The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  “There!” Willie roared. “There!” And he waved his right hand, the hand clutching the manuscript of his speech. “There is the Judas Iscariot, the lickspittle, the nose-wiper!”

  What’s the difference between the first three pauses and this one? Suppose Warren hadn’t used “paused” and written only the action, as he does here?

  Willie blinked around at the crowd again.

  He steadied himself by the table, and took a deep breath while the sweat dripped.

  He wiped the sweat off his face with his left hand, a flat scouring motion.

  Is there a difference? Does the writer need to tell the reader that a character pauses? All The King’s Men won the Pulitzer Prize, and Robert Penn Warren was America’s first poet laureate, so no one’s going to quibble with his word choices or narrative technique. Many writers use “paused” regularly.

  I’m a dissenter. Create your pauses. The action is the pause. Alvin paused and looked out at the garbage truck. Alvin looked out at the garbage truck. What’s the difference? We know Alvin has stopped talking; that’s what a close quote means. In the pause, he looks out at the garbage truck.

  In Plainsong, Maggie Jones is talking to the pregnant teenager, Victoria Robideaux, at her kitchen table asking Victoria about the father of her child:

  He was nice to me. He would tell me things.

  Would he?

  Yes. He told me things.

  Like what for instance?

  Like once he said I had beautiful eyes. He said my eyes were like black diamonds lit up on a starry night.

  They are, honey.

  But nobody ever told me.

  No, Maggie said. They never do. She looked out through the doorway into the other room. She lifted her teacup and drank from it and set it down. Go on, she said. Do you want to tell the rest?

  Maggie’s actions comprise the pause; Haruf never uses the word. It’s a longish pause; Haruf devotes three verbs to Maggie’s sip of tea, drawing the action out, lengthening the pause. Maggie is thinking about what she has just said, They never do, and is struck suddenly by something she and the girl have in common, disappointment in a man or men. The pause tells us this. Maggie Jones has known disappointment. Many writers use “paused,” and you can, too. Take it a case at a time, and consider whether the action or actions create the pause effectively, by themselves. You might decide, as I did, that they do, every time.

  6

  TELLING STORY THROUGH DIALOGUE

  A friend called and said he’d written a novel and asked if I would edit it. It consisted largely of dialogue, he said, and wondered if that would be a problem. “There’s no such thing as too much dialogue,” I said.

  I had spoken too soon. The novel was set up this way: the protagonist, a middle-aged woman who has led a rich life both professionally and amorously, is lunching with a former beau in a New York delicatessen. The old boyfriend asks questions, and the questions elicit stories. The stories were pretty good, or had the potential to be: love affairs gone hilariously awry, sexism triumphantly overturned in the workplace. The trouble was the narrative voice. The stories were being told in a sly, chatty, zestful way that made fairly good dialogue but lacked the range, elasticity, and vocabulary for the long haul of sustained dramatic narrative. The narrative sounded like what it was: a woman regaling a close friend in a restaurant. The stories came tumbling out, lively but abbreviated, like a highlights film.

  You’re leaving too much out, I told my friend. If Sophie’s going to tell her own story in the form of dialogue with a friend, I said, you’ve got to give her a stronger narrative voice. A change of venue might help, I said—something less public, with more ambiance: a place conducive to reflection and reminiscence.

  The device of the storyteller as narrator goes back to The Canterbury Tales and involves a tacit understanding between writer and reader.

  The device of the storyteller as narrator goes back to The Canterbury Tales and involves a tacit understanding between writer and reader. Charles Marlow is Joseph Conrad’s storyteller in his great novellas, Heart of Darkness, Chance, and Youth, and for most of his classic novel, Lord Jim.

  THE FIRST PERSON NARRATIVE OF CONRAD’S CHARLEY MARLOW

  Heart of Darkness, at one level, takes place at nightfall on the deck of the yawl Nellie, at anchor on the Thames, where her crew is lying around waiting for the tide to change. Conrad sets the scene in his emotive and inimitable way—the sun going down, sky and water darkening, some “lazy” words among the men. By and by Marlow begins to talk:

  “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago—the other day. Light came out of this river since—you say knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

  Marlow goes on, gradually shaping the tale of his voyage, as ship’s captain, deep into the Belgian Congo—that literal and metaphorical heart of darkness. Marlow’s narrative, strictly speaking, is dialogue; it is set off by quotation marks throughout, and is interrupted from time to time by a remark by one of his listeners, and, once, by Marlow relighting his pipe, during which we get a vivid look at him in the flare of the match. It’s dialogue, but dialogue that’s as rich, coherent, and well-ordered as any first-person narrative:

  “And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.”

  Nobody talks like this, but so what? We settle on the deck of the yawl, in the dying light, glad to be there, and to listen.

  Conrad sets the stage for Marlow somewhat differently in Lord Jim. We’re at a dinner gathering thirty pages in, on a “verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers,” when Charley Marlow takes up the narrative, by request:

  “. . . Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet game of rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think, ‘Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.’”

  Marlow does, for three hundred seventy pages: nearly four hundred pages of uninterrupted dialogue.

  THE HENRY WIGGEN NOVELS: A STORYTELLER’S DIALOGUE WITH A DIFFERENCE

  Mark Harris, who died in 2007, was best known for his four novels about Henry Wiggen, memoirist and star left-handed pitcher for the big-league New York Mammoths. Henry is shrewd, flippant, and indifferently educated, and his narrative voice, colloquial and colorful, has been compared to Huckleberry Finn’s. Harris’s most acclaimed novel—he wrote thirteen in all—was the third in the Henry Wiggen series, Bang the Drum Slowly, which begins:

  Me and Holly were laying around in bed around 10 A.M. on a Wednesday morning when the call come. I was slow answering it, thinking first of a comical thing to say, though I suppose it long since stopped handing anybody a laugh except me. I don’t know. I laugh at a lot of things nobody ever laughs at except her.

  Henry’s own dialogue, like Huck Finn’s, is the same as his narrative voice. Well, of course: he talks to people the same way he talks to the reader. But a curious thing happens when other people speak in the Henry Wiggen novels: they talk just like Henry. Same diction, same quirky style and voice, same vocabulary. There are idiosyncrasies galore in the dialogue. In this scene from Bang the Drum Slowly, Henry “Author” Wiggen is haggling over his contract with the owners of the Mammoths in a Florida hotel room:

  I said, “Leave us not waste time talking contract unless you are willing to talk contract. I was taught in school where slavery went out when Lincoln was shot.”

  “I know,” said Old Man Moors, “for you wrote it across the top of your contract.”

  “Not across my contract,” I said. “Maybe across the contract of a turnstile turner.”

 
“Author,” said Patricia, “leave us all calm down.” She was very beautiful that night, and I said so, and she thanked me. Her nose was quite sunburned. “You are looking over your weight,” she said. “It will no doubt take you many weeks to get in shape.”

  “He looks 10 pounds over his weight at least,” said Bradley Lord.

  “Mr. Bradley Lord,” said I, whipping out my loose cash. “I have $200 here which says I am no more than 2 and 3/8 pounds over my weight if you would care to go and fetch the bathroom scale.”

  “What do you consider your absolute minimum figure?” said Mr. Moors.

  “19,000,” I said.

  “In that case,” said he, “we can simply never do business, and I suppose I must be put to the trouble of scouring up another left-hand pitcher.”

  “That should not be hard,” said I, “for I seen several promising boys out there this afternoon. Any one of them will win 4 or 5 games if God drops everything else.”

  “In this book,” writes Twain in an ‘Explanation’ at the front of Huckleberry Finn, “a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last.” In other words, the dialogue in the novel is genuine—we hear what Huck hears.

  “Stand by you!” Mary Jane Wilks tells Huck. “Indeed I will. They sha’nt touch a hair of your head.” Mary Jane’s voice is her own. She speaks past Huck, to us. This has been the convention in first-person narratives going back to Swift and Dafoe.

  But Mark Harris, as Henry Wiggen, puts his own stamp on his characters’ dialogue. The conceit is that the novels are memoirs; it is after publication of the first in the series, The Southpaw, that Henry’s teammates begin calling him “Author.” The dialogue, the reader understands, is not what Henry hears. It is reconstructed, written by Henry Wiggen. We know that Patricia Moors didn’t say, “Leave us all calm down,” and the conjunction in her father’s “I know, for you wrote it across the top of your contract” gives the line a comical and implausible formality. There are no contractions in the dialogue—unless you are willing, that should not be hard—and we understand that Henry hasn’t been schooled in their use.

  The result speaks for itself and is proof of Mark Harris’s virtuosity. The dialogue in his Henry Wiggen novels, so novel and eccentric, is like all good dialogue in one necessary way—it’s an extrapolation, a creative improvement over the real thing. It has a tone and melody of its own. The Henry Wiggen novels on one level are comic—even Bang the Drum Slowly, in which Henry’s teammate and friend, Bruce Pearson, is dying of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma—and Harris’s dialogue is some of the funniest ever written. It is funny, in part, because its syntax and idioms are Henry’s own. The dialogue doesn’t sound real, but that’s beside the point; Harris has made a different arrangement with the reader.

  Damon Runyon made the same arrangement in his diverting short stories of Broadway. Some vintage Runyon dialogue from Breach of Promise:

  Harry the Horse pounds me on the back to keep me from choking, and while he pounds so hard that he almost caves in my spine, I consider it a most courteous action, and when I am able to talk again, I say to him as follows:

  “Well, Harry,” I say, “it is a privilege and a pleasure to see you again, and I hope and trust you will all join me in some cold borscht, which you will find very nice, indeed.”

  “No,” Harry says, “we do not care for any cold borscht. We are looking for Judge Goldfobber. Do you see Judge Goldfobber round and about lately?”

  Well, the idea of Harry the Horse and Spanish John and Little Isadore looking for Judge Goldfobber sounds somewhat alarming to me, and I figure maybe the job Judge Goldfobber gives them turns out bad and they wish to take Judge Goldfobber apart, but the next minute Harry says to me like this:

  “By the way,” he says, “we wish to thank you for the job of work you throw our way. Maybe some day we will be able to do as much for you. It is a most interesting job,” Harry says, “and while you are snuffing your cold borscht I will give you the details, so you will understand why we wish to see Judge Goldfobber.”

  Runyon’s characters are gamblers, loan sharks, small-time gangsters, waitresses, club dancers, and street missionaries, and they don’t talk like this any more than Patricia Moors says, “Leave us all calm down.” Runyon was a great humorist, and his dialogue, like Mark Harris’s, is relentlessly comic. It reads as if his hustlers and hangers-on were affecting a high-bred gentility in their speech, and failing ludicrously.

  Oddly, Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, writing the book for the Runyon-inspired musical, Guys and Dolls, took the dialogue straight from Runyon’s two stories, Blood Pressure and The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, preserving its orotund constructions and omission of contractions. At the end of Act I, the natty and virile gambler, Sky Masterson, finds the beautiful Sarah Brown at work in the Save-a-Soul Mission, and the conversation quickly turns personal:

  Sky: “It is nice to know, Miss Sarah, that somewhere there is a guy who will appeal to you. I wonder what this guy will be like.”

  Sarah: “He will not be a gambler.”

  Sky: “I am not interested in what he will not be. I am interested in what he will be.”

  The absence of contractions gives the dialogue, here and throughout the show, an artificial and implausible dignity, and I’ve sometimes wondered why Swerling and Burrows made this choice. Mark Harris made the same choice when he wrote the screenplay for the 1973 movie version of Bang the Drum Slowly. In Harris’s script the dialogue is generally cleansed of contractions, as it is in his novel. Even the Georgia hayseed, Bruce Pearson, played by Robert De Niro, speaks without shortening “was not,” “will not,” “have not,” and so on. The tough-talking manager of the Mammoths, Dutch Schnell, played by Vincent Gardenia, doesn’t use contractions. There’s an odd similarity between the baseball movie and the Broadway musical.

  Guys and Dolls is one of Broadway’s most endearing musicals, and Bang the Drum Slowly is an esteemed film that retains its charm and poignancy after more than forty years. The dialogue works in both, obviously, as it does in Runyon’s stories and Harris’s Henry Wiggen novels: we enjoy it, simply, for what it is.

  MULTIPLE STORYTELLERS

  Most of Faulkner’s brooding and brilliant novel, Absalom, Absalom! is dialogue in the way that Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are, with the difference that Faulkner uses three storytellers as narrators: the old woman, Rosa Coldfield, young Quentin Compson, and—briefly—Quentin’s father. The dialogue isn’t plausible any more than Charles Marlow’s is. Quentin, in his room at Harvard, is talking to Shreve, his roommate:

  “And he not calling it retribution, no sins of the father come home to roost; not even calling it luck, but just a mistake: that mistake which he could not discover himself and which he came to Grandfather, not to excuse, but just to review the facts for an impartial (and Grandfather said he believed, a legally trained) mind to examine and find and point out to him.”

  Quentin is both listener—to his father, to Rosa—and storyteller, to Shreve in their cold room late at night. The settings are powerfully evoked, and Faulkner never lets us forget where we are as we listen in. Rosa Coldfield has invited Quentin into her “office,” with its “dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall,” where he will sit through the long September afternoon while the old woman opens the story of the implacable Henry Sutpen and his offspring. She is leading up to a request, which Quentin will agree to, and which will touch off the novel’s fierce climax.

  Quentin listens in silence to Rosa, but his Harvard roommate Shreve is nowhere near as passive, and his interjections, which are often lengthy, are a counterpoint to Quentin’s narrative, and a crucial influence on the telling. Shreve is Canadian and has a cynical view of the American South; Quentin, troubled and defensive, is carrying on a kind of argument with his friend, trying to explain
and justify the land of his forebears, with its tormented and violent history. In truth, as the reader knows, Quentin is trying to convince himself, as well as Shreve.

  It all adds up to one of the greatest of American novels, and no discussion of dialogue can ignore its unusual narrative strategy. Faulkner’s understanding with the reader, like Conrad’s, is acceptance—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief.” Rosa is talking to Quentin, Quentin to Shreve. The dialogue isn’t real . . . but it is. That’s the deal. Enjoy it

  PLAUSIBLE DIALOGUE AS NARRATIVE: THE ORDINARY STORYTELLER

  Conrad, in his Marlow novels, and Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! erased the distinction between first-person narrator and a storyteller within the novel, a rare strategy in fiction. The Marlow novels and Absalom, Absalom! are written in the third person, strictly speaking, but Conrad speaks to the reader directly, as Marlow, and Faulkner as Quentin and Rosa Coldfield. Rosa’s story to Quentin, and Quentin’s to Shreve, could as easily have been presented as conventional first-person narratives. There’s no law against multiple first-person narratives in a novel; Lee Smith uses them all the time, handing the narrative off from character to character down through two and three generations. Keep the option in mind.

  What about the ordinary storyteller? Marlow’s narrative, as he lolls on the deck of the yawl, carries an entire novel, but Marlow is no ordinary storyteller, as we’ve seen. When do you turn the narrative over to an ordinary storyteller, and for how long?

  It depends on the story—its importance, and who is in it. The reader isn’t going to suspend disbelief with regard to the storyteller’s voice and diction, as we do with Marlow and Quentin, so the story has to be told in the character’s speaking voice. This means dialogue, with its quirks, subjectivity, and colloquialisms. The story will be compact, as all dialogue must be. It will be short on detail.