Dialogue (24 page)

What you want to learn is how to control the pace of your story through dialogue. Without knowing how to do this, you have no sense of whether you're putting your reader to sleep or keeping her wide awake and turning pages as fast as she can. By the way, you can keep your reader

quickly turning pages in a literary or mainstream story, too, if you can learn to write dialogue that has some substance.

The only thing standing in the way of our being able to pace our stories is plain and simple unconsciousness. We're just not thinking about pacing as we're writing, so my challenge to you in this chapter is to start to think about it. Not after you've completed the story and while reading it to your critique group happen to notice the yawns and blank stares. Most stories are paced not too fast, but too slow. The time to think about pacing is while you're writing your first draft.

My goal in this chapter is twofold: (1) to get you to think consciously about pacing your story, and (2) to teach you how to use dialogue as a pacing tool.

creating momentum

A story gathers momentum as it moves. That's not to say we should start our stories out slowly, hoping things will pick up as we write. We can't afford that luxury. We situate our characters in the scene's setting, introduce the conflict, create some emotion, all while the characters are moving into dialogue with one another. In real life, conversation can take many twists and turns, and sometimes you're left wondering how you even got into a particular conversation. Dialogue has its own momentum and is driven by—guess who—the characters. We have to trust our characters enough to let them talk to each other about what they need to talk about. This isn't always easy because as writers we have agendas, and it's so easy to impose our agendas on our characters. When we do that, the characters start making speeches and going off on all kinds of tangents that aren't theirs but ours.

In the following scene from John Kennedy Toole's comedic novel A
Confederacy of Dunces,
the protagonist, Ignatius Reilly, is visiting a ladies' art show trying to sell some of his hot dogs. The scene starts off slowly as Ignatius approaches some of the paintings, then gathers steam as he starts to comment quite candidly on the artwork.

The Alley was filled with well-dressed ladies in large hats. Ignatius pointed the prow of the wagon into the throng and pushed forward. A woman read the Big Chief statement and screamed, summoning her companions to draw aside from the ghastly apparition that had appeared at their art show.

"Hot dogs, ladies?" Ignatius asked pleasantly.

The ladies' eyes studied the sign, the earring, the scarf, the cutlass, and pleaded for him to move along. Rain for their hanging would have been bad enough. But
this.

"Hot dogs, hot dogs," Ignatius said a little angrily "Savories from the hygienic Paradise kitchens."

He belched violently during the silence that followed. The ladies pretended to study the sky and the little garden behind the Cathedral.

The author now inserts a narrative paragraph where Ignatius abandons his cart for a moment to scrutinize the ladies' paintings of flowers—critically.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed after he had promenaded up and down along the fence. "How dare you present such abortions to the public."

"Please move along, sir," a bold lady said.

"Magnolias don't look like that." Ignatius said, thrusting his cutlass at the offending pastel magnolia. "You ladies need a course in botany. And perhaps geometry, too."

"You don't
have
to look at our work," an offended voice said from the group, the voice of the lady who had drawn the magnolia in question.

"Yes, I do!" Ignatius screamed. "You ladies need a critic with some taste and decency. Good heavens! Which one of you did this camellia? Speak up. The water in this bowl looks like motor oil."

"Let us alone," a shrill voice said.

"You women had better stop giving teas and brunches and settle down to the business of learning how to draw," Ignatius thundered.

What causes a dialogue scene to gather momentum and really begin to move is when one or more characters begin to express emotion or strong opinions. It happens when your characters' agendas begin to collide, when one character can't get what he wants from the other characters. In the above scene, Ignatius, in rare form, is actually minding his own business, but then true to his nature, he can't keep his mouth shut and his opinions to himself. Of course, the scene speeds up the minute he opens his mouth and begins to express just how appalled he is at the atrocities he sees in front of him in the name of art. And of course, the ladies just want him to leave and stop attracting so much negative attention to their artwork.

You want your story to go somewhere. You know you need to pick up the pace a bit so that it does. Dialogue does this because, of all of the fiction tools at your disposal, dialogue is the one that most quickly puts your characters and your reader in the present moment.

speeding up

Letting a scene drag is one of the worst mistakes a writer can make. There is no excuse for this. Bringing two or more characters together and letting them chat on and on about nothing is inexcusable. The problem is many writers aren't even aware that their characters are doing this, even when it's in front of their noses. They're sitting right there writing the story and fail to see that they're boring their reader to death with going-nowhere-fast dialogue.

There are many reasons dialogue scenes bog down. The main one is that we clutter them with so much added narrative and action that the reader has to muddle his way through and the going becomes a little clunky. Sometimes, the scene is weak when it comes to tension and suspense, and the reader is yawning big time. Our characters are just talking about nothing. For a very long time. Like this:

"Hi Mom," Dolores spoke loudly into the phone. Her mother was hard of hearing. "Dolores, is that you?" "It's me, Mom, how are you?" "Fine, I'm fine, my back's been acting up again." "Have you been to the doctor?"

"Oh, yes, he can't do anything, just writes out more prescriptions. I'm so drugged up now, I can hardly even stay awake." "How have you been sleeping?" "Oh, fine, just fine." "Do you need anything?"

"Need anything? You mean, like milk or eggs or---" "Anything at all. Do you need me to bring you anything?" "Oh, no, I'm fine. How's the boys?" "They're fine, growing like weeds." "How's Bill?"

"He's fine. He got laid off his job." "That's nice, dear, well, thanks for calling." "Bye, Mom." "Bye, Dolores."

I see scenes written like this all of the time, more often than I care to admit. Long and slow and boring. No tension. No drama. No suspense.

As I mentioned above, dialogue by its very nature is an accelerator, metaphorically speaking. When a story or scene needs to move, get people talking. The faster you get them talking, the faster the scene moves. Cutting out any extra narrative or action sentences causes your story to speed along. You can even cut out descriptive tags so your dialogue comes down to the bare bones. Also, the more emotion you put into a scene, the faster it moves.

The reason emotion speeds things up is because it heightens the tension and suspense. Characters expressing emotion are unpredictable and often out of control. Anything can happen, so the stakes are up.

Do you ever notice how, when you're watching a fast-paced movie and the stalker is closing in on his victim, you start shoveling your popcorn into your mouth at breakneck speed?

That's where your reader is when you include the kinds of emotional dialogue scenes that move so fast that the characters are stumbling over their own words. Whether the emotion is fear or anger (closely connected) or sadness, it gives the dialogue a power surge and propels the scene forward. In this scene from Anne Tyler's
Ladder of Years,
the protagonist, Delia, a wife and mother, has run away from home. Her sister, Eliza, has come to visit her, possibly to talk some sense into her.

"Sit down," she told Eliza. "Could I offer you some tea?"

"Oh, I...no thanks." Eliza took a tighter grip on her purse. She seemed out of place in these surroundings—somebody from home, with that humble, faded look that home people always have. "Let me make sure I'm understanding this," she said.

"I could heat up the water in no time. Just have a seat on the bed."

"You are telling me you're leaving us forever," Eliza said, not moving. "You plan to stay on permanently in Bay Borough. You're leaving your husband, and you're leaving all three of your children, one of whom is still in high school."

"In high school, yes, and fifteen years old, and able to manage without me fine and dandy," Delia said. To her horror, she felt tears beginning to warm her eyelids. "Better than with me, in fact," she continued firmly. "How are the kids, by the way?"

"They're bewildered; what would you expect?" Eliza said.

"But are they doing all right otherwise?"

"Do you care?" Eliza asked her.

"Of course I care!"

Things start out slowly with long sentences and paragraphs as Eliza is getting settled in the room. But when she starts to accuse Delia, things start to speed up. Delia feels the tears warming her eyelids, and the scene surges forward with short sentences and paragraphs. We're in the emotion now and everything feels more urgent.

Pumping up the emotion doesn't necessarily mean using a lot of exclamation points. It could mean shortening the sentences and paragraphs or cutting out any and all narrative and action sentences. It could mean having your characters shooting short phrases of dialogue back and forth at a rapid pace. This can be very effective when done well and not overdone.

slowing down

As I mentioned earlier, often the problem with our stories is that that they move too slowly. But if they move too quickly, the reader can't catch her breath and the story often feels fragmented, kind of like it's running away with the characters. Both characters and scenes feel undeveloped, causing the whole story to kind of derail. While too much dialogue is usually not the problem in a story that's not working, every once in a while, someone gives me a story to evaluate where the writer has decided that the characters will just talk away. And away. And away. Just as we can learn how to use dialogue to gather momentum in a scene, we can also learn how to control our scenes by slowing them down.

But if dialogue is a device used to speed stories up, then how can dialogue be used to slow them down?

It's true that to use dialogue is most often to step on the accelerator. But

if the story is running away with you in the middle of a dialogue scene and you need to put the brakes on, there are a few ways you can do it.

You can weight the scene down with narrative, description, and background, or you can bring slow-talking Harry onstage and everything will come to a screeching halt. Harry just isn't in a hurry.

When everyone in the scene is running on at the mouth and things are heating up but the point has been made and now you want to slow things down, a slow-talking character can bring the other characters, as well as the reader, back into the moment. Use some hems and haws and uhs along with long, rambling sentences to show the slow pace. You can add bits of action—slow action—to show Harry kind of moseying his way through the conversation. Picture an old guy on a porch sitting next to his friend talking about fishing. That's Harry.

Another way to slow the scene and/or story down using dialogue is to move your characters into a rational conversation where there's less action and emotion and more cerebral logic concerning their situation. Note I said less action and emotion, not less tension. Tension is something that needs to be present in every scene of dialogue no matter how slow or fast. But dialogue that focuses on the intellectual side of a conflict or problem simply moves more slowly and methodically than dialogue where the characters are emoting and arguing.

Following is an example of this from John Steinbeck's novel
East of Eden.
The younger brother, Charles, is insanely jealous of his father's love for his older brother, Adam. In this scene, Charles has just unleashed his rage on Adam and beaten him to a bloody pulp. The scene moves at high speed through the fight, slows down just a bit as Adam makes his way home, then speeds up again as the boys' father demands to know why Charles beat up his older brother.