Dialogue (6 page)

Sure, you may have an outline and you expect your characters to follow it. But it's kind of like when you have a goal for a conversation you plan to have with your partner, friend, or boss, and you find yourself saying things you hadn't planned to say at all. Sometimes this works out and sometimes it doesn't. But the fact is it happens, and you can't always control it. Often the words are out before you can reign them back in. Every once in a while you can catch yourself as it's happening, but most of the time you just keep talking, either making a fool of yourself or saying some really brilliant things that you hadn't anticipated at all. It all depends on the headspace you're in at the moment. That's true of your characters, as well. Their headspace is your headspace. Relax and let them be who and where they are. You can always reign them back in in another draft if that's what needs to happen.

What if I don't put in enough narrative and the reader can't follow the dialogue?
Worse yet, what if I put in too much and slow the dialogue way down? Pacing can be such a bugaboo. When is it too much? When is it not enough? We'll talk more about this in chapter eight, but for right now, this is a very real fear.

You have to have a sense of rhythm to know when enough is enough and when too much is too much. Some scenes call for bare dialogue—dialogue with no added narrative or action. Other scenes need a lot of extra narrative so we understand the core of the dialogue. And still others need action so the dialogue doesn't drag. The perfect balance is sometimes hard to come by, but this fear doesn't have to paralyze you. The more you practice, the better you'll get at this. And if you go over a little bit—too much narrative or action, too much dialogue—you'll catch it in your rewrite because you'll be watching for it.

Dialogue functions like real-life conversations. We talk, we think, we act. We do all of this unconsciously. This is how you want to write dialogue, and if you're worried about what you're doing every minute, your dialogue will come across like that—jerky, stilted, and unnatural. Eventually, after you feel comfortable with dialogue, you won't even be asking this question because you'll intuitively know when to put in a bit of narrative here, a bit of action there, a line of dialogue here, and an identifying tag there all the way through a scene.

Remember Carol? I don't know if she ever got over her fear of writing dialogue. She stopped writing her novel. I think she got bored with it, which is understandable. A story without dialogue is boring indeed. And that should lead your list of fears: What if I become so afraid of writing dialogue that I don't write any?

Don't despair. You
will
become comfortable with dialogue because you're a storyteller, and all stories need dialogue to feel alive to the reader.

You will overcome your fear because you're committed to your story.

In the next chapter, we'll look at the different kinds of dialogue we need to create to make our characters sound authentic in the various fiction genres. In the meantime, keep reading. And for goodness sake, keep writing.

Do you remember Susan Jeffers' book
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway?
This is how you want to approach your fears about writing dialogue. You want to practice challenging them until confidence overrides the fear. Later in this book, we'll go through published excerpts and discuss specific tips that will assist you in this process. The more you challenge your fear by taking risks with your dialogue, the less often your fear will show up when you're writing. Let's take the above fears one by one and give you the opportunity to practice.

What if I let my character talk and he sounds stupid, not at all like I want my reader to perceive him?

The wonderful thing about writing as opposed to speaking is that this is the world of second chances. We can rewrite and rewrite and rewrite as many times as we need to.

Consider one of the characters in a story you're writing. Or consider a character in a completely new story idea. You have a definite role for him in the story. Shine the spotlight on this one character. Know what he wants. Give him a goal in a scene. Be sure you know exactly how you want your reader to perceive him. Now go ahead and write a scene of dialogue, slipping into this character's persona so you can write him for who he really is. Don't think about how stupidly or brilliantly he's talking until after the scene is over.

Now go back and read what you wrote. Does he sound stupid? How stupid? If he sounds real stupid, you might have to "fire" him and create another character to take his place. If he sounds just a little stupid, you can probably revise the dialogue and edit out the stupid parts. If the stupidity persists, maybe he's a stupid character, and you need to go with that. Consider, too, that the problem may be with you. No, I don't mean that you're stupid. But maybe you can't look at your story objectively. Have someone else read your work and give you feedback. Those characters that you think sound stupid may sound just fine.

What if my characters start talking and they all sound the same?

Know your character. Ground yourself in all of their personas, protagonist and antagonist alike and all minor characters, no matter how unlikable. Write first-person character sketches, letting your characters tell you who they are. How do you get to know real people? By spending time with them. The more time you spend with them, the better you get to know them, and soon you can hardly remember when you didn't know them. If you absolutely can't slip inside of any one of your characters, fire him and get a new one to take his place.

Create one scene in your story that includes all of your characters. Now write that scene from each character's point of view, one at a time. Focus on dialogue as the main way of recording the event. If it's impossible to put all the characters in one scene (maybe they lived at different times), then have the odd character reflect back on or project forward to the same scene the others experienced. What you want to do is create the same event for everyone, but show how they all experience it differently. Let each of them tell you about the event in his or her own words. This may include slang, dialect, or certain words or phrases that the other characters would never think to use.

When you reread these scenes, do your characters all sound alike? Have you created your character charts? If not, do that right away. If so, pull out some of the external or internal traits and feed them into the dialogue of the characters that sound alike. This will accomplish what I mentioned earlier in the chapter—the other parts of your characters' lives are different, and they can bring some of that difference into their dialogue. If you have to do this more than once to achieve your goal—write a scene from everyone's viewpoint—then do it as many times as it takes to really get to know these people.

What if my characters don't sound like my reader expects them to?

This problem is easily fixed if you get your characters talking right away, like I suggested earlier. But for practice consider the following:

You've portrayed a character as a Harvard-educated woman. A physicist with two kids, recently divorced, out to lunch with friends, she's complaining about her boss. Suddenly she says, "Well, give me a two-by-four and I'll show him that I'm no ninny" or some such uneducated line.

You're appalled. Where did that come from? Clearly, from somewhere inside of you that at one time had an abusive boss or husband or father or whatever. Okay, so it's not what this character would normally say. A lot of writing fiction is about working through our unresolved issues. Sometimes we need to follow and sometimes we need to reign that character in. Part of being a writer is knowing when to do what. Anyway, you're going to have to get this character off that subject, and work it out in another book, maybe non-fiction, or you're going to just let her go for it and clean it up later. Getting back to your Harvard-educated character—in this case, reign her back in. Rewrite just that one line so it sounds like an intelligent complaint about the boss. Maybe something like, "He seems to think that if we aren't all working twelve-hour days, as he does, that we're not committed to the company. I suppose I'll need to address this in our next staff meeting." You get the idea.

What if my dialogue sounds flat and boring and doesn't do anything to move the story forward?

As for flat and boring, well, maybe your character needs to get a life. But, yes, it is absolutely necessary that every scene of dialogue move the story forward, and so yes, you need to do something about this. If you recognize that you write the kind of dialogue that doesn't keep the plot moving, then you're already ahead of a lot of writers that who are completely unaware that they're writing rambling dialogue, most of which does nothing to move the overall story.

Find a dialogue scene in a story you're writing that you doubt does much to move your story forward. It gives some background on the characters and it reveals a bit of who they are, but you know that's not enough. Every scene needs to keep the story moving. Now rewrite that scene with one thing in mind — how you can make the dialogue do triple duty: characterize, provide background, and forward the plot. And while you're doing that, keep it lively and full of tension. Not too big of an order, is it?