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by Gloria Kempton (mobi)

  What makes Francesca's dialogue work so well that we're pulled in at an emotional level? First, it's the details. The author paints word pictures. Instead of "...he'd have to live the rest of his life with the gossip," Francesca

  says, "...he'd have to live the rest of his life with the whisper of the people here." This creates an image in the reader's mind, and we can see and feel Richard's pain as the townsfolk whisper to each other about Robert and Francesca.

  "If you took me in your arms and carried me to your truck..."

  "His hot little Italian wife ran off with some long-haired photographer..."

  Magical dialogue also includes metaphors. "In spite of what I said about not taking the road away from you..." Francesca is talking about Robert's freedom.

  Magical dialogue is emotional dialogue. Francesca is able to articulate her longing for what Robert has to offer as well as her compassion for how Richard and her children would suffer if she left them and rode off with Robert into the sunset. She's able to hold those two emotions simultaneously, which tears her in two. It's magical.

  Like I said previously, I happen to believe that most writers either have the ability to write this kind of dialogue or they don't. We have to have a mind that thinks in magical terminology, sentences, and phrases. I'm so in awe of those who can write like this, so in awe that most of the time I leave it to them to write. But every once in a while, I try. If you think you have this ability, work to develop it. If not, keep trying. Never underestimate the romantic in you.

  cryptic

  Much of the dialogue in literary and religious stories deals with abstract ideas and vague concepts and has double meanings that readers can't always immediately decipher. They're not supposed to. Sometimes other novels will have bits of cryptic dialogue when the plot calls for some things to remain hidden or secret. These bits of dialogue plant subliminal messages in the reader's mind that help to communicate the story's theme and will ultimately make sense if the author is able to successfully pull the story off at the end. Some writers are especially gifted at this. Chuck Palahniuk is one of them. Here are three dialogue passages from his novel Fight Club that make little sense at the moment, even sounding like the ranting of a crazy person, but when woven into the story build to a satisfying resolution at the end. In the first one, the main character, unnamed because he turns out to be one with his alter ego, Tyler Durden, has just learned that while he was away for

  a few days, his condo blew up. In the following scene, the doorman is giving the viewpoint character his perspective on the situation.

  "A lot of young people try to impress the world and buy too many things," the doorman said. I called Tyler.

  The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street. Oh, Tyler, please deliver me. And the phone rang.

  The doorman leaned into my shoulder and said, "A lot of young people don't know what they really want." Oh, Tyler, please rescue me. And the phone rang.

  "Young people, they think they want the whole world."

  Deliver me from Swedish furniture.

  Deliver me from clever art.

  And the phone rang and Tyler answered.

  "If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't."

  We don't completely know what the doorman is talking about because this takes place only forty pages into the story, and we're just beginning to understand that the viewpoint character's major conflict is his disillusionment with an empty consumer culture and his struggle to find an answer. In the next passage, Marla, the viewpoint character's annoying once-in-a-while girlfriend and a constant reminder of what makes our consumer culture so empty, makes a couple of cryptic comments.

  "You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger."

  A few moments later, after rambling on for a while about her latest Goodwill find and how people dump dead Christmas trees:

  "The Animal Control place is the best place to go," Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital and then into the big pet oven. "The big sleep, 'Valley of the Dogs' style.

  "Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you." Marla looks at me as if I'm the one humping her and says, "I can't win with you, can I?"

  At this point, Maria isn't making many points with us because we don't have a clue as to what she's talking about. Later, it will all make sense and tie in directly to what "Tyler" is dealing with in his life.

  In the last example, a police detective has started calling the viewpoint character about his condo explosion. They're on the phone with each other and the detective has just asked if he knows anyone who could make homemade dynamite. "Tyler" is whispering advice over the viewpoint character's shoulder.

  "Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution."

  I told the detective that it was the refrigerator that blew up my condo.

  "I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit... The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said, "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."

  It doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment, but later the viewpoint character comes to terms with that part of himself, his ego, that is bent on self-destruction.

  What distinguishes cryptic dialogue from other kinds of dialogue is its indirectness, subtlety, and ambiguity. If you want to see a lot of examples of this, amazingly enough, check out Jesus' words in the Bible. That's right— Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are full of cryptic dialogue. Stories with double meanings. Stories that can be interpreted in many different ways, depending upon what the reader wants to hear.

  In order to write cryptic dialogue, you can't be a black-or-white thinker. You have to be able to view the world from more than one perspective. Why? And why is cryptic dialogue so effective in literary and religious stories, and even some mainstream stories? Because these kinds of stories have a message and readers don't want to be preached to, told what to believe, or what to think. But they usually don't mind having their current belief systems challenged. Cryptic dialogue that doesn't come right out and make a concrete statement, that has hidden meanings the reader must discover,

  honors the reader's intelligence and ability to come to his own conclusions about the story's subject. The reader will be much more receptive to your story's truth when the characters are talking around a subject rather than hammering some moralistic idea into each other's brains.

  Practice writing dialogue for your characters that holds back, skirts around the real issues, and can be interpreted in more than one way.

  Cryptic dialogue is difficult to do well. If we're not careful, we can end up writing preachy, moralistic, dogmatic junk that can turn off readers in droves. But when done well and woven through the plot, cryptic dialogue can provide the substance that gives meaning to the entire story.

  descriptive

  The literary, mainstream, and historical story often relies on dialogue for much of its history, background, and description. Or at least it should. Too many of these stories are full of long, boring passages of narrative that the reader has to wade through on the way to the plot. In this kind of story, even once the plot is moving, the author often stops the action with more long, boring passages of narrative. I can appreciate that the author is enamored with the research of her story's time period, but there are more interesting ways to dispense it to us, and for the reader, the most engaging way is through dialogue. The goal of descriptive dialogue is to provide the reader with the information she needs to understand the characters and story l
ine in the context of the setting or time period in which they live. This is the author's goal. The character's goal can't be sacrificed for the author's, and that's where authors often err. Descriptive dialogue can still have tension and suspense and can be inserted into a scene of action so the story doesn't bog down while we're getting the information we need.

  Let's look at the following scene of descriptive dialogue from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Leah has just put her little sister in the swing outside of their hut in South Africa and is combing her hair when the village schoolteacher, Anatole, comes by. He's trying to explain to Leah, not so successfully, about the state of the Congo at this point in time.

  I drew the edge of the comb slowly down the center of Ruth May's head, making a careful part. Father had said the slums outside Leopoldville would be set right by American aid, after Independence. Maybe I was foolish to believe him. There were shanties just as poor in Georgia, on the edge of Atlanta, where

  black and white divided, and that was smack in the middle of America.

  "Can you just do that, what they did down there? Announce your own country?" I asked.

  "Prime Minister Lumumba says no, absolutely not. He has asked the United Nations to bring an army to restore unity."

  "Is there going to be a war?"

  "There is already a kind of war, I think. Moise Tshombe has Belgians and mercenary soldiers working for him. I don't think they will leave without a fight. And Katanga is not the only place where they are throwing stones. There is a different war in Matadi, Thysville, Boende, Leopoldville. People are very angry at the Europeans. They are even hurting women and little children."

  "What are they so mad at the white people for?"

  Anatole sighed. "Those are big cities. Where the boa and the hen curl up together, there is only trouble. People have seen too much of the Europeans and all the things they had. They imagined after Independence life would immediately become fair."

  "Can't they be patient?"

  "Could you be? If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue waiting patiently, Beene? Or would you throw a rock?"

  The descriptive dialogue in this passage reveals an important part of the setting and the story situation without bogging down the action, which happens when the author uses only narrative to dispense this kind of information. In literary, historical, and mainstream stories, the bantering of descriptive dialogue between characters keeps things moving forward.

  You may have a lot of background you need to insert in the story in order for the reader to understand the context of your setting and plot, but if you use only narrative to get it in there, the reader can feel like she's watching a documentary. If you're writing this kind of story, look for ways to show the history, description of setting, and/or cultural situation through the characters' conversations with one another so the reader is engaged in the story.

  Throughout any passage of descriptive dialogue, you'll want to include narrative thoughts and reactions of the viewpoint character's, of course, but this is so much easier for the reader to absorb when this kind of narrative is woven into dialogue rather than doled out in long, boring paragraphs of exposition.

  The pitfall of descriptive dialogue is that sometimes we have our characters going on a little too long because we may have an entire historical situation we want to explain to the reader. Sometimes we get caught up in wanting to dispense all of the research we've done, so we decide to put it all in one passage of dialogue that goes on for pages.

  I believe that one of the reasons literary novels are known to have such a small number of readers compared to other kinds of novels is because of the long passages of narrative description. I wonder, if more literary, mainstream, and historical authors used less narrative description and more descriptive dialogue in their stories would they attract a wider audience? You don't have to sacrifice engaging dialogue just to make your novel fit into one of these categories.

  shadowy

  The horror and mystery writer's goal is to scare the bejesus out of us, and these authors take their jobs very seriously. Occasionally, a mainstream novel has enough horror and mystery in it to warrant this kind of dialogue.

  Getting hold of the purpose of a passage of dialogue will help you write it more creatively because you know it's not just filler. In shadowy dialogue, your character's role is to keep your reader in a suspended state of suspense and a kind of terror, although you periodically tighten and loosen the tension. This is generally achieved with an ominous tone of suspense or foreshadowing of things to come. Things that are a little more intense than a walk in the park. The kinds of things you find in your worst nightmare: creepy, crawly things that attack, maim, and kill. Shadowy dialogue always has a foreboding threat of danger looming over the protagonist.

  Check out the following example from Stephen King's The Shining. Here we have Danny, the son of the unsympathetic protagonist, Jack, in dialogue with his imaginary friend, Tony. He has imagined Tony into being to cope with life with his insane father. In "reality" (you never really know what's real and what isn't in a Stephen King novel), Tony is actually Danny in a few years, a suspended character between he and his father, all in Danny's imagination. In this scene, Tony is trying to warn Danny of impending harm to his mother, possibly her death.

  He began to struggle, and the darkness and the hallway began to waver. Tony's form became chimerical, indistinct.

  "Don't!" Tony called. "Don't, Danny, don't do that!"

  "She's not going to be dead! She's not!"

  "Then you have to help her, Danny...you're in a place deep down in your own mind. The place where I am. I'm a part of you, Danny."

  "You're Tony. You're not me. I want my mommy.I want my mommy."

  "I didn't bring you here, Danny. You brought yourself. Because you knew."

  "No-"

  "You've always known," Tony continued, and he began to walk closer. For the first time, Tony began to walk closer. "You're deep down in yourself in a place where nothing comes through. We're alone here for a little while, Danny. This is an Overlook where no one can ever come. No clocks work here. None of the keys fit them and they can never be wound up. The doors have never been opened and no one has ever stayed in the rooms. But you can't stay long. Because it's coming."

  "It." Danny whispered fearfully, and as he did so the irregular pounding noise seemed to grow closer, louder. His terror, cool and distant a moment ago, became a more immediate thing.

  One reason the shadowy dialogue in the above passage works is because while Tony seems like a friend, we're not always sure. He's what's known as a shape-shifter, the archetype in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, that keeps the reader in the dark as far as whether the character is really for the protagonist or against him. The protagonist can never quite trust the shape-shifter, so when the shape-shifter speaks in dialogue, we're always questioning him, wondering whether he's speaking truthfully or not. Here Tony is delivering bad news. Should Danny even believe him? Another reason the dialogue works is because it's cryptic, so we have to keep reading to find out what Tony is even talking about. And the last reason it works is because Tony is definitely delivering an ominous threat of something to come that could turn Danny's world upside down and change him forever. Shadowy dialogue's effectiveness is mostly in the tone of the character's words, but you can use setting and action to add to its creepiness.

  The purpose of shadowy dialogue, used in mysteries and horror stories, is to keep the story as dark as possible. Horror and mystery readers are interested in the dark and supernatural, preferably both at the same time. The characters are usually somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness where the darkness is concerned. It's a zone where both character and reader teeter between the light and the dark, between what's real and what's imagined. And we all know scary things go on in our imaginations sometimes. Horror and mystery writers know how to develop those imaginary moments to where t
hey feel more real than reality itself, and therein lies the terror we feel when we read this kind of story. The characters' dialogue reflects this mood.

  breathless

  The purpose of this kind of dialogue is to keep the reader on the edge of his chair, turning pages until the wee hours of the morning. The word you want to remember is suspense. Breathless dialogue is all about creating suspense, which is what readers are looking for when they buy an action/adventure or suspense thriller. They want every page to be full of spine-tingling, creeped-out, nail-biting suspense. It's your job, as the writer, to give it to them as the characters express themselves to each other in ways that turn up the heat. And turn it up. And turn it up.

  Let's look at Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park for an example of how dialogue works in suspense thrillers. Here we have three characters trying to get from one side of the lake to the other without the most dangerous of all dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus, seeing them. But then Lex starts coughing. And coughing.

  Lex coughed loudly, explosively. In Tim's ears, the sound echoed across the water like a gunshot.

  The tyrannosaur yawned lazily, and scratched its ear with its hind foot, just like a dog. It yawned again. It was groggy after its big meal, and it woke up slowly.

  On the boat, Lex was making little gargling sounds.

  "Lex, shut up!"Tim said.

  "I can't help it," she whispered, and then she coughed again. Grant rowed hard, moving the raft powerfully into the center of the lagoon.

  On the shore, the tyrannosaur stumbled to its feet.

  "I couldn't help it, Timmy!" Lex shrieked miserably. "I couldn't help it!"

  "Shhhh!"

  Grant was rowing as fast as he could.

  "Anyway, it doesn't matter," she said. "We're far enough away. He can't swim."