mainstream like "cool".

For your cousin example, I'd probably have the character say, "So, your cousin's coming over, right?". It's exactly how I would have asked it as a teen, and probably how I'd still ask today. I suppose breaking it down, it's not just about the subject, but also the relative location. So if they were meeting up with the cousin somewhere, I'd say, "Your cousin'll be there, right?". I also feel like contractions help a lot. So instead of "cousin is" or "cousin will" it's "cousin's" and "cousin'll". I like to shorten words too like, "'cause" and "'bout" instead of "because" and "about". I don't know if you'd call that slang, but it's just the way I've noticed people talk. I try to avoid doing that for the structured text of the story though, everything outside of dialog, unless it's someone's inner monologue.

[Executionus]

If this is you, how do you deal with trying to sound like a young person?

Watch enough young entertainers/streamers on Tiktok, Twitch, or Youtube and you'll absorb various youth slangs you can use in writing dialogue. Usually though the rule of thumb for teen dialogue across generations is to purposefully sound slacking on rules and grammar, use exaggerated adjectives and emphasis to convey youthful over-excitement, deliberately go against traditional anything or social hierarchies, and lean into being playfully rude or teasing with peers without pushing all the way into toxicity. For a teenager, every moment of their life is the best or worst moment so far, and every situation feels (and is treated) dramatically more extreme than what it would feel for an adult. Accurate teens should feel overacted, drama is in their blood.

[Namb]

@Executionus - Great advice.

Unfortunately, I have almost no "footprint" on the internet. This is intentional: the less presence you have, the less likely it is to be hacked.

Boards like this and LinkedIn are the only social media in which I partake.

I once made a living as a technical writer. I lived under the whip of editors. I can do grammar like an English teacher and dream about sentence diagrams in my head. I can write a professional piece.

However, I can just as easily suspend these rules and I do in my writing. It's as easy as taking off my suit and slipping into my sweats after work.

I can also do being playfully rude. I've done that all my life with my friends. We like to jab and counter-jab. The longer we can keep that ball in the air, the better.

I'll have to work with the exaggerated adjectives. I use overstatement and understatement as an element in humor, so there is hope here.

Drama: that's going to be harder to master. I can do suspense, but that's not the same. I will have to work to develop a character who thinks that that the world will end at 6 PM on Friday night if someone doesn't ask her to the dance. I have forgotten how big small things like that are at that age.

Thanks for the tips.

[Namb]

I always feel like dialog (or is it dialogue?) comes easiest to me, along with feelings. Describing action is always the hardest thing for me to get right.

Ditto!

I also like your examples. If I wrote with the same thought process as I used as a technical writer, people would respond with, "Real people don't talk like that."

As for commentary outside the dialog, I'm careful there, too. I can write flowery verse and impressive verse, and in many articles I do. However, the purpose of a story is for the entertainment of the readers. So, good, somewhat grammatically correct language is appropriate. It should strive to paint a picture rather than impress the reader with your literary prowess.

So I will write things like, "The shadows lengthened and light was slowly fading." instead of "The gloom overtook the schoolyard like an incipient fog creeping in." Yes, I have seen stories with descriptions like this.

And I avoid dyed-in-the-wool cliches like the plague. "Throbbing member" GACK!

One other thing I try to do, and don't always succeed at doing, is to make each character have a unique voice. A reader should know who is speaking by HOW they say something. This cuts down on the "Billy said," or "Sally said" in the story.

[TeenFan]

One of the best examples of different teens using different styles of speech is the classic movie "The Breakfast Club"
A group of individuals have to spend time in school detention.
The characters are:
A varsity sports player (male)
A nerdy underclassman (male)
A rich social girl
A rebellious delinquent (male)
A girl who is a loner, social outcast

Each of them come almost speaking a different language, but it is all English.

However, I think this is more difficult to do when writing characters who are in Junior High. The various personality
types are harder to make authentic when every main character is in the 7th grade (12-13 years old).

Mainly not having the kids speak big, fancy words should be good enough, and keep it simple. Today's kids shorten things to be
very efficient (a negative thing about constant text messaging).