Dialogue (40 page)

We have to let our characters tell their stories. In a sense, yes, these are
our
stories, but we've created characters to play the various parts, so we need to make sure we afford them their dignity and don't exploit them by putting words in their mouths that
we
want them to say.

To betray and exploit our characters is to:

• have them expressing strong feelings on subjects that might normally put them to sleep

• have them rambling on and on about some issue in which they really have no interest

• put reams of information in their mouths that they would never say out loud just because we need to educate the reader on the story background

• put reams of description in their mouths that they would never say out loud just because we need the reader to see the other characters and/or setting

• give them a voice at any point that isn't who they are

• use them to preach our own personal agenda. Which is our next don't.

•
Don't use your characters to preach your personal agenda.
I feel strongly about the death penalty, child abuse, and chocolate. Prison reform, religious fundamentalists, and weight loss. Road rage. But what kind of a writer would I be if, every chance I got, I was putting words in my characters' mouths about these issues and subjects? I wouldn't be walking in integrity, and I sure wouldn't be creating characters who did.

Okay, I'd be lying if I said I'm writing stories that don't include my personal pet peeves and issues I feel strongly about. I don't know of a writer who is so detached from his personal agenda that he isn't writing about it at all. We write about subjects that matter to us, that we feel passionately about. We're
supposed
to be doing that. But our characters will only be authentic if we allow them to have their personal issues, too, and to express their thoughts and feelings about those issues in a way that is very much in their own voice.

For example, I happen to be writing a novel about the death penalty. That's the subject, but the characters all come from different places, and when they make a philosophical statement, I better make sure it's
their
philosophical statement, not mine. One of the main characters has a lot of traits that I don't respect, and sometimes I don't like writing her scenes. She says things that make me so mad, yet I need her because she represents the opposing side of the death penalty (opposing in this case meaning the opposite side of my own) and is the catalyst for many discussions in the story that I want my characters to engage in on this subject that, yes, I feel so strongly about.

• Don't try to be cute or clever.
This don't is in the same family as
Don't try too hard.
Writers who think every time their characters open their mouths they have to say something entertaining, amusing, or clever are in the same league as actual people who are forever trying to make the rest of us laugh. After a while, these folks are just annoying. You really don't want your characters to annoy your readers. This is not a good thing.

How do you know if you're trying to be cute or clever? Well, this is the difficult part. I have a sense that real people don't know when they're doing this, so I wonder if writers can know. I'm hoping that just pointing it out will be enough to alert you that it's possible so you'll watch for it and resist the tendency. One sign is if your characters are always laughing at each other. If you find yourself constantly writing, He laughed, She chuckled, He cracked up, They all laughed, They split a gut, you're probably doing a bit of this. It's better to underplay than overplay. Subtlety is always preferable to bowling the reader over with your characters' personalities.

• Don't let the dialogue drive the scene.
I've read stories by writers (unpublished—an important distinction in this context) that were 80 percent to 90 percent dialogue, and unless you're very good at this or you're writing a specific kind of story in which this could be effective, an all- or mostly-dialogue story just doesn't work.

Dialogue is a vehicle for moving the plot forward, for characterization, for providing background information to the reader, for description of other characters, for creating suspense and building tension—all purposes we've talked about in this book so far. But dialogue is the means to an end, not the end in and of itself.

In a plot-driven story, the plot events are what drive the story forward, and in a character-driven story, the protagonist's internal transformation is what moves the story. The dialogue is simply a means of engaging the characters in a scene with each other so they can
move—
externally or internally, preferably both.

When you allow dialogue to drive a scene, unless you're an expert dialogue writer, your characters end up talking all over the place
about
the story events and the other characters, and so the action and narrative suffers. The characters come off as shallow because they're just
talking.
Not thinking or acting, just flapping their lips. And we know what we think of real people who are all hot air.

You want your story to be three-dimensional, to include action, narrative,
and
dialogue. Of course, there are exceptions—moments when the dialogue will take over a scene—just like there are moments when the action and narrative will take over. This is as it should be. But these are definitely exceptions. For the most part, you want to weave these three elements into each scene you write. In a three-dimensional scene, the dialogue affects the narrative and the narrative affects the action, which affects the dialogue, etc. You can mix all of this up many different ways because most of the time you need all three.

•
Don't worry about perfection.
Dialogue is the one element of fiction where you have to worry the least about getting it "right." By that I mean grammar and sentence structure. You can get by with more in dialogue than you can in any of the other elements of fiction because we want our characters to sound like real people having real live conversations. People talk in sentence fragments, phrases and half phrases, slang, and dialects. Most of us don't care how we sound or come off to one another when we're just hanging out, and our characters don't either. It's only the writer who gets uptight about this stuff.

There's no such thing as the perfect sentence in dialogue, unless it's "Help!" when a character is drowning or "No!" when a female character doesn't want to have sex. It's that simple. If you could get just this one point from this book, you could relax and never be afraid of dialogue again. Dialogue is just people talking.

To let go of your need to write perfect dialogue means you'll create dialogue that's more authentic because you'll let your characters be who they are and talk out of that real place inside of them. We're hearing a lot about breathing these days, and sometimes I wonder if we would be less uptight as writers if we could just breathe with our characters when writing their dialogue. It's worth a try.

When feeling the need to write perfect dialogue, just remember:

• Your characters are human, definitely not perfect.

• Your characters aren't thinking nearly as hard about what they're saying as you are.

• Your characters have something to say and you need to listen instead of think so hard about what
you
want them to say or think they
should
be saying.

Now you know everything—almost—that you're not supposed to do when writing dialogue. But what
works?
When writing dialogue, what
can
you do that's effective and engages readers in your characters' conversations with each other?

• Do write dialogue that's worth eavesdropping on.
It was Gary Provost who originally said it and I thought it was a great thing to remember: "There's no absolute rule about when you use dialogue and when you shouldn't, but here's a good generalization: If a stranger were nearby, would he try to eavesdrop on the conversation? If the answer is no, don't use the dialogue. If the answer is yes, use it."

That makes perfect sense to me. If we went through every story we wrote with this in mind, I bet we'd get rid of a lot of the ho-hum dialogue we write.

Every once in a while I take a pad and paper and sit in a restaurant and write. If there are other restaurant patrons nearby, and if they're talking about anything interesting at all, then I'm sunk. I simply can't concentrate. I once heard true crime writer Ann Rule talk about her friendship with horror writer John Saul. When they go out to lunch together, their conversation is often focused on who killed whom and with what kind of weapon. She says they get all kinds of looks from the people around them.

So the question to remember is: Would anyone want to eavesdrop on your characters' conversation? Why or why not?

• Do know your characters (especially the minor ones).
I've mentioned it

many times in this book, already, but it bears repeating. It's only as you know your characters that you can write dialogue for them that rings true. Otherwise, it sounds like stick people talking, and all of your characters will sound the same—they'll sound like you. I once read in a writing book that if your story could take place anywhere, then you haven't got hold of either your setting or your story because the setting is intricately connected to the story. The same is true of dialogue. If the dialogue you create could be spoken by any of the characters, then you don't know your characters.

Damon Knight gives us some good advice on this subject in his book
Creating Short Fiction:
"Dialogue in fiction should resemble real dialogue with the various hesitations, repetitions, and other glitches edited out of it. Listen to people talk. No two are exactly alike. By the way they talk, their choice of words, the things they talk about, and the attitudes they express, they tell you where they grew up, how they were educated, the kind of work they do, what social class they belong to, and much more. When you know who your character is and where she comes from and what she's like, you should know instinctively what she will say and how she'll say it. If the people in your stories
don't
talk 'in character,' it must be because you don't know them well enough, or because you have not spent enough time listening attentively to people's speech patterns."

We often make special efforts to do character sketches and charts on our protagonists, antagonists, and one or two minor characters, but we need to also know the rest of the cast so the entire story will ring true when all of our characters speak, not just the major players. How are we going to know if a line is false if we don't know the character speaking it?

A couple of years ago, I started writing first-person profiles for all of the characters in my stories. This allows them to tell me who they are in their own voices. This is actually pages and pages of dialogue when you think about it, because I'm letting them talk to me. It has opened my characters up to me like nothing I've ever tried before. All of these years, I've been toiling over those humongous lists of questions in dossiers suggested by writing teachers to get to know your characters. I get so bored answering all of the questions and filling out the dossiers that I have no passion left for the story when it's time to write it. So I've become an advocate of the first-person profile, especially for the antagonist, because writing in first person forces me to get inside of his head.

• Do pace your dialogue.
Every story has a rhythm, and we need to try to get into our story's rhythm so it moves well. As we learned in chapter eight, we can use dialogue to either speed up a scene or slow it down. When we're conscious of this process, our dialogue works in tandem with the action and narrative to create a flow that's organic to the story we want to tell. For example, if it's an action/adventure story, the dialogue will move as quickly as the action and narrative, unless the action is over the top, and then you can use the kind of nondramatic dialogue that will slow the scenes down a bit. If it's a romance, you may use mostly dialogue to tell your story, and in this case, it will probably move along at a nice clip.