Dialogue (28 page)

In real life, when someone makes a startling or shocking statement and no one says anything, the words are suspended in air and are much more powerful and influential than when others around that person begin to fill in the emptiness with their own words or reactions.

Rita Mae Brown is an expert at this in her novel
Venus Envy.
The story is about a woman, Frazier, who goes into the hospital thinking she has cancer and "comes out" to everyone that she's gay, then finds out that someone made a mistake and she doesn't have cancer after all. Now she has to live and deal with the mess she created by coming out. Without even knowing the events of each chapter, let's just look at the dialogue Brown uses to close some of her chapters.

• "I can see I'm getting nowhere with you. You won't be content until you ruin this family. Why? So you can be queer?" Libby was ripshit. "The only people who are queer are the people who don't love anybody. That means you, Momma. You are incapable of love!" Frazier slammed down the phone so hard she scared the cat.

• ".. .Maybe every human being has only one question to answer—" Carter, listening intently, interrupted: "What's that?"

"Do you want to live or do you want to die?"

• Frank sighed. "What this town needs is an enema."

• As Kimberly left, Sara and Frazier sat for a moment. "Sarah, I get the feeling people would have preferred that I died. It would be better than having to face things. Or maybe saying that they want me dead is too strong. Maybe they just want me to get a pink slip, you know, so I could be excused from life."

The author clearly knows the effectiveness of this technique, which is why she uses it so often and so well. I'm guessing she really gave her chapter endings a lot of thought to come up with a tense line that would create enough suspense so the reader has to keep turning the pages. And notice how she doesn't go on to the other characters' reactions. She just leaves us with the one shocking line of dialogue.

Sometimes it can be difficult to leave our characters' words hanging, but it works wonders for suspense and tension.

Is there anything that creates more drama, more suspense and tension, than people's feelings? Feelings create wars between individuals and nations, and at the same time create mutually loving relationships. In the next chapter, we'll explore how dialogue can convey our characters' feelings so as to engage our reader at an emotional level.

Scene openings. Go through some of the novels on your bookshelf—preferably the ones you've read — and study the scene and chapter openings. How hard did the author work to grab the reader with dialogue to get the action rolling and bring the characters to life? Choose at least five scene or chapter openings and rewrite them, using dialogue that will pull the reader into the scene or story. Go over the top and be as outrageous as you can. Doing this exercise will free you to think out of the box. Now go through any of the sto-

Conflict—the center of tense dialogue. Write two pages of tense dialogue for each of these conflictive scenarios:

• a character who is keeping a secret from another character, while trying to make small talk

• a character who is being forced to go against her value system in a job setting; she's in dialogue with her boss

• a male character who has just discovered that his best friend has slept with his (the first character's) girlfriend; the two friends are at a bar playing pool

Techniques to tighten tension. Write one page of dialogue for each of the five techniques we discussed earlier in this chapter:

• Silence - Put a character in a scene that creates such intense feeling for him that he doesn't trust himself to speak. Show the other characters around him chattering away.

• Anxiety - Put a character in a scene that creates such anxiety for her that she begins to feel out of control on the inside and the more she talks about it, the more anxiety she feels.

• Strategic tagging - Rewrite the following sentences so as to string them out and increase the tension; put the tag in the middle of the sentence:

"I'm not sure I can do the job unless there's something in it for me," he said.

She looked at him and said, "I love you, but I'm not free to start another relationship right now."

"If you do it quickly and carefully, they'll never hear a sound," she said.

• Pacing - Put a character in a situation that is increasing in tension and let his dialogue match the increasing tension.

• Suspense - Put a character in a scene of dialogue in which she's trying to find a

way to tell another character about something that's going to happen in the future.

Scene endings. Now go through the novels on your bookshelf—again, preferably the ones you've read — and study the scene and chapter endings. How hard did the author work to write dialogue endings, or even narrative endings, that were tense and suspense-ful? Choose at least five weak endings and rewrite them, ending each with one final line of startling dialogue. Then, if you're in the middle of writing a short story or novel, check out your scene endings and see if there's a line of dialogue you can tack on that will startle the reader and compel her to read on, even though she has to get up early the next morning.

[ it was a dark and stormy night—using dialogue to set the mood and facilitate the emotion ]

"I'd rather be working at Taco Bell!" I told my friend as I climbed out other car after a heated discussion about my current editorial job. Nothing wrong with Taco Bell, you understand—that's not the point. The point is I was over-the-top tired, angry, frustrated, disappointed, and done with my job. I spoke those words with so much emotion that they haunted me for days and I eventually quit my job.

The words that you say, scream, or whisper to others with the most emotion are the ones you remember. The words that others say, scream, or whisper to you with the most emotion are the ones you remember.

We want our stories to be memorable for our readers. We want to create characters who are unforgettable. In order to do this, we must write dialogue that is full of emotion. It doesn't matter whether the emotion is fear, sadness, joy, or anger. What matters is that our characters are emotionally engaged with the situations and conflicts we've created for them, and that they're conveying their feelings to one another through dialogue that is charged with emotion. Charged and super-charged. Turbo-charged. The more emotion, the better.

I didn't say melodrama, I said emotion. There's a difference. We're not writing soap operas. The emotion in a scene of dialogue is what draws your reader into your characters' situational conflict and makes her care about the problems facing the character. Every bit of dialogue in your story must convey some kind of emotion. What you have to decide is what kind. This is determined by the kind of story you're writing and what is going on for the characters in any one particular scene.

I see new writers make a lot of mistakes when it comes to writing emotional dialogue. This usually comes from trying too hard:

• characters cracking jokes and laughing uproariously when the jokes aren't funny

• characters crying and sobbing all over each other to the point that the reader is watching, going, "Yeah, yeah, get on with it."

• characters who are full of fury when the situation amounts to something like a stubbed toe or a broken fingernail

We create characters that go over the top and are inappropriate in the expression of their emotions because we (1) are not able to access our own emotions and therefore act inappropriately ourselves, or (2) we're trying to make a point in our story and think extreme emotion is the way to do it.

More often, I see the other extreme. Writers that underplay the emotion:

• A character loses her husband, whether to an affair or death, and goes to her Bridge Club the next night, the main concern on her mind getting the recipe for the cranberry cucumber salad.

• A female character hears a noise, and with no fear, grabs a baseball bat and runs down the dark basement stairs to confront the burglar.

• A character loses his job only to tell his wife when he gets home that he knows he deserved to be fired—no anger, just acceptance.

We create characters who deny and repress their emotions because we deny and repress our own.

As a writing coach, I'm often frustrated that I can't help writers with this aspect of their storytelling. I joke that writers need therapy to be able to write well, but somewhere down deep, I think I really believe that.

Whether or not you get therapy is up to you. In the meantime, there are some practical things you can do to make sure your dialogue is full of the kind of emotion that grabs readers and makes your characters memorable. In this chapter, we'll take a few common emotions and see how dialogue can be used to show these emotions through your characters. But first, let's talk about how the use of emotion can establish your story's mood.