Thus you must be willing to take dialogue apart to look at what makes it tick. As you read, be willing to isolate moments within a dialogue. Highlight them in your book. Dog-ear the pages. Tear out a page and tape it to the wall above your computer. The idea is to take the dialogue on its own terms, to isolate the specific techniques the writer uses, before returning to the story as a whole to examine the dialogue's function in the larger context.
Begin by looking for the general tension of the dialogue. Some beginning writers confuse tension with conflict, assuming it comes and goes depending on whether characters agree or disagree. Tension is more like the energy between charged particles. It's always there, even when two people agree. Think of two cars traveling a reasonable distance apart from one another along an interstate at sixty-five miles an hour. Safe distance. Same direction. Same speed. No tension, right? Wrong. We all know it only takes one little bump in the road, one touch of the brakes, a doe in the headlights for everything to be completely and suddenly redefined. So you might start by looking for those three qualities when gauging the tension of your dialogue: direction, speed and distance (or separation).
TENSION IN DIALOGUE
How do I apply all this talk of direction, speed and distance to a dialogue?
Set two characters up in a blank room—that is, a bare stage, a void, a place not yet defined. Now make a decision. One of them wants something. The other does not have it, or can not get it. How will the first get it, if not by speaking? He must move in the direction of his desire.
1: Give it to me.
The direction here is clear and declarative. It's a palpable tension. Surely, you can see that this addresses a need in a particular way. Nothing has been named yet, we have no fix on place, or even space, and yet the character speaks out of a sense of what she wants. But it would be no less so if it started this way.
1: Excuse me.
He's still moving in the direction of his desire, toward what he wants, by breaking the silence, by starting things up. I don't have to move much past that utterance to see a sort of tension filling up the space. Where would you expect this to move from here? Direction is a natural part of dialogue. We expect to be led somewhere by the response. How will the other character deal with this? As the answer to this question becomes clearer, we often start to see the issue of distance, or separation, being defined. The tone of that response will set up speed. You might expect me to say that the tension I've set up demands that he reveal everything he wants in the first line. For now, let's have the second character work from a position of total neutrality.
1: Excuse me.
2: Yes?
1: Do you know the time?
2: No, I don't.
1: Do you have any sense of how long we've been here?
2: No.
That's probably as neutral as you're going to get. Still, speaker 2 is resisting. It's possible to read a certain distance into that exchange, an attitude that suggests speaker 2 isn't going to help speaker 1 in any way, shape or form. The brief responses lend an element of increased speed. Play it any way you want. Some element of tension is generally shaped by the act of speaking.
All good dialogue has direction. It's a mishmash of need and desire on the part of an individual character weighed against the tension inherent in the gathering of more than one person. Not convinced? Think there isn't always tension when people speak? "What about families?" you say. "What about people who love each other? There's not always tension there." Some of you are laughing at that already, because for many of us a family (love it as we may) is our greatest tissue of tensions. But I would remind you of my terms. This is not grand conflict here, not man versus nature; nor is it painful tension, nothing one could take care of with a little cup of tea and a foot rub. This is the stuff that fills the spaces between us, even when we don't recognize it As a writer you have to learn to trust that it's there.
Go back to the conversation in the blank room. Try to make it as free of tension as possible. Would it look something like this?
1: Hi.
2: Hi.
1: How are you?
2: Fine. How are you?
1: Great. Nice day.
2: Really. Nice day.
Sounds hauntingly like those conversations we all have in elevators, or at a chance encounter, or in the hallways at school. Most people say they hate this kind of jabber, and in other places in the book, I've suggested, as I will again here, that there's no place for it in fiction. Sure people talk like this in the world, but that's why we must shape dialogue when we write. Good dialogue relies on a stronger tension than we see here. Good dialogue requires sharper word choice, more defined attitudes, more originality. As I said in chapter one, good dialogue should be something of an event unto itself.
But despite the apparent neutrality of the dialogue above, it is not without direction. Look at it again. Chart the direction using arrows if you want. Who starts the conversation? Speaker 1. ("Hi.") It's his energy that plays off the response too. Here, again, we might use the word "speed," or "pace." ("How are you?"). He's the one asking the questions. Speaker 2 is feeding off him. The arrows I'd draw would consistently be moving from 1 toward 2. That's one sort of tension, a sort of tensionless tension. Something that would take a long time to build up to the point where you might call it conflict, the point where 1 would want something from 2. It might end like this.
1: Fine then.
2: What do you mean?
1: Nothing.
2: Okay.
1: Fine.
2:1 don't understand.
1: You wouldn't.
2: Are you angry?
1: No.
2: You seem angry. Have I done something wrong?
1: You just don't care. I'm sorry I ever talked to you.
That's an exaggeration, of course. And I have shaped things to my needs. That's what I believe you must do. But there's no question I have moved from the tension buried in the direction of an apparently neutral conversation and found one result. Could you nag out a neutral conversation for pages and pages, keeping it neutral the whole time? Your answer may be yes. Mine is no. That's the sort of thing we do in life. Jabber about sports, ask about the grandkids, exchange greetings. These are masks we wear. They don't last long before we start to reveal who we are. Put two people in one place, force them to listen to one another and soon they are telling stories or, more aptly for us I guess, telling stories in the act of telling. That is what the writer must believe.
Your challenge is to see the stories within the words of your character. Looking for speed, distance and direction and then manipulating these is a good place to start. If we accept that all good dialogue has these elements of tension, what is it that sets good dialogue apart from lifeless dialogue? Good dialogue rises out of the way a writer makes use of individual techniques, such as
• interruption
• silences
• echoing
• reversals
• shifts in tone and pace
• idiom
• detail
DIRECTED DIALOGUE
Let's look at an example that begins in a fairly "placeless" place, on the radio airwaves, on a radio talk show. This conversation opens Peter Abrahams' novel The Fan. This is one of those conversations we hear all the time. Read it once, then read it again, the second time looking for the tension that's buried in the direction of the speakers. I'll follow with a summary of the novel, and an overview of Gil, the main character, who is also the caller in this dialogue.
"Who's next? Gil on the car phone. What's shakin', Gil?"
Dead air.
"Speak, Gil."
"Is this . . ." "Go on." "Hello?"
"You're on the JOC." "Am I on?"
"Not for long, Gil, the way we're going. This is supposed to be entertainment." Dead air.
"Got a question or a comment for us, Gil?" "First-time caller."
"Fantabulous. What's on your mind?" "I'm a little nervou
s."
"What's to be nervous? Just three million pairs of ears out there, hanging on your every word. What's the topic?" "The Sox."
"I like the way you say that." "How do I say it?" "Like—what else could it be?" Dead air.
"What about the Sox, Gil?" "Just that I'm psyched, Bernie."
"Bernie's off today. This is Norm. Everybody gets psyched in the spring. That's a given in this game. Like ballpark mustard." "This is different." "How?" Dead air. "Gil?"
"I've been waiting a long time." "For what?" "This year."
"What's special about it?" "It's their year." "Why so tentative?" "Tentative?"
"Just pulling your leg. The way you sound so sure. Like it's a lead-pipe cinch. The mark of the true-blue fan." Dead air. "Gil?" 'Yeah?"
"The Vegas odds are—what are they, Fred? Fred in the control room there, doing something repulsive with a pastrami on rye—ten to one on the Sox for the pennant, twenty, what is it, twenty-five to one on the whole shebang. Just to give us some perspective on this, Gil, what would you wager at those odds, if you were a wagering man?"
"Everything I owe."
"Owe? Hey. I like this guy. He's got a sense of humor after all. But, Gil—you're setting yourself up for a season of disillusion, my friend."
"Disillusion?"
"Yeah, like—"
"I know what disillusion means."
"Do you? Then you must—"
"They went down to the wire last year, didn't they?"
"Ancient history, Gil."
What is the charge that runs through this conversation? How and when do we begin to see the tensions of character revealed? The voice of the talk-show host is the active presence in the conversation, pressing against Gil's nervousness, against his stake in the team, against the public perception of the team, to shake him up, to force him into talking. His direction is clear, and, not surprisingly, Gil is not revealing enough for us to know many real facts about him. This is an openly antagonistic dialogue, one in which the movement of one character is an attempt to drive the tensions to the surface. The teasing, the cajoling, the chiding of the host are all a part of this. But so too is Gil's reluctance to speak, to reveal much about himself. The anonymity of the airwaves is a part of that, sure. But Gil's unwillingness or inability to reveal the tensions within him adds to the antagonism. Not surprising that what would follow is the dark story of Gil's obsessive relationship with a player and Gil's course of self-destruction. In the middle of the dialogue above, when Gil says, "I've been waiting a long time ... [for] this year," it resonates, like all good dialogue, toward the story ahead, toward the year to come.
This is an example of directed dialogue, in which the writer is attempting to use dialogue as a means of setting up the tensions of the longer work. The particular tensions of this dialogue are reflective of issues that will come into play later. One character (in this case the talk-show host) is used as foil for the other. At first it would appear that the host might be the center of this story, but as we read on, it becomes clear that Gil is the one with the story to tell. It's a fine example of a writer bringing tension directly to the surface through the dialogue itself.
The risk of directed dialogue is that it too often serves the needs of the writer first. It becomes a means of explanation, of exposition, and little more. What Abrahams does well is use the fast, staccato rhythm of the talk-show host to hedge the direction of the piece by employing some specific techniques.
• Interruption. When Gil cuts off the host with, "I know what disillusion means," this is another moment where his story is foreshadowed.
• Silences. Represented here as "Dead air."
• Echoing. "Everything I owe" followed by "Owe?..." One speaker often picks up or repeats the last word of the previous speaker.
• Reversals. The host moves from sarcasm ("Fantabulous") to challenging ("What's special about it?") to chiding ("Ancient history, Gil.").
• Shifts in pace. This is an excellent example of a dialogue that works well without dialogue tags.
• Shifts in tone. The dialogue lurches forward when it moves from the host's glib line about "ballpark mustard" to Gil's grim response: "This is different."
• Convincing use of idiom. "You're on the JOC."
• Strong details. The references to the Sox, ballpark mustard, etc.
These elements hold this dialogue, and the others like it in the
book, together, allowing it to work for the writer to advance plot and to serve as a convincing reflection of Gil's world. That's the best effect of directed dialogue.
INTERPOLATED DIALOGUE
The artificial part of directed dialogue is that it requires two characters to be "stuck" in one place long enough for them to open up their lives to the reader through conversation. How many conversations have you had in which all your hopes and fears are revealed, at least in part, within a few exchanges? Odds are not many. Those moments do come, but most often the writer must choose ways to isolate specific moments of dialogues or specific directions within these dialogues to reveal the heart of the character. Often this requires interpolating the dialogue with narrative. Interpolating a dialogue allows the narrative to interrupt and interpret the dialogue. Often a single line of dialogue is interpolated into a far larger moment in the scope of the story than it is in the lives of the characters themselves. Take a simple, one-word response like "Sure." Lines like this pass our way again and again in dialogue, but think for a moment about ways to make this word tie in to the life of a character in some meaningful way. Our character may be saying it unwillingly and with a sense of resignation. To interpolate a moment like this, the narrative might step in, interrupting the dialogue on the page, to unwind the character's life in some way, perhaps touching on all the other times she'd simply given in like that. While this may sound intimidating, it ought to be the stuff writers rub their hands over, as it allows for direct connection from the external world of event to the internal world of the character.
In Anton Chekhov's great story "The Lady With the Pet Dog," a moment of casual conversation becomes a looking glass into a character's soul. The story centers on Dmitry Dmitrovich, a Muscovite in late nineteenth-century Russia. His public life, and married life, leaves him unsatisfied and melancholy and, on vacation in Yalta, he meets a woman with whom he begins an affair. He is rejuvenated by the relationship, but as it would be destructive to both his life and the woman's, he must keep it a secret. His life is split in two, and while he discovers his humanity in his new love, he is trapped by the world in which he lives. At one point, he leaves a restaurant and feels the urge to share his secret. Read the passage below and notice how little is actually spoken but how much is revealed in the words and reactions of the characters. This interpolated dialogue, brief as it is, has a direction too. Its effect, however, is made clear through the narrative that precedes and follows it.
Already he was tormented by a strong desire to share his memories with someone. But, in his home it was impossible to talk of his love, and he had no one to talk to outside; certainly he could not confide in his tenants or in anyone at the bank. And what was there to talk about? He hadn't loved then, had he? Had there been anything beautiful, poetical, edifying or simply interesting in his relations with Anna Sergeyevna? And he was forced to talk vaguely of love, of women, and no one guessed what he meant; only his wife would twitch her black eyebrows and say, "The part of the philanderer does not suit you at all, Dmitry."
One evening, coming out of the physician's club with an official with whom he had been playing cards, he could not resist saying:
"If you only knew what a fascinating woman I became acquainted with at Yalta!"
The official got into his sledge and was driving away, but turned suddenly and shouted:
"Dmitry Dmitrovich!"
"What is it?"
'You were right this evening: the sturgeon was a bit high."
These words, so commonplace, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, an
d struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manner, what mugs! What stupid nights, what dull humdrum days! Frenzied gambling, gluttony, drunkenness, continual talk always about the same things! Futile pursuits and conversations always about the same topics take up the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life clipped and wingless, an absurd mess, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a prison.
Although Peter Abrahams would surely cringe at the comparison to a master like Chekhov, it's important to note ways in which this dialogue is completely different from the one cited from The Fan. This passage acts as one of the story's moments of clarity, an epiphany in which the character sees his life stripped to its most brutal essence. Yet, the dialogue itself is short and the explicit meaning of what is said would not appear to apply to the protagonist's life in any larger sense. It is a moment that, without the accompanying narrative, might appear to be just another moment of daily jabber. But this brief exchange, in which Dmitry's associate tells him the fish was "high," meaning a bit spoiled, just as Dmitry is about to reveal his heart, represents something far larger, and Chekhov attaches a lyric piece of narrative exposition to the dialogue directly. Like the passage before it, this dialogue reveals, but the interruption and interpretation of the narrative drives home the point of what is not said, rather than what is said. This is where the interpolation comes in. The dialogue is realistic; the narrative is expository and interpretive. The two are clearly attached, without apology, by the writer. It's not about filling silences so much as filling the gaps left by our words, the gaps between us.
Interpolation is part of the way we tell stories to one another. It is part of the internal texture of a character. Picture yourself telling someone about an argument you had.
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