His mother said, "I don't believe this. I do not believe it. No matter how long I've been a mother, it seems my children can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me."
"I'm not doing this to you! Why does everything have to relate to you all the time? It's for me, can't you get that into your head? It's something I have to do for myself, to be forgiven."
"Forgiven what, Ian?" his father asked.
Ian swallowed.
"You're nineteen years old, son. You're a fine, considerate, upstanding human being. What sin could you possibly be guilty of that would require you to uproot your whole existence?"
Reverend Emmett had said Ian would have to tell them. He'd said that was the only way. Ian had tried to explain how much it would hurt them, but
Reverend Emmett had held firm. Sometimes a wound must be scraped out before it can heal, he had said.
Ian said, "I'm the only one who caused Danny to die. He drove into that wall on purpose."
Nobody spoke. His mother's face was white, almost flinty.
"I told him Lucy was, um, not faithful," he said.
He had thought there would be questions. He had assumed they would ask for details, pull the single strand he'd handed them till the whole ugly story came tumbling out. But they just sat silent, staring at him.
"I'm sorry!" he cried. "I'm really sorry!"
His mother moved her lips, which seemed unusually wrinkled. No sound emerged.
After a while, he rose awkwardly and left the table. He paused in the dining room doorway, just in case they wanted to call him back. But they didn't. He crossed the hall and started up the stairs.
This is a pivotal scene as Ian unburdens his soul to his parents and gets no response whatsoever. We're reminded of his intention in the story when he says, "It's something I have to do for myself to be forgiven." This is what the story is about, Ian working hard to get forgiveness for his "sin." In every scene, you want to remind your reader of the main character's intention, as this is the way you engage your reader and keep engaging her as the story progresses. Using dialogue for this purpose is especially effective because the character is stating his goal out loud. It's coming right from his mouth.
Your protagonist can sit around and think about his intention or you can create a scene of dialogue and action and show his passion about his intention in a scene with other characters. Dialogue shows.
keeping your characters in social settings
Dialogue can only keep the story moving when you put more than one character in a scene. When you isolate your characters, there's no one for them to talk to. There's no dialogue. Of course, there is no way to get around putting your characters in scenes by themselves once in a while. But if an isolated character scene goes on too long, the story starts to dry up.
This seems to be a problem with many mainstream and literary stories; the protagonist is too often alone in scene after scene, engaged in self-analysis. The reader will hang in there for a while, but rambling self-analysis
slows the story way down, and if it goes on too long, you risk losing the reader. So, when thinking through the scenes you want to create, remember that, for the most part, your reader most enjoys those scenes where two or more characters are engaged in some degree of dialogue and action.
A scene of dialogue must always move the story forward in some way. No exceptions. If you ever find yourself creating dialogue that fails in this purpose, you'll just have to throw it out later, no matter how creative, clever, funny, or brilliant.
Now, have you ever wondered if there's a strategy to bring all three elements of the scene together—dialogue, narrative, and action—so the scene is balanced and focused in its purpose? This is what we'll deal with in the next chapter.
Provides new information. Stephanie and Peter, a married couple, are opening up a new business together, a Greek restaurant on the south side of town. They have had their door open for several hours now and are serving customers. This is a dream come true for this couple. Suddenly someone walks in the door and gives them some information that lets them know this may not be their dream come true after all but the beginning of a nightmare. Write a three-page scene of dialogue that is full of tension and suspense and includes some new information that will take the plot in another direction entirely.
Reveals new obstacles. Imagine the kind of conflict that would make you crazy. (Our best story ideas come from experiences that we ourselves have lived, would want to live, would hate to live, wish we had never lived, etc.) Yes, this is fiction, but in this scenario make yourself the protagonist. Think of a goal that you have in your life and put yourself in a scene with another character—someone who knows you well. Write three pages of dialogue that opens with the other character announcing the obstacle to your goal. How do you feel? What would you say? How would you act in that moment that you know you may be facing an insurmountable obstacle to your goal?
Increases suspense. Every scene in every story should have suspense, but in thinking about a dialogue scene moving a story forward, the suspense needs to connect to the overall plot and theme. Whether the plot is action/adventure, romance, or literary, the dialogue can be used to create suspense. Choose one of the following subjects and write a three-page scene of dialogue that shows the characters in conflict and the suspense intensifying as far as the story's outcome.
• war • assisted suicide • prison reform
• racism • gay parents • homelessness
Furthers the theme. Choose a subject you feel strongly about, that you could write a story about. Summarize it in a sentence—the conflict or problem and what you see as the resolution, if you have one. Now put two characters into a scene who are on different sides of this issue. It's your story, so the theme that should be evident in the scene is the way you perceive the situation can be resolved. In your three-page scene, show your characters in conflictive dialogue to the point where both of them are thinking a little bit differently at the end of the scene than they were in the beginning.
Shows character transformation. In each of the following scenarios, the protagonist is confronted and challenged to make some changes in her life. The scenario is only a small part of a bigger story about a bigger theme. Write a three-page scene of dialogue that shows the confrontation and the response of the protagonist to the challenge that she needs to look at something within herself.
• A wife finds out her husband (protagonist) is attracted to and beginning to spend time with a single woman who is friends with the couple. She confronts him and gives him an ultimatum.
• A boss tells her employee (protagonist) that she's taking too many coffee breaks and extending her lunch hours, as well as spending too much time on the phone.
• A mother (protagonist) discovers that her twenty-something daughter is a prostitute who plans to continue as long as there is work.
Reveals/reminds of goals. Choose one of the three following scenarios and write a two-page scene from the point of view of the character that feels most passionately about his or her goal. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure that the protagonist's goal or intention is evident in the scene.
• A fourteen-year-old girl wants to go out on a date with a sixteen-year-old boy. This would be her first date, and her parents are against it.
• A man in his thirties loves to work on old cars, then sell them for a profit. He has at least five beaters plus parts laying all over his yard at any one time. The next-door neighbors are growing increasingly anxious over this. They have a perfect house and a perfect yard.
• A young, very aggressive woman tries to sell a harried mother of two some perfume in a store parking lot.
Keeping your characters in social situations. Write a two-page scene of dialogue that starts out with a character alone and in conflict with himself. Then bring another character into the scene and begin to develop the conflict externally as well as internally. Use one of the following settings:
• a mountai
n trail • a jail cell • a hospital room
• a dark alley • a church sanctuary
[ narrative, dialogue, and action — learning to weave the spoken word ]
As a new writer, my stories were mostly dialogue. Pages and pages of characters talking. I loved to write dialogue. I don't know that I thought a story needed anything else. I wrote my very first story in fourth grade—a puppet play consisting of nothing but dialogue and a few stage directions. I wrote a lot of skits and plays after that. Dialogue was and always has been my favorite part of writing a story.
Somewhere along the line, I realized there were other elements necessary to telling stories: action and narrative. Description is also part of a story, but it's really just another form of narrative. While dialogue is the element that brings a story and the characters to life on the page, action creates the movement and narrative gives the story its depth and substance. Dialogue is the characters' words, action the characters' physical movement, and narrative the characters' thoughts about everything going on around them, which can take the form of observation of the setting, other characters, or mental musing on the story situation. Stories need all three elements—dialogue, action, and narrative—to create a three-dimensional feel for the reader.
Writing a story means weaving all of the elements of fiction together, just like quilters weave the various patterns of their quilts or ice skaters weave in and out of each other on the ice. When it's done right, weaving dialogue, narrative, and action can create a beautiful tapestry.
why weave?
Expert weaving of dialogue, narrative, and action is done unconsciously.
Once we learn how it's done, we don't think about it while we're doing it. We are letting the characters lead us, so we're no more thinking about which element of storytelling we're using than we are thinking about when to use the clutch, brake, and accelerator when we're driving. We just do it. When reading a story, we don't notice whether the author is weaving or not— when it's working. When it's not working, when the author is not doing it, we notice. I can only speak for myself. I notice.
Some talented writers are able to pull off memoirs and novels using mostly narrative and almost ignoring action and dialogue. Many of these books are so well written that we would never even know what's missing unless it was pointed out to us—and even then, we wouldn't care because the story worked for us on some level. Just know that these are the exception. Too many beginning writers, I've noticed, think they're the exception, but most likely they're not.
Certainly, there are scenes in all of our stories that work best using only narrative or only dialogue or only action. The more you write, the more you'll recognize those scenes and why using only one of these three elements is the most effective. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to practice conscious weaving, which we'll focus on in this chapter.
Think for a moment about a "scene" in your life. Maybe you're outside playing with your kids, at the gym, or at work. You're doing (action), you're thinking (narrative), and you're talking (dialogue), often all at the same time. When others around you are doing all three of these things, when do you pay the most attention? Obviously, you don't know when someone else is thinking because you can't read another person's thoughts. Sometimes when others are doing things, we take notice. But if anyone near us is talking about anything interesting at all, we listen. We can't help it. Writers are probably more guilty of this than anyone else. People are always inclined to eavesdrop on the interesting conversations of others. The key word is interesting.
We weave because it's life. Our days are full of weaving. We get up, think about a work project, talk to our partner about the day, eat breakfast, take the kids to school, think about a conflict we're having with a neighbor, go to work, think about the stops we need to make on the way home from work, and on an on until we fall into bed at night. This is our life—a series of thoughts, actions, and words that go on all day, every day. We want our fictional stories to imitate life, so we need to show all the dimensions of our characters' lives—at once. Not the boring stuff, of course, but the stuff that matters, the stuff that pertains to and furthers the plot.
Can you imagine a story of only dialogue? Or action? Or narrative? I'm such a fan of dialogue that I'll go out on a limb and say that if you're going to err, err on the side of too much dialogue rather than not enough.
To weave is to blend two or three elements of fiction together so it makes for a smooth ride for the reader. Let's see how that works out practically.
dialogue into action
In a scene that is mostly action, bits of dialogue here and there give the scene its three-dimensional feel. Again, this is just like life. When some kind of action is taking most of our attention, we don't completely stop talking, but we probably talk less, depending on the kind of action in which we're engaged and the kind of emotion the action is evoking from us. Too often new writers, when creating an action scene, forget about using dialogue altogether, I'm guessing because they're so focused on trying to get their character from Point A to Point B and they neglect to consider that the character would probably be expressing something, even if it's just a word or phrase here and there. Even if he's alone in the scene, you can have him talking out loud to himself, again, for that three-dimensional feel you're after in every scene you write.
Dialogue can be very effective when woven into action scenes that include a lot of characters, such as a crowd or party scene. It can make the scene feel alive and happening while on another level your viewpoint character is having his own private drama separate from the crowd. Especially in crowd scenes, you want to do this because to mimic reality, there is always more than one thing going on with any number of the characters present.
Stephen King does a good job of this in an action scene in his novel Bag of Bones. In this scene, King is describing a carnival, and in his magical style, writes the scene so it's part dream, part reality, and the protagonist, Mike, moves between the two in his mind while navigating the carnival. Suddenly he runs into Kyra, the young daughter of the woman he's falling in love with, and for a moment they stand watching the Red-Tops, a singing group, when Kyra notices that a lady on the stage is wearing her mother's dress. Up until this point the scene has consisted mostly of narrative and action. Watch what King does with the dialogue as Mike and Kyra try to make their way out of the carnival.
"Why is the lady wearing Mattie's dress?" Kyra asked me, and she began to tremble.
"I don't know, honey, I can't say." Nor could I argue—it was the white sleeveless dress Mattie had been wearing on the common, all right. We watch the action onstage for a few more paragraphs, then:
The crowd roared happily. In my arms, Kyra was shaking harder than ever. "I'm scared, Mike," she said. "I don't like that lady. She's a scary lady. She stole Mattie's dress. I want to go home." King moves into a number of paragraphs of narrative and action about the lady on the stage—his usual scary stuff—and then the scene is off and running. Right or wrong, I'd had enough. I turned, putting my hand on the back of Ki's head and urging her face down against my chest. Both her arms were around my neck now, clutching with panicky tightness. King describes another part-dream, part-reality character, then: "Excuse me," I said, brushing by him.
"There's no town drunk here, you meddling son of a bitch," he said, never looking at me and never missing a beat as he clapped. "We all just take turns." Mike and Kyra keep moving, dodging around three drinking farmers, until they're free of the crowd. More dialogue as they head toward the street and home:
"Almost done, Irish!" Sara shrieked after me. She sounded angry, but not too angry to laugh. "You gonna get what you want, sugar, all the comfort you need, but you want to let me finish my bi'ness. Do you hear me, boy? Just stand clear! Mind me now!"
Mike is carrying Kyra and they begin to move faster.
On our left was the baseball pitch and some little boy shouting, "Willy hit it over the fence, Ma! Willy hit it over the fence!" with mon
otonous brain-crog-gling regularity. They keep moving.
"Are we home yet?" Ki almost moaned. "I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy."
"I will," I said. "Everything's going to be all right."
Each line of narrative I inserted between the dialogue passages is where King has included a few paragraphs of action in the scene. Can you see how the dialogue gives the feel of many things happening at once as Mike passes and runs into the various characters and tries to comfort Kyra, all while trying to get her away from the carnival and home?
Without the dialogue, the scene would feel stagnant, like it's standing still even though there's action and the characters are moving around. The dialogue helps give the scene its momentum as we watch Mike caring in a nurturing way for Kyra while staying focused on getting them out of there. Action without dialogue often lacks substance. Granted, as I said above, there are times in a story when only dialogue or only action or only narrative is what's needed for that moment in the story, but most of the time you want to weave these three elements together.
narrative into dialogue
Narrative seems to be the favorite element of most writers. I seldom see stories that use too much dialogue, but I often see stories that use too much narrative. Narrative tells, dialogue shows. There's a time for telling and a time for showing. This is the skill in learning to weave—knowing when to do what.
Narrative is the part of the story that does any number of things but show characters talking to one another. It might describe characters or setting, reveal background, flash back to the past, move into a character's mind and reveal thoughts, characterize, and philosophize. In the first person and/or literary story, especially, the story's voice comes through most effectively in narrative, since the story is most often character-driven rather than plot-driven, and the protagonist has a very personal story to share with the reader. In this type of story, the protagonist is developing a more intimate relationship with the reader, gaining the reader's trust and can talk more directly to the reader through narrative.
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