Dialogue Exercise 3

In my last post I wrote about the piece of flash fiction entitled “Green Grass”. In that post I briefly described draft speed writing and how I managed to complete a story so quickly. The draft itself was far from great, but in the 15 minute writing session I had succeeded in more than enough so that the revision went rather quickly.

The revision was largely focused on dialogue. The structure had been completed in the draft and remained almost unchanged, but the dialogue needed tweaking. Even before I started revising the lines, my first thought was to eliminate the speech quotation marks. My fingers hesitated too long over the ‘delete’ key, so I figured I still wasn’t confident enough to write dialogue without quotation marks. So, I moved onto the dialogue itself, trying to squeeze out every drop of meaning, while also including a small section between Rachel and Austin that seems almost confusing and superfluous when talking about how Ben combs his non-existent hair. But I wanted those three lines so that it would temporarily distract the reader before the bomb dropped.

Once I was done with the dialogue I decided to eliminate half of the dialogue tags. Up until very recently, I had been really heavy on the use of dialogue tags. This is not because I don’t trust the reader, but because I like using tags to slow down the verbal action. But this really can’t be ideal in all situations, and it wasn’t in “Green Grass” so I reduced them by about half. Yeah, I use a lot of dialogue tags.

When it comes to long form writing, I think I will still tend to want to slow dialogue down by using tags. This is not just a style choice, it’s how I would like dialogue to be read. Short exchanges, but not quick reading. What will my readers think?