Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in the Eye II, Tate Modern. Photo credit: Karen Kao
A while ago, a student asked me to talk about writing dialogue. She
felt that her own dialogue was stilted, created solely for the purpose
of completing her writing exercise for the week.
I said something vague and probably wholly unsatisfactory, although
this student was too polite to say so. I think I mumbled something like:
use dialogue when it’s the most efficient way to convey your
information. When the reader needs to hear the words coming out of the
mouth of one of your characters.
After class, I went home and started looking at my writing books. As I
had hoped, there were plenty of better answers than my flubbed attempt.
So here’s what I learned about writing dialogue.
Legend has it that Truman Capote could eavesdrop on a conversation on
the street, rush back to his hotel room, and transcribe that
conversation verbatim. If true, that transcript would have been littered
with stammering,grammatical errors, and the cliches and banalities that constitute so much of our everyday conversation.
Francine Prose is an author and creative writing teacher. She recalls
being taught to avoid actual speech. Instead, her characters should
speak in fluent, economic and certain terms.
The idea, presumably, is that
fictional dialogue should be an “improved,” cleaned-up, and smoothed-out
version of the way people talk. Better than “real” dialogue.
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (Harper Perennial 2007)
So how do you write this new and improved dialogue?
Bad Dialogue
First, you need to know what bad dialogue looks like. John Gardner
would be happy to say. He’s an academic and a novelist as well known
for Grendel, a re-imagining of the Beowulf saga from the monster’s side, as for The Art of the Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers.
Gardner must have been a fearsome teacher. He gets quite grumpy in The Art of Fiction complaining about the common errors that newbie novelists make.
I mean things like, in dialogue,
“um, uh . . .” — sometimes used by good writers in ways that don’t stand
out and distract from the fictional dream, but usually used by amateurs
in ways that make the reader tear his hair.
John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Vintage Books 1991)
Francine Prose’s pet peeve is exposition framed by quotation marks. That is to say, an obvious and awkward attempt by the author to convey information in the form of stiff, unlikely, artificial conversation. Here is one hilarious example.
“Hi, Joe,”
“Nice to see you again, Sally.”
“What have you been doing, Joe?”
“Well,
Sally, as you know, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m twenty-six years
old. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for twelve years. I’m unmarried and
very lonely. I come to this bar twice a week, on average, but so far
have failed to meet anyone I particularly like.”
Prose
This is backstory disguised as dialogue. Imagine the real-life Joe.
Not even the biggest loser would describe himself in such a bald-faced
fashion.
Multitasking
We humans are devious creatures. When we talk, it’s often with more
than a simple message in mind. We may be trying to make an impression,
extract information, achieve some goal or all of the above. Rather than
come straight out and say what we want, we sidle and whisper and nudge.
Think also about how we listen (if at all) to what another is saying.
Body language, an abrupt switch of topic, and a pregnant silence are
also part of the conversation. When we talk, we send and receive a vast
array of signals, not all of which are verbal.
If you want to know how 5 year olds talk, go to a playground. To create the patois of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead listened to archival recordings of ex-slaves. Actual speech is pretty complex.
Once I assigned a class to
eavesdrop on strangers and transcribe the results. I decided to try it
myself, in a university coffee shop. Within moments I overheard a young
woman telling her male companion about a dream in which she saw Liza
Minnelli arrayed in white robes and a starry crown, dressed as the Queen
of Heaven. What made the conversation doubly engaging was that the girl
seemed to be romantically attracted to her friend, and was using her
story as a means of seduction, unaware that he was, insofar as I could
tell, gay. This fact was not unrelated to his lively interest in Liza
Minnelli, yet another connection that his companion was preferring not
to make.
Prose
The best sort of conversation involves communication and
miscommunication at multiple levels. So, too, is dialogue a form of
multitasking.
Good Dialogue
What are these various tasks that dialogue can achieve? Think first
about setting. Most works of fiction start with some form of
description, say, of the main character.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever,
and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite
some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one
years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Jane Austen, Emma
You can also open a fictional work with action, the way every James Bond movie starts with an explosion or a free-fall.
It’s rare to find a story, short or long, that opens with dialogue. But this presents no obstacle for a master storyteller.
Last Stories by William Trevor. Photo credit: Karen Kao
‘The Brahms?” she said. ‘Shall we struggle through the Brahms?’
The
boy, whose first lesson with Miss Nightingale this was, said nothing.
But gazing at the silent metronome, he smiled a little, as if the
silence pleased him. Then his fingers touched the piano keys and when
the first notes sounded Miss Nightingale knew that she was in the
presence of genius.
William Trevor, “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil” in Last Stories (Viking 2018)
This is not, strictly speaking, a dialogue because the student
doesn’t respond. But no answer is expected nor is any required. The
smile is enough. As Gardner notes, gesture is a part of any real
dialogue.
Characterization
Dialogue and action can be one and the same (“I do.”). It can and
often does advance the plot (“Let’s kill him.” “OK, you do it.”) William Trevor is a master of idiomatic dialogue, the kind that manages to define a setting and a character all in one go.
‘Well, there’s that if you’d want
it,’ the crippled man said. ‘It’s a long time waiting for attention.
You’d need tend the mortar.’
The two men who had come to the
farmhouse consulted one another, not saying anything, only nodding and
gesturing. Then they gave a price for painting the outside walls of the
house and the crippled man said it was too much. He quoted a lesser
figure, saying that had been the cost the last time. The men who had
come looking for work said nothing. The tall one hitched up his
trousers.
‘We’ll split the difference if that’s the way of it,’ the crippled man said.
Still not speaking, the two men shook their heads.
‘Be off with you in that case,’ the crippled man said.
William Trevor, “The Crippled Man”
Through his speech, we get an immediate sense of the crippled man.
Impatient, irascible, penny-pinching. We don’t get every line of speech
the man gives, just the parts we need. And through their silence, we get
an impression of the two men who’ve come in hope of work. They’ve
learned
to pretend not to understand, to
frown and simulate confusion because, in any conversation, it was
convenient sometimes to appear to be at a loss.
Idem
There, in a nutshell, the art of dialogue.
Note: Talk to Me was first published by Karen Kao on her blog Shanghai Noir.
Some nutshell: full of meaty tips! Thanks for this checklist of critical, dialog dos and don't. I find it useful to read final drafts of dialog passages aloud to let my ears - and those of patient friends - be the final arbiters.
This is SO useful. Lots of examples of the different things dialogue does in stories - first of all yes, crucially, what it is NOT designed to do. I love the illustration of 'exposition contained within speech marks' - hilarious! The trick is to make your dialogue sound as if lifted straight from real life but craft it carefully to omit, as you say, all the hesitations, repetitions and cliches (unless the cliches are important to the character). As with all writing, what looks most natural will only have got there through subtle artifice. Ironic, eh. And what about swear words? My characters are 11 - 13 year olds and anyone with that age in the house will tell you that using bad language in exclamations is completely natural to them. But if you reflect that in a middle grade book it doesn't work - a 4 letter word on the page has far more shock value that in real life. Interestingly, dropping the bad words doesn't weaken what the character is saying; often the opposite. (Yes, I worked that out eventually!)
Campaigners & friends March 9th 2022 On March 9th last year (2022) I travelled to Westminster with friends and fellow-campaigners, lobbying for the legal right to a care supporter -- caregiver, care partner... The terminology doesn't matter too much. It's the right to have someone who we love to be with us in a time of need. This might be when we're in a hospital, a care home, a mental health unit or anywhere else in our fragmented health and care system where we're likely to feel powerless and afraid. I wrote a blog before I left home , listing just a few of the unseen people who would be travelling to London with me. I mentioned Daniel, repeatedly put into ‘seclusion’ in a mental health unit when he cried out for his wife. I remembered Riya, a woman younger than me, struggling to recover from a stroke among people who didn’t speak her language or understand the ritual dimension of her food needs. Riya was lucky to be alive but her doctors found her apathetic an
i Meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee--aka The MeMe's--two egomaniacal blowhards joined at the lip on Facebook. I have in mind a particular pair, so extreme and so relentless, that I've had to Mute one and completely Block the other. For the daily ego swaggering and endless self-promotion wore me down and bored me. As a writer, I'm appalled, for the authors I admire have lives apart from their work or the natural hunger for fame. As a reader, I doubt that anyone who sees FB Friends only as cash cows or tickets to one more award can write a word worth reading. But on and on and on they go, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, without pausing to think even once about the question of all questions: Was that good for you too? For your consideration, I submit four modest proposals for keeping the bombast and bullshit in check. i 1) Writers' groups such as MWA and HWA should put a cap on the number of awards any author can receive. Three would seem reasonable; after that, let them work tow
Books don't come more suspenseful than this red-blooded actioner. And not since Virgil has an author committed to writing daily only a couple of lines. Moreover, not even Virgil wrote a book with no words-- only numbers. More Reb MacRathian nonsense? Only if you don't believe in the amazing maze comprised of our writing, our lives, and our health. This new book resulted from a recent annual wellness exam in which my grades were mostly good-- except for my blood pressure. In the mid-170s, it was alarmingly high. The doctor showed me the following chart: His immediate goal was to get my BP down to 130, which would still leave me in danger as you can see from the chart. Ultimately, we must reach the green zone: "Less than 120." For God's sake! How the hell was I to live to write the great books I might still have within me? I'd already abandoned alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, red meat, white bread; and I'd greatly reduced my intake dairy, sugar, and sodium.
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
….. wrote nobody, ever. Even Dinah Washington couldn’t have made that scan. But sometimes it’s good to look back and that’s what I’m doing with this, my last ever blog for Authors Electric. Back in January 2021, I’d just published my first novel, the diary of Isabella M Smugge and I was riding high on adrenaline and the joy of realising a lifelong dream. That same month, the redoubtable Wendy H Jones asked me if I’d like to start contributing to Authors Electric. “Would I?” I replied jauntily, flexing my fingers and cracking out a new ink cartridge. “I love a blog.” And so I do. Writing for the More Than Writers blog (thanks again Wendy) is what got me my start in publishing fiction and the discipline of turning out 600-800 engaging words once a month honed my style no end. The enormous header tank of ideas sloshing around in my head was ready to be plundered and I loved the freedom Authors Electric gave me to write about anything I fancied. Knowing that other great writer
Comments
And what about swear words? My characters are 11 - 13 year olds and anyone with that age in the house will tell you that using bad language in exclamations is completely natural to them. But if you reflect that in a middle grade book it doesn't work - a 4 letter word on the page has far more shock value that in real life. Interestingly, dropping the bad words doesn't weaken what the character is saying; often the opposite. (Yes, I worked that out eventually!)