• Do know your characters (especially the minor ones). I've mentioned it
• You don't have perfect speech, so why do you think your characters should?
• Who are you trying to impress?
many times in this book, already, but it bears repeating. It's only as you know your characters that you can write dialogue for them that rings true. Otherwise, it sounds like stick people talking, and all of your characters will sound the same—they'll sound like you. I once read in a writing book that if your story could take place anywhere, then you haven't got hold of either your setting or your story because the setting is intricately connected to the story. The same is true of dialogue. If the dialogue you create could be spoken by any of the characters, then you don't know your characters.
Damon Knight gives us some good advice on this subject in his book Creating Short Fiction: "Dialogue in fiction should resemble real dialogue with the various hesitations, repetitions, and other glitches edited out of it. Listen to people talk. No two are exactly alike. By the way they talk, their choice of words, the things they talk about, and the attitudes they express, they tell you where they grew up, how they were educated, the kind of work they do, what social class they belong to, and much more. When you know who your character is and where she comes from and what she's like, you should know instinctively what she will say and how she'll say it. If the people in your stories don't talk 'in character,' it must be because you don't know them well enough, or because you have not spent enough time listening attentively to people's speech patterns."
We often make special efforts to do character sketches and charts on our protagonists, antagonists, and one or two minor characters, but we need to also know the rest of the cast so the entire story will ring true when all of our characters speak, not just the major players. How are we going to know if a line is false if we don't know the character speaking it?
A couple of years ago, I started writing first-person profiles for all of the characters in my stories. This allows them to tell me who they are in their own voices. This is actually pages and pages of dialogue when you think about it, because I'm letting them talk to me. It has opened my characters up to me like nothing I've ever tried before. All of these years, I've been toiling over those humongous lists of questions in dossiers suggested by writing teachers to get to know your characters. I get so bored answering all of the questions and filling out the dossiers that I have no passion left for the story when it's time to write it. So I've become an advocate of the first-person profile, especially for the antagonist, because writing in first person forces me to get inside of his head.
• Do pace your dialogue. Every story has a rhythm, and we need to try to get into our story's rhythm so it moves well. As we learned in chapter eight, we can use dialogue to either speed up a scene or slow it down. When we're conscious of this process, our dialogue works in tandem with the action and narrative to create a flow that's organic to the story we want to tell. For example, if it's an action/adventure story, the dialogue will move as quickly as the action and narrative, unless the action is over the top, and then you can use the kind of nondramatic dialogue that will slow the scenes down a bit. If it's a romance, you may use mostly dialogue to tell your story, and in this case, it will probably move along at a nice clip.
When you've just come off a fast-paced action scene, you might want to create a scene of interaction between your characters for the purpose of reflecting on what just happened. Whatever your story needs, you want to be conscious enough of how dialogue works in pacing so you can accelerate or brake at will. This will make your dialogue more effective because it will contribute to the story's overall rhythm, making the entire story a smoother ride for your reader.
• Do write functional dialogue. Functional dialogue is dialogue that goes somewhere, that has a destination and propels the story forward. It's dialogue with a purpose. As we've read throughout this book, dialogue needs to do a lot of things for the story, sometimes all at once. How can we possibly stay aware of all that dialogue has to do while we're putting words in our characters' mouths?
The answer to this question is: Don't think. About anything. You write dialogue from a place in your gut, not your head. The sooner you learn how to do this, the better you'll become at dialogue.
"Right," I can hear you saying. "You've told me a hundred things I need to think about while I'm writing dialogue. That's what this book has been all about from the first page. Now you're telling me, 'Don't think'? Are you nuts?"
Actually, learning the lessons in this book is important so they'll become second nature to you. But while applying them, you don't want to be thinking about them. When learning to ride a motorcycle a couple of years ago, I only thought about the "rules" for the first few months. Now I never think about them because I know what they are. I don't have to think about them. They're a part of me. Okay, you can think about the rules in this book because they're new to you, but eventually you have to
let go and surrender to the process of writing dialogue. It's as easy as riding a motorcycle; you only need to learn and then let go. There is one way you know if you've learned or not—if the ride is still a bumpy one, you're not quite there. When it's smooth, it's because you've let go. And the result is functional dialogue—authentic dialogue, suspenseful dialogue, purposeful dialogue.
• Do honor your character's journey. Your character is going somewhere. You may have had a destination in mind, but now he's happily on his way, not the least bit concerned about your original plan for him. Again, if you want your story to be organic, you need to honor your character and put words in his mouth that are intricately connected to his internal and external journey, which is your story.
Of course, in order to honor your character's journey, you have to know what it is. Be sure to spend time pondering your character's journey before you begin to write. Then, when he speaks, he will know where he's going and can talk about it with intelligence and integrity. For example, in chapter three we looked at a passage of Atticus Finch's dialogue in To Kill a Mockingbird. Here's a man who was very aware of his journey, his stand against racism, from the very beginning of the novel. His words indicate just how aware he was. Let's look at a paragraph of his speech once more:
"What was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was her daily reminder of what she did. What did she do? She tempted a Negro."
Harper Lee had a destination for Atticus Finch and in a focused way took him toward that destination in much of the dialogue that he spoke throughout the novel. Not to preach but to speak out what would become his destiny at the end of the story and change an entire town. That's how powerful dialogue can be and how important it is that you commit to honoring your character's journey while writing dialogue.
• Do search for the essence. In How to Write Best-Selling Fiction, Dean Koontz tells us,
Many writers think—erroneously—that fiction should be a mirror of reality. Actually, it should act as a sifter to refine reality until only the essence is before the reader. This is nowhere more evident than in fictional dialogue. In real life, conversation is often roundabout, filled with general commentary and polite rituals. In fiction, the characters must always get right to the point when they talk.
Every scene of dialogue has an essence, and that's what the writer is responsible for re-creating. The goal is to always write authentic dialogue while writing only the dialogue that matters in the current scene as it connects to the overall story problem. There are nuggets in all dialogue, and if we want those nuggets to shine, we have to cut away all of the extraneous words that distract from the essence of the nuggets.
My personal opinion is that most of us write too many words. We would do well to write far less than we do. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that probably 75 percent of the writers I work with in a coaching capacity regularly complain about the word limits imposed on them in their writing
assignments. They haven't learned to appreciate that word limits are a gift to teach them to write and make every word count for something. When learning to write with word limits, when being open to the process instead of resisting it, certain writers emerge as champions because they embrace the lessons and discover the essence of each scene as they write it.
If you want to get in the habit of searching for the essence in your story dialogue, comb through your characters' words until you find the ones they have to say, the ones that without, the story would be lost on the reader. I guarantee you, there are very few of those. Oh, yes, we need the words that characterize and create suspense and tighten the tension, but to find the essence means to tie even these words into the story's theme so every word in every scene connects in some way to the big picture.
I don't believe that you always have to know up front what the dialogue's essence is while writing each scene of your story, but if your intention is to find it and cut away everything around it so it can come forth, then this is what will happen. All it takes is a willingness on your part to find it, to not be satisfied until everything but the essence is cut away.
So these are just a few of the dos and don'ts, guidelines to help you with what's really important in writing dialogue. And back to the writing frenzy my student mentioned in the beginning of this chapter. The creation of the first draft of a story is not the time to be thinking about the guidelines, worrying about whether you're following them, thinking about the rightness or the wrongness of style, voice, form, or anything else. But when you've written the first draft and are into your revisions, using the left side of your brain, these guidelines will come in handy as they will give you something tangible with which to measure the quality of your writing.
Our final chapter addresses our relationship with our readers. This is the most important relationship we have after the one with our characters. If we can understand what dialogue can do for our readers, we'll get more excited about writing the kind of dialogue that delivers substance and connects in ways that sometimes can even change a reader's life.
Don't try too hard. If you want to ease into your character's persona before you write a scene, the following exercises might help:
• Put on a hat that your character would wear when writing his dialogue. (You might want to go out and invest in a few hats for this exercise.)
• Put on music that your character would listen to.
• Rent a movie that includes a character that your character reminds you of and watch it right before your writing time.
• Write up to five e-mails in your character's voice to the other characters in the story to prime the pump before you work on your story.
• Cut a photo out of a magazine that looks like your character and post it nearby while you're writing his dialogue.
• If you can't get into any of the above, you need to do more work on your character's development.
Don't betray your character or reader. Think about what it would mean to write the kind of dialogue that would betray the characters in your story. Pondering this will ultimately indicate how well you know your characters. Write one paragraph for each character. In this paragraph, come up with a subject that would betray that character's basic personality and the goals you have for that character in the story.
Don't use your characters to preach your personal agenda. Take any or all of the following issues and write one paragraph of a character's dialogue that preaches and one that simply shares an opinion. (Of course, there are certain characters who preach because that's who they are, in which case preaching is okay—but they're not usually characters your reader will have a lot of respect for.) If these issues don't light you up, choose different ones.
• abortion • the environment • euthanasia
• homelessness • war • child abuse
Don't try to be cute or clever. If you're unaware of when you may be writing cute or clever dialogue, this exercise may help you. The goal is for you to become aware of this tendency, so try to answer the following questions as honestly as you can about any of the dialogue you suspect may be too cute or clever.
• Does this line of dialogue ring true for this character?
• Am I trying to lighten things up too much by having my character laughing too hard and too often in this scene?
• Is this line of dialogue necessary or have I just thrown it in, hoping to entertain the reader?
• Do I understand my character's sense of humor and am I being true to it in every scene in my story?
• Is there a way I can show my character's sense of humor more subtly?
Don't let the dialogue drive the scene. Using only dialogue, write one page of a scene that shows one character in conflict with another character over money. Now rewrite the same scene using dialogue, narrative, and action, first from one character's point of view, then from the other character's point of view. The goal of this exercise is to see how action and narrative contribute to a scene what dialogue only can't.
Don't worry about perfection. Write one page of dialogue without thinking about any of the rules of writing dialogue. You can make up a character or use one in a story you've been writing. The goal is to write without thinking, to just go. Let her say anything that comes into her mind, no matter if her dog would turn over in its grave. Don't even punctuate if you don't want to. If you do it often enough, this one exercise may free you up to where you're not afraid of dialogue anymore.
Do write dialogue that's worth eavesdropping on. With your pad and pencil, go sit in a public place like a park or mall and listen to people talk until you hear a conversation that gets your attention. If that never happens (many people talk about nothing), develop one of the nothing conversations into a conversation that would raise the hairs on the heads of anyone nearby.
Do know your characters (especially the minor ones). Write first-person profiles for all of the characters in a story you're working on. If you're not currently working on a story, be spontaneous. Write three first-person profiles of characters you would like to write stories about. It doesn't matter if you like the characters or not. This is organic, so just go for it and see what happens.
Do pace your dialogue. Practice pacing your dialogue. Use the following scenarios for practice and write one-page scenes of dialogue.
Fast-paced
• three friends at a party
• two car thieves on a joyride
• two female friends at a mall
Slow-paced
• two monks in a monastery
Do write functional dialogue. Experiment. Write a page of dialogue without thinking about anything at all. You can use characters from a story you're writing or just write dialogue in a vacuum. You're coloring out of the lines, so it doesn't matter.
• two hikers on a trail
• a woman and her therapist in his office
Do honor your character's journey. Choose five characters from recent short stories or novels you've read and find lines of dialogue that honor each protagonist's journey. Or even the antagonist's journey; antagonists have an agenda and a destiny, too. These lines should indicate who they are and what their goal is in the story. If you want to use a character or characters from your own story in one of these exercises, that's even better. Choose dialogue that clearly indicates who the character is in the story.
Do search for the essence. Choose a character from a movie you've seen recently, a story you've read, or even someone in your real life, and write one page of fictional dialogue about something that's desperately important to this person. When you've completed the page, cut away everything until you have only the essence of the passion and subject left.
[ connecting with readers — you can make a difference ]
How many times have we been told, as writers, that we should write for ourselves and no one else? We shouldn't try to please anyone but ourselves. Not family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, enemies. It's just you and the blank page.r />
This is partly true. Integrity demands that we write out of the truth that resides in us.
But there's a delicate balance here, because if we are so concerned about being true to ourselves and not pleasing others we become self-serving, and the consequence of that is to exclude our readers. And don't think they can't feel that.
There are too many self-serving writers out there already. This happens to be a personal soapbox of mine, so I'm not going to go on and on about it lest I do the very thing I'm telling you not to do.
In this chapter I want to chat with you about how we can serve our readers through our fictional dialogue to assure their loyalty and commitment to our characters once they've started down the road with them. There is a line in the Bible that has always been a favorite of mine: ".whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant." (Matt. 20:26) I believe greatness and servanthood are intricately connected. If we can learn to consider our readers with every story we write, we can serve them with our fiction in a way that can empower them and change their lives. For me, this is what writing fiction is all about.
A character's dialogue, delivered with passion and authenticity, can actually change a reader's life. And isn't that what many of us are about when we write—changing lives? Sure, some of us, maybe even most of us, want to make money at this. Some of us would even like a little fame thrown in. We write to entertain our friends, relatives, and strangers out
there in readerland. But down deep in the core of our hearts, wouldn't it be wonderful if we knew we had made a difference in someone's life through the way we portrayed a fictional character?
I'm a living example that this can happen. I'm sure, if I thought about it, I could think of many lines of dialogue that have in some way changed my life and made me a better, more loving person. But I can think of one for sure, used earlier in one of the excerpts in this book. It's Emma's words from Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment to her boys as she lay dying.
"... you're going to remember that you love me," Emma said. "I imagine you'll wish you could tell me that you've changed your mind, but you won't be able to, so I'm telling you now I already know you love me, just so you won't be in doubt about that later."
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