Dialogue (8 page)

Let's take a look at some of J.R.R. Tolkien's dialogue in
The Lord of the Rings
and see exactly what we're talking about. Do you see yourself at all?

A dozen hobbits, led by Sam, leaped forward with a cry and flung the villain to the ground. Sam drew his sword.

"No, Sam!" said Frodo. "Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it."

Saruman rose to his feet, and stared at Frodo. There was a strange look in his eyes of mingled wonder and respect and hatred. "You have grown, Halfling," he said. "Yes, you have grown very much. You are wise, and cruel. You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt to your mercy. I hate it and you! Well, I go and I will trouble you no more. But do not expect me to wish you health and long life. You will have neither. But that is not my doing. I merely foretell."

He walked away, and the hobbits made a lane for him to pass; but their knuckles whitened as they gripped on their weapons. Wormtongue hesitated, and then followed his master.

What makes this scene of dialogue work? What distinguishes it as magical?

It's certainly
dramatic.
For starters, take the phrase,
flung the villain to the ground
in the first paragraph. It's not dialogue, but it could be. It's definitely dramatic. Flung? Villain?

Did you notice that no contractions are used? The language is almost Shakespearean.
"Do not kill me." "He has not hurt me." "I do not wish him to be slain."

It's
eloquent. "You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt, to your mercy."

It's
direct. "But do not expect me to wish you health and long life. You will have neither."

If you want to write fantasy or science fiction, you must become a master of magical dialogue. How? Practice. Read lots and lots of stories in the science fiction/fantasy genres. And challenge yourself with the exercise at the end of this chapter.

In a romance, magical dialogue takes on a little different form, but it's still magical in that it transcends the way we talk to each other in normal society in this century. One reason I don't read a lot of romance novels is because many romance writers can't pull off this kind of transcending and magical dialogue. They try, but it comes off as hokey rather than magical. I think Robert James Waller does an admirable job in this passage of dialogue

between his hero, Richard, and his heroine, Francesca, in
The Bridges of Madison County.

He started to speak, but Francesca stopped him.

"Robert, I'm not quite finished. If you took me in your arms and carried me to your truck and forced me to go with you, I wouldn't murmur a complaint. You could do the same thing just by talking to me. But I don't think you will. You're too sensitive, too aware of my feelings, for that. And I have feelings of responsibility here.

"Yes, it's boring in its way. My life, that is. It lacks romance, eroticism, dancing in the kitchen to candlelight, and the wonderful feel of a man who knows how to love a woman. Most of all, it lacks you. But there's this damn sense of responsibility I have. To Richard, to the children. Just my leaving, taking away my physical presence, would be hard enough for Richard. That alone might destroy him.

"On top of that, and this is even worse, he would have to live the rest of his life with the whispers of the people here. 'That's Richard Johnson. His hot little Italian wife ran off with some longhaired photographer a few years back.' Richard would have to suffer that, and the children would hear the snickering of Winterset for as long as they live here. They would suffer, too. And they would hate me for it.

"As much as I want you and want to be with you and part of you, I can't rear myself away from the realness of my responsibilities. If you force me, physically or mentally, to go with you, as I said earlier, I cannot fight that. I don't have the strength, given my feelings for you. In spite of what I said about not taking the road away from you, I'd go because of my own selfish wanting of you."

Okay, who talks like that? Not anyone I know. That's pretty articulate for an off-the-cuff moment. Pretty articulate and pretty, well, magical. Magical in that all of it makes perfect sense and is said in such eloquent language that we marvel at it while at the same time being fully aware that if left to us, we'd say something banal like, "Nope, I can't hang out with you anymore. If Richard finds out, I'm dead meat." In a romance story, somehow the magical dialogue connects with the romantic in us and we can go there with Francesca. We can believe it.

What makes Francesca's dialogue work so well that we're pulled in at an emotional level? First, it's the
details.
The author paints word pictures. Instead of
"...he'd have to live the rest of his life with the gossip,"
Francesca

says,
"...he'd have to live the rest of his life with the whisper of the people here."
This creates an image in the reader's mind, and we can see and feel Richard's pain as the townsfolk whisper to each other about Robert and Francesca.

"If you took me in your arms and carried me to your truck..."

"His hot little Italian wife ran off with some long-haired photographer..."

Magical dialogue also includes
metaphors. "In spite of what I said about not taking the road away from you..."
Francesca is talking about Robert's freedom.

Magical dialogue is emotional dialogue. Francesca is able to articulate her longing for what Robert has to offer as well as her compassion for how Richard and her children would suffer if she left them and rode off with Robert into the sunset. She's able to hold those two emotions simultaneously, which tears her in two. It's magical.

Like I said previously, I happen to believe that most writers either have the ability to write this kind of dialogue or they don't. We have to have a mind that thinks in magical terminology, sentences, and phrases. I'm so in awe of those who can write like this, so in awe that most of the time I leave it to them to write. But every once in a while, I try. If you think you have this ability, work to develop it. If not, keep trying. Never underestimate the romantic in you.

cryptic

Much of the dialogue in literary and religious stories deals with abstract ideas and vague concepts and has double meanings that readers can't always immediately decipher. They're not supposed to. Sometimes other novels will have bits of cryptic dialogue when the plot calls for some things to remain hidden or secret. These bits of dialogue plant subliminal messages in the reader's mind that help to communicate the story's theme and will ultimately make sense if the author is able to successfully pull the story off at the end. Some writers are especially gifted at this. Chuck Palahniuk is one of them. Here are three dialogue passages from his novel
Fight Club
that make little sense at the moment, even sounding like the ranting of a crazy person, but when woven into the story build to a satisfying resolution at the end. In the first one, the main character, unnamed because he turns out to be one with his alter ego, Tyler Durden, has just learned that while he was away for

a few days, his condo blew up. In the following scene, the doorman is giving the viewpoint character his perspective on the situation.

"A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said. I called Tyler.

The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street. Oh, Tyler, please deliver me. And the phone rang.

The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don't know what they really want." Oh, Tyler, please rescue me. And the phone rang.

"Young people, they think they want the whole world."

Deliver me from Swedish furniture.

Deliver me from clever art.

And the phone rang and Tyler answered.

"If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

We don't completely know what the doorman is talking about because this takes place only forty pages into the story, and we're just beginning to understand that the viewpoint character's major conflict is his disillusionment with an empty consumer culture and his struggle to find an answer. In the next passage, Marla, the viewpoint character's annoying once-in-a-while girlfriend and a constant reminder of what makes our consumer culture so empty, makes a couple of cryptic comments.

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

A few moments later, after rambling on for a while about her latest Goodwill find and how people dump dead Christmas trees:

"The Animal Control place is the best place to go," Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital and then into the big pet oven. "The big sleep, 'Valley of the Dogs' style.

"Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?"

At this point, Maria isn't making many points with us because we don't have a clue as to what she's talking about. Later, it will all make sense and tie in directly to what "Tyler" is dealing with in his life.

In the last example, a police detective has started calling the viewpoint character about his condo explosion. They're on the phone with each other and the detective has just asked if he knows anyone who could make homemade dynamite. "Tyler" is whispering advice over the viewpoint character's shoulder.

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution."

I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up my condo.

"I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit... The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."

It doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment, but later the viewpoint character comes to terms with that part of himself, his ego, that is bent on self-destruction.

What distinguishes cryptic dialogue from other kinds of dialogue is its indirectness, subtlety, and ambiguity. If you want to see a lot of examples of this, amazingly enough, check out Jesus' words in the Bible. That's right— Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are full of cryptic dialogue. Stories with double meanings. Stories that can be interpreted in many different ways, depending upon what the reader wants to hear.

In order to write cryptic dialogue, you can't be a black-or-white thinker. You have to be able to view the world from more than one perspective. Why? And why is cryptic dialogue so effective in literary and religious stories, and even some mainstream stories? Because these kinds of stories have a message and readers don't want to be preached to, told what to believe, or what to think. But they usually don't mind having their current belief systems challenged. Cryptic dialogue that doesn't come right out and make a concrete statement, that has hidden meanings the reader must discover,

honors the reader's intelligence and ability to come to his own conclusions about the story's subject. The reader will be much more receptive to your story's truth when the characters are talking around a subject rather than hammering some moralistic idea into each other's brains.

Practice writing dialogue for your characters that holds back, skirts around the real issues, and can be interpreted in more than one way.

Cryptic dialogue is difficult to do well. If we're not careful, we can end up writing preachy, moralistic, dogmatic junk that can turn off readers in droves. But when done well and woven through the plot, cryptic dialogue can provide the substance that gives meaning to the entire story.

descriptive

The literary, mainstream, and historical story often relies on dialogue for much of its history, background, and description. Or at least it should. Too many of these stories are full of long, boring passages of narrative that the reader has to wade through on the way to the plot. In this kind of story, even once the plot is moving, the author often stops the action with more long, boring passages of narrative. I can appreciate that the author is enamored with the research of her story's time period, but there are more interesting ways to dispense it to us, and for the reader, the most engaging way is through dialogue. The goal of descriptive dialogue is to provide the reader with the information she needs to understand the characters and story line in the context of the setting or time period in which they live. This is the author's goal. The character's goal can't be sacrificed for the author's, and that's where authors often err. Descriptive dialogue can still have tension and suspense and can be inserted into a scene of action so the story doesn't bog down while we're getting the information we need.