Dialogue. We’ve all heard the amazing benefits of adding good dialogue to our manuscripts. Tired, worn-out prose? Add snappy dialogue for instant zap. Article screeching to a halt? Jump-start it with quotes from experts. Tasty dialogue: It’s nutrition for your manuscripts. It moves your story along, helps you get to know your characters and their strengths and foibles, and it satisfies your reader’s urge to eavesdrop without getting caught.

What makes a sandwich?

When making a sandwich, you need two basic things: outer layers and inner layers. The outer layers could be bread, a bun, a pita. If you’re on a low-carb diet, it might be two lettuce leaves. The outer layers are important because they flavor and hold your inner layers in one place. When you combine your outer wrappings with your peanut butter and jelly, turkey and swiss, or potato chips and sweet pickle slices, you end up with a great meal.

What’s this got to do with writing?

A satisfying dialogue sandwich has the same features your favorite sandwich has: outer and inner layers. The truly neat thing about a dialogue sandwich, however, is that you can make the innards the outers, or the outers the innards. What, exactly, constitutes the innards and outers of a dialogue sandwich? Speaking parts and action parts.

To make your dialogue sandwich, choose two speaking parts as your outers, and slap an action part in the middle for your innards, like this:
Before: Mandy pouted when her mom yelled at her.
After: “I don’t like it when you yell at me.” Mandy pursed her lips in a pout. “So don’t do it. Okay?”

Or use the handy-dandy amazing dialogue sandwich flip, and use two action parts for the outers and a speaking part for the innards, like this:
Before: Suddenly, Jeff remembered his library book.
After: Jeff slammed on the breaks. “Oh, no! I forgot my library book!” He scrambled out of the car and ran back in to Mandy’s house.

And there’s no law on the books that says you can’t make a sandwich using your dependable “said” and “asked” tags:
Before: “I can’t believe I flunked English this semester. That’s the last time I study at Mandy’s house,” Jeff said.
After: “I can’t believe I flunked English this semester,” Jeff said. “That’s the last time I study at Mandy’s house.”
(Note: Switching the innards and outers works great with dialogue sandwiches, but not with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

A Well-balanced Diet

Remember the first time you ate chocolate mousse and you wanted to devour it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? And remember the ensuing trips to the bathroom at inopportune times? I bet you learned that variety is one of the keys to a well-balanced diet, didn’t you?

To make sure your manuscript is getting the variety it needs, sprinkle some dialogue snacks in there to move your plot along from lunch to dinner. Build your snack by using simple dialogue tags such as “said” and “asked” or by using a quick action tag like this:
“What did you say? I wasn’t listening,” David said.
“What do you mean you don’t like pickled pigs’ feet?” Mary Lou asked.

After a light snack or two, consider where you can add another sandwich, strengthening your manuscript the way the entrée completes a meal by following the soup and salad.

Build Your Own Sandwiches

Now that you have a firm grasp of dialogue nutrition, practice your new sandwich-building skills on one of your old manuscripts. Then march your before and after manuscripts to your critique group and see how they like the menu change. Soon, you’ll be an expert at concocting dialogue sandwiches that leave your readers drooling for more.

Copyright 2010 Heathr Trent Beers