Dialogue (23 page)

It's all in the details. In the heart of downtown Seattle, we have a place called Pike's Place Market. It's an outside array of food booths and shops full of tables of homemade clothing, jewelry, leather goods, and anything else you could think of. In one area, the vendors throw fish back and forth to entertain the customers. You can buy any kind of fish imaginable here. It's a place full of life and energy, a sensory heaven. Create a one- or two-page scene of dialogue between two characters who are visiting from out of town. Use all five senses in your descriptive dialogue of this setting.

Dialogue description. A character, Janie, is taking her blind friend, Darcy, to Las Vegas for the first time. Janie lives in a small town in Iowa where she's a teacher's assistant for a second grade class. She's only been to Vegas once before. Using Janie's third-person voice, write a one-page scene of dialogue for Janie as she describes the sights and sounds of the city. Use as many descriptive, active, and specific verbs and nouns as you can.

Stay in voice. Write a one-page scene of dialogue describing a Harley-Davidson convention from any or all of the following characters:

• a Buddhist monk • a small child • a political candidate

• a Ninja motorcycle enthusiast • a mental hospital escapee

Different stories, different settings. If you haven't already, identify the kind of story you're writing—genre, mainstream, or literary—and write a one-page scene that shows your character in dialogue with another character, describing the setting and staying with the voice of the kind of story you're writing. If you're not currently writing a story, choose a type of story and create a protagonist for that story who is talking to another character about the setting. Or choose one of the following:

• romance - the female protagonist describing a beach in Hawaii to her male antagonist

• horror - two characters in an empty warehouse rounding a corner and finding it not so empty after all

• action/adventure - one character describing the setting of his next crime spree to another character, in an effort to get him to join in

• science fiction/fantasy - one character describing an otherworldly setting to another character

• suspense thriller - two characters discussing an area of town where bodies keep turning up

• mystery - a character describing a suspicious looking house to her friend

• literary - one character flashing back in her mind to a time on her grandmother's farm and telling another character about it

• mainstream - a corrections officer telling a friend about how the system works against the inmates

Weaving narrative setting into dialogue. Write a one-page dialogue scene for the following settings, weaving narrative details into the characters' dialogue:

• a dingy bar on the edge of town

• a candy store in a beach town

• a vacant lot

• a cross-dresser's closet

• a zoo

Integrating your setting. A father has taken his ten-year-old son on a vacation to his childhood hometown. Using his thoughts, words, and actions, write a two-page scene of descriptive dialogue.

[ brakes or accelerator — dialogue as a means of pacing ]

"Let's see," the small-town, slow-talking cop said as he stood outside my window.

It doesn't matter if he was slow talking, fast-talking, or a deaf mute— cops intimidate me.

"Looks like you were doing about sixty-seven in a fifty-five mile-per-hour zone. Well, I suppose I'll have to write you up."

Whatever. Just hurry up so I can get back on the road and out of this humiliating moment sitting here in my car hanging out with you.

I can't believe it, I grumbled to myself as he returned to his patrol car to write me up. Almost twenty years without a ticket and here I am. I mean, really, I would have hit the twenty-year mark in another year or so.

"Okay, I'm just gonna make it sixty-five instead of sixty-seven so it'll bring your fee down a bit."

"I haven't had a ticket in almost twenty years," I told the cop, thinking this bit of trivia might make him swell with pride for me, resulting in a torn-up ticket. "Isn't that something?"

"That's something, all right," he said as he handed me the ticket. "You gotta be careful around here because, you know, us small-town cops don't have nothing else to do but sit out here and catch folks like you hightailing it through our town like you got somewhere to go."

This is a true story; I'm still feeling the pain of the $75 ticket. The point? I might have been speeding, but the minute I ran into Mr. SmallTown Cop, my true story slowed right down. We weren't going anywhere fast. And that's simply because he wasn't in any hurry. You can't speed up a slow character; he moves in two speeds—slow and reverse. The same is true

with a fast character—fast and fast forward. So it pays to know your characters because who they are determines how slowly or quickly they talk.

pacing your story

Every story has its own pace. Most literary and many mainstream stories move slowly, easily, from opening to conclusion. Such a story may ramble on about the characters' philosophies and life strategies, and on occasion the author will even use dialogue to achieve the slow pace—if the author knows what he's doing. Reading slow-moving dialogue is preferable to reading lengthy passages of philosophical narrative.

Genre stories generally move quickly, employing more dialogue and action and less slow-paced narrative, because they are generally plot-driven rather than character-driven, like literary and mainstream stories. The emphasis is on the action that keeps the plot moving rather than the narrative that keeps the character growing.

Whatever kind of story you're writing, you want to be conscious of the pacing. It makes sense that a character-driven literary story will move more contemplatively than an action suspense story. Dialogue generally speeds things up, but of course there are exceptions, as there are exceptions to everything in fiction. For example, you might have a slow talker who, every time he appears in a scene, causes the action and other characters to just kind of come to a stop. But that's the exception, and we want to look at the general rule—that dialogue normally speeds everything up. A story is woven, using both fast and slow-paced scenes, to achieve a rhythm that works for the kind of story you're writing.

Let's say you're writing a suspense thriller and you need to keep things moving. The focus of your story will be on your fast-paced dialogue and action scenes, and the narrative will be woven in only if and when you need it. The characters in a suspense thriller don't do a lot of thinking other than moments of wondering how to get out of the scrapes in which they find themselves. These nondramatic scenes are placed strategically every so often so the viewpoint character can catch up with himself. Other than that, the story keeps moving. And dialogue makes up the bulk of a fast-paced story.