Kidlit Haha Week Day #2: LET’S TALK DIALOGUE! with Dev Petty

Let’s Talk Dialogue! (Hahahahaha, see what I did there?)

Howdy! Dev here, your friendly neighborhood picture book writer. If you’re reading this, it’s likely you write picture books, and also likely you have an interest in writing funny ones. Congratulations! What better thing can we do than give kids a hearty laugh, right? 

Yours truly is here today to share some thoughts on writing picture books in dialogue. Picture books written in dialogue can be hilarious, engaging, and memorable for readers, but writing them can be a tricky beastie. So much so that writers are often cautioned against it. Just like the big stack of successful picture books in dialogue I have on my shelf…that’s just silly.

I’ve been lucky enough to write and sell a handful of picture books in all dialogue including I DON’T WANT TO BE A FROG and its followups, CLAYMATES (along with the forthcoming CLAYDATE), and HOW OLD IS MR. TORTOISE? You could probably include my Chip the Dog books in there, too. If you’d like to take a peek at those, I recommend it, but there are many wonderful other examples of picture books written in dialogue.

Grab yourself a stack of Mo Willems, Jon Klassen, Jory John, and you’ll see there are a handful of things they all share. While books written in other ways contain tension and stakes, emotions, discord etc., books written in dialogue MUST have these things to hold the interest of a reader over the course of a picture book which is made of just talking.

It’s well to remember that reading a book written in dialogue can be fatiguing. Parents out there will surely remember late nights hoping to will the choice of a simple, narrative, don’t-have-to-point-at-the-guy-who’s-speaking book. Because of that, it becomes extra important to be punchy and economical. You don’t need every back and forth. We are spinning a story, not eavesdropping. When in doubt, I often try to imagine it a page or spread like a single panel comic. Think The Far Side or Bizarro.

What can I convey about the story and the storytellers in this limited space? A good tip is to think in vignettes. It might be a conversation on a page or three turns that bring a joke, bit, or interchange to a conclusion, but you have to have some sort of grouping that can be resolved.  Think in terms of how you might tell a joke aloud and what happens in that final moment before the punchline. Page turns are an amazing tool for making your point, you just have to remember to make it. Be deliberate. 

Grab thyself a stack of books written in dialogue, and you’ll see they often have a specific structural approach. A deliberate approach. I realize being deliberate can feel restrictive or contrived, but when it comes to dialogue, it can create a framework that is easy to work within, Your average sitcom opens at the same kitchen table or couch, has asides and bits.

Consider a few different ways of telling the same story: 

Example 1: 

A: What should we do today?

B: I don’t know.

A: What if we play outside.

B: Sure, let’s go. 

A: What should we do? 

B: Hmmmm. I don’t know.

A: Let’s build a fort.

B: Oh no, it’s raining. 

Example 2:

A: What should we do today?

B: Let’s go build a fort outside, or go fishing. 

A: That sounds fun, let’s go. 

B: Oh no, it’s raining.

Example 3:

A: Let’s play outside! We can build a fort and climb a hill and go fishing. We’ll pick berries and kick a ball. 

[Illus note: starts to rain] 

In this third example, we’ve accomplished a few things. We’ve cut the words, we’ve upped the personality, we’ve created a funny setup (perhaps these characters continue with big plans which are thwarted), and we’ve ceded the heavy lift to the illustrations giving a lot of nice, airy space in our writing. 

Working in all dialogue is a very specific choice. You do it when you want the characters to be your narrators. When you have characters you want to know through your story or a story you want to be known through your characters. This means you have to have some fairly well-defined characters whose personalities can be gleaned from their voices and also how they interact. How they interact, and in some ways, THAT they are interacting so closely (in dialogue), becomes a character itself. There’s a relationship there. And it may be quippy or droll, playful or overly-analytical, but it’s a relationship that hovers over everything else.

A good example of this is HOW OLD IS MR. TORTOISE? Where there is an ensemble of characters, most without super distinctive personalities, who are engaged in a shared goal/situation. 

Some tips on writing in dialogue:  

• Read your story aloud! Record yourself reading it. Have someone else read it to you. Read it like a play with a friend or have your children act it out! If that makes you feel silly, you’re in the wrong business. 

• Use a storyboard! Anyone who follows my silly writing ramblings knows I’m evangelical about this. I use the fantastic Debbie Ridpath Ohi’s printable storyboards. I print them out in droves and I can tell you my writing (and success rate selling things) has improved dramatically since I began using them. 

• Remember, no one wants to read fourteen spreads of characters just…talking. Dialogue or not, there has to be action on the page. Something has to be happening. This isn’t My Dinner With Andre told by farm animals. You are still telling a story, and stories need rising action, a turn/climax, a conclusion, a heart. 

• Commit. Use a palette knife, not an airbrush. Humor and dialogue aren’t smooth. Try to avoid homogenizing, qualifying, transitioning too much. Get and stick to your point. Remember a given joke or bit may simply not land, that’s life…that’s writing! But softening things doesn’t make it any more likely something will hit, so you might as well go for it. Better to have three kids fall over in stitches than a dozen kids quietly chuckle. 

• Slapstick is tricky. A banana peel fall is usually only funny if a character has spent a whole book talking about how they totally won’t slip on a banana peel. You need character and context for a surprise to land. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be surprise-ING in your writing, just make sure you hold your reader’s hand, so unexpected moments have a real and humorous impact. 

• It’s easy when we write humor, especially humor in dialogue, to get into animation mode, to lose the forest for the trees by writing a laundry list, a series of beats. This happened, then this, then THIS! Dialogue or not, you’re still trying to write a story. Write the story first…the humor and dialogue will follow.  

• Create thyself a dummy! Can’t draw? Stick figures, stickers, circles with eyes. Put it together in a dummy, and turn the pages and see how it flows. 

• Consider a middle ground. Use speech bubbles. Speech bubbles are a wonderful tool in your toolkit whether your picture book is third or first person, dialogue, whatever! Speech bubbles can help you  achieve that always desirable space between words and illustrations. When used with in-line dialogue, they can strengthen your character’s voice giving them an opportunity to break free from the narration and express how they feel or what they’re thinking. 

If I can impart one thing, it would be not to talk yourself out of dialogue. It can be a more technical kind of writing, but reading a funny, dialogue book aloud to a room full of first graders is just about the best feeling in the world. 

Funny story, I once read Jory John and Benji Davies’ book GOODNIGHT ALREADY at a bookstore reading for my book I DON’T WANT TO BE A FROG. The shop asked me to pick a book I liked, so I read that one. By the end, a kid was actually spread eagle, sobbing on the ground because he wanted that book, not mine, despite his mother trying desperately to be polite.

Why? Because it’s REALLY FUNNY. It’s a story that could be told in 3^rd person, or 1^st person, and it might fly! But that story is so perfectly done, and avails itself of all the joys of characters interacting aloud. It’s a clinic. 

So break free of “she said” and “he remarked.” Give yourself permission to get in there with some weird characters you cooked up in your head and just see how they handle a situation together, or at odds, or when one is really trying to get some rest. I assure you that you’ll learn a ton about timing and relationships and silliness.  

Happy Writing!

-Dev

Dev Petty is the author of several picture books including I DON’T WANT TO BE A FROG, CLAYMATES, DON’T EAT BEES, and HOW OLD IS MR. TORTOISE? You can find her most recent book, DON’T TRUST CATS, in bookstores in now.

In a former life, Dev worked in visual effects on The Matrix Trilogy and dozens of other projects. She lives in her native Berkeley with her husband, daughters, and pets including a snake named Boots.