Dialogue (26 page)

Creating momentum. Choose one or all three of the following scenarios. Start the scene out slowly and then, through dialogue, gather momentum as you write. You also may want to do this with a scene or scenes in your own story.

• A father and his daughter are stuck in rush hour traffic. She's fiddling with the radio, and he's talking on his cell phone. Suddenly the phone goes dead and the girl's favorite radio station won't come in. They have to talk. Write this scene from either the father's or the daughter's viewpoint, or try one of each.

• A man and woman are having an affair, but up until now, it's been only physical. One of the two decides the relationship needs to be taken to the next level. Write a sex scene that turns out to be more about talk than sex.

• Two homeless men, strangers to each other, end up under the same freeway overpass for the night. They ignore each other at first, but then one of them starts to talk and can't seem to quit.

Speeding up. Take the scene about Dolores under the subhead Speeding Up and rewrite it so it moves. You can add narrative or action or delete lines, anything that will make the scene move and contribute to a story that's going somewhere.

Slowing down. Steve and Jennifer are a happily married couple, well, most of the time. Jennifer is a little uptight and anal, always needing to be on time wherever they go. Steve is just the opposite. He really doesn't get why everyone is in such a hurry all of the time, especially his wife. In the following scene, you'll find only the bare dialogue between Steve and Jennifer. When a scene includes only dialogue, it moves quickly. Your task is to slow this scene down by adding narrative, description, background, and bits of action here and there.

"I'm ready to go, Steve."

"Coming."

"When?"

"Right now, right now. I'll be right down."

"It's 4:15, Steve."

"Yeah, it sure is. I just looked at the clock."

"Mom is going to be so upset if we're late to pick her up."

"Yeah, she gets like that, all right."

"Steve!"

"Huh?"

"C'mon!"

"I'm coming, honey, just putting on my socks."

"I'm going out to start the car."

"Don't forget to open the garage door—don't want to asphyxiate yourself."

"Are you coming?"

"I'll be right down."

[ tightening the tension and suspense — dialogue that intensifies the conflict ]

"Please take one," I instructed my writing class as I passed a box of rubber bands around the room.

Once everyone had a rubber band, I said, "Now, take your rubber band and stretch it a few times in your hand."

I took my own rubber band and pulled it back and forth, across and under my fingers. The writers in the room followed my example.

"This is tension," I told them. "Now, stretch it across your fingers and aim it at your neighbor."

It took a moment, but soon everyone had a rubber band aimed at someone near them.

"We've turned the tension up a notch," I said, smiling at the wincing and cringing individuals in front of me. "This is what you need a lot of in every scene of dialogue you write."

The tension created by a rubber band is weak compared to the kind of tension you want to create in your scenes of dialogue. Tension, suspense, and conflict should be at the core of every one of your dialogue scenes. No, this doesn't mean the characters need to be shouting at one another, fighting and raging, throwing things and brandishing weapons. Not at all. If this kind of tension and conflict is what your story calls for, of course, go for it. But the kind of tension, suspense, and conflict we're talking about here can range from one character subtly disagreeing with another character to such tightly strung words in a character's mouth that if he lets go, the force will do a thousand times more damage than letting go of a wimpy rubber band.

The horror writer Dean Koontz once wrote that most of the manuscripts he'd seen from new writers suffered from a lack of action more than anything else. I have always echoed that, but the more I coach writers, I'd have to now say that the absence of tension, suspense, and conflict is what I see manuscripts suffering from most. These are three different things, yet they can be lumped together because of their close association—they give movement to a scene. Dialogue without these three things is flat, one-dimensional, and boring. And as you know, no writer can afford to be boring. Not ever. Not even for one line of dialogue.

tension — the key to effective dialogue

Readers live vicariously through the characters you create for them. Some stories inform our lives to the degree that we have made life choices based on them. How many attorneys have been inspired by Atticus Finch in
To Kill a Mockingbird?
Mathematicians by John Nash in A
Beautiful Mind?
Prep school dropouts by Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye?
Okay, let's hope not. But you get the idea. Storytellers throw their characters into external and internal conflicts, then throw impossible obstacles at them, and readers are inspired as they turn page after page to see how these characters resolve their conflicts. Conflict is what stories are all about, and dialogue is the expression of that conflict. Without conflict, there's no story. Without dialogue, there's no expression of that conflict. How interesting would it be to read an entire novel with a character simply thinking about his conflict? Or moving around by himself to try to resolve it without talking to anyone else?

As things heat up for the viewpoint character in your dialogue scenes, you can present one, two, or three types of conflict, or all three at once: mental, verbal, or physical. The characters can play mind games with each other and harbor hateful or tormenting thoughts (mental). They can exchange heated and/or tense words (verbal). Or they can engage in violence or sex (physical). When conflict escalates to its peak, all three can take place in one scene. In this chapter, we'll give most of our attention to the verbal kinds of conflict where words are used as weapons.

in scene openings

When opening a scene, and especially when opening a story, you want to insert tension as soon as possible because tension is what will engage your

reader most quickly. Tension and dialogue are the perfect combination because you have people in conflict. Pit your characters against each other right away in some kind of tense scene of dialogue and reader interest is assured.

In the opening scene of
Phantom
by Susan Kay, the author shows the viewpoint character delivering a baby, but not a normal baby. The story starts out with narrative that's tense, but the dialogue increases the tension even more as Madeleine begins to express her horror upon seeing her child for the first time. Here, Father Mansart is trying to comfort the new mother after her initial horror.

"My dear child," he said compassionately. "Do not be deceived into believing that the Lord has abandoned you. Such tragedies as this are beyond all mortal understanding, but I ask you to remember that God does not create without purpose."

I shivered. "It's still alive...isn't it?"

He nodded, biting his full underlip and glancing sadly at the cradle.

"Father" -I hesitated fearfully, trying to summon the courage to con-tinue—"if I don't touch it___if I don't feed it."

He shook his head grimly. "The position of our Church is quite clear on such issues, Madeleine. What you are suggesting is murder."

"But surely in this case it would be a kindness."

"It would be a sin," he said severely, "a mortal sin! I urge you to put all thoughts of such wickedness from your mind. It is your duty to succor a human soul. You must nourish and care for this child as you would any other."

It's tricky to open a scene with dialogue because the reader needs some idea of the setting and who the characters are as they start talking. Once all of that's established, the dialogue can take off and be the catalyst for all kinds of tension between the characters.
Phantom
begins with narrative. Madeleine, the viewpoint character, has just given birth to a freak of nature and is understandably upset.

When you begin a scene, any scene, you want to establish your character's intention right up front. You can do this either through narrative, action, or dialogue. Clearly, the viewpoint character's intention in this scene is to separate herself from her freakish newborn as fast as she can, and the only way that immediately comes to her is to simply neglect "it" and let it die. She puts her thoughts into words, which horrifies the priest at her side. Things are already tense as she realizes what she's produced, but the tension accelerates as Father Mansart heaps guilt on her for even allowing herself to think such a thought. When the tension in the dialogue accelerates, the reader knows things are really going to take off.

degrees of tension

In fiction, when we speak of tension or conflict within the context of dialogue, our minds begin to immediately think of fighting, arguing, and verbal sparring, and yes, all of that can happen in a passage of tense dialogue. But it doesn't have to. There are degrees of tension, and when a character falls silent in the middle of a conversation, that can be as tense, maybe even more, than if the characters start shouting at each other. You know how they say that it's calm before the storm? Before certain people go over the edge, sometimes they're eerily quiet.

If you know your characters, you know which of them would exhibit this trait—the more tense a situation becomes, the more stressed out the character is and the more likely he is to grow quiet until he cracks. In a dialogue passage, you could show one character growing quiet by accelerating the dialogue of another character. This contrast would actually make the silence of the other character very loud, if you know what I mean. Whenever you want to emphasize something, put the opposite of whatever it is in the near vicinity.