Dialogue: It Was the Best of Problems, It was the Worst of Problems

A client of yours who is a literary agent has asked you to work with a client of hers on point of view, telling you the writer seems baffled by it.  Another, quite different agent, has remarked to you more than once that his biggest problem in dealing with his clients is getting them to understand the nature of "beats," those moments of activity in a story, the literary equivalent of notes on a musical score, expression volition and duration.  A client who is a writer finds difficulty in expressing motivation, and yet another has problems distinguishing voice from style.

You sympathize with all these difficulties to the extent that you had to work your way through them to the point where you felt confident with them, where they neither intimidated you nor caused you to either under- or overestimate their importance.

And yet.

You still believe the single most important aspect to the early and intermediate writer is dialogue, which is not what people say to one another so much as it is how characters advance story through its accelerated impact upon them.  It is in effect the energy created between one character saying "Good morning" to another, only to be met with the response, "Not that cheery-dearie business again."  Or, "I love you," provoking the response, "I'm supposed to issue a get-out-of-jail-free on the basis of that, right?"

It is true that some short story writers are able to express an entire narrative without using a word of dialogue while at the same time causing you to believe you have heard conversations among the characters.  It is also true that Harold Pinter could get "dialogue" out of two characters who didn't speak a work but instead rattled or otherwise got "dialogue" out of the sounds they produced by holding their portions of the daily newspaper and turning pages or otherwise creating sounds that evoked the nature of their feelings through the silence surrounding them.

Dialogue is not only the imaginary conversations within a single character or a pair of characters, it is in its way An American Gothic of drama in the evoked volley and return of feelings set against the deeper, truer feelings of the individuals; it is the seemingly magical effect of what is being said, set against what is being felt.  Of course it is not magic.  It is drama.  It is dialogue.

This early into the twenty-first century, the great dramatic dialogue seems to surround the issue of whether there is or is not a god.  You have close friends and some students on both sides of the debate.  Your own take is that there is none, although that only matters to you because you do not always address it directly in your stories.  You have not polled your characters on whether they believe or not, although you suspect a smaller percentage of them believe than those who do not.  The dialogue is, you recognize, a useful subtext, an argument your characters have had off stage with those about them, thus the residue of their differing attitudes as they engage one another.  How do such characters behave, speak to one another?  How do they speak of any basic matters?

There are a number of individuals in reality for whom you have measures of love along with regard.  You love some of them in spite of your regard for them because this, too, is part of human nature.  You feel love from a number of persons.  A number of persons you have loved have died, their loss particularly haunting because of you awareness that they loved you in ways that at one time defined your connection to the world and to reality.  It is feasible that the time will come when all those who love you in that particular way will be gone from you except in memory, revising your sense of connection to what you think of as reality and the universe.

The effect this will have on your conversations and dialogue cannot be forecast nor measured just as anticipated grief can only be spoken of aslant as opposed to straight on.  You can predict that in the process of aging, persons show a tendency to be haunted by past events and by the ghostly memories of significant individuals in their life who have died.  These individuals in some form or other of denial or displacement carry on dialogue with ghosts.  Your mother, for instance, frequently told you as a kind of ironic aside that if there is such a thing as an afterlife, your father will have a great deal to answer for.  This glimpse of her, this memory of her speaking to you, helps define her at once at her strongest and best and as an example of her own felt vulnerability.  This is the stuff of dialogue.  This is the stuff you need to remember.

Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XXIV

There is an order of dramatic events in story that at first blush may seem to come at whim, either the whim of the characters or of the writer.  This order has its origins in what the major character wants and how this character behaves in service of bringing these wants to resolution.  Each time that character appears in a scene, he or she brings expectations relative to the final outcome.

All characters come into a scene with some degree of expectation, perhaps dread or anticipation, perhaps even curiosity.  A character without some tangible expectation has no business in a particular scene.  It is literally enough for you to say John, a minor, minor character, who will be in the scene, dreads the scope of the scene which could be say a faculty meeting or other arrangement where individuals tend to talk at great length about themselves as opposed to the agenda for the meeting.  John has, through his dread of the coming meeting, bought his way in.  Everything John says will reflect his being here under a measure of duress-regret-unwillingness.

This vision of characters having an expectation in a forthcoming scene is the basis for what they say, which is what dialogue is.  If you don't know what a character is doing in a scene, that character will not sound convincing, but even more to the point, will not sound as though he or she knows why you've got him there at that moment.

Dialogue is not conversation, not even when the characters are conversing.  Some expectation or misinterpretation or misunderstanding is waiting close at hand to pounce.  In the better scenes and exchanges of dialogue, characters may become so eager or frustrated or preoccupied that they reveal/betray some hint of their true agenda.

When I was a low-level employee at the night office of The Associated Press, nestled in a corner of the Los Angeles Times building, there was a sign in place at every reporter's desk.  It read:  "There has never been a better verb than said."  This adage can well apply to fiction as well; said is a neutral word, one the reader takes for granted unless it is inelegantly or inexpertly repeated to the point of distraction.  Elements of story such as dialogue may be used to create a relevant effect, but think about this:  the best effect of all in story is the plausible sense of story, a sense we take in the same way we take in breath as we read.  We do not need someone to explain to us why we breathe any more than we need someone to explain to us what story is and what it means.

Speak the speech, I pray you

The spoken word in a dramatic narrative is a welcomed respite from the conversation of the workplace, school, home, and all those places in between where we attempt to convey our needs and dreams to others. Although these spoken words have subtext and make some attempt at nuance, they are not dialogue and they are precisely not dialogue because no matter how we yearn or try to be characters, we are merely ourselves. As ourselves, we speak conversational English, trying to enhance the result with wit, possibly even humor. We go about our daily routine approaching moments when we wish we had dialogue to offer but at the same time mindful that dialogue does not work in the quotidian any more than conversation works to any effect at all in fiction.

The secret is to understand that dialogue in fiction may be given the sound of conversation, but it and trees falling in the forest have in common the need for a hearer. You might say each, the tree and the dialogue, needs a listener or a reader. If conversation between two or more individuals becomes too focused, the participants become self-conscious or distracted.

We have in common with our characters the trait that causes us to say one thing while meaning either its very opposite or an understatement of our true intent. In conversations, we have devices to defuse the sentiments and bits of information put forth. In dialogue, we speak at these elephants in the living room, their appearance beginning to appear before the reader as though intent had sprung a leak and was spilling slowly forth.

None of this means we cannot have an enjoyable time with friends or that dialogue needs to be confrontational; in either case we should be understood and the motives of our characters begin find places through which to leak. If, in a conversation, we allow that today wasn't particularly eventful, in fact even a bit boring, this can be an excuse for another round, a commiseration, or some attempt at raising the level of conversation to something more substantial. If in a story nothing happened that was particularly eventful, the reader should have the option to think one of the characters was lying or perhaps failing to notice something momentous, which the reader has already seen.

A Table for Two

The driving force in narrative is curiosity.
Reader and characters proceed to peer beyond what will happen, into the territory of what information will be revealed in the unfolding of an event.

Two individuals are having a conversation somewhere--or so the reader thinks at first blush.  Each of the two characters has come into the scene bearing the baggage of explosive previous encounters.  They have come to THIS place because it is neutral, with no associations for either of them.  They have brought with them the gifts of a resolve to be patient with one another, each purposeful in the intent to let the other finish thoughts, sentences, ideas.

We don't know the names, gender, ages, social rank of either and yet look at how much we already know about them.  The "Go-ahead" card is down on the table; each is determined to let the other go ahead and/or finish what is to be said.

We can begin to wrap other relevant data about the armatures of these two, data that will find its way with a snow-shoes-through-a-mine-field purpose and caution, learning more about each of the characters and feeling the tangible emotional climate as they proceed.

So long as we have been triggered toward suspicion, we can suspect they will once again escalate toward combustion because they have done so in the past.  WE may also feel the mounting tension because timing and pace have become important factors in the meeting.  

Though neither has an abundance of time, each is constrained by the be patient rule. Whatever the subject of conversation, we sense the control and deliberation being exercised to the point where it becomes a tangible tension.  

The subject may never be directly articulated, as with the conversation between the couple in the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants."  The subject at hand may also be--writer's choice--carefully spelled out to the point where the reader will wonder, What is it with these two? because there is a subtext shimmering there over the conversation like the ghost of a former lover.  

We may, of course, set off with a conclusion already in mind.  They are heading to combustion, perhaps to the point of not speaking again for some weeks or months to come--perhaps not ever again.  Having opted for this approach, we can set the conversation in motion with an agenda or agreed-upon result:  Did you bring the papers for me to sign?  

What a lovely, evocative line.  "Of course I brought the papers for you to sign.  That was the entire purpose of this meeting, wasn't it?"  What a lovely lagniappe to tack onto this simple sentence:  "What do you take me for?"  And now, the attitude-tinged response.  "Well."  Or, if you are the sort who prizes greater clarity:  "Well, I thought..."

The thing has evolved; we want to know.  Reader and writer, we want to know.  Let's start with the first thing we want to know:
"What's that supposed to mean?"

There is absolutely nothing unusual in this conversation, yet it carries agenda and implication crackling between the two characters much in the manner of the electricity between Richard and Anne in Richard III, Act One, Scene Two.

What will they do?  When and how will they do it?

We still know precious little about them.  Does it say anywhere that they are analogs of two trains, speeding toward one another on the same track?  So long as the conversation is on the table, a tension begins to grow until none of us, reader, writer, or characters can endure it.  And this is the point where we begin looking closely for the optimal point in the text to end the scene, a deed that may mean leaving out a line or an exchange that has become memorable with the texture of wit, but this is not about wit; it is about two unnamed individuals of indeterminate age, gender, and moral clarity, meeting to exchange dialogue.  

We barely know enough about either to determine who they are or what they want and what they might do to us.  They could be man and woman, woman and woman, man and man.  They could be former lovers, present-time lovers, parent and child.  The choice is entirely ours.  

We have set them loose to work their way across the whiteness of page, of computer screen, of the stage of the mind.  They are nameless but they are armed with two weapons that may pierce us to the quick, drama and dialogue.

Bad Dialogue: The Last Refuge of a Tin Ear

In your own reading of the fiction of other writers, you are willing to put up with matters of plot--too much or too little--as well as matters of description, setting, even theme.  You consider it a strength that some of the stories you have enjoyed the most were set in places or eras for which you had no apparent interest.  You were somewhat taken aback, for instance, when Richard Powers' novel, The Echo Maker, began in, ugh, Nebraska, but the outcome of that is, as they say, history.  

Having more or less defined yourself as laissez faire in your approach to reading, let us move to the place of intransigence, the place where your cholers rise with every infraction to the point of boil, to the point where you become, as it were, at one with Dorothy Parker's observation about a book she was reviewing:  "This is not a book to be set aside lightly.  It should be thrown across the room with great force."  

The issue is dialogue.  No other thing, not even Lee Child's stick-figure representation of his character, Jack Reacher, comes upon you with the force of a dragon waking up with a hangover as does dialogue rendered as conversation.  You find yourself the perpetrator of enough inane conversation without having to endure more in print or on the computer screen or the screen of your iPod Touch.  "Oh, yeah, the novel's comin' along.  No, don't have anything but a thematic ending in sight yet.  Yeah, yeah, a little something, page or two, every day."  You find yourself on the receiving end of it, too.  Conversation is, after all, a major component of the human condition, and you want that; you relate to how, Intelligent Design factotems to the contrary notwithstanding, the need to transfer sophisticated and complex information has led the size of our brain to enhance, giving us some greater opportunity to survive a tad longer.

You are particularly offended by such tropes as, "Oh."  Or even "Oh, I see," rendered as separate paragraphs, absent any bodily movement or interior monologue to provide subtext or even context, but the blood doth begin to boil when the Hi, Honey, how was work today? Oh, not bad kind of conversation begins and the writer, struggling to break away from such bons mots, becomes even more conversational.

Bad dialogue is the albatross an otherwise decent story must carry in living tribute to The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner."  Bad dialogue is the But she really said that of drama, the burden one must bear until the message comes through and the writer--yourself included, realizes that a bad story is made palatable, even good with effective dialogue.  Bad dialogue is the pin prick in the tip of the condom of story; it is a reminder that we are reading or participating somehow in the literary equivalent of vacation photos.

"If you come any closer, I--I'll shoot,"  he said menacingly.

"If you don't stop at once, I'll scream," she said threateningly.

Bang, bang.

"Help, help."

I'm outta here; just thinking about it is getting to me.  See you later.

Some Scary Thoughts about Dialogue

Much has been said about the role of dialogue in its relationship to advancing story while simultaneously offering forth clues about the agendas and personality of the characters involved in the story. 

Not enough has been said about the role of dialogue in the critical and ongoing definition of the writing self, that focused agglomerate of conflicting forces to the point where it is almost worth calling it TBS--The Balkanized Self.

Dialogue in this case becomes conversation between the critical, thinking aspect of self and the visceral, emotional receptors.  As a guiding principal, consider how, as we move outward from childhood, through the rocky shoals of puberty and into overt sexual agendas to complicate our foraging, hunting and gathering selves, the causes of what we consider nightmares morph from dragons and ogres, and monsters into more casually encountered mammals, possibly even persons not unlike our very self.


The menace enters through the side wings of the ordinary.  Perhaps a rat or spider here and there, but most nightmares could well be out-takes from "I Love Lucy" reruns or even, heaven forfend, "Happy Days."  The factor that pushes these dreams into the genre of nightmare as opposed to quotidian dream is the emotional equivalent of the sound track, the resident emotion.  

This is one reason Stephen King is so good, which is to say scary; he particularizes the fearful lurking in the ordinary.  He does it with a rather extensive-but-ordinary vocabulary, via cadence of his lines, and sometimes through the merest questions:  "What's that?" or "Did you see that?" or "I can't believe what I just saw."  

The emotion is brought in sideways, through subtext and inference, through evocation, which comes from the senses, the scary way scary things smell, the taste in one's mouth when one is frightened (and thus the question, Does having a dry taste in one's mouth contribute to the emotional undertow of a nightmare?), the way things sound.  (How, for instance, does a buzzing fly sound when it is in your room, scoping out its next landing site, as opposed to when it is trapped in a spider's web and about to become the prix fixe dinner of said spider?)

An ordinary dream encounter is just that--ordinary.  In a true nightmare, there is the enhanced presence of one or more emotions, playing on the sense of danger, fear, frustration, impending menace.

Pay some attention to a scene in a dramatic movie, asking yourself when you ever heard the sound tract using a bassoon as a suggestion of menace.  Or perhaps a moment intended to be humorous, punctuated by tense, sawing violins.  It is the emotion subtext that informs the scene of the scariness.

The dialogue between reason and emotion informs us of how we can play the ordinary, the quotidian for its scary, Stephen King effects.  We need both to keep the scene on even keel, from foundering in the self-induced sea of the melodramatic, with the focus where it belongs, on the apparently normal, set to play against a background brimming with fear of falling or of failure or discovery.

When we have come to recognize this delicate balance between the reasonable and the unthinkable, we may metaphorically ask it to dance, try it out on the page, bring the memorable nightmare to a life that can be felt across continents and, of course, ages. 

Dialog Redux

Dialog is a dramatic force that resides in what is said but not intended, in what is intended but not said. It propels the Sisyphus boulder of story up the hill of expectation, where it pauses, lurches, then begins its downward tumble toward the discovery of damage. It is an attempt to communicate something, either to the person making the utterance, the person to whom it is putatively directed, or some abstraction of audience, perhaps even the gods.

Dialog is the drawings on the cave walls, exquisite evocations of something real, functional, beautiful; in some ways it is recognition and proof of our own existence because someone has uttered our name. But it is not all good news, not by any means; it is a Wagnerian opera when we were expecting Puccini, it is no when we were hoping for yes, it is a broken heart when we were expecting the kite fly of elation, it is the who? when we were hoping to be remembered.

In real life, the life from which we flee or seek to redesign whenever we sit or stand or lie down to write, there is conversation. In the alternate universe of fiction there is dialog, what we might have said had we been our characters, what we might have said had we known more clearly what we were doing. Conversation in fiction becomes a speed bump, a device that causes the story and our sense of it to lurch, jostling us out of our abandon. In fiction, dialog may be contrived to sound like conversation, but when have you seen individuals in story actually rely on such a thin veneer? Thus does conversation in fiction become a betrayal or motive or goal or self by the way it offers up proof of a recognized weakness.

The remarkably apt literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) recognizes dialog as a duality attempting to organize life, imparting to it the potential of being an agent as a specific aspect of message. This is a position I believe most writers come to accept as they grapple with the duality of dialog and their own attempts to set it into motion with action and intent. We don't have to wait for the Pinter and Miller and Stoppard of today, we can start way back in the day with, say, act one, scene two of Richard III, in which the dialog between he who wishes to become Richard and Anne, rages before us in a fiery clash of agenda and duality.

Dialog is the kindling for story; it should make us aware of the smoulder manifest when individuals--any individuals--gather to debate agenda--any agenda. To get to this place, we need to position ourselves firmly within the sphere of influence of each character who steps onto our stage. We have to become the three bag ladies waiting outside for Macbeth as well as the Rob and Laura Petrie of Macbeth. Anything less is conversation.

Having A Say in the Matter

You've gone through the literary equivalent of a line-up, identifying from a supply of potentials the ensemble who will populate your story. There were some moments of indecision as you looked at the possibilities, scanning the menu of suspects to see which were real characters and which were only real persons you know in real life. You've made your choice and now you have a sense of their alibis, their connective links, their background, their strengths, their weaknesses. You may even have a line into their secrets, those juicy tidbits they withhold from all, possibly even from themselves.

Knowing them as well as you now do, you also know how they sound, how they talk, how even though they may have grown up in the same neighborhood, they sound enough unlike their 'hoodies that they stand out, as identifiable to your readers as they were to you way back there when you were cruising the line-ups, scoping them out.

What they say has nothing to do with conversation because they don't make conversation, they either put up a foreboding wall or a protective wall; they do not engage in small talk but instead are working out some problem or screwing up enough courage to do something, or are trying to convey the sense of being at ease and conversational.

They don't always talk directly to issues, either, fearful of revealing an unpopular or unpolitical attitude.

There is always something else going on when these characters are speaking, some fear that they will betray a guarded emotion, or perhaps give over someone ,a suspicion or wariness hanging over their head. Even among friends, there is a fear that these individuals, these dramatic, involved individuals, will say something that will give them away. You know how it is because of the times your IM comments or a congratulatory sentence left on a friend's blog has been taken completely out of context you know why some individuals are always limiting their comments to LOL or using emoticons to prove they were only kidding or that they meant something as a joke and please, don't take it seriously.

In other words, dialog is in fact in other words, a reflection of some kind of tension within a character and simultaneously between characters. If you stop to deconstruct, people in stories don't talk the way people in real situations talk, one reason being because drama is heightened awareness, another reason being because there is no time for such leisure. Dialog is the petri dish of story; tension, suspense, and subtext thrive in it, breed excruciating surprises and heartbreaking revelation. If it is anything less, it is an albatross.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Dialogue

1. Are the individuals actual persons, talking the way real persons do, or are they characters?

2. Can you tell the difference between the two?

3. Does the reader know the difference?

4. Do your characters:
(a) talk to each other as though the reader were not there?
(b) talk to the audience as though the other characters were not there?
(c) try to explain things to each other that they already know?
(d) say things that are likely to bore the reader?

5. Do your characters speak as characters of their time and social station would speak?

6. Do your characters speak to intimates and strangers in the same tone and with the same attitude?

7. Do your characters tend to sound alike?

8. Do your characters like one another?

9. Do your characters always say what they mean?

10. When you think about writing dialogue, does the word "subtext " make you nervous?

11. Do your characters ever say things that surprise or embarrass you?

12. Do your characters know how to end a conversation?

13. Do you know how to end a conversation?