He Said, She Said: Dialogue Tips

Beats

Beats describe the actions that are interspersed with the dialogue. For example:

I took a deep breath. “What do you mean he isn’t coming home?”

The beat is the part where the character takes a deep breath.

Beats are important in any section of dialogue, whether the scene involves a lot of action or whether it’s mostly conversation. However, the intensity of the action will influence how frequent your beats will be. If the scene is high intensity action, such as dialogue that takes place during a fight, there will be a lot of beats. If the characters are sitting in a living room having a conversation, there will not be that many (however a few are still good to break up dialogue a little).

Where possible, you should use beats to replace adverb constructions. Compare:

“This isn’t fair!” she said angrily.

She stomped her foot. “This isn’t fair!”

Both sentences convey anger, but the second does it a little more smoothly than the first. One of the biggest problems with novice writing is the tendency to overuse adverbs, especially in dialogue tags. Avoid it with beats.

Furthermore, beats are important because body language is a major part of how we communicate; yet writers often ignore body language.

Body language is especially important when the writer needs to convey something that the character might not say aloud. For instance, a guy may not want to say that he’s nervous for his date. But if he’s fiddling with his zipper, the reader will understand he’s nervous without the character or the author coming straight out and saying it.

Be careful, though. Every author seems to have certain phrases they love and use all the time. If you say a character scratched his head twice on the same page, the reader may stop thinking he’s confused and start thinking he has lice. Classic example of too much of a good thing being a bad thing.