Thoughts On Dialogueby Eileen Charbonneau Dialogue is a powerful tool for a writer. If used well it can define character, move plot, amplify theme and voice, and be fun to read! It adds life and realism to your scenes and gives the illusion of being effortless and flowing while infusing your fiction with emotion and action. That's the good news. The bad...er, challenging news is that writing good dialogue is hard work!! Let's start with dialogue illuminating characters. In fiction with energy, no two characters put any one thought the same. If the reader doesn't learn something new about the character every time she ventures between those quotation marks, the writer isn't doing her job. When characters speak, we find out who they are. The things that affect speech are many: age, education, sex, status, interests, lifestyle and life experience, job, and religion (I once had, you should excuse the expression, a devil of a time with my heroine's Quaker "thees!"). A Kentucky woodsman might tell his loved wife "Your hair shines like a blackbird's wing." But if that woodsman's from Ireland he'll compare it to the raven, and if he's Lakota he'll use crow in the compliment. Having your own dialogue with your characters might help if you're stuck on understanding who they are. Go on, talk to them. Ask them questions. Make them BIG questions. How would you react to the accusation that you're cheating on your spouse? Do you believe in God? Can't get too up close and personal! But sometimes we have to show our heroes and heroines from a more distanced view. Having a minor character's comment can act as a Greek chorus--lets the reader see what's really going on outside the sometimes muddled heads of our heroes and heroines. In THE RANDOLPH LEGACY, I have a hero who sees himself as small, ugly and crippled, and a Quaker heroine who is obliged to notice only the beauty of his soul and not his physical transformation in the course of the story. So how do I get the reader to see Ethan in a clearer glass? When the couple elope, I lean on my chorus character, Mrs. Custis, the judge's wife, who has just met them. Here's a conversation between her and Judith: "We like your man. He's very handsome." "Do you think so? I mean, I've always seen him so, but others, when he was sick, and what with his lameness--" "Lameness? What lameness, dear?" "You didn't notice?" "Notice what?" "Of course his boots help." "Now, what woman with any eye for beauty would be looking at the boots of that fine formed man?" On to the plot-dialogue link. How does dialogue advance the action of your story? Through how characters react to conflict. The action of your story can be advanced through arguing, seducing, planning, giving ultimatums, slighting, gossiping (remember those two crones arguing over the dead Scrooge's clothes in "A Christmas Carol?"). Be careful here. Each conversation should end with some condition being different from what it was at the beginning. That is: the relationship is altered, or someone's grown wiser, or the speakers and/or readers have information they didn't know before. This last is the easiest to mess up. It's where we want to avoid that soap opera "tell"---not "I see you wear glasses" but "Your glasses are always dirty!" which gets across 1) this character wears glasses and 2) his personality, if they're always dirty and 3) the personality of the one who notices! That's making your dialogue work triple duty. The attitude of the writer toward her story is called voice. Dialogue is one of the easiest places to establish this. Think of Jane Austen's circumventing heroines, Janet Evanovich's Trenton babe bounty hunter, Tony Hillerman's terse and incorruptible Navaho policemen. Here's an exchange from Cathy Maxwell's TREASURED VOWS: "If a man did to one of my sisters what I did to you last night, I would kill him. After I'd seen them married! "Then I should thank the heavens that I have no overbearing male relative to avenge my honor, because I have no desire to enter into a marriage of convenience." "What? You wish to live a scandal? To be ostracized from polite society?" "Nothing happened last night for which either of us should apologize. Furthermore, a woman today can take a lover and still find doors open to her--" "Only the doors of a bawdy house!" "That's not true! Mary Wollstonecraft had a lover. She even had a child by him--" "Don't quote that heretical woman to me right now! I wish with all my being that you'd never heard her name or that of her abominable book!" (Can you tell that Cathy Maxwell is a hoot to be with?) Is good dialogue easy? No. It only appears that way. Good dialogue is very different from real speech, which is repetitive, boring, and often inconclusive. The trick for the writer is to make dialogue appear realistic. Some general don'ts: 1) Don't repeat in dialogue what has been explained in narrative. 2) Don't have too many dangling speeches. They cause confusion and annoy. 3) Don't write long winded soliloquies. 4) Don't use odd spellings to convey an accent or speech impediment. 5) Don't use unnecessary dialogue tags--hissed, exclaimed peevishly, dramatically, etc. Paragraph instead. English is a muscular language. Lean in your verbs. 6) Don't be overly clever or silly...listen to bad TV sitcoms or dramas to hear what I mean! What is good dialogue? Well, it has intensity. A few carefully honed words of dialogue work better than paragraphs of explanation. It's character specific, it moves the plot, it proclaims that elusive "voice." Good dialogue has timing. It rings right in the ear. So go ahead and speak your written exchanges aloud. As Duke Ellington said about jazz..."If it sounds good, it IS good!" Eileen Charbonneau is a member of HudsonValley RWA and writes historical novels for TOR/Forge books. WALTZING IN RAGTIME is a June1997 release in its paperback edition. Her new hardcover, THE RANDOLPH LEGACY is an August lead title. This article originally appeared in the HVRWA newsletter, A Word About Romance. GDRWA thanks the Hudson Valley chapter for allowing us to reprint it.
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