The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  In John Sayles’s 1977 novel about 1960s radicalism, Union Dues, the West Virginia coal miner Hunter McNatt is giving a history lesson to fellow conspirators at a clandestine union meeting:

  “One night some of these agents killed a union organizer, blasted him right off’n his front porch from their car while Luther and the other folks that lived by him looked on. They brought it to the Sheriff, said they could recognize faces and names and all, but Sheriff said no, it was too dark to see. Wouldn’t make an arrest. Well, people expected as much, so Luther and some of the other fellas who was tryin to bring the union in, they took it on themselves. Laid out all night with their rifles, waitin for a couple of the agents to come by this tavern used to be up the hill a piece from here. Eye for an eye they figured.

  “Only there was spies in amongst them. The Sheriff and the agents got word and come down out of the pines around midnight, catching these miners from behind. Luther, he took one in the meat of the shoulder and one half-tored his buttock off . . .”

  Hunter McNatt’s narrative voice here is eloquent in a folksy way, and it’s easy to imagine it carrying an entire novel. But this is dialogue, and Hunter puts a story of murder, betrayal, and a shootout in a nutshell, as anyone would, telling it orally. In two sentences Hunter recounts the miners’ visit to the sheriff, their informing him that one of their own has been murdered and the sheriff’s refusal to do anything about it: Sayles, if he’d taken over the narrative and written a flashback, could have spun this out into a tense and dramatic confrontation. Imagine the sheriff on the porch, the men in the dark just below him; imagine the taut dialogue. Sayles then could have put us on the hillside in the dark and written the eruption of gunfire, the ambush, men being hit, bullets singing in the air.

  Why didn’t he?

  For one thing, he didn’t want to leave the back room of the darkened bar, where the union meeting is being held. He wanted to keep us at the meeting, instead of transporting us back in time to the sheriff’s house, and to the pine woods and the shooting. Hunter’s story is an interruption of the business at hand—the union leader, Luther, has been denigrated as a sellout, and Hunter feels compelled to give some perspective to the younger men in the room—and Sayles wants to keep the interruption brief. And there is this: Luther is a minor character, and a blow-by-blow account of the events Hunter describes would bring him, Luther, too far into the foreground. It would put too much focus on him.

  You make this choice every time a character begins to tell a story: let the character tell it, or take over yourself. In a novel by a student of mine, the male and female protagonists, husband and wife, first met in a fashionable bar in Paris, where a pianist was playing Cole Porter songs. It was love at first sight. Years later the wife describes the meeting to a female friend over drinks at a rooftop bar in Manhattan—the reader’s only witness to the event.

  I urged the author—begged her—to write the scene in the Parisian bar in her own narrative voice, as a flashback. I said it needed a full telling, from moment to moment: action dialogue, ambiance, the strains of “Let’s Fall In Love” and “Night and Day.” The event was too important to be left to Julia over cocktails. The reader needed to be there, not hear it secondhand.

  Screenplay writers make the choice all the time, with the same considerations as the novelist. A flashback clears the screen and resets it, transposing us to another place and time. A new narrative takes us over; for the time being, we’ve left the context—the trigger of the flashback, the storyteller, if there is one—behind. The question, always, is simple: how important is the story?

  Claire Malek, my female protagonist in The Last Summer, has left Washington, D.C., and her job as secretary to a United States senator, in a hurry. It’s clear to the reader that she’s suffered a betrayal of some sort, but Claire refuses to talk about it, even to her fifteen-year-old daughter. Nearly halfway into the novel, Lane Hillman, in love with Claire by now, takes her to the theater and then to a piano bar. The play was a romantic musical, the pianist is playing Johnny Mathis, and Claire’s mood turns wistful and reflective. Lane asks her what happened in Washington. She’s trying, with less and less success, to deflect his youthful and gentlemanly advances:

  “Tell me what happened,” he said.

  Then he’ll stop. Then this will be over and I can live a normal life again and find someone who’s right for me.

  “Ask the waitress for another round,” she said.

  There’s a text break here, and the flashback begins in a car on a highway outside of Washington. Midnight, Claire in the passenger seat, her boss driving. It is very dark. He’s speeding. If the novel were a movie, the flashback would occur the same way. No screenplay writer would let Claire tell the story herself; it was a wrenching turning point in her life, and she’s the female protagonist, so we need the tale in full. The film audience would get the story as Claire experienced it, not as she would tell it. So does the reader in my novel.

  The flashback runs to sixteen pages. Text break, and:

  Now they sat in the dark in the vinyl-smelling Chevy, looking out at the bay. They could hear the waves, slow and sibilant, on the shore below. The misted moon spread a dull pewter sheen on the water.

  “I wanted to go see Tyrone Moore’s mother,” Claire said. “I called the state police and got the name of the funeral home. The funeral home gave me the address. It was in a real bad section.

  “I was afraid to go there alone, even in the daytime. I asked Mark to go with me. ‘One last favor,’ I said, ‘and then we’re even.’ I said if he came with me I’d tell Mrs. Moore I was driving. ‘Which you were,’ Mark said. Then he said he was busy and hung up on me.

  “I didn’t know who else to ask. I wasn’t going to take a girl into that neighborhood. I tried a couple guys I knew who weren’t on Bob’s staff. I tried a guy I’d dated for a while. I was leaving in a few days, and all of them were afraid or busy or just didn’t want to bother. So I never went.”

  Lane and Claire have had a second drink and left the bar by the time she gets to the end of her story: the reader knows she’s been talking for a long time. (It was still told to Lane, not seen by him; the reader was there, Lane was not, but the distinction disappears; it is a given that Lane and the reader are equally affected—another tacit understanding with the reader.) Claire finishes the account herself, covering several days in three short paragraphs—a brief coda, which Claire can articulate, as storyteller, as well as I could, and which returns the reader not just to Cape Cod on a summer night, but to a close shot of Claire—all the way back to the present.

  TAKING EXPOSITION OUT OF DIALOGUE

  The storyteller is talking to somebody in your novel, as well as to the reader. The listener, or listeners, might know more than the reader does; be aware of this, and don’t let your storyteller tell other characters things they already know in order to impart the information to your reader. You’re forcing your dialogue when you do this. We don’t do this in real life, and when you do it in fiction it stands out like the proverbial sore thumb. This is known as “exposition through dialogue.” Avoid it.

  “Dad left for work at seven,” Jimmy tells his sister, Greta, let’s say, on page one. It’s a bad line, because work is where Dad goes every morning, and Greta knows it.

  “Dad left for the bank at seven,” Jimmy says, another bad line, written with the idea of letting the reader know that Dad is a banker. Find another way. Greta knows Dad’s a banker, and Jimmy knows she knows it.

  What Jimmy is probably going to say—he would in my novel—is, “Dad left at seven.”

  Then how do you inform the reader that Dad is a banker? There are two ways. Drop in a line of simple exposition—early, but not too early:

  “Dad left at seven,” Jimmy said.

  “Why so early?” Greta said.

  “I think he’s seeing someone,” Jimmy said.

  Charles Kaufman was president of the Queen’s County Savings Bank, down at the foot of Main Street by t
he village green. He was president of Rotary and chairman of the hospital’s board of directors.

  “No way,” Greta said.

  Withhold Charles’s position at least until Jimmy’s second line, which, you can reasonably hope, will gain the reader’s full attention and curiosity. Who is this guy who may be having an affair? Charles Kaufman’s job and position in the community are suddenly interesting.

  Or, instead of an early expository sentence or two, you can let the dialogue do the revealing, but in a plausible way:

  “I think he’s seeing someone,” Jimmy said.

  “No way,” Greta said.

  “I was at the bank yesterday, and I saw this hot young redhead go into his office. She was in there a long time.”

  “So what?”

  “Greta, he’s the frigging president. What’s he doing talking to a twenty-year-old for an hour?”

  Fiction is revelation, and timing is everything.

  Disclosure doesn’t have to come immediately, or all at once. I tell students constantly: the reader will wait. It’s okay, in fact, to keep him wondering for a while. Fiction is revelation, and timing is everything. Make sure your characters are speaking to each other, not to the reader. There are other ways besides forced dialogue, and there’s plenty of time to reveal that your character is a deep-sea diver or an economics professor at Berkeley.

  • • •

  The cardinal requirement of dialogue is unpredictability.

  Occasionally, and you want to avoid it when you can, a character must tell a story that the reader already knows, has been witness to. The cardinal requirement of dialogue is unpredictability, some element of discovery or surprise, and your character might tell the familiar story in a way so colorful and subjective that it sheds new light on the story itself, or on the character telling it. He might exaggerate, if that’s in character, or leave something out, or invent something that didn’t happen, and there’s surprise in that, of course.

  If the storyteller is a straight talker, set his dialogue aside and boil the story down for him. For John Grady Cole it’s a question of what he tells Magdalena, not how, in their final liaison in All the Pretty Horses:

  He told her about Blevins and about the prison Castelar and he told her about what happened to Rawlins and finally he told her about the cuchillero who had fallen dead in his arms with his knife broken off in his heart. He told her everything.

  We know all of this. We were there. We don’t need to hear the story again, so McCarthy compacts it into two sentences, which let us know that he has held nothing back.

  INDIRECT DISCOURSE

  You might want to pare a story down, but not strip it of all color and nuance. Indirect discourse is a compromise, halfway between dialogue and exposition.

  • • •

  Atticus Finch won’t talk to Jem and Scout about his hostile encounter with Bob Ewell after the trial of Tom Robinson, but their loquacious neighbor will:

  According to Miss Stephanie Crawford, however, Atticus was leaving the post office when Mr. Ewell approached him, cursed him, spat on him, and threatened to kill him . . . Miss Stephanie said Atticus didn’t bat an eye, just took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and stood there and let Mr. Ewell call him names wild horses could not bring her to repeat. Mr. Ewell was a veteran of an obscure war; that plus Atticus’s peaceful reaction probably prompted him to inquire, “Too proud to fight, you nigger-lovin bastard?” Miss Stephanie said Atticus said, “No, too old,” put his hands in his pockets and strolled on. Miss Stephanie said you had to hand it to Atticus Finch, he could be right dry sometimes.

  Harper Lee doesn’t want Scout, or us, to see the menace in this incident—which is a prelude to Bob Ewell’s attack on Jem and Scout—until later, in retrospect. The confrontation would have frightened Scout had she seen it, but she gets it second-hand from Miss Stephanie, who seems to have missed its latent viciousness. Scout—Lee—could as easily have given us Miss Stephanie’s account word for word, as dialogue, but Lee uses indirect discourse here to diminish the impact of a sinister event. If Scout had quoted Miss Stephanie instead of paraphrasing her, we would likely have seen Ewell’s spitting on Atticus as more ominous, even if Scout did not. Miss Stephanie’s closing observation on Atticus, “he could be right dry sometimes”—still indirect discourse, but her words, clearly—casts the incident in a droll and reassuring light. Lee, of course, chose the line for this reason.

  Indirect discourse is your way of controlling the storyteller, and the story.

  Indirect discourse is your way of controlling the storyteller, and the story. What light do you want to cast the story in? How quickly do you want to tell it? You can shorten it to a sentence or two, or let it run. You can throw in a little of the storyteller’s idiom. You can add some dialogue. Think of it as a collaboration between you and the storyteller, but remember that you are the one in control.

  7

  DIALECT, ACCENTS, AND THE VERNACULAR

  IMPARTING DIALECT

  The opening of Faulkner’s Light in August:

  Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not been quite a month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old.

  Lena Grove’s journey is a search for the man whose child she’s carrying. The kindly Armstids take her in for the night, and in the morning Mr. Armstid takes her in his wagon to Varner’s Store:

  She rises and walking a little awkwardly, a little carefully, she traverses the ranked battery of maneyes and enters the store, the clerk following. ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ She thinks, even while ordering the cheese and crackers; ‘I’m a-going to do it,’ saying aloud: “And a box of sardines.” She calls them sour-deens. “A nickel box.”

  “We ain’t got no nickel sardines,” the clerk says. “Sardines is fifteen cents.” He also calls them sour-deens.

  A fur piece and sour-deens are all the help Faulkner gives us in hearing the honeyed drawl of the deep South in the voice of Lena Grove, and of other poor whites like the store clerk. It’s enough. Lena buys the sardines and another good-hearted stranger gives her a ride into the town of Jefferson. She questions him:

  “I reckon you don’t know anybody in Jefferson named Lucas Burch.”

  “Burch?”

  “I’m looking to meet him there. He works at the planing mill.”

  “No,” the driver says, “I don’t know that I know him. But likely there is a right smart of folks in Jefferson I don’t know. Likely he is there.”

  “I’ll declare, I hope so. Travelling is getting right bothersome.”

  Hear the softness in Lena’s voice, the elongations? Faulkner, with no more than a fur piece and sour-deens, has alerted us to the accent in Lena’s speech. He doesn’t reproduce her pronunciation again in the novel. He doesn’t have to; he has set her dialogue to music.

  • • •

  Lena Grove is poor and uneducated. The clerk in Varner’s is from the same hardscrabble milieu. Armstid, a dirt farmer, says “sho” for “sure,” which marks his dialogue in the same way “a fur piece” marks Lena’s.

  Now listen to Jason Compson and his mother, in the third section of The Sound and the Fury, narrated by the odious Jason:

  “She didn’t go to school today,” she says. “I just know she didn’t. She says she went for a car ride with one of the boys this afternoon and you followed her.”

  “How could I?” I says. “When somebody had my car all afternoon? Whether or not she was in school today is already past,” I says. “If you’ve got to worry about it, worry about next Monday.”

  “I wanted you and she to get along with one another,” she says. “But she has inherited all of the headstrong traits. Quentin’s too. I thought at the time with the heritage she would already
have, to give her that name, too. Sometimes I think she is the judgment of both of them upon me.”

  “Good Lord,” I says. “You’ve got a fine mind. No wonder you keep yourself sick all the time.”

  The Compsons are gentry, though they’ve fallen on hard times, and Faulkner writes their dialogue in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! with no indication of an accent. In Light in August he does the same with the dialogue of Joe Christmas, the tormented protagonist. Christmas is an orphan, drifter, moonshiner, and finally a murderer, but there’s a worldliness about him, he’s been around, and his dialogue comes without the rural caress and backwoods melody of Lena’s. The dialogue of the seminary-educated minister, Gail Hightower, is unaccented. All of these Mississippians, of course, are speaking with what any northerner would hear as a distinct southern accent.

  Major de Spain and General Compson, in “The Bear,” are Confederate veterans and country aristocrats, and their dialogue is almost formal, reflecting their standing as educated men and landowners. They’re planning the day’s pursuit—yet again—of the gigantic grizzly, Big Ben:

  “We’ll put General Compson on Katie this morning,” Major de Spain said. “He drew blood last year; if he’d had a mule then would have stood, he would have—”

  “No,” General Compson said. “I’m too old to go helling through the woods on a mule or a horse or anything else anymore. Besides, I had my chance last year and missed it. I’m going on a stand this morning. I’m going to let that boy ride Katie.”