Dialogue (14 page)

Shows character transformation. In each of the following scenarios, the protagonist is confronted and challenged to make some changes in her life. The scenario is only a small part of a bigger story about a bigger theme. Write a three-page scene of dialogue that shows the confrontation and the response of the protagonist to the challenge that she needs to look at something within herself.

• A wife finds out her husband (protagonist) is attracted to and beginning to spend time with a single woman who is friends with the couple. She confronts him and gives him an ultimatum.

• A boss tells her employee (protagonist) that she's taking too many coffee breaks and extending her lunch hours, as well as spending too much time on the phone.

• A mother (protagonist) discovers that her twenty-something daughter is a prostitute who plans to continue as long as there is work.

Reveals/reminds of goals. Choose one of the three following scenarios and write a two-page scene from the point of view of the character that feels most passionately about his or her goal. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure that the protagonist's goal or intention is evident in the scene.

• A fourteen-year-old girl wants to go out on a date with a sixteen-year-old boy. This would be her first date, and her parents are against it.

• A man in his thirties loves to work on old cars, then sell them for a profit. He has at least five beaters plus parts laying all over his yard at any one time. The next-door neighbors are growing increasingly anxious over this. They have a perfect house and a perfect yard.

• A young, very aggressive woman tries to sell a harried mother of two some perfume in a store parking lot.

Keeping your characters in social situations. Write a two-page scene of dialogue that starts out with a character alone and in conflict with himself. Then bring another character into the scene and begin to develop the conflict externally as well as internally. Use one of the following settings:

• a mountain trail • a jail cell • a hospital room

• a dark alley • a church sanctuary

[ narrative, dialogue, and action — learning to weave the spoken word ]

As a new writer, my stories were mostly dialogue. Pages and pages of characters talking. I loved to write dialogue. I don't know that I thought a story needed anything else. I wrote my very first story in fourth grade—a puppet play consisting of nothing but dialogue and a few stage directions. I wrote a lot of skits and plays after that. Dialogue was and always has been my favorite part of writing a story.

Somewhere along the line, I realized there were other elements necessary to telling stories: action and narrative. Description is also part of a story, but it's really just another form of narrative. While dialogue is the element that brings a story and the characters to life on the page, action creates the movement and narrative gives the story its depth and substance. Dialogue is the characters' words, action the characters' physical movement, and narrative the characters' thoughts about everything going on around them, which can take the form of observation of the setting, other characters, or mental musing on the story situation. Stories need all three elements—dialogue, action, and narrative—to create a three-dimensional feel for the reader.

Writing a story means weaving all of the elements of fiction together, just like quilters weave the various patterns of their quilts or ice skaters weave in and out of each other on the ice. When it's done right, weaving dialogue, narrative, and action can create a beautiful tapestry.

why weave?

Expert weaving of dialogue, narrative, and action is done unconsciously.

Once we learn how it's done, we don't think about it while we're doing it. We are letting the characters lead us, so we're no more thinking about which element of storytelling we're using than we are thinking about when to use the clutch, brake, and accelerator when we're driving. We just do it. When reading a story, we don't notice whether the author is weaving or not— when it's working. When it's not working, when the author is not doing it, we notice. I can only speak for myself. I notice.

Some talented writers are able to pull off memoirs and novels using mostly narrative and almost ignoring action and dialogue. Many of these books are so well written that we would never even know what's missing unless it was pointed out to us—and even then, we wouldn't care because the story worked for us on some level. Just know that these are the exception. Too many beginning writers, I've noticed, think they're the exception, but most likely they're not.

Certainly, there are scenes in all of our stories that work best using only narrative or only dialogue or only action. The more you write, the more you'll recognize those scenes and why using only one of these three elements is the most effective. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to practice conscious weaving, which we'll focus on in this chapter.

Think for a moment about a "scene" in your life. Maybe you're outside playing with your kids, at the gym, or at work. You're doing (action), you're thinking (narrative), and you're talking (dialogue), often all at the same time. When others around you are doing all three of these things, when do you pay the most attention? Obviously, you don't know when someone else is thinking because you can't read another person's thoughts. Sometimes when others are doing things, we take notice. But if anyone near us is talking about anything interesting at all, we listen. We can't help it. Writers are probably more guilty of this than anyone else. People are always inclined to eavesdrop on the interesting conversations of others. The key word is
interesting.

We weave because it's life. Our days are full of weaving. We get up, think about a work project, talk to our partner about the day, eat breakfast, take the kids to school, think about a conflict we're having with a neighbor, go to work, think about the stops we need to make on the way home from work, and on an on until we fall into bed at night. This is our life—a series of thoughts, actions, and words that go on all day, every day. We want our fictional stories to imitate life, so we need to show all the dimensions of our characters' lives—at once. Not the boring stuff, of course, but the stuff that matters, the stuff that pertains to and furthers the plot.

Can you imagine a story of only dialogue? Or action? Or narrative? I'm such a fan of dialogue that I'll go out on a limb and say that if you're going to err, err on the side of too much dialogue rather than not enough.

To weave is to blend two or three elements of fiction together so it makes for a smooth ride for the reader. Let's see how that works out practically.

dialogue into action

In a scene that is mostly action, bits of dialogue here and there give the scene its three-dimensional feel. Again, this is just like life. When some kind of action is taking most of our attention, we don't completely stop talking, but we probably talk less, depending on the kind of action in which we're engaged and the kind of emotion the action is evoking from us. Too often new writers, when creating an action scene, forget about using dialogue altogether, I'm guessing because they're so focused on trying to get their character from Point A to Point B and they neglect to consider that the character would probably be expressing
something,
even if it's just a word or phrase here and there. Even if he's alone in the scene, you can have him talking out loud to himself, again, for that three-dimensional feel you're after in every scene you write.

Dialogue can be very effective when woven into action scenes that include a lot of characters, such as a crowd or party scene. It can make the scene feel alive and happening while on another level your viewpoint character is having his own private drama separate from the crowd. Especially in crowd scenes, you want to do this because to mimic reality, there is always more than one thing going on with any number of the characters present.

Stephen King does a good job of this in an action scene in his novel
Bag of Bones.
In this scene, King is describing a carnival, and in his magical style, writes the scene so it's part dream, part reality, and the protagonist, Mike, moves between the two in his mind while navigating the carnival. Suddenly he runs into Kyra, the young daughter of the woman he's falling in love with, and for a moment they stand watching the Red-Tops, a singing group, when Kyra notices that a lady on the stage is wearing her mother's dress. Up until this point the scene has consisted mostly of narrative and action. Watch what King does with the dialogue as Mike and Kyra try to make their way out of the carnival.

"Why is the lady wearing Mattie's dress?" Kyra asked me, and she began to tremble.

"I don't know, honey, I can't say." Nor could I argue—it was the white sleeveless dress Mattie had been wearing on the common, all right.
We watch the action onstage for a few more paragraphs, then:

The crowd roared happily. In my arms, Kyra was shaking harder than ever. "I'm scared, Mike," she said. "I don't like that lady. She's a scary lady. She stole Mattie's dress. I want to go home."
King moves into a number of paragraphs of narrative and action about the lady on the stage—his usual scary stuff—and then the scene is off and running.
Right or wrong, I'd had enough. I turned, putting my hand on the back of Ki's head and urging her face down against my chest. Both her arms were around my neck now, clutching with panicky tightness.
King describes another part-dream, part-reality character, then:
"Excuse me," I said, brushing by him.

"There's no town drunk here, you meddling son of a bitch," he said, never looking at me and never missing a beat as he clapped. "We all just take turns."
Mike and Kyra keep moving, dodging around three drinking farmers, until they're free of the crowd. More dialogue as they head toward the street and home:

"Almost done, Irish!" Sara shrieked after me. She sounded angry, but not too angry to laugh. "You gonna get what you want, sugar, all the comfort you need, but you want to let me finish my bi'ness. Do you hear me, boy? Just stand clear! Mind me now!"

Mike is carrying Kyra and they begin to move faster.

On our left was the baseball pitch and some little boy shouting, "Willy hit it over the fence, Ma! Willy hit it over the fence!" with monotonous brain-crog-gling regularity.
They keep moving.

"Are we home yet?" Ki almost moaned. "I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy."

"I will," I said. "Everything's going to be all right."

Each line of narrative I inserted between the dialogue passages is where King has included a few paragraphs of action in the scene. Can you see how the dialogue gives the feel of many things happening at once as Mike passes and runs into the various characters and tries to comfort Kyra, all while trying to get her away from the carnival and home?