Dialogue (22 page)

Owls and shooting stars mark Harry Potter's arrival at the Dursley's. And J.K. Rowling came up with a rather creative way to describe the setting in this fantasy novel, through the evening news.

The next excerpt is taken from
The Lords of Discipline,
a mainstream novel by Pat Conroy. The protagonist, Will, is telling Abigail, an old friend, how he feels about the Corps, which is the story's primary setting, comparing it to how she feels about her roses.

"I used to think that the Corps represented sameness. We all dress the same, we look the same, we live by the same rules, everything. But each one of us is different. When I walk into this garden each rose looks about the same to me, and you go to a parade at the Institute and all two thousand cadets look exactly the same to you. But if you look at them carefully, Abigail, the same thing happens to those cadets as to your roses. Each one is different, with his own surprises, his own miracles."

Keep in mind that this is a mainstream novel so the dialogue, the description, and even the action should make some kind of universal statement to the reader that connects ultimately to the story's theme. Will is describing the setting as he speaks, but he's doing it in such a way as to also make a statement about what he believes to be true about human beings. As you can see, the voice is very different than the newscaster's in the Harry Potter novel.

Finally, the following is an excerpt from
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
by Fannie Flagg. This is a literary novel, and in this scene Evelyn Couch and elderly Mrs. Threadgoode are sitting in the visitor's lounge at Rose Terrace where Mrs. Threadgoode, now that she has an ear she can bend, is going on and on and on about her life. Understandably, her voice is very different from the newscaster's in
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
and Will's in
The Lords of Discipline.

"The railroad tracks ran right across the backyard, and on summer nights that yard would be just full of lightning bugs and the smell of honeysuckle that grew wild, right alongside the tracks. Poppa had the back planted with fig trees and apple trees, and he had built Momma the most beautiful white lattice grape arbor that was full of wisteria vines...and little pink sweetheart roses grew all over the back of the house. Oh, I wish you could have seen it."

Since most of the story is a flashback, this is a creative way to introduce the setting to us before we even get there ourselves. We begin to get a feel for the town of Whistle Stop through the aged voice of one of its most prominent citizens.

weaving narrative setting into dialogue

In an earlier chapter, we discussed how to weave narrative into dialogue. Now we're going to discuss how to specifically weave narrative setting into dialogue. If done right, we can keep unfolding the setting throughout the scene as it moves. This is how it should be done—otherwise, the action and dialogue will begin to feel like it's taking place in a vacuum. We want our scenes to be visual. We don't want to create a bunch of talking heads; the reader needs to be able to picture our characters somewhere.

Weaving also gets us away from the tendency to create info dumps, those large paragraphs full of background, characterization, and setting details that are boring to write—we know they don't feel quite right—and worse yet, boring to read. So as much as you can, try to throw setting details into the actual dialogue as the scene moves forward.

The following example from Lorna Landvik's novel
Your Oasis on Flame Lake
will give you a small example of how this is done.

Darcy
was boogying around to "Love the One You're With," playing air
guitar like the maestro she is, and I was laughing,
trying to screw a fixture into its socket,
when
Sergio blasted through the door
like a gas explosion.

"It looks fantastic," he said,
twirling around like the little plastic ballerina inside a jewelry box
I once bought Lin. Even if
I hadn't been high up on the ladder,
I wouldn't have been able to watch him — he just made me too damn dizzy.

"Wow," said Franny, who had followed Sergio in.
She plopped down on the couch and hugged a pillow to her chest.
"It looks just like a nightclub."

Darcy's air guitar vanished
and she flung herself on the couch
next to Franny.

Obviously, the words in italic are the lines I want you to pay special attention to. This isn't heavy on setting, and you could do a lot more if you had to. For example, if you wanted to show that the characters were affluent, instead of just screwing a fixture into a socket, the viewpoint character

could be changing the lightbulb in a crystal candelabra. You could describe the couch as a
mammoth black leather sofa with a mink afghan hung over the back.
You could go the other way and describe a
25-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling
and a
ratty red futon with an old blanket that smelled like a dog bunched up in one corner.
How you use a dialogue scene to describe the setting always depends on what you're trying to get across about the characters or the story.

integrating your setting

The most effective way to integrate setting into a story is to use all three of the fiction elements at your disposal: dialogue, action, and narrative. This causes setting to simply form a background for the story. It's always there, almost like another character. It takes a gifted writer to be able to pull this off and make it feel natural.

Katherine Dunn is such a writer. In her shocking novel
Geek Love
(and I do mean shocking—and it takes a lot to shock me), Dunn is able to pull off just about everything in one scene. This is a story about a family of carnies. The main characters are the parents and their five children: Arturo, better known as Aqua Boy because he has flippers for arms and legs; Electra/Iphigenia, Siamese twins joined at the hips; Olympia, the hunchbacked protagonist; and Fortunato, who can move objects around rooms. Lil Binewski, the mother, ingested drugs—insecticides, arsenic, radioiso-topes, anything to make her babies more "special"—so she and her husband could make a living with them in the carnival, which was their home. In this scene, the father is telling his children the by now very familiar story about how he came by the idea of creating the Binewski freak show using his own children as the stars of the show. The story is told in Olympia's first-person voice.

"It was in Oregon, up in Portland, which they call the Rose City, though I never got in gear to do anything about it until a year or so later when we were stuck in Fort Lauderdale."

He had been restless one day, troubled by business boondoggles. He drove up into a park on a hillside and got out for a walk. "You could see for miles from up there. And there was a big rose garden with arbors and trellises and fountains. The paths were brick and wound in and out." He sat on a step leading from one terrace to another and stared listlessly at the experimental

roses. "It was a test garden, and the colors were, designed. Striped and layered. One color inside the petal and another color outside."

.The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. "It just struck me—clear and complete all at once—no long figuring about it." He realized that children could be designed. "And I thought to myself, now that would be a rose garden worthy of a man's interest!"

We children would smile and hug him and he would grin around at us and send the twins for a pot of cocoa from the drink wagon and me for a bag of popcorn because the red-haired girls would just throw it out when they finished closing the concession anyway. And we would all be cozy in the warm booth of the van, eating popcorn and drinking cocoa and feeling like Papa's roses.

I love the way the author moves between dialogue, narrative, and action as well as between the past and the present to give a sense of the story's setting, while at the same time turning the key to unlock the door to the story's theme. Brilliant. If you can ever pull this off, you, too, will fall into the category of brilliant.

In the Fundamentals of Nonfiction workshop I teach for Writer's Online Workshops, there's a line about settings I particularly like to use:
Description in action beats static description.
I would say the same is true of dialogue. Description in dialogue beats static description. Don't ever use narrative to describe your setting when you can have a viewpoint character interacting with the setting in a lively discussion with another character. That's really the whole point of this chapter.

You've learned how to move the story forward through dialogue, how to weave dialogue, narrative, and action, how to use dialogue as a characterization device, and in this chapter, how to use dialogue to reveal your story's setting. In the next chapter, we're going to discuss how dialogue can help with the pacing of a scene or story. You can use it to speed things up or pull back to slow things down. Read on to discover how you can get better control of your stories.

Establishing setting. Write a two-page scene of dialogue between two characters in one of the following settings or a modified version. Focus on integrating setting details into the scene from beginning to end. And remember, the details can come through the character's observations of the setting, through dialogue, or through action.

• a rock concert

• an AA meeting

• a corporate office

• a shopping mall

• the inside of a car

Too much too soon. Your characters are entering a winter wonderland. It's their first date and they've decided to leave the city behind and drive up to the slopes for the day to go skiing. One of the characters is from California and has only seen snow once before, as a small child. Describe the setting from her point of view as she describes it to her male partner in the car. The goal is not to info dump but to let it gradually emerge—not too much too soon.