DIALOGUE: THE MUSIC OF SPEECH (IIII)

This is the final part of Ms Ippolito's article, which can also be found here: http://www.expert-editor.com/id11.html

Talking Heads Syndrome

            Years ago, I once heard TV news readers referred to as "talking heads", a humorous and apt description. While the camera shifts from one head to the other, we might as well be listening to the radio. The "talking heads" are just reading some script—they aren't out there like Woodward and Bernstein, investigating, digging, and discovering.

            Back then, I was editing several mass market novel lines, each with a massive and detailed back-story—events that occurred before the current story began. The writers were often new novelists who tried to solve the problem of back-story through the use of "talking heads". The dialogue often degenerated to that of talking heads—recounting facts or information rather than revealing character. Sitting in his war room buried deep in the heart of a mountain, the king might say to a counselor: "I have ruled Emanon for thirty years. In all that time, the Norlanders have been attacking our borders. Our people have resisted valiantly, and thousands have died on both sides. Now the Norlanders are at the gates."

            The speech does fill in some background, but who talks like this—even in fantasy fiction? The reader knows that the words aren't coming from the mind and heart of a believable character but from the writer.

            Characters in fiction are as enmeshed in their experience as you or I. In conversation, we don't stand around uttering background information. We get on with our lives, and so should your characters. The king and everyone with him know about the Thirty Years War. What they need is to solve the problem beating at their gates now. That's what the reader wants, too. It's the present story, not back-story, that he or she has come to read.

            That means you keep the action moving forward, slipping in bits of background here and there. To do this, you'll use realistic bits of spoken dialogue by any character in the scene and the main character's interior dialogue.

             In the example of Emanon and Norland, what if a general bursts in on the king with a report of desperate battle just outside the walls? Hearing this, the king looks around at his counselors, seeing how the long years of war have aged them. In a flash, he realizes that his counselors are too cautious, while he has been too uncertain. For example:

            The king was barely listening. He didn't need a battle report to know where things stood. He stared at the map of his kingdom, once so vast and protected by mountains to the north and by the sea to the east and west. For years, the mountains had kept the Norlanders at bay, but no more.

 "Enough!" He slammed his fist on the table. Maps went flying, flagons overturned, and his counselors just stared at him. Within the walls of his city, even deep in the mountain stronghold of his war room, the king saw that his counselors, like his people, were weary of war.

He would listen to no more talk. Talk would not save them.

And there's your story. We've given the king both an external and an internal conflict. We've slipped in just enough back-story to involve the reader with his dilemma here and now. That's your story, not what happened over the past 3 days or 3 months or 30 years.  If my example were a story's opener, it would be enough to grab the reader's attention, get him immediately involved with the main character, and fill in enough back-story that he could quickly jump in with both feet.

This scene also uses the "free, indirect" style of interior dialogue. Written in third-person past tense and in words the character might use when actually speaking, the free, indirect style keeps us inside the character's mind and heart. We didn't interrupt the action with quotation marks around the king's thoughts, and we didn't need tags like "he thought" or "he wondered". Nor did we need a clunky point of view shift from "he" to "I" or even clunkier italics like, The king stared at the map. My counselors are weary, he thought. All they do is talk.

Both the italics and the POV shift reveal the writer's hand at work rather than the character's thoughts and feelings. To keep from breaking the spell, you want a seamless connection between the main character's inner and outer worlds—just as in real life. The free, indirect style is the perfect way to pull that off.

Now, look at a story or novel chapter of your own. Have you plunged the reader into the main action or are your characters standing around speaking and thinking back-story?

Dialogue as Conflict

            In life, most people prefer harmony to conflict, but when we sit down to read a story or a novel, we want drama, excitement, suspense. That means every scene must tighten the screws until the tension is unbearable. Two lovers murmuring sweet nothings is great in real life, but in fiction it lacks tension. Even in action writing, you need more than just characters shooting at each other and blowing things up. In life, a soldier is trained to obey without question. In fiction, what happens when the soldier suspects that his captain loves glory more than his men? Or what if the captain is a drunk or an addict? Or a traitor? Give us conflict, not good little soldiers.

            Dialogue serves this purpose beautifully. It's powerful stuff. Novelist Elizabeth Bowen said it was right up there with a fight, a murder, or lovemaking as the most "vigorous and visible interaction" characters can have. It's happening now—the scene is alive. It's unpredictable—creating suspense. It expresses character—what makes great fiction unforgettable.

            "Speech is what characters do to each other," Bowen points out.

            In other words, dialogue is action. Not just any action, but conflict. Pick up a good novel or story at random and flip through to some dialogue. You'll see immediately that it's argumentative in some way. A couple of characters agreeing with each other or carrying on some other amicable conversation will put your reader instantly to sleep. Even when characters are friends, lovers, colleagues, or companions, give your dialogue an edge.

Sol Stein, novelist, editor, and teacher, advises that all fictional dialogue be either adversarial or interrogation, no matter how subtle. He calls this the Actors Studio Method of Writing. Every time the main character encounters someone, it must further the plot in some way, but that other character still has his own agenda. In making the dialogue combative, you don't have to turn friends into enemies, but you will always create some form of tension. Give every character her own "script", her own motives.

To see how this works, open any good story or novel at random to a page of dialogue. Even when you don't really know the story or the scene, the dialogue will pull you in because it's combative. Leafing through Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger, I found great examples on almost every page. Here's one small bit from "Just Before the War with the Eskimos". Ginnie and Selena are riding home in a cab after playing tennis, when Ginnie suddenly says:

 "Hey, Selena. . ."

"What?" asked Selena, who was busy feeling the floor of the cab with her hand. "I can't find the cover to my racket!" she moaned.

Despite the warm May weather, both girls were wearing topcoats over their shorts.

"You put it in your pocket," Ginnie said. "Hey, listen—"

"Oh, God! You saved my life!"

"Listen," said Ginnie, who wanted no part of Selena's gratitude.

 "What?"

Ginnie decided to come right out with it. The cab was nearly at Selena's street. "I don't feel like getting stuck with the whole cab fare again today," she said. "I'm no millionaire, ya know."

This snippet isn't the end of the conversation or the scene, but it shows that good dialogue is a form of conflict even when the topic seems mundane and the characters are friends.

            For fun, take two characters, give them conflicting motivations, and then put them into a scene. You can come up with your own, but here's an example. Let's start with a faithful, loving husband who has planned a special birthday surprise for his wife. He hasn't said a word about her birthday, pretending to forget. The wife is now suspicious. When she finds unspecified charges on a credit card bill, she tries calling her husband at work. Unable to reach either him or his secretary, she decides they're having an affair. Now the husband is late getting home because he stopped to pick up his gift from the jewelers. He's still set on the birthday surprise, while the wife is determined to get proof of his cheating without tipping him off to her suspicions.

            That's the situation—the back-story. What happens when you put these two together in dialogue and let the sparks fly? Can you write dialogue for this scene, letting each character act out his/her private script without giving anything away? Let the dialogue and a few beats do all the work. Remember, though, that this isn't about "head-hopping", where you escape the hard work of writing good dialogue by hopping in and out of every character's thoughts and feelings.

            The innocent husband will be trying to maneuver his wife toward a lovely surprise. Playing detective, the wife tries to uncover her proof without tipping her hand. You'll also want to keep in mind Bowen's advice that, "Characters should be under rather than over articulate. What they intendto say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying."

            This is just an exercise, of course, but it demonstrates how you would play dialogue every time you write it. When writing dialogue, let your characters confront one another. To create tension, put them at cross-purposes, with either overt or underlying confrontation. You've got only one protagonist and one point of view, but that doesn't mean your secondary characters aren't involved in their own desperate struggles with life.

            Sol Stein puts it well: "Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action."

P.S

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