Fiction Writer's Workshop (4 page)

W
riting dialogue is so much about the energy and direction of the story at hand that many of the things a writer does are intuitive. A turn here. An exclamation. A silence. I'll often hear experienced writers say they've developed an "ear" for dialogue. The implication is that dialogue exists in the world and writers merely record, with good writers—those with the "ear" for it—recording a little more clearly. The truth is, it's not solely about recording, or listening, but about shaping.

When I speak of the energy and direction of a story, I am referring to its tone and emotion (energy) and tension (direction). Writers craft, or shape, patterns of energy and direction in dialogue. In many ways these become the signatures of their dialogue, the things that make the voices of their characters recognizable and sustainable. Writers may have an ear for dialogue, but what they work with is a voice, shaped and charged by the needs of story. What your character says is directed by the needs of the story.

Classifying dialogue by techniques can be troublesome. Writers don't work that way. Most writers I know despise the very act of naming the things they do. It makes them too self-conscious to think of the patterns they create as they create them. I'm going to do some of that here, but only for the purposes of comparison. You should be looking for the occasional pause, the turn, the reversal, the silence that defines each of these moments. Naming the patterns is unimportant; reading to uncover them is a worthy task.

Thus you must be willing to take dialogue apart to look at what makes it tick. As you read, be willing to isolate moments within a dialogue. Highlight them in your book. Dog-ear the pages. Tear out a page and tape it to the wall above your computer. The idea is to take the dialogue on its own terms, to isolate the specific techniques the writer uses, before returning to the story as a whole to examine the dialogue's function in the larger context.

Begin by looking for the general tension of the dialogue. Some beginning writers confuse tension with conflict, assuming it comes and goes depending on whether characters agree or disagree. Tension is more like the energy between charged particles. It's always there, even when two people agree. Think of two cars traveling a reasonable distance apart from one another along an interstate at sixty-five miles an hour. Safe distance. Same direction. Same speed. No tension, right? Wrong. We all know it only takes one little bump in the road, one touch of the brakes, a doe in the headlights for everything to be completely and suddenly redefined. So you might start by looking for those three qualities when gauging the tension of your dialogue: direction, speed and distance (or separation).

TENSION IN DIALOGUE

How do I apply all this talk of direction, speed and distance to a dialogue?

Set two characters up in a blank room—that is, a bare stage, a void, a place not yet defined. Now make a decision. One of them wants something. The other does not have it, or can not get it. How will the first get it, if not by speaking? He must move in the direction of his desire.

1: Give it to me.

The direction here is clear and declarative. It's a palpable tension. Surely, you can see that this addresses a need in a particular way. Nothing has been named yet, we have no fix on place, or even space, and yet the character speaks out of a sense of what she wants. But it would be no less so if it started this way.

1: Excuse me.

He's still moving in the direction of his desire, toward what he wants, by breaking the silence, by starting things up. I don't have to move much past that utterance to see a sort of tension filling up the space. Where would you expect this to move from here? Direction is a natural part of dialogue. We expect to be led somewhere by the response. How will the other character deal with this? As the answer to this question becomes clearer, we often start to see the issue of distance, or separation, being defined. The tone of that response will set up speed. You might expect me to say that the tension I've set up demands that he reveal everything he wants in the first line. For now, let's have the second character work from a position of total neutrality.

1: Excuse me.

2: Yes?

1: Do you know the time?

2: No, I don't.

1: Do you have any sense of how long we've been here?

2: No.

That's probably as neutral as you're going to get. Still, speaker 2 is resisting. It's possible to read a certain distance into that exchange, an attitude that suggests speaker 2 isn't going to help speaker 1 in any way, shape or form. The brief responses lend an element of increased speed. Play it any way you want. Some element of tension is generally shaped by the act of speaking.

All good dialogue has direction. It's a mishmash of need and desire on the part of an individual character weighed against the tension inherent in the gathering of more than one person. Not convinced? Think there isn't always tension when people speak? "What about families?" you say. "What about people who love each other? There's not always tension there." Some of you are laughing at that already, because for many of us a family (love it as we may) is our greatest tissue of tensions. But I would remind you of my terms. This is not grand conflict here, not man versus nature; nor is it painful tension, nothing one could take care of with a little cup of tea and a foot rub. This is the stuff that fills the spaces between us, even when we don't recognize it As a writer you have to learn to trust that it's there.

Go back to the conversation in the blank room. Try to make it as free of tension as possible. Would it look something like this?

1: Hi.

2: Hi.

1: How are you?

2: Fine. How are you?

1: Great. Nice day.

2: Really. Nice day.

Sounds hauntingly like those conversations we all have in elevators, or at a chance encounter, or in the hallways at school. Most people say they hate this kind of jabber, and in other places in the book, I've suggested, as I will again here, that there's no place for it in fiction. Sure people talk like this in the world, but that's why we must shape dialogue when we write. Good dialogue relies on a stronger tension than we see here. Good dialogue requires sharper word choice, more defined attitudes, more originality. As I said in chapter one, good dialogue should be something of an event unto itself.

But despite the apparent neutrality of the dialogue above, it is not without direction. Look at it again. Chart the direction using arrows if you want. Who starts the conversation? Speaker 1. ("Hi.") It's his energy that plays off the response too. Here, again, we might use the word "speed," or "pace." ("How are you?"). He's the one asking the questions. Speaker 2 is feeding off him. The arrows I'd draw would consistently be moving from 1 toward 2. That's one sort of tension, a sort of tensionless tension. Something that would take a long time to build up to the point where you might call it conflict, the point where 1 would want something from 2. It might end like this.

1: Fine then.

2: What do you mean?

1: Nothing.

2: Okay.

1: Fine.

2:1 don't understand.

1: You wouldn't.

2: Are you angry?

1: No.

2: You seem angry. Have I done something wrong?

1: You just don't care. I'm sorry I ever talked to you.

That's an exaggeration, of course. And I have shaped things to my needs. That's what I believe you must do. But there's no question I have moved from the tension buried in the direction of an apparently neutral conversation and found one result. Could you nag out a neutral conversation for pages and pages, keeping it neutral the whole time? Your answer may be yes. Mine is no. That's the sort of thing we do in life. Jabber about sports, ask about the grandkids, exchange greetings. These are masks we wear. They don't last long before we start to reveal who we are. Put two people in one place, force them to listen to one another and soon they are telling stories or, more aptly for us I guess, telling stories in the act of telling. That is what the writer must believe.

Your challenge is to see the stories within the words of your character. Looking for speed, distance and direction and then manipulating these is a good place to start. If we accept that all good dialogue has these elements of tension, what is it that sets good dialogue apart from lifeless dialogue? Good dialogue rises out of the way a writer makes use of individual techniques, such as

• interruption

• silences

• echoing

• reversals

• shifts in tone and pace

• idiom

• detail

DIRECTED DIALOGUE

Let's look at an example that begins in a fairly "placeless" place, on the radio airwaves, on a radio talk show. This conversation opens Peter Abrahams' novel
The Fan.
This is one of those conversations we hear all the time. Read it once, then read it again, the second time looking for the tension that's buried in the direction of the speakers. I'll follow with a summary of the novel, and an overview of Gil, the main character, who is also the caller in this dialogue.

"Who's next? Gil on the car phone. What's shakin', Gil?"

Dead air.

"Speak, Gil."

"Is this . . ." "Go on." "Hello?"

"You're on the JOC." "Am I on?"

"Not for long, Gil, the way we're going. This is supposed to be entertainment." Dead air.

"Got a question or a comment for us, Gil?" "First-time caller."

"Fantabulous. What's on your mind?" "I'm a little nervous."

"What's to be nervous? Just three million pairs of ears out there, hanging on your every word. What's the topic?" "The Sox."

"I like the way you say that." "How do I say it?" "Like—what
else
could it be?" Dead air.

"What about the Sox, Gil?" "Just that I'm psyched, Bernie."

"Bernie's off today. This is Norm. Everybody gets psyched in the spring. That's a given in this game. Like ballpark mustard." "This is different." "How?" Dead air. "Gil?"

"I've been waiting a long time." "For what?" "This year."

"What's special about it?" "It's their year." "Why so tentative?" "Tentative?"

"Just pulling your leg. The way you sound so sure. Like it's a lead-pipe cinch. The mark of the true-blue fan." Dead air. "Gil?" 'Yeah?"

"The Vegas odds are—what are they, Fred? Fred in the control room there, doing something repulsive with a pastrami on rye—ten to one on the Sox for the pennant, twenty, what is it, twenty-five to one on the whole shebang. Just to give us some perspective on this, Gil, what would you wager at those odds, if you were a wagering man?"

"Everything I owe."

"Owe? Hey. I like this guy. He's got a sense of humor after all. But, Gil—you're setting yourself up for a season of disillusion, my friend."

"Disillusion?"

"Yeah, like—"

"I know what
disillusion
means."

"Do you? Then you must—"

"They went down to the wire last year, didn't they?"

"Ancient history, Gil."

What is the charge that runs through this conversation? How and when do we begin to see the tensions of character revealed? The voice of the talk-show host is the active presence in the conversation, pressing against Gil's nervousness, against his stake in the team, against the public perception of the team, to shake him up, to force him into talking. His direction is clear, and, not surprisingly, Gil is not revealing enough for us to know many real facts about him. This is an openly antagonistic dialogue, one in which the movement of one character is an attempt to drive the tensions to the surface. The teasing, the cajoling, the chiding of the host are all a part of this. But so too is Gil's reluctance to speak, to reveal much about himself. The anonymity of the airwaves is a part of that, sure. But Gil's unwillingness or inability to reveal the tensions within him adds to the antagonism. Not surprising that what would follow is the dark story of Gil's obsessive relationship with a player and Gil's course of self-destruction. In the middle of the dialogue above, when Gil says, "I've been waiting a long time ... [for] this year," it resonates, like all good dialogue, toward the story ahead, toward the year to come.