Thoughts on Dialogue

Conversation among people is different from dialogue in stories, and many a beginning writer clinging to verisimilitude for its own sake will make the beginner’s error of working hard to reproduce conversation. But conversation serves a number of purposes dialogue does not.

Conversation

· Exchange of information

· Civil niceties

· “Small talk”

With even a moment’s reflection , a student writer will understand how deadly it will be to drama and to the fictive illusion if a writer reproduces conversation. Sure, people talk like that, but reality is no excuse for bad writing.

Dialogue

· Has an audience unknown to the speakers—the reader

· Reveals character with far greater depth than conversation

· Advances plot—which means augments drama by making conflict more evident or ratcheting it up to a higher level.

“But wait!” the student cries. “You said, ‘Show, don’t tell!’”

That’s true, and good dialogue does that because it always has more than a purpose of simply informing the reader. Informing the reader the reader by allowing him to overhear mundane conversation simply won’t do. It’s like moving furniture. Consider:

Alec said, “I know! Let’s go to Starbucks!”

Effie, the love of his life, said, “Yes. That sound like a great idea.”

So the lovers went to Starbucks.

A reader who politely but firmly places such prose in the fireplace is being kind. (Barnyard animal noises are impolite and really quite uncalled for.) We’ve read three sentences that do naught but prepare us for a change in setting, informing the reader of what might be made manifestly evident with a short line of narrative.

Even more deadly would be the “scene” that takes them there. Your professor confesses that at one time in his writing career had the devil’s own time getting characters to move about. It would take me pages and pages to get Alec and Effie out of the house and in front of a latte. With Alec and Effie, I might have “shown” Alec opening the door of his Chevy for Effie, trotting around to the driver’s side, getting in, inserting the key in the ignition, starting the engine, accelerating, enumerating with precision the names of the streets they passed, the songs on the radio, finding a parking place, etc. etc. etc. All this, until I learned that if nothing dramatic or revelatory happened on the journey, I could far more effectively play the fictive dream in my reader’s mind with a single line of narrative:

Alec and Effie went to Starbucks.

or, even better,

Later, at Starbucks, Alec confessed he’d fallen in love with a tattooed barista.

Since we all agree that the art of fiction writing is above all else an art of compression, then less is (usually) more.

Hemingway is generally considered a master of dialogue. He said, “"If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story."

I urge you to study Hemingway’s short fiction if for no other reason than to ponder his dialogue. Read it out loud. Roll it on your tongue. When your family accuses you of being insane, smile knowingly and read out loud in the shower.

Here is the opening of “Hill Like White Elephants,” a Hemingway story that proceeds almost exclusively by dialogue. Note how the exposition and setting is dispensed with in a single paragraph. We are in Spain, it is hot, the girl speaks no Spanish. Notice how the dialogue often is oblique—she asks, “What should we drink?” and he responds, “It’s pretty hot.” Notice when she says, “Let’s drink beer,” he simply orders and does not exchange a conversational nicety with her. Note Hemingway’s use of understatement—few attributives, and when they appear, he uses the word “said.” Beginners grope for synonyms—the master is too busy planting the fictive illusion in our minds to distract us by impressive vocabulary—does anyone imagine Hemingway does not know the verbs, “expostulate” or “breathed”? The student will be hard-pressed to find an adverb: no one speaks “wearily” or “resignedly.” Noticed how characterization and plot are carried forward gradually—something is not right between these two, and we suspect it when she says, “No you wouldn’t have,” which we can understand to mean that she is accusing him of a lack of imagination. He denies it, and her disappointment in him as a man and companion is manifest, the conflict (if not the issue) is clear. It cannot help her mood that she must depend on him to communicate, and as will become clear in the story, she is getting on the train without him. When the waitress brings them the beer, we see that the girl is looking at the distant hills, which means she is not looking at the young man. It’s indeed the end of something. The action needs to rise and character needs to be revealed, and so a few lines later she complains that everything one waits for tastes of liquorice (that’s how Hemingway spells it). He says “Oh cut it out,” and she says “You started it”; It is simply no longer possible for an attentive reader to miss that they are at odds with each other. No one is going to scream or yell—this story is far more subtle. If you’ve never read it, well, you should. And please notice that between the lines

'Yes, with water.'

'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.

There has to be considerable action the writer simply knows to omit: the waitress returned to the bar, poured two drinks, added water, returned with the drnks, placed them on the table, they lifted the glasses…none of that is on the page!

The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

'What should we drink?' the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

'It's pretty hot,' the man said.

'Let's drink beer.'

'Dos cervezas,' the man said into the curtain.

'Big ones?' a woman asked from the doorway.

'Yes. Two big ones.'

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

'They look like white elephants,' she said.

'I've never seen one,' the man drank his beer.

'No, you wouldn't have.'

'I might have,' the man said. 'Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything.'

The girl looked at the bead curtain. 'They've painted something on it,' she said. 'What does it say?'

'Anis del Toro. It's a drink.'

'Could we try it?'

The man called 'Listen' through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

'Four reales.' 'We want two Anis del Toro.'

'With water?'

'Do you want it with water?'

'I don't know,' the girl said. 'Is it good with water?'

'It's all right.'

'You want them with water?' asked the woman.

'Yes, with water.'

'It tastes like liquorice,' the girl said and put the glass down.

'That's the way with everything.'

'Yes,' said the girl. 'Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe.'

'Oh, cut it out.'

'You started it,' the girl said. 'I was being amused. I was having a fine time.'

Writers need dialogue when characters are at odds with each other, or one wants something from the other. Look at this passage from Shakespeare and think of the drama.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great?

Julius Caesar, I, 3.

Cassius is persuading Brutus to join a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar (plot advance) while Cassius by his choice of persuasive tactic reveals his own jealousy (characterization). All this, and poetry, too….

Dialogue as good as these samples is hard to come by.