A to Z of Business Storytelling -04

D — Dialogues

In the last post, I mentioned about the importance of characters in a story. What to characters do? They think, feel and act. But more than that, they talk often. By allowing the characters to talk, the storyteller ensures that the story is moving forward. When characters talk, how does the audience understand that? Through dialogues!

But many a times, the storyteller uses the ‘indirect speech’ format to explain the conversation between the characters. For example, a leader attempting to tell a corporate story may say as follows.

• My manager was furious. He was shouting at us for not taking the customer complaint seriously.

Imagine if the same is told in the following manner.

• Bala, my manager was fuming.
• “Team, what Tamasha is going on here?… Why are we not taking the customer complaint seriously?
• “No Bala, we thought that this is a trivial issue.”
• “What trivial?… Are we not aware that every complaint of our customer is serious?… You are one of the senior folks in the organization…. How come you missed it?”

Can you see the difference between the two approaches? The first approach was using an indirect speech. What were the limitations of it? The specific words used by the manager were missing. The audience may not be in a position to get to know the feelings of the character. Rather this approach was little boring. This kind of narratives are ok for essays, but not for stories.

The second approach was using a direct speech. i.e completely with the dialogues. The storyteller need not have to elaborate the feelings of the character in a detailed manner. After saying that the manager was fuming, the storyteller jumps into the dialogues. This approach also enables the storyteller to use a vocal variety.

The audience are intelligent enough to understand that who is the manager and who is the subordinate with the help of dialogues, vocal variety and the body language. Also when the speaker treats the audience intelligent, they do respect the speaker and connects with him/her better.

If the dialogues are meaningfully used, they drive the story plot. They take the story from one scene to another. Hence unwanted dialogues need to be minimized. One can see a major impact of storytelling, when dialogues are judiciously used.

To sum up here are a few tips while focussing on the dialogues.

• Takedown your script (print or softcopy) and highlight the conversation portion between the characters.
• Convert all the narratives into dialogues. i.e all indirect speeches into direct speeches.
• While delivering the dialogues, make use of emotions, vocal variety and body language appropriately. (These aspects would be covered in my other posts)

Please remember that if a dialogue is not advancing the story plot, consider removing it.

Kindly follow the hashtag #atozofbusinessstorytelling for others posts on this thread.