It's quite possible that your dialogue is not as bad as you think. When we think of all the timeless Licherachoor we want to write, the sparkling passages of which we dream and which we idolize in our favourite writers are usually not the dialogue. So after sculpting some Booker/Pullitzer winning passages, we get to our dialogue and it seems so ... normal and well, boring. But speech tends to be like that. If you transcribed a real conversation between your friends, you'd see how much drivel and purely functional non-literary bits there are in a conversation. And I think it's important to allow yourself that. Not every conversation in your writing can be full of Tarrantino-esque quips on postmodern culture.
I always used to struggle with dialogue because it seemed to be commonplace stuff that was necessary to the structure of the writing, but not very interesting in itself. But these days after lots of practice (there's another thing - the more of it you write, the smoother and more natural it feels) I feel much more confident with it, and start to stress more over the other stuff, which is an odd turnaround.
Now whether I've just lowered my standards to let in my crappy dialogue, or whether I've just become more comfortable with the ordinariness of speech, allowing myself to enjoy the less-showy but nonetheless vital and entrancing rhythms of conversation, is anyone's guess, but it gets me through.
An important feature of prose versus something like poetry is that it achieves a lot of its effect through accretion of detail. Characters can reveal themselves slowly through subtle rhythms in their speech. What you think is cardboard now might just be a necessary part of that character's construction, which will develop throughout the length of the work, and you need to give it that time, and allow for some ordinariness in their speech along the way. |
