Dialogue (3 page)

"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 True 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.

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.