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as an editor I spend a ton of time talking about dialogue I am a huge geek about it and I can't wait to cover some common mistakes and how to fix them so not just pointing out what is wrong but also how to fix them so once you've learned about these tips and my fixes your dialogue is going to get so much better that people are going to ask you to hold courses about writing dialogue that is my hope for all of you all right on to the about me slide hi I'm Tracy as yall

know I write for both adults and kids I am the author of four picture books which you can see a few of them here I also write short stories and essays so personally as a writer I have written dialogue for both kids and adults as an editor I work on not only picture books but also novels Memoirs and more trade non-fiction so you can see some of the covers of those books here like Neil and the magic of unkindness um like Martin was saying earlier dialogue is in pretty much all categories of writing and it

can help your storytelling in any category um just a quick note dialogue's got to be great for both both traditionally published and self-published books and I have worked with authors of both types of books and really it's the same common errors that pop up no matter what publishing Journey someone is on all right we're going to try to get through seven common dialogue mistakes and Martin with our little mop here just cut in if you're like well let's hurry up um we'll talk about why their mistak and how to avoid them we're going to fly

through some and you'll get some instant ways to easily level up your writing While others are a bit more complex so just as a quick overview we'll talk about characters telling each other what they should already know characters talking in Long chunks confusing paragraph spacing too many dialogue tags too many fancy dialogue tags and characters saying each other's names too much as well as characters floating in space all right we're going to start ready with characters telling each other things that they should already know so I had some fun coming up with an example of

this mistake and I'm going to read it aloud for you Susan remember when we went to the diner on Main Street last week Mary put her for down and took out her wallet why sure you got your favorite blueberry pancakes Susan took a big bite of her salad well remember how I forgot my wallet and you covered me Mary waved her wallet in the air it was my pleasure this time I'm paying Mary handed her credit card to the waitress so why is this a mistake I know the chat is sometimes delayed so I won't

necessarily read these but if you want to chime in you can go ahead so basically of course Susan remembers going to the diner and paying for Mary uh Mary doesn't have to tell her or remind her about any of this and I see this kind of thing all the time why do writers feel inclined to do this so Susan is saying this in dialogue for the benefit of the reader not for the other character in the SC in the scene as readers we may not know about the time at the diner last week and this

writer who was me coming up with an example is using dialogue to fill in this past information so doing this is a mistake because it can be like waiting a big red flag hey you're reading a book these people aren't real they're talking to you the reader not to each other and we don't want to do that we want people to forget that they're reading a book and feel like this is happening in real life so you'll notice I use the word remember twice and that's a bit of a red flag for me because it

means the characters probably already both know what they're about to say aloud so this mistake can happen without the word remember or with it and it's not always about characters remembering something another example of what characters would already know would be two scientists telling each other information that they would certainly already know but the readers wouldn't like getting into the details of recet science or genetics or something like that so when we write a novel or a memoir or a picture book we want people to forget that they're reading a book and get immersed in

the world of the story so how would we fix this section of dialogue to be more realistic here's my little screen I'm ready Martin for the next one of the fix information that the characters already know you can either put it in Pros or use a newbie character so here's how I fix that in the next slide well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary put her fork down this is my favorite salad in town though Susan took a big bite this time I'm paying Mary waved her

wallet above the table she still felt bad that she had forgotten it last week Susan had been so nice to to cover her so this is really simple I kept in a little information about last week I personally like to compare my favorite foods at restaurants across town so that felt realistic and not too forc to me I also moved the information about forgetting the wallet to the pros and out of the dialogue and it's such an easy trick sometimes writers think that everything is more interesting when it's said in dialogue but actually it is

okay to just let us fly through any logistical nitty-gritty information in the pros then you can keep your dialogue more realistic and engaging all right next up let's look at what using a newbie character would look like my food was delicious said Elizabeth well I think the pancakes from the diner were better but these were still pretty good Mary put her fork down this is my favorite Town salad in town though Susan took a big bite this time I'm paying Mary waved her wallet above the table then turned to Elizabeth I forgot my wallet last

week and Susan covered me that was so nice Susan said Elizabeth so Elizabeth wasn't there last week so Mary has to um explain what happened to her I'm sticking with a pretty low stakes example here pancakes salad but this would be more important for something like the rocket scientists who have to explain things to the reader a lot so when you have a lot to explain like scientific Concepts or the rules of a fantasy world you should use a newbie character or you you don't have to but it's one option this is part of why

we see a lot of books about people moving to a new place they can observe their surroundings with the same sense of wonder that a reader would I always think about Harry Potter when we talk about this because Harry is new to the magical world so it is realistic that the other characters need to explain everything to him this is probably more common in kidlet as we like to bring kids into a new world or fantasy world more gently whereas adults can be thrown into the deep end and be trusted to stick with it a

little bit more it's always a balance how much information do you need to give and how quickly do you need to give it it's always Balan all right on to the next dialogue issue characters talking in big chunks and I put these next to each other because characters talking in chunks often happens along with those characters imparting information to the reader I don't think that we have time to do a really extreme example of this so we're just going to use something still kind of low stakes and silly all right here's here's Mary's big chunk

of d dialogue well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good I have compared pancakes at all of the diners in town it's kind of a hobby of mine last week was my all-time favorite because they were just so fluffy I've got to see if they'll give me their recipe it probably have preservatives in it but they tasted so good I don't even care second best has got to be The Season's Diner over on Main Street oh I can't wait to get back there they include a side of bacon

and their pancakes aren't the best their bacon is the science of how pancakes become fluffy is so fascinating to me all right I read that really quickly um just to get the point gr I think that we probably all know people like Mary but we really don't need to know all of this about pancakes in one go so the problem with not really having time to show an extreme example is that this does sound like someone we know um but if you know someone who talks like this I am willing to bet that it is

kind of a defining character trait for them and if someone talks like this you know you think of that person like oh they are the talker so if you have a character like this in one of your books I would just say know that that's going to stand out looks like I lost my camera too so I'm just messing around with things here for one moment so let's talk about fixing this issue um if you want to cover that didn't help um if you want to cover all of this information about pancakes um there are

ways to do it without letting Mary monopolize the conversation and of course again we're talking about pancakes but we could be talking about important World building or scientific information so the fixes cut it cut it down or cut it completely in some cases break it up or summarize so cutting it all we need is well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good um unless we're showing a pretty serious obsession with pancakes for plot and character reasons this is all we need um even with higher Stakes information like World

building think about whether your readers need to know everything or if that information can be spread out through the book or just cut entirely all right next fix breaking it up well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary put her fork down do you have a favorite pancake place in town Susan said oh for sure but last week's blew everything else out of the water before then I would have said the season Diner over on Main Street Mary leaned back in her chair rubbing her stomach that's a

lot of pancake knowledge Susan took a bite out of her salad I love love comparing pancakes it's kind of a hobby of mine so that's much more realistic I would be likely to find something like this maybe in a romance novel or a contemporary novel where we're showing a friendship developing between these characters where they're doing a more natural back and forth all right fix [Music] three summary this is one of my favorites because it actually it can be just so easy and huge well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were

still pretty good Mary put her fork down do you have a favorite pancake place in town Susan said Mary told Susan all about her hobby of comparing pancakes ranking the different diners in town and speculating about the recipes so that shortened it up so much and we can imagine that there's a back and forth without actually showing it if it's not about something vitally important to the plot um so one of my favorite tricks is to remember summary for when one character has to tell another what just happened in a scene that the readers already

got to see happen you can just say and Mary told Susan what happened and you are covered this is a good trick for Memoir too I know I saw in the chat that we had a few Memoir writers and in Memoir you may not remember exactly what was said um so we might see more summary in Memoir you can just say I remember the conversation went something like this and then use a mix of dialogue and summary it is possible to use too much summary and dialogue I have seen that and I will comment on

manuscripts I'd love to see this playing out in scene but not enough summary is way more common than too much summary in my experience all right next one this is kind of like a logistical mechanics one confusing paragraph spacing is pretty common as a dialogue mistake especially in early drafts all right so to get to the example well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good space Mary put her fork down hm this is my favorite salad in town though Susan took a big bite this time I'm paying space

Mary waved her wallet above the table she still felt bad that she had forgotten it last week Susan had been so nice to cover her so what I did here in this mistake example is I messed up all of the spacing from the previous example if we hadn't read this before we wouldn't know who said what all right let's look at what it's supposed to be like our fix is use a new paragraph whenever someone new speaks thinks or asks and here is the example and I'm going to keep saying space for that podcast if

we have a hope of making a podcast well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary put her fork down space this is my favorite salad in town though Susan took a big bite space this time I'm paying Mary waved her wallet above the table she still felt bad that she had forgotten it last week Susan had been so nice to cover her space Susan pulled out her wallet no don't even think about it it was my pleasure and we can just go back to splitting so this is

an extremely this is an extremely short and simple example but if we go back I don't know Martin if you want to go back two slides before just going on the Fly here you can just see it's so confusing when Mary and Susan both have dialogue on the same line and then at the end with Mary waved her wallet above the table we don't have a way to know that that's connected to this time I'm paying and I really do see this all the time and sometimes I think it happens when writers are going more

in a bit of a stream of Consciousness and they're just writing dialogue as it comes out um but it's it's an easy fix to just go through every time someone new Acts or thinks um new space along the same line don't use too many paragraph spaces if you add a space when it is the same person we are then suddenly going to doubt whether it is a same person talking and acting when you have um an action like Mary putting her fork down you can keep that action in the same line and it serves as

a dialogue tag which brings me to the next big issue to many dialogue tags all right I see this all the time and I think people are out there thinking no one is ever going to be able to tell who is speaking in my book so I've got to use all of these dialogue tags yes sometimes I do get confused about who is speaking because there aren't enough tags but too many tags is the more common error by far and I actually don't think this is a bad idea you can index to two many tags

in your first draft but then just know that you're going to have to go through and take them out as you refine your work all right here's our example well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary said she put her fork down this is my favorite salad in town though Susan said she took a big bite this time I'm paying Mary said she waved her wallet above the table so I added all of those sets and none of them are needed here our fix is to use a

dialogue tag or action slth thought not both I kind of joke that when I'm doing a copy edit half of my time is spent just deleting she said where it's not needed um I really I don't even really think that is a joke I think that's just true of a lot of copy editing all right here is the fix you can delete either the action or the tag well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary said hm this is my favorite salad in town though Susan took a

big bite this time I'm paying Mary still felt bad that she had forgotten her wallet last week Susan had been so nice to cover her you can also see here that you use a comma with someone who is being described as speaking so with a word like said so for Mary said but when someone is doing an action like Susan took a big bite you use a period for the third paragraph and this is where I think people sometimes get tripped up because actions are pretty clear and dialogues are pretty clear but thoughts can be

trickier um in this case Mary is um really the the point of view character here so we only get a thought from her we don't need to hear that she said or she acted we just hear how she feels Mary still felt bad all right and here's a little caveat for picture books if you're writing and I don't think that we've got a lot of picture book writers from the chat but because you're limited with words in picture books and you have the illustrations doing some of the work for you it is often best to

use a dialogue tag and not an action also terms you don't always have full control of your paragraph spacing so I would just feel free to use said she said in a picture book and not worry about substituting actions in as much as you would for fiction that's longer or non-fiction for older readers that doesn't have pictures all righty the problem in any category is when you have too many fancy dialogue tags that's the best way I came up to describe them it's just fancy all right so let's go to the next um mistake example

and I'll give you all a hint that there is an extra bonus dialogue mistake in this example so if you can catch it in the chat um weigh in all right well I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary said snobbishly H this is my favorite salad in town though Susan salivated this time I'm paying Mary exclaimed she waved her wallet above the table all right so I have gone in and added spice or fanciness to each of these dialogue tags Mary said snobbishly could be useful because she

could be saying that same dialogue nicely or snob snobbishly and it adds a little more detail but it's kind of an awkward way to do it so I kind of have a little red flag up anytime I see the letters ly um so a word that's an adverb in a dialogue tag like snobbishly so check when you see an adverb check to make sure you need it all right I see a few people did catch that mistake in the next line Susan salivated is an action and not a dialogue tag so right after though there

should be a period and not a comma um that's so common especially with words like smiled because I think people kind of see smiled in the same Bay as said or sometimes side salivated is a little extra got to keep you guys entertained um I mean that's gonna be a pretty good salad right is is Susan a dog unless she's a dog I don't think she's actually salivating all right the third little too fancy tag here is exclaimed so why would you make readers say that whole mouthful we've got the exclamation point remember we want

readers to feel immersed in the book and not spend any time being impressed with the author's vocabulary um this is especially true for picture books where it's actually more important to keep things simple and not distracting picture books are not um tools for teaching kids vocabulary words like exclaimed uh they're supposed to be good stories all right so our fix is just to keep it simple um on to the example I don't even think I can eat these pancakes Mary said they don't hold a candle to the ones from last week this is my favorite

St in town though period Susan smile this time I'm paying Mary waved her wallet above the table so what I did here is I changed the actual dialogue the words coming out of Mary's mouth to be snobby so we don't need snobbishly I had Susan smile because that's more realistic then salivated but also to show the period not a comma then I just cut Mary exclaimed so never be afraid to just you said it disappears and blends into the background all right on to the next one this is another one that should be a really

easy fix to level up your writing instantly so characters sing each other's names too much here is my mistake example well Susan I think the pancakes last week were better but these were still pretty good Mary said that may be true Mary but this is my favorite salad in town Susan took a big bite Susan this time I'm paying Mary still felt bad that she had forgotten her wallet last week Susan had been so nice to cover her all right so I see in the comments um we're already seeing that there are things wrong with

this picture there are so many names um I would really like to say that this is an exaggeration that I came up with but I see dialogue that looks like this all the time um sometimes I think it's people trying to get around providing a name for their character when they're writing in first person so they're doing this so that we can learn the character names sometimes it seems like they're using names to clarify who is speaking but you really want a light touch on names in dialogue um people do say each other's names so

maybe when they're saying hello or goodbye or if they're in a large group and they need to specify who they are talking to or they're speaking a hard truth or it's a really serious moment um or maybe one character has a habit of saying a lot of names I do know people who are like this and they always stand out to me but people normally don't say lots of names like in this example listen to this next time you are in the position to e drop and you won't hear all of these names all right

so my fix is pretty easy cut the names all right we can cut all the names in the spoken dialogue here and we still know exactly who is talking uh I'm not going to read this one aloud for the sake of time I think we are kind of sick of talking about pancakes at this point um but you just we don't need the names to know who is talking I would say that in 90% of circumstances you can cut the names from your dialogue it is so quick and easy and it will make your writing

seem instantly more professional all right we are going to switch up the example when we go to our next topic characters floating in space all right on to our example okay so like I said I changed up the example I'm going to go from one of my favorite topics which is pancakes to another which is dogs okay did you make an appointment for the vet for BoBo Lara said oh shoot Joe said I forgot I was really counting on you to do that Lara said I know I know and I'm so sorry Joe said just

another thing to add to my list Laura said so there's nothing wrong with he said she said nothing technically wrong but this is kind of boring right we don't know where these characters are or what they're doing so the fix is to add action thoughts and descriptions okay Lara scratched behind Bobo's ears he didn't seem to have as much energy as normal it was nice to snuggle up on the couch but she was worried that he wasn't running around like he normally would be this time of night did you make an appointment for the vet

oh shoot Joe barely looked up from his phone I forgot I was really counting on you to do that Lara sighed and shifted away from Joe I know I know and I'm so sorry Joe didn't sound very sorry he was chuckling at something on his phone just another thing to add to my list Lura stood up and stomped away Bobo followed her tail tapped between his legs and my dog's name is Bobo and he's in here with me so he's still he seems to be sleeping through all these mentions of his name um so see

how pretty simple actions and thoughts can really change this dialogue so in the um previous example Joe was definitely in the dogghouse but now that he's buried in his phone and Lara is stomping away we know that he's really in big trouble so just through adding a little bit you no longer have characters in space we know that they're on the couch and then they're getting up and they're moving away and we have a lot more accused for the emotions here so one thing I would love for you all to do is uh think about

as you write what balance are you hoping to build in your writing between dialogue action and Whit space it's weird to judge this on slides in a presentation but when you look at a word doc or scrier or whatever you use to draft you should be getting a sense for the balance that you want um there's no real right answer or exact formula here um but you want to get a sense of this is it's part of your voice as a writer all right so we made it even with our little mishap in the beginning

just key takeaways instead of focusing on the mistakes we're going to focus on the fixes and our key takeaways summarize info characters would already know break up big chunks of dialogue use a new paragraph for a new character speaking or in Cut unnecessary dialogue tags keep dialogue tags simple don't be afraid of said cut unnecessary names and show the physical world around the dialogue all right time for questions I see the chat is hopping over here cool oh just putting myself back on here thanks so much for that Tracy it was really yeah the the

comments have been great I think people have been sort of spotting some familiar uh Trends in their own manuscripts perhaps so I hope you're able to learn a lot from that see Bobo where is he he's over here oh is that bobo he is gonna order pancakes and clean up my office which is a big mess which I normally try to hide well while the uh questions come in what time of the day do you think Susan and Mary were were eating because I'm trying to figure out which one of them is deranged either like

Susan for having a salad breakfast or marry for having pancakes too late you guys don't eat pancakes that maybe it's an American thing pancakes are like fair game for dinner oh okay wow that's so funny I never even thought of that H okay let's it's a diner it's a diner thing oh yeah maybe I'm heading to America in in the summer so maybe I'll have to do that yeah get some pancakes pancakes for um for the table there's a whole thing table pancakes and then everybody can have a bite of pancake and some salad uh

shine has a question can you talk a bit about Whit space I think you mentioning that uh when you're talking there about adding the thoughts and actions yeah and like casting around do we have a um do you want to bring back the the slide from before yeah I was trying to get um an image of it in a physical book and I think that this is something that you should look at books in the genre and age category that you are writing and one trick you can even do is retype those books onto a

Word document and then you will see what does that look like what does that final book look like when it is on a Word document and how much white space is there so yeah I mean I have a picture book this is my picture book that just came out and you'll see in a picture book there's just a ton of OB ly white space in the final book there's just three words on that page maybe 10 on this one a little bit of dialogue in this one um but on a word doc it's just like

one or two pages total and there's still a ton of white space obviously that's not going to be the case for Memoir or fiction which I cannot reach from my chair and I don't want to knock everything over after all of the mishaps that we've had uh but that's just more of gaining a sense of what the balance is for a given scene a given character in your voice as a writer uh cool let's bring up uh another one here uh some people are asking about showing someone's thoughts cuz I guess you know when I

started writing stuff whenever anyone had any sort of thoughts I would you know put it in italics or oh this is strange comma I thought um whereas I see you just sort of presenting it quite directly in some of the examples you had yeah um I mean we could spend a whole other hour talking about character thoughts right um my favorite way to address thoughts is just to blend them into the narrative not say I thought not say um not put them in italics um you will see in more like distant removed point of views

or perhaps a more omniscient point of view things like italics and things like uh Mary thought but if you have a closer point of view certainly first person even a third person where we're really getting inside someone's head you just blend the thoughts right into the pros cool thank you Steph s asks how do you recommend using dialogue tags when you don't know someone's name using the man or the child can get repetitive yeah absolutely um that's where actions and thoughts can really be your your friend um are you talking about it depends on if

you're talking about you know the point of view character if you are closely following you know there's a child that's your main character and you're not using their name um you're not going to be able to avoid a lot of the use of the child uh but you can swap in um you know he she they whatever pronouns are appropriate um as well instead of just saying the child uh let's see what else do we have here uh Chrissy M mckinnes asks would you say fancy tags are more acceptable in some genres say romance I

would say that they're least acceptable in a picture book um where every word is just so scrutinized and it'll be read aloud um when you're writing in longer genres longer age categories you can get away with more um I wouldn't say I think you probably end up seeing them more in books that perhaps Le have less time spent on Cy editing so perhaps books like the romance probably has a little bit less time spent on copy editing because there's a lot of pressure to publish quickly um a lot of self-published books have a lot of

pressure to publish quickly sometimes I think we'll see these like hotly anticipated fantasy followups um where there's a lot of pressure to publish quickly and I think in some of those cases um every word is perhaps not scrutinized as much but I I don't know they always bother me but I'm an editor so when I'm listening to a published book and I'm like oh I would have cut that it still really bothers me uh boy boss I think asked earlier uh how would you go about subtext I think they're sort of asking from a neurod

Divergent uh perspective of you know dealing with subtext in dialogue can I see that how would you go about subtext so um I didn't really tackle subtext too much in this because I wanted to focus on mistakes um like basic common mistakes subtext I say is a way to level up dialogue past clean dialogue to really amazing dialogue so if I'm understanding subtext the way this is how the way that I understand subtext is characters are saying one thing and behind what they're saying is a whole other world that's going on so they could be

saying the opposite of what's really happening they could be saying something that um you know it's it's like a little bit like what Lara was saying about Bobo like I was really counting on you to do that the subtext to that might be that Joe has let her down on something every single day this week um or that she's on her way out you know like this is the last draw yeah I mean I'm a huge fan of of subtext I think a lot of it it's really hard to show in super short examples um

a lot of it comes from the context of getting to know the characters a lot of it comes from description actions thoughts um the pivotal short story that's used to teach subtext is um I'm gonna get the word slightly wrong but H Hills like white elephants by Hemingway whatever the exact title is someone wants to chime in in the chat um where they're talking about oh I don't want to spoil it anyways they're talking about the surroundings and it shows through subtext that there's something very important going on with these characters in their personal lives

uh and Hemingway would be an example of a writer who has a lot of white space so even with the subtext and so much being shown by the surroundings he doesn't add a lot around his dialogue yeah it feels like a lot of it comes in with like your action beats like if the action beat doesn't match up to something they said that might mean they're sort of hiding something um yeah the action beats sometimes when you have them between two sections of dialogue it like gives it almost like a pause between those bits which

can sort of load it up quite a bit as well right and sometimes you don't always realize that there has been subtext in dialogue until you read on later and then you're like I have to go back and read and see what I think about that dialogue now and I think that's really fun as as a reader uh cool uh let's do one last one here hasht ask how much is too much dialogue that's a great question and there's no right answer I mean I think that relates a lot to what we were talking about

with um Whit space and um it depends on the characters depends on the scenes I would say that if you feel like your characters are doing small talk or it's not moving the plot forward or not showing us something really important about the character then it's probably too much cool all right well Tracy I want to thank you so much for uh braving the storm and uh joining us back for this one um as we mentioned we're going to have the uh transcripts available to everyone in a few days and I'm sure we'll be able

to turn this one into a podcast also up on Friday uh Tracy of course is an editor available to work on your projects on rezy um the link to her profile is just in the video description rey.com trcy sorry gold- Tracy uh I had a look at it there is a Tracy gold but I think that was an account we set up in AA movie uh so yeah what sort of projects are you looking to work on right now what sort of U so I work on a lot of picture books but I also love

working on novels and Memoirs I love fantasy I love sci-fi I love stories about underdogs in both Memoir and in fiction um anyone fighting a really interesting uphill battle that's that's the kind of story that I'm interested in cool well if you if that sounds like something you're working on do reach out to Tracy thank you all for joining us today stay safe catch you next time bye