Talk Pretty: A Craft Essay
One of the biggest pitfalls for writers is dialogue. Dialogue should be a busy tool in fiction. The legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard famously said his most important rule for writing was that if it sounded like writing, he rewrote it. Leonard, who is considered one of the greatest writers of dialogue ever, had it right. Dialogue, as we’ll talk about, needs to do some heavy lifting, sure, but it must do so while sounding completely natural. Unfortunately, and especially in rough drafts, there is the tendency to jump to dialogue because it seems needed to break up exposition. But dialogue should never be used as a door jamb to ongoing flow of the prose. It has so many other incredibly helpful functions.
Too often readers encounter characters saying plenty but not at all engaged in any way meaningful to the narrative at hand. An example:
“You doing okay?”
“Been doing fair,” Richard said.
“Well that’s good.”
“Mostly been watching television and that’s about it.”
This is a mostly pedestrian exchange. The writer is doing very little with what the characters are saying to further plot or characterization or very much of anything else. Now let’s put some extra care into exactly what the characters are saying with regard and in an attempt to add depth to both the characters themselves and also the forward motion of the story:
“You doing any better these days, Richard?”
“Doing alright,” he said. “Can’t complain. Nobody around to hear it anyway.”
“Don’t suppose there is,” I said. “That kind of being alone is hard on a man. I know it.”
“Yeah, but you get by. Mostly I've been watching television and that’s about it,” he said. “Westerns. Kathy always loved those.”
Here in the second treatment there’s a lot more going on. With only a few more reveals (“...Nobody around to hear it..” and “Westerns. Kathy always loved those.”) we get a clear picture that Richard is living alone and that it is most likely because Kathy has either left or died.
Further than that we don’t know. Was Kathy a girlfriend, a wife, a daughter? This can either be further teased out through dialogue or through exposition at the pleasure of the writer. But the important thing to remember is that dialogue should never be simply pedestrian.
Take this challenge: Try to write a scene entirely through dialogue. Focus on building the scene, developing character, and revealing information in bits and pieces so as to build a natural narrative suspense.
Now let’s look at dialogue that’s doing a lot more work. Here’s an example from The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver:
“With all due respect,' my father said, 'this is not the time or the place for that kind of business. Why don’t you sit down now, and announce your plans after I’ve finished with the sermon? Church is not the place to vote anyone in or out of public office.”
“Church is the place for it,” said Tata Ndu. “Ici, maintenant, we are making a vote for Jesus Christ in the office of personal God, Kilanga village.”
Father did not move for several seconds.
Tata Ndu looked at him quizzically. “Forgive me, I wonder if I have paralyzed you?”
Father found his voice at last. “You have not.”
What you’ll notice is there’s a bit of prose added in here, a common technique among skilled storytellers. It can add power and make what’s said more memorable. The best example here is the pre-dialogue description in the last sentence, “Father found his voice at last.” This gives us a real sense of the pause that takes place there before he speaks those last words.
~~~~~~~~~~
Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Oblivion Angels, is currently nominated for the Chaffin Award for Fiction, and the Independent Fiction Alliance named his novel, Alice, a best book of the year. His work has also been published in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2022.