250 Things You Should Know About Writing (8 page)

Each line of dialogue from a character is that character's signature. It contains their voice and personality. One speaks in gruff, clipped phrasing. The other goes on at length. One character is ponderous and poetic, another is meaner than two rattlesnakes fucking in a dirty boot. Don't let a character's voice be defined by dialect, slang, or other trickery. It's not just how they speak. It's also what they say when they do.

Theme is one of those things you as the author don't really speak out loud -- but sometimes
characters
do. They might orbit the theme. They might challenge it. They might speak it outright. Not often, and never out of nowhere. But it's okay once in awhile to let a character be a momentary avatar of theme. It's doubly okay if that character is played by Morgan Freeman. God, that guy's voice. He could say anything -- "Beans are a musical fruit" -- and I'm like, "There it is! Such gravitas! Such
power
. It's the theme.
It's the theme
!"

We expect that dialogue and action are separate, but they are not. Speak is a verb. So's talk. So's discuss, talk, argue, yell, banter, rant, rave. Verb means action. That means,
duh
, dialogue is action, not separate from it. Further, dialogue works best when treated this way. Don't stand two characters across from one another and have them talk at each other like it's a ping-pong game. Characters act while speaking. They walk. Kick stones. Clean dishes. Load rifles. Pleasure themselves. Build thermonuclear penile implants. Eat messy sandwiches. This creates a sense of dynamism. Of an authentic world. Adds variety and interest.

I'm not talking about the MTV reality show, though one supposes there the lesson is the same (
so
not your friend). What I mean is, if you want to ruin good dialogue, the fastest path to that is by mimicking dialogue you hear in the real world. Dialogue in the real world is dull. It's herky-jerky. Lots of um, mmm, hmm, uhhh, like, y'know. If you listen really hard to how people speak to one another, it's amazing anybody communicates anything at all.

Yes, yes, I know. David Mamet writes "realistic" dialogue. Everyone interrupts everyone. They say inexplicable shit. They barely manage to communicate.
Subtextapalooza
. It's great. It works. You're also not David Mamet. I mean, unless you are, in which case, thanks for stopping by. Would you sign my copy of
Glengarry Glen Ross
? All that being said...

Characters don't stand nose to nose and take turns speaking. People are selfish. So too are characters. Characters want to talk. They want to be heard. They don't wait their turn like polite automatons. They can interrupt each other. Finish one another's sentences. Derail conversations. Pursue agendas. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat. It's a battle of energy, wits, and dominance.

Dialogue can represent a pure and potent form of conflict. Two or more characters want something, and they're using words to get it. Before you write conversation, ask: what does each participant want? Set a goal. One character wants money. Another wants affirmation to justify her self-righteousness. A third just needs a fucking hug. Find motive. Purpose. Conscious or not. Let the conversation reflect this battle.

"But it really happened," is never an excuse for something to exist in fiction. Weird shit happens all the time in reality. Ever have something happen where you say, "Gosh, that was really convenient?" You put that in your story, the audience is going to kick you in the gut and spit in your cereal. Dialogue suffers from similar pitfalls. Just because you hear it in reality doesn't mean it works in the context of story. Story has its own secret laws. You can make dialogue
sound
real without mimicking reality. One might term this "natural" dialogue; authenticity is about feeling real, not about being real.

Writing dialogue sometimes means you just let two characters babble for awhile. Small talk, big talk, crazy talk. Let 'em circumvent the real topic. Give them voices. Open the floodgates to your sub-conscious mind. And let the conversation flow. Write big, write messy, write long. Cut later in comfort.

You might write two characters just sitting down and shooting the shit and think, "I'll cut this down later." But don't be so sure. Sometimes characters just need to chat, babble, mouth off. Who they are can be revealed in two people just fucking around, seeing what comes out of their heads. That can work if it's interesting, if it puts the character on the map in terms of the audience's mental picture, and if it eventually focuses up to be something bigger than how it began. Oh, and did I mention it has to be interesting?

Like I said, dialogue is easy to read. Or, it's supposed to be. Anybody who writes dialogue that's dull, that doesn't flow like water and pop like popcorn, needs to be taken out back and shaken like a baby. Find the boring parts. The unnecessary stuff. The junk. Anything that doesn't feel a) necessary and b) interesting. Stick it in a bag and set it on fire. Want to read great dialogue? Sharp, fast, entertaining, witty-as-fuck, with a lot going on? Go watch the TV show
GILMORE GIRLS
. No, I'm not kidding. Stop making that face.

Heh, "duty." Heh, "
log
." Shut up. If you take one thing away from these 25
nonsense nuggets
gems of wisdom, it's this: let dialogue do the heavy lifting and perform double- or even triple-duty. Dialogue isn't just dialogue. It's a vehicle for character, theme, mood, plot, conflict, mystery, tension, horror. Dialogue does a lot of work in very short space: it's the goddamn Swiss Army knife of storytelling. Or MacGyver. Or Trojan Horse. Or MacGyver hiding in a Trojan Horse carrying a Swiss Army knife. Didn't I tell you to shut up already? Where's Morgan Freeman when you need him? He'll tell you to shut up and
you'll listen
.

Part of why dialogue reads so easy is because it's conversational, and conversation is how we interact with other humans and, in our heads, with the world. We talk to inanimate objects, for fuck's sake. (What, you've never yelled at a stubborn jar of jelly? SHUT UP HAVE TOO.) There's a secret, here, and that is to treat
all
your writing like it's dialogue. Write things conversationally. Like you're talking to the audience. Like you and the audience?
Real BFFs
. You can abuse this, of course, but the point is that in conversation you'll use straightforward, uncomplicated language to convey your point -- no value in being stodgy and academic when you're just talking. So too is it with writing, whether it's description in a screenplay or in fiction, you'll find value in straightforward, uncomplicated, even talky language. Talk with the audience, don't lecture at them. Everything is dialogue. Some of it's just one-sided, is all.

Consider: if I were to say to you, "describe for me this lamp," you would begin listing off its traits in earnest. "Base made of iron-wood, 60 watt light-bulb, fraying electric cord, lampshade made of human skin," and on and on. But that is not what you do in fiction. I don't want you to describe every detail. I don't seek an accounting of all the brass tacks. First lesson is: don't describe everything. Knowing how to write description is often about know what
not
to describe.

Less
isn't exactly
more
, here -- less is less, but that's the side on which you should err. Better to make the reader hunger for more detail than be bludgeoned about the head and neck with it. A reader who wants to know more keeps reading. A reader who knows too much will put that book or script down and have a nap as if he just ate a whole plate of carnival food. (Sidenote: I’d shank a dude in the kidneys for a bite of funnel cake.)

The reader doesn't realize this, but he wants to get his hands dirty. Or, his brain-hands, at least. I'm paraphrasing the brilliant Rob Donoghue here, but it's like this: when Betty Crocker first starting selling mixes, they were super-easy to make. Packet of powder, add water, bake. But they didn't sell -- in part because they were too easy. It felt like a cheat. So, Crocker chose to leave out the egg -- meaning, a housewife had to
add
an egg, an extra step. And bam! They sold like a sonofabitch. The lesson is that, your audience wants to work. When they work, they feel invested. Hand them a pick-ax, a pith helmet, and a backpack sprayer filled with sex-lube. Don't give them all parts of the description -- let them fill in details with their imagination. Let them add the egg.

The author likes to be in control. And you are. But you have to cede some intellectual and imaginary control to the audience. You don't need strict autocracy over description. You only need agency over those details that are critical for the story to be what you want the story to be. Leave everything else to the reader to invent inside their crazy head-caves.

This reportedly goes back to Roger Zelazny, who said you should stop at three details in description. People aren't going to remember much more than that, anyway. It's a good rule, though I don't think you need to be quite this mathematical about it. Rather, like with most writing advice, the tenet and the
practice
of that tenet are a bit divergent. (After all, does he mean three details about one character? All characters? The room? A lamp? The heating vent? If I'm allowed three details
per item in the room
, then suddenly I'm writing 1,436 details. I think it just means, “keep the details to a minimum, asshole.”)

Describe only what matters to the story. If the reader must know something, then ensure she knows it. I don't give a fuck about your lamp. Or what leaf-rot is on the oak tree outside. Or what the tag on the dog's collar looks like. If you choose to describe these things, it should be because I need to know them. A character is going to brain another with the lamp. The leaf-rot is part of a larger plot point about some sort of botanical
doom-fungus
. The tag on the dog's collar is shaped like a lucky four-leaf clover because his owner is William "Irish Billy" McArdle, an ex-IRA bomber turned merc thug, and the clover is his signature.

Over-description slows down the pace of reading -- and, if it's truly too egregious, the reader will slam the door and walk away. (In Internet parlance?
tl;dr --
"too long, didn't read.") This is true when writing scripts, too -- description separates out action and dialogue, and those two things keep a script's story moving. Heavy description can kill a script like a hammer-blow to the skull.

That's not to say a reader won't find detail compelling. Fat can be flavorful. Simply describing the antagonist's Dodge Charger as "cherry red" seems like a non-essential detail. But always look for the ways that description can do double-duty. The fact that the muscle car is
cherry red
suggests deeper meaning. We know that red cars are likely to be pulled over. We intuit that red is a color of anger, blood, fire. The character's choice of color can tell us something about that character. Thus, the detail seems fatty, and it is -- but it's also an
essential
fat. Like what you get from olive oil, or avocados, or the unctuous barnacles scraped from the thighs of Oprah Winfrey.

Fuck weather. Too many writers go straight to describing the weather. I think it comes from that old saw, "It was a dark and stormy night," except everyone seems to forget that it comes from a laughably bad book. Describe the weather only if it matters. If a storm has physical effects on the plot, describe it. A miserably cold day might cause a car accident (ice) or lost visibility (blizzard). If the weather matters, tell us. Pro-tip: it usually doesn't matter.