Dialogue Read online

  Closing her mouth, Fiona narrowed her eyes at him. "So why aren't we at the police station, Mr. Do-Gooder? Just hours ago you were telling me that I couldn't be a fugitive from justice, that I had to turn myself over to the police. But now that you're also accused, we're hiding."

  "You want blueberries in your pancakes?"

  "I want some answers!" she shouted at him.

  Since this is a romantic suspense, Deveraux has to do double duty in intensifying the conflict in each scene; she has both the plot—the murder— and the relationship between the hero and the heroine to develop. This scene works well on both levels as Fiona is screaming at Ace to give her some answers about the murder—she's scared to death at being a suspect— while furious at him for not being more direct with her. As you probably know, when writing romance, the hero and heroine often start out intensely disliking each other. A scene of dialogue showing this is a lot more fun than the protagonist simply telling us from inside her head.

  creates tension and suspense

  As a writing coach, I have worked with hundreds of fiction and nonfiction

  writers over the years, and the weakness I see most often in scenes of dialogue is the lack of tension and suspense. Nothing is at stake. The characters are just chatting about something or other. Making small talk. Having a tea party. Ho-hum.

  Dialogue's purpose, and there is no exception to this, is to create tension in the present and build suspense for what's to come. As a fiction writer, you want to remember this. No matter what kind of scene you're writing, no matter the genre, tension and suspense must be included, most often at the core of the scene. Successful authors know this. Robin Cook, the author of a number of successful medical mysteries, is such an author. His stories are full of tense dialogue scene after tense dialogue scene. The following excerpt is one from his novel Fatal Cure. It illustrates the kind of tension and suspense in a dialogue scene that grabs the reader by the gut so she couldn't stop reading even if the house was on fire.

  The protagonist, Angela, is on a personal mission to find a killer. The reason this is personal for her is because her husband, David, has just discovered a body buried in the basement of the house they recently moved into. Prior to this scene, she confronted the Chief of Police about what she sees as incompetence and indifference in the police's search to find a suspect.

  "Don't you dare paint me as an hysterical female," Angela said as she got into the car.

  "Baiting the local chief of police like that certainly isn't rational," David said. "Remember, this is a small town. We shouldn't be making enemies."

  "A person was brutally murdered, the body dumped in our basement, and the police don't seem too interested in finding out who did it. You're willing to let it rest at that?"

  "As deplorable as Hodges' death was," David said, "it doesn't involve us. It's a problem that should be left up to the authorities."

  "What?" Angela cried. "The man was beaten to death in our house, in our kitchen. We're involved whether you want to admit it or not, and I want to find out who did it. I don't like the idea of the murderer walking around this town, and I'm going to do something about it. The first thing is we should learn more about Dennis Hodges."

  Cook creates tension in this scene by pitting Angela and David against each in their different approaches to how this case should be handled. The suspense comes from Angela's determination to do something about the

  murderer walking around her town. She has spoken her commitment out loud and we know she means what she says. She's going to do something and we'll keep reading to find out what she does. Effective dialogue always, always delivers tension.

  speeds up your scenes

  As storytellers, we have a number of writing tools at our disposal—narration, action, description, and dialogue, to name a few. When you're considering how to pace a story, description and narration will move it slowly, steadily, and easily along. Action and dialogue will speed it up—dia-logue even more than action. When characters start talking, the story starts moving. Usually. There are always the dull chatting scenes I mentioned above. But we're talking here about effective dialogue—dialogue that delivers.

  Dialogue is a way to control the pace of our stories. Getting back to Angela and David—in this scene, David is talking to his daughter about the body he discovered in the basement. The first paragraph is a narrative one and moves more slowly than the scene of dialogue that follows.

  When it was almost seven Angela asked David if he would take Caroline and Ami home. David was happy to do it, and Nikki came along. After the two children had been dropped off, David was glad for the moments alone with his daughter. First, they talked about school and her new teacher. Then he asked her if she thought much about the body discovered in the basement.

  "Some," Nikki said.

  "How does it make you feel?" David asked.

  "Like I don't want to ever go in the basement again."

  "I can understand that," David said. "Last night when I was getting firewood I felt a little scared."

  "You did?"

  "Yup," David said. "But I have a little plan that might be fun and it might help. Are you interested?"

  "Yeah!" Nikki said with enthusiasm. "What?"

  "You can't tell anybody," David said.

  "Okay," Nikki promised.

  David outlined his plan as they continued home. "What do you say?" he asked once he had finished.

  "I think it's cool," Nikki said.

  "Remember, it's a secret," David said.

  "Cross my heart."

  In the narrative paragraph that follows this scene, David goes into the house and makes a phone call, and we learn that he's experienced some distress about two of his patients who had previously died. Here things slow down as the author begins feeding us necessary information in narrative. The narrative slows the story back down after the scene of dialogue. What makes dialogue move more quickly than narrative? It's the quick back-and-forth of the character's words to one another, like a tennis ball being batted back and forth across the court.

  It's obvious which part of the above excerpt moves more quickly. Of course, there are times when you want a scene to move more slowly, so I'm not saying that it's always best to use dialogue. But when you need to speed up a scene, this is its purpose. This is what it will do for you.

  adds bits of setting/background

  Do you ever find it difficult to get the setting and background into your story in an interesting way? Here dialogue comes to the rescue once again.

  As writers, we have a tendency to want to use narrative to set up every scene for the reader before the action starts, which is unnecessary. Once the action in a scene is rolling along, you can use dialogue to throw in what you need us to know at that moment about the setting and story background. In Joyce Carol Oates' novel We Were the Mulvaneys, Patrick, the viewpoint character in this scene, and his sister, Marianne, haven't seen each other for a few years. He has just asked her how she did in college and she's told him she had to take a couple of incompletes. Listen to how Marianne describes the town she now lives in, Kilburn, and later how the author slips in a few details of the current setting, Patrick's room.

  "Well—" Marianne squirmed, pulling at her spiky hair. "Things sort of came up. Suddenly."

  "What kind of things?"

  "An emergency at the Co-op, just after Thanksgiving. Aviva who was assistant store manager got sick—"

  "Store? What store?"

  "Oh Patrick, I must have told you—didn't I? In Kilburn, in town, we have a Green Isle outlet. We sell preserves, fresh preserves, fresh produce in the summer, baked goods—my zucchini-walnut bread is one of the favorites. I — "

  "And you work in the store? How many hours a week?"

  Marianne dipped her head, avoiding Patrick's interrogative gaze. "We don't think in terms of hours—exactly," she said. She was sitting on Patrick's sofa (not an item from home, part of the dull spare slightly shabby furnishings of the apartment) while Patrick sat facing her, in a rather overbearing position, on his desk chair, his right ankle balanced on his left knee in a posture both relaxed and aggressive.

  Thinking Pinch-style I have a right to ask, who else will ask if I don't?

  "What terms do you think in, then?"

  "The Green Isle Co-op isn't—a formally run organization, like a business. It's more like a—well, a family. People helping each other out. From each what he or she can give; to each, as he or she requires."

  Here we get a sense of who the town is as a character as well as some physical details. Setting and background can actually be made interesting when incorporated into a dialogue scene. The reader experiences the setting through the viewpoint character's observations, and depending on the character, this could prove very interesting indeed. As long as there's tension, of course.

  communicates the theme

  In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King writes: "When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.. .it seems to me that every book—at least every one worth reading—is about something."

  This something is better known as theme. What's your story about? What do you want your story to say to your reader? In its simplest form, theme is your story's conflict and resolution.

  Theme is something we need to weave through our stories in bits and pieces, letting it pop up here and there to reveal what the story is all about. Dialogue is definitely a fiction element that pops everything up and out. When characters are talking, whispering, shouting, hissing, grumbling, sneering, or moaning, the reader is listening. If you can sneak your theme into the dialogue, your reader will hear it in a way that it can't be heard in narrative.

  Back to One Tru
e Thing for a moment. The author, Anna Quindlen, is an expert at writing about something in this novel and weaves the theme all through the narrative in the story. Toward the end of the novel, when Ellen is on the stand for her mother's murder, the author uses dialogue to bring it out once more. The prosecutor has just asked her if she loved her mother. This is her answer:

  "The easy answer is yes. But it's too easy just to say that when you're talking about your mother. It's so much more than love—it's, it's everything, isn't it?" as though somehow they would all nod. "When someone asks you where you come from, the answer is your mother." My hands were crossed on my chest now, and the woman in the blue suit turned her rings. "When your mother's gone, you've lost your past. It's so much more than love. Even when there's no love, it's so much more than anything else in your life. I did love my mother, but I didn't know how much until she was gone."

  This isn't the entire theme, but certainly one important part of it, and when Ellen speaks these words, the reader knows exactly what she's talking about because the themes in our lives are universal. Dialogue is not only a faster and more effective way to communicate the theme than to use long paragraphs of dry exposition, but it's also more emotional, up-front, and personal with the reader. You have to be careful, of course, that the characters aren't simply preaching and moralizing to each other just to make sure the reader gets your message. If you have a philosophy or idea you want to get across in your book—and you should—then it's perfectly natural to have your characters discussing this idea. If the theme is woven in in other ways throughout other scenes, your characters' dialogue about it in any one scene will feel natural. Use dialogue to convey your story's theme to your reader.

  We will cover all of the above in more detail in future chapters. There's a lot to learn about how to get your dialogue to deliver in a way that engages your reader at an emotional level.

  But before we get into the nuts and bolts of writing dialogue, there are a few fears we should dispel so you feel free to bring your characters onstage and let them loose to be their authentic selves. We'll deal with these fears in the next chapter.

  The following exercises are designed to give you the opportunity to practice the purposes of dialogue and release the voice inside of yourself through fictional characters.

  Characterizes/reveals motives. Consider the background of both your protagonist and antagonist. Write a scene where both of them show up and have to talk to each other, whether they want to or not. In this scene, find a way to insert a bit of motivation into the dialogue so we have sympathy for both characters.

  Sets the mood in the story. Place two characters in a setting that will enhance the story's mood. A dark, creepy alley in a horror story, a bright island beach in a romance, or you might want to reverse these for something different—a dark alley in a romance or an island beach in a horror story. Write a scene of dialogue focusing on the mood/emotion you want to convey in the overall story.

  Intensifies the story conflict. Two characters are arguing about the moral issues concerning abortion, or the death penalty, or assisted suicide, or another hot topic of your choosing. Write a scene of dialogue that intensifies the conflict between these two characters. Show the conflict escalating as they continue to argue.

  Creates tension and suspense. Two characters are in a fender bender. One, the antagonist, has yet to get a learner's permit and was taking the family car out for a joyride without insurance. Write a scene of dialogue that's full of tension and suspense for what's ahead for both characters.

  Speeds up your scenes. Find a bit of ponderous narrative in one of your own story scenes and transition into dialogue, using it to speed up the scene. Resist using much narrative or action; try to create most of the scene using just dialogue so you can discover how dialogue quickly speeds up the pace in a scene. If you're not far enough into a story of your own, complete this exercise with a novel on your bookshelf.

  Adds bits of setting/background. Find a line of dialogue, either in something you've written or in a novel you've read, that reveals the story's setting. If it's out of another author's novel, study how the writer managed to insert bits of the setting into the dialogue to make it seem like a natural part of the discussion between the characters.

  Communicates the theme. Pull at least three novels off your bookshelf and see if you can find a line or two of dialogue that communicates the story's theme. If you can't find anything, create a line of dialogue that clearly conveys what you believe the story to be about.

  [ mute characters and stories-abolishing your fears ]

  "Are you planning to use any dialogue in your novel?" As a writing coach, this is the first time I'd ever had to ask a writer this question. New writers often use too much dialogue, but seldom none at all.

  "Well, sure." Carol shifted uncomfortably as she studied her manuscript.

  "We're into the third chapter and all of the characters are passing each other without speaking." I'd already noticed this in previous readings of the first couple of Carol's novel chapters, but we were working on other things and I hadn't gotten around to mentioning it.

  "Yeah, well, I know I have to get it in there pretty soon." She flipped a few pages over. "I have a question about where the comma goes in this one sentence on page five."

  I'm not a therapist, but I knew Carol was avoiding the subject of dialogue—again. She never wanted to talk about it. Turns out when I finally did make her talk about it that she was scared of dialogue. Afraid that when her characters started talking, they would sound stupid, not at all profound and mysterious as she imagined them to be in her mind. She didn't want to dispel their mysteriousness by letting them open their mouths and make fools out of themselves and especially out of her. This is the first time I got anyone to admit this, but I have a feeling it's a common problem with both nonfiction and fiction writers. I've noticed that nonfiction writers avoid dialogue most of the time because they don't feel like they have to use it. Fiction writers know at some point they have to use it, but they do so with great trepidation.

  Writing dialogue happens to be something I've always enjoyed. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is that I tend to create and write about characters

  much like myself. I haven't taken a lot of risks in my fiction—creating stories I couldn't live, creating characters I couldn't be. I can appreciate the fear around dialogue, especially if you have to work with characters with dialect or speech impediments or who live in another world you've never experienced, whether real as in another part of the planet or on another planet altogether as in science fiction or fantasy.

  Since the premise of this book is to learn to release the voice within us and create dialogue that delivers our story to the reader, no matter what kind of character we're creating, we have to first begin to understand the hindrances, conscious and unconscious, that keep us from plunging right in and doing it. We have fears about dialogue that handicap us and keep us from relaxing while we're writing, misconceptions that create pressure to do it "right." And that's where the paralysis comes in that Carol experienced. The good news is that bringing these fears and misconceptions out into the open allows us to see them for what they are and determine to not be driven by them any longer. Good writing of any kind, whether we're writing dialogue, exposition, action, or description, can happen only when we're relaxed and not worrying about the mechanics. That's the purpose of this book—to help you relax by showing you how you can become more comfortable with your voice and to teach you the mechanics so you can practice and make them automatic.

  Natalie Goldberg tells us in Writing Down the Bones, "Don't think. Don't get logical." She goes on to say that ".. .the aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing about what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel."

  Our fears and misconceptions prevent us from burning through to first thoughts. When we're full of fear, we have no choice but to write out of what our fear brings up. The flow of energy Natalie is talking about is blocked, so we can't write about what our mind "actually sees and feels." The only way to defuse our fears is to bring them out into the open—so let's get started.