Dialogue (21 page)

it's all in the details

Whether you're writing dialogue, action, or narrative, vivid details are what cause a reader to be able to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell—in short, to be able to experience your story on a sensory level.

Now, in dialogue, we have to remember that characters don't necessarily talk using rich details to describe another character's appearance, a building, or anything else. Most of us are actually quite uncreative when it comes to using sensory details. So above all, you want your characters to sound real.

As I emphasize so often in this book, everything depends on the kind of story you're writing and the characters that inhabit it. Anne Rice, because of the voice she uses in her vampire novels, can get away with some pretty heavy descriptive details in her dialogue passages. Let's look at one in
Interview With the Vampire.
The vampire, Louis, is telling a boy about a journey he took with his daughter, Claudia. In this particular passage, he describes their approach to a monastery.
Listen
to the richness of the detail in this short paragraph, which is only a small part of the setting.

"In moments we had found the gap that would admit us, the great opening that was blacker still than the walls around it, the vines encrusting its edges as if to hold the stones in place. High above, through the open room, the damp smell of the stones strong in my nostrils, I saw, beyond the streaks of clouds a faint sprinkling of stars. A great staircase moved upward, from corner to corner, all the way to the narrow windows that looked out upon the valley. And beneath the first rise of the stair, out of the gloom emerged the vast, dark opening to the monastery's remaining rooms."

This passage appeals to the reader's sense of sight and smell. The reader can see the
great black opening, the vines encrusting the edges,
and
the sprinkling of stars.
Can't you
smell
the damp stones?

Rice doesn't stop there. She continues with the sensory details, putting them into Louis' mouth as he goes on with his story. She appeals next to the reader's sense of hearing.

"There was only the low backdrop of the wind. I could see a flat stone there, and it sounded hollow as she gently tapped it with her heel."

Claudia stops to listen and asks Louis if he can hear what she hears.

"It was so low no mortal could have heard it. Just a rustling now, a scraping, but it was steady; and then slowly the round tramping of a foot began to distinguish itself. The tramp of the feet grew louder, and I began to sense that one step preceded the other very sharply, the second dragging slowly across the earth."

In the middle of all of this emphasis on sensory sound, the author throws in the sense of touch, as well.

"Claudia's hand tightened on mine, and with a gentle pressure she moved me silently beneath the slope of the stairway. I could feel the fabric of my shirt against me, the stiff cut of the collar, the very scraping of the buttons against my cape."

Would that we could all tell stories that were so suspenseful and employ the kinds of sensory detail that causes the reader to hold her breath and intensely feel every moment of the scene.

Again, the author can get away with this because of the voice she uses in her vampire novels. You probably wouldn't be able to reveal this level of detail in the dialogue of a character who's a gangster or a plumber. The level of detail might be the same, but the way it's expressed would be different.

When creating setting details for your character to express through dialogue, you don't want to go overboard and clutter the dialogue with a lot of unnecessary minutia. Include only those details that enhance the mood you're trying to create, get across the emotion the character is feeling, or move the plot forward in some way. Actually, the fewer the details, the more each one will stand out. And the sharper the detail, the more the setting will come into focus.

Setting contrasts are another way to make details stand out. In the above passage, one reason the
streaks of clouds
and
sprinkling of stars
stands out is because the author already established in our minds the
black
walls and opening into the room.

If you find that the dialogue in your story suffers from a lack of detail when you're trying to establish your story's setting, try a visualization exercise. Imagine yourself as your character in the story setting:

• What do you see before you?

• What do you smell in this particular setting?

• What can you reach out and touch?

• What do you hear all around you?

• Can you taste anything? What?

• How are some of the sensory details contrasted?

dialogue description

Writers use a variety of techniques to describe their story settings:

[ 1 ]
omniscient narrative description as a character appears in a particular setting

[ 2 ]
a character's thoughts about the setting in which he finds himself

[ 3 ]
moving the characters into action and throwing in setting details as the characters are chasing each other and interacting in every way possible

[ 4 ]
dialogue

Setting details can often feel static in narrative description (1), and many readers can easily get bored after a few paragraphs that describe a house's furnishings or a town's main street. The same thing happens if a character stands in the middle of a setting looking around and thinking,
Ugh
(2). Yet this is what seems to come to us to do first when considering how we might present setting. Action (3) works well because the writer is dispensing details as the characters move, so it's just a few here and there.

But what about using dialogue to get your setting across to your reader? If you do it in a lively and intriguing style, putting words in the mouths of characters the reader cares about, this can work nicely.

In Terry Goodkind's novel
Wizard's First Rule,
one of the characters, Kahlan, is explaining the setting to another character, Richard, in such a way that even includes suspense for the future, because this is a setting they're

going to have to understand if they're going to navigate it and get where they want to go in the story.

Kahlan stared into the fire. "The boundaries are part of the underworld: the dominion of the dead. They were conjured into our world by magic, to separate the three lands. They are like a curtain drawn across our world. A rift in the world of the living."

"You mean that going into the boundary is, what, like falling through a crack into another world? Into the underworld?"

She shook her head. "No. Our world is still here. The underworld is there in the same place at the same time. It is about a two-day walk across the land where the boundary, the underworld, lies. But while you are walking the land where the boundary is, you are also walking through the underworld. It is a wasteland. Any life that touches the underworld, or is touched by it, is touching death. That is why no one can cross the boundary. If you enter it, you enter the land of the dead. No one can return from the dead."

"Then how did you?"

She swallowed as she watched the fire. "With magic. The boundary was brought here with magic, so the wizards reasoned they could get me safely through with the aid and protection of magic. It was frightfully difficult for them to cast the spells. They were dealing in things they didn't fully understand, dangerous things, and they weren't the ones who conjured the boundary into this world, so they weren't sure it would work. None of us knew what to expect." Her voice was weak, distant. "Even though I came through, I fear I will never be able to entirely leave it."

Using words like
the underworld, death, curtain, rift, wasteland, magic, spells, and dangerous,
the author brings this setting to life even though we're not quite there. We anticipate getting there because now we know it's an exciting place fraught with all kinds of scary things.

The use of dialogue to convey setting is effective here because we trust Kahlan. She speaks with authority and confidence and we know that she knows what she's talking about. We believe her. We're actually in Richard's point of view in this scene, and one reason we believe her is because Richard believes her, and he's a trustworthy character.

Once again, when using dialogue to describe, you have to know your characters so you know what kinds of details they would mention in their description of a place. As you can see, Kahlan is the kind of character who

goes psychologically deeper when describing place than many characters would. She doesn't just describe the physical appearance of the boundary or the underworld. She goes into the wizards casting spells and what it all means, which is much more interesting than just physical details.

stay in voice

Sometimes I see fiction manuscripts from my students who use dialogue to describe setting and the characters begin to sound like those time-share salespeople: "And over here in this corner we have a gas fireplace with a marble hearth and mantle and strobe lights on the ceiling above." What you want to remember when using dialogue to describe setting is to stay in your character's voice. If you have a character in your novel who's into hip-hop, then, "Hey, man, it's yo mama's blue rag on the floor there," and well, you know what I mean. Joyce Carol Oates handles this pretty well in her novel
Middle Age.
Roger and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Robin, are in the car together discussing a dead uncle. While the setting they're discussing doesn't play a huge part in the story, it's important for the characterization of Uncle Adam.

She said hesitantly, "Mom was telling me, she'd heard from some friends there, Mr. Berendt had—some things?—people were surprised to find?—in his house?" "What things?" "Oh, I don't know." "What kind of things?"

"It's just gossip, you know Mom. She'll say anything people tell her." "Honey, what kind of things? I'm Adam's estate executor, and I know." "Mom was saying she'd heard Mr. Berendt had, like, lots of money hidden away? In boxes? Like, buried in the cellar of his house? Millions of dollars?" Robin was watching him closely. Seeing his grimace, she said, "I never believe it, why'd Uncle Adam hide money like that, if he had it? If, like, anybody had it? You'd put it in a bank, right? I told Mom that. She's so credulous."

They discuss the ridiculousness of this idea for a moment, and then Robin continues:

"I was in Uncle Adam's cellar, a few times. When we were there visiting. I must've been, like, ten. A long time ago." "Were you?"

"The cellar was old. It was sort of creepy. Uncle Adam said maybe there'd been dead people buried there, a really long time ago? Like, if they'd been murdered in the tavern, that the house used to be, they were buried in the cellar. Was that so?"

Oates uses the setting details to show the eccentricity of Robin's Uncle Adam. We learn that he may have hid money in the old house and told his niece stories about possible dead people buried in the cellar. Robin talks about her uncle and his creepy house and cellar. But note how she phrases so many of her remarks as questions. This is how she talks throughout the story and how so many teens typically speak, raising their voices at the end of their sentences in a question.

When your character is describing place, be sure to remember who's talking and stay in voice.

different stories, different settings

There are all kinds of stories, settings, and characters, and when certain characters in certain kinds of stories talk about certain settings, they mention certain things that other characters in other kinds of stories would never think of mentioning. The following are three very different characters from three very different kinds of novels speaking about three very different kinds of settings.

In this first excerpt from J.K. Rowling's
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,
Mr. Dursley, Harry's uncle, is listening to the news. This is how the local newscaster and weatherman describe one aspect of the story's setting on this particular day in Britain:

When Dudley had been put to bed, he went into the living room in time to catch the last report on the evening
news:

"And finally, bird-watchers everywhere have reported that the nation's owls have been behaving very unusually today. Although owls normally hunt at night and are hardly ever seen in daylight, there have been hundreds of sightings of these birds flying in every direction since sunrise. Experts are unable to explain why the owls have suddenly changed their sleeping patterns."

The newscaster passes to the weatherman and the dialogue continues:

"Well, Ted," said the weatherman. "I don't know about that, but it's not only

the owls that have been acting oddly today. Viewers as far apart as Kent, Yorkshire, and Dundee have been phoning in to tell me that instead of the rain I promised yesterday, they've had a downpour of shooting stars!"