Hello,
I have in my story a couple of scenes with verbal confrontations, where the protagonist accuses people who have been lying to her and they try to explain their side and reveal some shocking information.
I’m worried of making these scenes too static by concentrating only on the dialog. At the same time, I’m worried that including too many physical reactions risks making the scene melodramatic, especially since there are only so many gestures and facial expressions expressing anger or emotional turmoil. Do you have any advice for me?
Best,
Camille
Hi Camille,
When you are just starting the dialogue, try to give a sense of the physical space the characters are in. They can interact with things in the space such as leaning against walls, pulling out chairs, thunking down on the couch, clutching glasses, etc. The body language can also be as much about how they are interacting with the other person as simply showing anger. For instance, one person can start to storm off and the other person can chase them down. You won’t need movement or body language for every line of dialogue, but it can generally fit in pretty often without being too much.
That said, when dialogue gets intense, you’ll probably have a section where everything else drops away and it’s pretty much just the dialogue. That’s okay; when things are intense the pacing should be tighter, and the dialogue is what’s most important. If you’ve set the scene earlier, readers will remember the general environment you introduced for a bit. If you want, you can break intense moments up by looking for places to add dramatic pauses. Let a character stare and seethe for a moment, for instance.
There’s no quick answer; it’s just about balance. I have a post on pacing dialogue that might be a little helpful if you haven’t read it.
Happy writing!
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If this is a movie, a play, or a comic book (any visual medium), then you’d have to worry about stage business, what the audience looks at while this is going on, though that is really more the department of the director, artist, or whatever
In prose, if the dialogue itself is powerful and dramatic enough, then you don’t need to describe the physical stuff nearly so much
Once we’ve started writing the story itself, how do we weave our worldbuilding into the dialog without having it come across as clunky?
This article might be helpful.
https://mythcreants.com/blog/taming-your-exposition/
You aim to reference things as much as a person in the real world would, and try to make those descriptions evocative enough that the reader can sort of guess what that’s referring to (even if it’s only an incomplete picture), while avoiding any ‘As you and I both know…’ tags. It helps when one member of the conversation knows things the other does not, or has a reason not to consider in their thought process.
“Should we plan to picnic on Sunday? I’d love an excuse to try my new wave-bike,” Steve said. [There’s a vehicle that probably travels over water.]
Katie shook her head. “I can’t ride in my hoop skirt until you save up for a sidecar, laserbrains. But the picnic sounds nice! What if we head to Hightower Park instead?” [A hoop skirt is a common thing for women to wear on a picnic. Laserbrains is a (friendly) insult. There’s a proper noun on that park that could be significant.]
Waving his hand in a so-so gesture, Steve said, “They said on the news we’re going to have frog-rain in the morning, so the park will be a total zoo.” [Frog-rain is some sort of weather that might not inconvenience a water-based picnic.]
“I guess we’re ordering in,” Katie sighed. “How do you feel about pizza balls? I’ve got the yamok sauce you like at home.” [Pizza-balls are a kind of food in this world. They’re tasty with yamok sauce.]
Now you’re all set to tell us about the plight of the poor yamok-berry farmers who are being exploited by the wealthy Hightower Corporation, and how Katie & Steve can reach their secret island research base even in the middle of a frogstorm.