Nuts & Bolts 2: Dialogue

121}SELECTING DIALOGUE

Good dialogue bubbles up from our stories like methane gas from a swamp. If you have to second-guess what your characters might or would say, either you’re not listening to them, or your characters aren’t sufficiently motivated to speak. You should either respect their silence or provide them with the necessary motivation.

When good dialogue does bubble up, your job as author is not merely to record it but to select what your readers will hear; sum up the rest through narration, or indirect dialogue, dialogue that tells of a conversation instead of replicating it. An example of indirect dialogue, from Clancy Sigal’s Going Away:

I explained to this garage man that he was one of a vanishing breed, and he surprised me by not disagreeing. He said the filling station was now to America what the one-family forty-acre farm used to be, the outpost of independence. I asked him how much independence he could have when he was mortgaged to the Eagle Petroleum Company, and he said plenty, everyone these days was mortgaged to somebody …

Indirect dialogue can capture the essence of a long exchange without taking up all that space. Furthermore, it has an authenticity born of not claiming, by way of quotation marks, that the conversation has been presented verbatim. It’s left to the reader to imagine the fleshed-out conversation

We should aim to provide readers with only the most pertinent, illuminating, and entertaining parts of dialogue. Words like “Well,” “Um,” “Hey,” “Oh,” “Right,” “Okay,” “Yeah”—those “naturalistic” flourishes—can probably be ditched.

Two acquaintances meet at a bus stop. Here is an early draft of their exchange:

“Hey, Joanna,” said Ken. “I thought I might see you. How are you?”

“I’m okay. Pretty good. I overslept. Glad I didn’t miss the bus.”

“Sit next to me, why don’t you?”

“Okay.” Joanna sat down. Ken looked at his watch.

“The bus should be here soon. It’s three minutes late already. So—how are you?”

“You already asked me that. How are you?”

“Oh, well. Not too bad, I guess. Considering.”

That’s when she saw his cane. “Oh, my God. What’s with the cane, Ken? What happened?”

“I was wondering when you’d notice,” said Ken, “I sprained my ankle yesterday on the way to Ben’s Meat Market.”

“How awful! Was it a bad sprain? I mean, did you, like, break any bones?”

“No, no broken bones. I mean it’s bad enough, I guess, then again it could have been a lot worse. But no, no broken bone. Just a sprain.”

“Are you sure? Did you see a doctor?”

“Yeah, sure, I saw a doctor. As a matter of fact I spent a grand total of seven boring hours at the emergency room. I got there at seven in the morning and left at four. Can you believe they kept me there that long?”

“Gee! What a drag! You must have been bored out of your mind!”

“Well, it wasn’t all that bad, really. I took my students’ stories with me and I got some work done, so the time went by pretty fast.”

This exchange can be trimmed to:

They met at the bus stop.

“What’s with the cane?” said Joanna.

“I sprained it yesterday on the way to Ben’s Meat Market,” Ken said. “I spent seven hours in the emergency room.”

“What a drag!”

“It wasn’t so bad. I took some of my students’ stories with me and got some work done.”

Hardly scintillating. But it wastes less time.

122}DOUBLING UP ON DIALOGUE

By doubling up on dialogue you blunt its effectiveness.

In the original draft:

“I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it I understand,” said Albert, turning back to the game. “I guess I was just sort of curious.”

Shorter and better:

“I was just sort of curious,” said Albert, returning to his game.

Or:

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand,” said Albert, turning back to the game.

And it would be nice if, once in a while, your characters didn’t respond verbally to each other at all; their actions can speak for them.

Albert turned back to the game.

Any of these choices are good. Combine them all, and the whole will be less than the sum of its parts.

123}ASKED & ANSWERED:
CALL & RESPONSE DIALOGUE

A student’s dialogue suffers from being “tape-recorder” real. There’s too much call-and-response, and too little subtext and surprise.

In spite of their “realistic” stammering, the characters appear to pay too close attention to each other. Although the writer has gone to great lengths to render dialogue naturalistic, he has overlooked the deeper fact that people seldom actually listen to each other. Because each speaker has her own agenda, dialogue doesn’t always move neatly forward: It takes sharp curves, goes around detours, and stumbles over bumps and potholes, with each speaker taking part in a slightly different conversation.

In Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, an old railroader visits the title character in his shanty houseboat dwelling following a bar fight (I’ve edited out some stage directions):

Hidy, said the old man.
Come on in.
Was you in bed?
It’s all right. Come on in.
Cold in here. What happened to your head?
[Poking the fire] I got hit with a floorbuffer.
Say you did?
What time is it?
Could you not hear it comin?
No. What time is it?

A writer friend of mine once suggested that the secret to writing great dialogue is never to have characters respond directly to each other. This takes it a bit too far, but I agree with the general notion: Too much dialogue is written too directly. (Note, by the way, that you needn’t use quotation marks for a character’s thoughts. Many authors do this, but it seems to suggest that people think in words and sentences.)

Another example, this one from George Axelrod’s quirky screenplay for The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon.

A nightmare-fraught Marco (Frank Sinatra) meets Rosie (Janet Leigh) aboard a train:

MARCO: Do you mind if I smoke?

ROSIE: Not at all. Please do.

[Marco strikes a match to light a cigarette; it goes out. Embarrassed and frustrated, he stumbles through the car. He stops between cars and leans on a wall. The landscape rushes by. Rosie joins him. She taps him on the shoulder and offers him a cigarette.]

ROSIE: Maryland’s a beautiful state.

MARCO: This is Delaware.

ROSIE: I know. I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But, um, nonetheless, Maryland is a beautiful state. So is Ohio, for that matter.

MARCO: I guess so. Columbus is a tremendous football town. You in the railroad business?

ROSIE: Not anymore. However, if you’ll permit me to point out, when you ask that question, you really should say, “Are you in the railroad line?” (beat) Where’s your home?

The chief virtue of this exchange (which departs significantly from Condon’s novel) lies in its playful unpredictability. Instead of presenting us with a typical “boy meets girl” scene, Axelrod capitalizes on Leigh’s flirtatiousness and Sinatra’s delirium to produce a conversation so surreal it might have been penned by Ionesco or Sam Beckett.

Though Axelrod doesn’t take my friend’s advice, he does deal every third or fourth line of dialogue from, so to speak, the bottom of the deck, as if the characters aren’t following a script, but improvising as they go.

Dialogue’s chief function is to amuse. It does so chiefly by conveying character: by showing us how characters express themselves, by showcasing their spontaneous wit and charm. Now and then call-and-response dialogue may be unavoidable—as when the witness is grilled by a detective. But it seldom evokes character.

124}I WOULDN’T SAY THAT:
GENERALIZED DIALOGUE

Applied to dialogue, the conditional is troubling:

“What’s the matter, kid, you don’t like bluestockings?” my father would say.

“No,” I’d answer. “And what’s more I don’t like stockings!”

The implication that the above exchange took place on several occasions—like some Abbott & Costello routine—is off-putting. By putting this conditional dialogue in quotation marks, the author inadvertently undermines confidence in his narrator’s reliability.

Other key words to watch out for: “always,” “whenever,” “usually,” “typically.” Repeated use of such words is symptomatic of writing in background or routine mode, creating a pattern of predictable behavior against which, presumably, you intend to juxtapose exceptional events. But readers will tolerate only so much background before demanding that the tacit promise of a real story be fulfilled.

125}LOOK MA, NO QUOTATION MARKS

Joyce did away with them: He called them “eyesores” or “perverted commas” and used long (em) dashes instead. As seen in the example above, Cormac McCarthy does away with them—and the dashes—too.

I’m talking about quotation marks, those paired flea-specks that set off dialogue in most stories and novels. The fact is you don’t need them, not if you make it otherwise clear who is speaking, and when. (It helps to have distinct-sounding characters.)

The fact that you can dispense with quotation marks doesn’t mean that you should. Eliminating quotation marks from dialogue can lend a muted quality to your storytelling, as if the characters were speaking in a dream, their voices seen more than heard—like people paralyzed by sleep, unable to scream or shout.

Dialogue in quotation marks is “LOUDER!”