Writing Great Kid Lit Scenes Using Dialogue and Thoughts, by Chris Eboch

To celebrate the release of my new book, You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers, I’m sharing an excerpt from a chapter on dialogue and thoughts: 

A good scene typically has a mix of action and dialogue, with some thoughts and enough description to help the reader picture the setting. Some scenes are going to be mainly action. Others are going to be mainly dialogue. If that’s appropriate to reality, that’s fine. For example, people don’t usually stop in the middle of battle to have conversations. Or you might have a character who is alone for a stretch of time, with no one to talk to. But in general, a story will be more entertaining and flow better if it has plenty of action and dialogue. Watch out for scenes that are all description, with no action, or all action, with no dialogue.

Thoughts as Dialogue

You can also use thoughts in place of dialogue. This helps keep the action from seeming like just a lot of stuff happening with no emotional reaction. Here’s a scene from my middle grade Egyptian mystery, The Eyes of Pharaoh, where there’s no dialogue. The main character, Seshta, has just dropped down from the roof after spying on people. I’ll italicize the things that come across as her thoughts, to make them obvious. However, they were not italicized in the actual book. Also notice that I don’t need to say “she thought.” Because we are in her viewpoint, it’s clear this is what she is thinking.

            She paused under a willow tree to calm and arrange herself. She moaned as she smoothed her dress. Dust and little tears marred the fine linen, with one big rip in the hem. How would she explain the ruined dress to the priestess? She tried to cover herself with the shawl.

            Most of the party guests still lingered at the far end of the garden. Musicians on lutes, reeds, and drums had joined the harpist. Seshta trudged past the pond. What should she do next? She wanted to hear what Prince Penno said to Meryey, but they would be on their guard to make sure Miw’s father didn’t spy on them.

            Why was Miw’s father there? What did the prince mean about “the other girl?” They hadn’t said anything yet about Reya; she had to focus on him, whatever other strange things happened.

Notice how thought is woven in with action to show her reaction. In a battle scene, you might have fewer thoughts, but there could still be some, even if they’re brief:

            Richard is in trouble. Got to get to him.

            That came close.

            Duck!

Don’t Forget The Reaction

In real life, we don’t always know why things happen. In fiction, we should. We expect story events to follow a logical pattern, where cause leads to a reasonable effect. If you show a cause without an effect or an effect without a cause, you confuse your readers.

This goes beyond the cause and effect of major plot action. It includes a character’s internal reaction to the external action. Yet I often see manuscripts where action is followed by action with no internal reaction, so we don’t understand the character’s motives. No matter how great the action, the reader is confused and skeptical.

This has ghosts for sure!

Within each scene, you need to show not only what your main character does, but also why. Don’t assume people can read between the lines. In one manuscript I critiqued, the main character heard voices. Ghosts? The narrator never identified them as such. Did the boy think the voices had another source? Had he not yet decided? Maybe they weren’t supposed to be ghosts after all. The writer may have assumed that readers would interpret this properly, but by not putting the narrator’s interpretation on the page, she left this reader confused.

In Manuscript Makeover, Elizabeth Lyon suggests using this pattern: stimulus – reaction/emotion – thoughts – action. In other words, something happens to your main character (the stimulus); you show his emotional reaction, perhaps through dialogue, an exclamation, gesture, expression, or physical sensation; he thinks about the situation and makes a decision on what to do next; and finally he acts on that decision. This lets us see clearly how and why a character is reacting. The sequence may take one sentence or several pages, so long as we see the character’s emotional and intellectual reaction, leading to a decision. You can vary the pattern, but make sure you include emotions and thoughts so your character’s behavior is clear.

An Example from The Eighth Day

Dianne K. Salerni’s shares an example from her middle grade fantasy adventure, The Eighth Day. First, here’s the excerpt with action, dialogue, and description, but no thoughts:

           Jax rode his bike into the center of town. The streets were empty. The traffic lights were on, but frozen green, red, or yellow.

            “Oh, crap!” Jax yelled, braking.

            It took three tries for Jax to break through the glass doors of the Walmart with a concrete parking block. He filled up a shopping cart with supplies he’d seen people grab before snowstorms or hurricanes and during zombie movies.

Without including thoughts, Jax’s action doesn’t make sense. Some readers might be able to guess why he’s doing what he’s doing, but others might be baffled, or they might guess wrong. Here’s the actual scene (slightly edited for brevity), with thoughts:

            Jax rode his bike into the center of town. The streets were empty. The traffic lights were on, but frozen green, red, or yellow. (Stimulus: what he sees)

            He thought about zombies.

            He thought about alien abduction.

            He thought about the old movie where Will Smith and his dog were the last creatures on earth. (Thoughts)

            “Oh, crap!” Jax yelled, braking. (Reaction/Emotion)

            Will Smith and his dog had not been alone in that movie. There’d been other creatures that lurked in dark places and came out at night to kill. (Thoughts)

            It took three tries for Jax to break through the glass doors of the Walmart with a concrete parking block. He filled up a shopping cart with supplies he’d seen people grab before snowstorms or hurricanes and during zombie movies. (Action)

Now the reader knows what Jax is thinking, how he’s interpreting the situation, so his actions make sense. The scene is also more dramatic, with more emotion.

What's he thinking?

Writers often forget to include the character’s emotional reaction and decision-making. We are so familiar with our characters that it’s obvious to us how they would feel and why they would do what they do next. You just have to remember to put what you know on the page. My first draft of a scene often focuses on the action and dialogue. I read back through it intentionally focusing on the reaction, the character’s emotional response, using both physical sensations and thoughts.

Make sure you’re using action, dialogue, description, and reaction, possibly in the form of thoughts. Then you’ll have vivid, believable scenes building a dramatic story.

Find much more advice on story development in You Can Write for Children: How to Write Great Stories, Articles, and Books for Kids and Teenagers, which is available for the Kindle, in paperback, or in Large Print paperback.

Chris Eboch’s novels for children include The Genie’s Gift, a middle eastern fantasy; The Eyes of Pharaoh, a mystery in ancient Egypt; The Well of Sacrifice, a Mayan adventure; and Bandits Peak, a survival story. Her writing craft books include You Can Write for Children and Advanced Plotting. 

Learn more at www.chriseboch.com or her Amazon page, or check out her writing tips at her Write Like a Pro! blog. Sign up for her workshop newsletter for classes and critique offers.

Revision Notes, by Tracy Edward Wymer

I’m in the middle of a major revision on my middle grade novel. This would explain my short-term memory loss, constant misplacement of car keys, and truncated conversations with friends I normally enjoy talking to. In short, my mind is Elsewhere. 

I've always compared revising a novel to taking a car engine apart, piece by piece, and spreading the pieces over the garage floor, then cleaning and fixing every piece and putting the engine back together again. Presto! Like magic!  

Yeah, right. Revising a novel takes maximum effort, focus, and persistence. And a lot of coffee!

Since I'm going through this process now, I thought I’d share a few revision notes, with examples, that have helped me develop my story, in hopes of it reaching its full potential. Most of these notes, or suggestions, came from my agent, but some of you might have beta readers who would point out similar instances to you. I always find that concrete examples help tremendously (the teacher inside of me speaks!), and I hope that you can take something useful away from them. 

Keep in mind, this story is still a work-in-progress. 

Revision Notes

1. More! - Like my recent shortened conversations with friends (because of the revision), search your manuscript for truncated scenes. I tend to bottle up my main character’s emotions (gee, I wonder who the main character gets that from) and stop short of finishing conversations between characters. This leaves the scene unfinished, with an abrupt ending.   

Scene Synopsis: Eddie, the main character, has been shot with a pellet gun, and has a pellet lodged in his back. He was shot by his nemesis, Mouton, an overgrown bully with Tourette Syndrome. Gabriela, the new girl in town, who is also from Brazil, is helping Eddie.

Original Scene: 

At Gabriela’s house, under the bathroom light, she uses tweezers to pull out the pellet in my back. She places an ice pack over the tiny hole. It’s not a hole that goes all the way through me, just a hole that goes through one layer of skin. 

“You are luck,” Gabriela says. “This could have been worse.”

“You mean lucky.”

Gabriela rolls her eyes. She presses harder on the ice pack.    

“Ouch!” 

“I knew you would be injured during this mission,” she says. “Night air is bad air.” 

“Where did you hear that phrase? Let me guess, The Phantom Tollbooth?” 

She smiles, holding the ice pack on my wound. Let me say that again. The prettiest girl in school is holding an ice pack on MY WOUND.  

I am lucky. 

I have my bike. 

I have my girl. 

Now I can find my Golden Eagle.

In this revised scene, I did not add-on to the end of it, but implemented more dialogue prior to the ending. I liked the ending that I had originally written, so I left it alone. 

Revised Scene:

At Gabriela’s house, under the bathroom light, she uses tweezers to pull out the pellet in my back. She places an ice pack over the tiny hole. It’s not a hole that goes all the way through me, just a hole that goes through one layer of skin. 

“You are luck,” Gabriela says. “This could have been much worse.”

“You mean lucky.”

Gabriela rolls her eyes. She presses harder on the ice pack.    

“Ouch!” 

“I knew you would be injured during this mission,” she says. “Night air is bad air.” 

“Where did you hear that phrase? Let me guess, The Phantom Tollbooth?” 

“That is right. I am learning more unusual English phrases from Milo and his dog than I am learning at school.”

“Have you made it to the part in the book when—”

“Eddie! Do not ruin the story for me!”

She adjusts the ice pack on my wound. 

“You should see Mouton’s room,” I say. “It’s covered in all these paintings that look real. I can’t believe he can paint like that.” 

“I am not surprised.” 

“What? How can you not be surprised?” 

“Everyone has a special talent,” she says. “Mouton cannot control what he says, but he can control what he puts on a canvas.”

“Wow. When you say it like that, it sort of makes sense.” 

“Maybe he can help you with your project.”  

“Yeah, maybe.”

She smiles, holding the ice pack on my wound. Let me say that again. The prettiest girl in school is holding an ice pack on MY WOUND.  

I am lucky. 

I have my bike. 

I have my girl. 

Now I can find my Golden Eagle. 

2. Cut Telling! Show this! (Show, don't Tell) - Middle grade readers need the story to roll quickly, so pacing is always on my mind when writing. Because of this, I have a habit of fast-forwarding through mini-scenes that, if written in full, can reveal a lot of about characters. 

Scene Synopsis: Eddie is walking with Miss Dorothy, an elderly woman, back to her house. Eddie has grown up birdwatching on Miss Dorothy’s land. 

Original: 

I walk with Miss Dorothy from her house, giving her my arm to lean on. She tells me about the times Dad brought me here. She remembers when I said my first word: bird. Dad once told me it was a sound between nerd and turd, so he and Mom guessed it had to be bird.   

Revised:

I walk with Miss Dorothy toward her house, giving her my arm to lean on.

“I used to love seeing you here with your dad,” she says. “He was a good man.”

“Miss Dorothy?” 

“What is it, Eddie?” 

“Was my dad…” 

I hesitate, scared of what she might tell me.  

“Go on, Eddie, spit it out.” 

“Was my dad an honest person?” I finally ask her. 

She stops walking and looks up at six bobwhite quail perched on a telephone wire.

“Put it this way, Eddie. Your father was his own person. He was true to himself. The way I see it, that’s as honest as one can be.”

I nod, letting her know that I get what she’s saying.

She smiles, grabbing onto my arm, and we walk to her house.  

3. Too Vague! Be Specific! - Be wary of vague language and unclear moments in your narrative. Make every word and moment (in this case, memory) specific. This will help with character development, and make your characters feel more dimensional.

Original:

I want to yell something back at Mouton, like Dad did once to a birder who was in his way. 

Revised:

I want to yell something back at Mouton, like Dad did once when he told another birder who wouldn’t get out of his way to “move it or lose ’em,” in reference to the guy’s teeth. But if I say something like that, Mouton will totally sabotage my locker.  

Say what?!

Now for one of my pet peeves.  I’ve noticed, as I’m sure many of you have, an increasing trend in modern fiction: the use of non-speech verbs as dialogue tags.

For example:

“That is the ugliest prom dress I’ve ever seen,” said Jessica, cringing.

Becomes:

“That is the ugliest prom dress I’ve ever seen,” cringed Jessica.

I think I understand why writers do this.  They feel it streamlines the text and gets rid of unnecessary words.  The “said” is implied by the quotation marks, right, so why does it need to be spelled out for the reader?

While this may be true, using non-speech verbs in this manner feels very awkward and incorrect to me.  I’m sorry, you can’t cringe dialogue, no matter how hard you try.

Now, I’ve been known to push the envelope with verbs like “hiss” and “laugh.”  Hiss has long been a subject of controversy when it comes to dialogue, with one faction arguing rather vociferously that you simply can’t hiss your words.  Personally, I don’t mind hiss as a dialogue tag.  I know you can hiss words.  I had a rather scary fourth-grade music teacher who was champ at it when she got angry.  Which was rather a lot…

I also think it’s possible to laugh words.  You know, when you’re trying to speak but you’re laughing so hard that your words come out sounding a little choked up and trembling with your laughter.

These work for me.  But what I really find distracting are words that are not even close to being speech-related used as dialogue tags:

“Hi there,” waved Jim.

“What a lovely day it is,” smiled Mary.

No, no, no, I say, cringing.  (NOT: No, no, no, I cringe.)

Use of non-speech verbs this way will just never feel right to me.  More importantly, I think it should be avoided because it has the potential to be distracting for many readers.  (I've also heard that some industry professionals feel that it gives your writing an amateurish look.)  But perhaps that’s me being old-fashioned when it comes to dialogue.  What do you think?

-Dawn Lairamore

photo credit: Ian Sane via photopin cc

Writing Dialogue for Middle Grade

I thought I’d continue Dawn’s discussion of what makes middle grade by focusing on writing middle grade dialogue. I have some writer friends who are querying stories and have been told the voice in their stories is YA instead of middle grade and vice versa. That got me thinking about what exactly that means in terms of dialogue.

The most glaring way to make something not middle grade is to have too many snarky characters. Certain television shows may make it seem like 11-year-olds are the most incredibly sophisticated, world-weary, witty mini-adults, but middle grade writers who have actually been around children know 11-year-olds don’t have the speech patterns of Jon Stewart wannabes.

As brave teachers know, in a group of thirty middle-graders, there will probably be one or two precocious ones who can outsnark most adults, but the rest of them talk like kids. That means there will be lots of teasing, random thoughts popping up that have nothing to do with the current conversation, some one-upmanship, and general silliness. There is absolutely not going to be deep discussions about feelings, nor much talk about life beyond the next few weeks, except when it involves birthday party or Halloween costume planning, all of which are discussed months in advance.


There is also an amazing difference in the way most kids talk among themselves and how they talk (or don’t) when a non-family adult or close friend of the family is present. By middle-grade age, most kids don’t let their whole personalities show around unfamiliar adults. They become much more quiet, except for the few very confident ones.


I get tired of the articles I read that claim you can hook middle grade boys with stories containing jokes about body functions. By the time boys are middle-grade age, those jokes are no longer so funny to most of them and they don't tell so many of them. A first grader will laugh, but most fifth grader have moved way beyond that. When they are together, they are much more interested in talking about their current obsessions, whether it be games, sports, books, movies, tv shows, or anything that fascinates them. And a fascination for one kid will lead him to talk about it whether or not anyone else is interested. There are books that describe toddlers doing ‘parallel play’, where they are playing next to each other, but not interacting. I think middle-graders have a lot of parallel conversations. It can be very funny to listen to three kids discussing three different subjects all at the same time. Sometimes one will listen to another, but often they just keep talking.

I have loved my years of being a mom chauffeur and eavesdropping in on middle-grader conversation. Kids at that age are so funny, it is one of the reasons I chose to write for this age group. I'd love to hear more tips and thoughts from any of you as writers, parents, teachers or librarians ~Dee

Talking the Good Talk—My Tips on Dialogue

If you’re writing fiction, dialogue is most likely going to make up a good part of your book, so you want it to be topnotch. Dialogue is a major means by which any character’s voice is expressed, and dialogue was probably the most difficult challenge I faced as a new writer. My novel, Ivy’s Ever After, was my first serious attempt at writing fiction. My prior fiction history consisted of two short stories I eked out while taking a creative writing class in college (boy, did they stink!), and an abandoned attempt to write a children’s novel several years later (I made it as far as Chapter 4). I didn’t have much experience with dialogue, and it wasn’t really working out for me. I’d re-read chapters I’d spent hours writing, only to discover that all the characters sounded the same. Grrrrr—how boring! I wanted characters that came alive in the reader’s imagination, that jumped off the page, that exuded interesting and distinctive personalities. Don’t we all? And since this was something greatly on my mind while I was writing Ivy, I thought I’d use my Project Mayhem debut—and my very first blog post ever!!—to share some of the tips that helped me the most with dialogue.

I learn best through observation and examples, so I made a point of reading lots in the realm of middle-grade (which you should be doing anyway, duh). When I came across a book with particularly great dialogue, I’d read those sections over again. I’d try to pinpoint what about these characters’ voices made them so enticing, and how I could apply these methods to my own writing. I checked audio books out of the library and listened to them while I commuted to work, made long drives to visit friends out of town, and did boring stuff around the house like scrubbing the kitchen floor. There was something about hearing dialogue performed out loud that really helped the nuances sink in. (This is one of the reasons, by the way, that I always read everything I’ve written out loud. But I think it’s especially important for dialogue. You’ll be able to hear if it sounds unnatural or just doesn’t flow.) 

During this time, someone at a writing conference passed along her favorite tip for dialogue. You should, she told me, be able to take any line of dialogue out of context and be able to tell which character said it—their speech styles should be that distinctive. This was great advice, but not advice I agreed with in its entirety. I mean, come on, if your character says something like, “No,” or “I’d like a glass of water,” do you really need to go out of your way to make that super-duper distinctive (“Nay, forsooth, my friends,” “Gimme a glass of water or I’ll smash your face, punk.”)? I think if you get carried away with this, your dialogue can start sounding over-the-top, and you’ll just end up annoying your readers. But, in general, this has been a useful tip for me. I certainly think you should be able to identify large chucks of dialogue or any especially significant dialogue using this method. 

Most helpfully, I made a list of my major characters and what I thought their speech style should be like given their background and personality. Did they talk fast or slow? Were the thoughts expressed in a scattered or orderly fashion? Did they use a lot of expressions and if so, what kind? Did they have a speech impediment? Stutter or slur their words? 

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ivy’s Ever After, it’s a fractured fairy tale about a princess and a dragon who team up against a (not-so-nice) handsome prince. (You can read Chapter 1 at my website, http://www.ivyseverafter.com/.) Here’s how I tried to distinguish the speech styles of several characters: 

• Ivy, my princess, is far from a proper lady. She’s sassy, opinionated, bold—and her dialogue shows it. She doesn’t stand on formality, so she often uses colloquialisms or speaks in sentence fragments. She doesn’t hide emotion, as a proper princess would—when she gets angry or excited, the exclamation points start coming out! Sometimes she interrupts other characters if she doesn’t like what they have to say. (Oh, how I love this feisty princess—but no one said she had the best manners in the world.)
• Elridge, my dragon, is not your typical dragon. He’s timid rather than ferocious. He stutters when he gets nervous. He uses the expression, “Dear me,” a lot, often uttered at faint-hearted moments, sort of the way Piglet was always muttering, “Oh d-d-dear,” in those Winnie the Pooh cartoons I loved when I was a kid.
• Ivy’s father, the king, speaks formally, as you would expect of a royal monarch. He tends to use complete sentences and proper sentence structure, and his vocabulary is a little more sophisticated than that of the other characters.
• Ivy’s fairy godmother, Drusilla, is overly excitable. She tends to get caught up in a single train of thought and ramble on and on. . . . Can you say run-on sentence?
• The trolls in Ivy’s world live in large underground caverns. I wanted them to sound different than their human counterparts—they live a very different subterranean existence, after all—so I peppered their dialogue with a lot of rock- and cave-related insults and expressions: “Boulder-brain!” “Dripstone!” “Feldspar fungus!”

I hope some of these methods are as helpful to you as they were for me. And, even though Ivy’s Ever After was released back in May, other Project Mayhemers have been so great about giving away copies of their books that I’m not about to let them show me up! So, please follow and leave a comment to win a signed copy of Ivy’s Ever After. And thanks for stopping by :)