Stein on Writing (16 page)

The Secrets of Good Dialogue

Success in writing dialogue is one of the most rewarding aspects of the writer’s craft. By the time you finish reading this chapter you should know more about dialogue than ninety percent of published writers. The fact is that the majority of writers write dialogue by instinct with little knowledge of the craft.

I was lucky. Plays consist entirely of dialogue. Before I was a novelist I was a playwright and had a chance to see my plays produced on and off Broadway in New York, at the National Theater in Washington, and in California. For many years I lived in a world in which the currency was dialogue.

In the autumn of 1989, I was invited to give a twelve-week course on “Dialogue for Writers” at the University of California at Irvine. In the class, writers of fiction far outnumbered playwrights and screenwriters. When I returned east at the end of those three months, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the students, some with many books to their credit but still learning, refused to let the course end. They met weekly, insisting that I come back. I did each winter, and many of those writers are still studying with me, perfecting their dialogue and other aspects of their fiction.

Readers enjoy dialogue in stories and novels. Those same readers would hate reading court transcripts, even of dramatic confrontations. What makes dialogue interesting and so much actual talk boring?

Talk is repetitive, full of rambling, incomplete, or run-on sentences, and usually contains a lot of unnecessary words. Most answers contain echoes of the question. Our speech is full of such echoes. Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes. Some people mistakenly believe that all a
writer has to do is turn on a tape recorder to capture dialogue. What he’d be capturing is the same boring speech patterns the poor court reporter has to record verbatim. Learning the new language of dialogue is as complex as learning any new language. However, there are some shortcuts.

First, let’s examine some of the advantages of dialogue. As you know from an earlier chapter, fiction consists of three elements: description, narrative summary, and immediate scene. The twentieth-century reader, influenced by a century of film and a half century of television, is used to seeing what’s happening in front of his eyes, not hearing about events after the fact. That’s why immediate scenes—onstage, visible to the eye—dominate today’s fiction.
Dialogue is always in immediate scene,
which is one reason readers relish it.

When talk is tough, combative, or adversarial it can be as exciting as physical action. Listen to this exchange from an early episode of the television series
NYPD Blue.
The central character is a detective named Kelly. In court he sees the murderer of an eight-year-old boy use legal technicalities to win a plea bargain. Kelly is enraged. The judge warns him, “We govern by law, not by your whim.” Not bothering to conceal his contempt, Kelly counters:

Don’t tell me how you govern. I work your streets. I clean up after how you govern. The way you govern stinks.

Confrontational dialogue—whether in Shakespeare, a contemporary novel, or a policeman talking back to a judge in a TV drama—is immediate, creating a visual image of the speakers as it shoots adrenaline into our bloodstream.

As the writer of fiction masters dialogue, he will be able to deal with characterization and plot simultaneously. Let’s prove that by taking a hard look at just four lines of dialogue and what we can accomplish with them.

First, some actual overheard conversation:

SHE: How are you?

HE: How am I? Oh, I’m fine, how are you?

SHE: And the family?

HE: The family is great. Everybody’s well.

It doesn’t take much of this to bore a reader out of his skull. Let’s change those lines somewhat:

SHE: How are you?

HE: I suppose I’m okay.

SHE: Why, what’s the matter.

HE: I guess you haven’t heard.

Those simple changes introduce suspense. The second line,
“I suppose I’m okay,”
doesn’t sound like the character really is okay. The fourth line makes the reader want to know what happens next.

Let’s try another revision of those four lines:

SHE: How are you?

HE: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.

SHE: Is anything wrong?

HE: No, no, absolutely not. I just didn’t see you.

With that exchange, we know something is wrong and that the man is lying. We’re beginning to get a sense of character.

In life, speakers answer each other’s questions. We compliment a speaker by saying he is direct. Dialogue, to the contrary, is
indirect.
The key word to understanding the nature of dialogue is that the best dialogue is
oblique.
Take another look at those first two lines:

SHE: How are you?

HE: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.

He doesn’t answer her question! He is not direct. His response is oblique. The writers I’ve coached who learn how to make their dialogue oblique have all taken a giant step toward improving their work.

Let’s try one more revision:

SHE: How are you? I said how are you?

HE: I heard you the first time.

SHE: I only wanted to know how you were.

HE: How the hell do you think I am?

Characters don’t need to make speeches at each other. From just four lines the reader learns that these two people have probably had a relationship in the past that is not resolved, and at least for one of them the relationship is filled with bitterness.

We’re not only characterizing, we’re building a story out of just four lines. A reader’s emotions can be sparked with few words. That’s the power of dialogue.

Tension can now be increased not only by the substance of their relationship but also by incidental matters. For instance:

HE: It’s beginning to rain.

SHE: What do you suggest?

The conversation can now go in a number of directions. He can say,
“Why don’t we talk some other time.”
Or
“Why don’t we go in for a cup of coffee.”
Or
“Come sit in my car for a few minutes.”
Each of these would take the plot in a different direction.

We’ve come a long way from the original, boring four lines.

If you need proof that dialogue and spoken words are not the same, go to a supermarket. Eavesdrop. Much of what you’ll hear in the aisles sounds like idiot talk. People won’t buy your novel to hear idiot talk. They get that free from relatives, friends, and at the supermarket.

What is the most frequently used word in real speech? Uh. It’s what people say to borrow time to think of what they want to say. “Uh” is totally useless to a writer. Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts.

Count for what? To characterize, to move the story along, to have an impact on the reader’s emotions.

Some writers make the mistake of thinking that dialogue is overheard. Wrong! Dialogue is invented and the writer is the inventor.

Elmore Leonard is considered a superb practitioner of dialogue, but does anyone in life talk the way his characters do? Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is invented, it is a semblance of speech that has the effect of actual speech, which is what his readers prize.

If you’re relatively new to dialogue, you might try an exercise I’ve developed that is used by screenwriters as well as novelists. Let’s imagine two characters, Joe and Ed. Joe says,
“Ed?”

What is Joe trying to accomplish by that one word?

There are several possibilities:

• Joe wants to get Ed’s attention.
  
• Joe has heard somebody and wants to know if it is Ed.
  

Now imagine that Joe adds one word and says,
“Now Ed.”
What is Joe’s intention?

If there were a comma between “Now” and “Ed,” it might mean “The time is now, Ed.” But there isn’t a comma or pause. There are a couple of possibilities.

• “Now Ed”
  is a reproof.
  
• It’s a warning.
  

We don’t know which unless we know the context in which the two words are spoken. But what is clear is that those two words in context can mean a lot—an admonition or a warning.

Let’s try one more. What does Joe mean by repeating Ed’s name three times:
“Ed, Ed, Ed”
? If a dozen readers were to pronounce those three recitations of Ed’s name, you’d probably get a dozen different intonations but only one meaning: Joe’s feeling of disappointment in Ed’s conduct, derived from one word repeated three times:
“Ed, Ed, Ed.”

With this exercise we are learning to listen to what words mean. The reader can get all the words he needs from a dictionary. What the reader gets from your fiction is the meaning of words. And most important, the emotion that meaning generates.

We’ve learned that
what counts is not what is said but the effect of what is meant.
If you keep a journal, that’s worth writing down.

When I worked with Elia Kazan on
The Arrangement,
we tested dialogue by reading lines aloud to each other. As I noted earlier, the best way to judge dialogue read aloud is to read it in a monotone without expression. The words have to do the job.

When I examine dialogue in chunks, mine or someone else’s, I ask myself the following:

• What is the purpose of this exchange? Does it begin or heighten an existing conflict?
  
• Does it stimulate the reader’s curiosity?
  
• Does the exchange create tension?
  
• Does the dialogue build to a climax or a turn of events in the story or a change in relationship of the speakers?
  

The next step is to check if the lines spoken by each character are consistent with that character’s background. Then I remove clichés that are out of character. I remove any echoes that slipped in.

Talk is full of echoes. Echoes don’t belong in dialogue. Here’s an example of echoing conversation from a cocktail party scene:

SHE: Boy, am I glad to see you.

HE: I’m glad to see you, too.

It fails as dialogue. Here’s how it was rewritten:

SHE: Boy, am I glad to see you.

HE: You finally got your contacts in.

Let’s imagine a cocktail party at which a man is trying to come on to a woman he has just met. He might say:

“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Her instinct is to be polite. She might answer:

“Why, thank you.”

That is boring. Nothing is happening. Watch what happens when her response is oblique:

HE: You are the most beautiful woman in the world

SHE: I’d like you to meet my husband.

Most conversation is square, and therefore turgid. There is no story. In the example of dialogue above, the man makes a verbal pass, and the woman declines it.
Something is happening.

In creating oblique dialogue, the questioner must provide the respondent with an opportunity to be oblique. Otherwise, it might seem that the respondent didn’t hear or didn’t understand. Certain forms of question call for a response. For instance:

“Why are you giving me the third degree?”

Since the question is direct, a lack of direct response may be noticed by the reader. We expect questions to be answered. A simple change in the question can open the gate wide for an oblique response:

“What’s this third degree?”

It is highly unlikely that you have a group of friends all of whom speak exactly alike. If they were a group of characters in a work of yours, you’d want to differentiate each one’s speech. Most writers recognize this, yet the chief fault of many television and film scripts as well as novels is that the dialogue of different characters sounds the same. Even some experienced writers are unfamiliar with the techniques available to them for differentiating characters through their speech.

The richest means of such differentiation are
speech markers,
signals that are quickly identifiable by the reader. Vocabulary is an important marker. Throwaway words and phrases are markers. Tight or loose wording is a marker. Run-on sentences are markers. Sarcasm is a marker. Cynicism is a marker. Poor grammar is a marker. Omitted words are markers. Inappropriate modifiers are markers. Consider all these a mine for the jewels of dialogue.

Vocabulary encompasses different kinds of markers, such as polysyllabic words and professional jargon. Polysyllabic words like
intricate, oxymoron,
and
antediluvian
indicate the speaker is well educated or pretentious, depending on the context. The point is that the character’s speech can be differentiated from others’ with just a word or two. Be warned. The words have to fit the character you’ve created. Otherwise, the special vocabulary will jar the reader.

Jargon is a two-edged marker that usually identifies the character’s profession and at the same time conveys a negative impression of the speaker. There is a tendency among people within a profession to use or create words whose meanings are clear only to others within their narrow group and obscure to the rest of the world. This tendency in all specializations is a barrier to communication and a support of self-serving secrecy in an “in” group. Writers have an obligation to defend their language against the assaults of jargon.