Contractions in dialogue?

[TheNaughtyCraftsman]

I know that as a rule contractions should be avoided, but if they are part of dialogue are they ok? At times it seems a little stiff and stilted otherwise. "I will have" as opposed to "I'll have" for example. Thanks.

 

[TxRad]

I know that as a rule contractions should be avoided, but if they are part of dialogue are they ok? At times it seems a little stiff and stilted otherwise. "I will have" as opposed to "I'll have" for example. Thanks.

The first rule of writing is that rules are made to be broken.

When I started writing, I decide I would try to write as people speak and not how my English teacher said it had to be done. It's worked out pretty good so far. Out of 150+ stories here on Lit, over a hundred of them have the red H and 8 or 9 have a blue W. Not bad for a dirty old man.

 

[TheNaughtyCraftsman]

Thanks, that was what I was thinking as well. It makes it a little harder when you have part of your brain trying to play grammar nazi as your characters are talking.

 

[PennLady]

I know that as a rule contractions should be avoided, but if they are part of dialogue are they ok? At times it seems a little stiff and stilted otherwise. "I will have" as opposed to "I'll have" for example. Thanks.

Fiction writing has different rules than the formal writing most of us learned in school. If you are writing a conversation, think about how those people would talk. Do you want them to sound like Data from Star Trek? Or like they're from the 19th century? That's fine. But writing something more contemporary will almost demand contractions.

A common thing I find in stories is that lack of contractions make the stories and characters seem very stiff. Contractions go a long way towards making things more "real" in many ways.

And FWIW, if you click on my story page in my sig and read any stories, you'll see I use contractions all the time.

 

[TxRad]

Thanks, that was what I was thinking as well. It makes it a little harder when you have part of your brain trying to play grammar nazi as your characters are talking.

Luckily, it has been long enough since my last English class that I don't remember half that crap anyway.

Now if I could just get a handle on homilies and commas.

 

[sr71plt]

Dialogue should approximate (to the degree it doesn't start bothering the reader) how that particular character would speak. Most of us speak using personal pronoun contractions, so that's a basic "it's OK" in writing dialogue. (In contrast "period" piece foreign-speaker dialogue often doesn't use contractions in dialogue to help signal the time/place/origin, even if they really did use contractions in that period/place).

Beyond that, you can show different levels of education in characters by having your lesser-educated, or regional-speaking characters using contractions that cut off the "g" in gerunds, e.g., gonna, tryin', and such common speech short cut as "wanna" for "want to."

This shouldn't precisely follow spoken speech, though (play back a recording of a conversation. It often will be a mish mash of contractions, repeated words and phrases, and incomplete sentences). It should be used just enough to flaover the dialogue to categorize that particular character.

Use your ears to listen to speech patterns for the type of character you are portraying in your stories, use some of those mannerisms, and tone them down a bit.

 

[RodenAddison]

I use contractions a lot in dialogue. People don't speak the way they are taught to write in general. The spoken word tends to be filed with contractions, incomplete sentences, even wrong words and screwed up idiom. It can make it more real.

When it comes to narrative, it's a whole other ball game. Way stricter.

My favourite broken idiom was provided by a neighbour who was having a real problem with a contractor.

"If he thinks I'm going to let him get away with that he can just go screw me!"