PANEL: “Writing Dialogue: The Fundamentals of Speech in Fictionâ€
At the Tin House conference, author, Charles D’Ambrosio gave one of the most informative talks on, eh-hem, dialogue. Common pitfalls, things to avoid, and tips on how to create powerful, revealing communication between your fashioned characters. D’Ambrosio believes that dialogue can be the least realistic part of a realistic story. What privilege dialogue’s given, its own paragraph break, its own form of punctuation – we dress up our dialogue in quotations, our overcoats.
Always, dialogue should lift the floor above prose.
General Concept:
*Every character’s speech exists within a rhythm. What one reveals is never obvious: we tread between lines, behind lines, and characters should have individual dialogue quirks. Personality needs to exist in dialogue and in characters relations to others. The relationship is the rhythm! If not, if all the dialogue is flat, there is no sense of person, of mystery behind each line under those quotation marks, conflict will feel manufactured.
*Natural dialogue: People rarely, if ever, answer direct questions – only in interviews. Avoid having the dialogue reflect a Q&A session, avoid loading up expository information between quotes as well. Dialogue shouldn’t be passive, just a simple break between blocks of prose, dialogue must be revelatory, must clue the reader into individual characters’ motivations and personality. If you remember from my Dorothy Allison thread below, characters don’t come alive for the reader, in her opinion, until they speak (or get into an argument).
Key Points:
*Externalize the internal to a certain extent. Move from speaker (out) to character (in).
*Dialogue must be operating on several different layers. Characters must mean/be more than what they’re saying. Dialogue is a means to intuit information, don’t deliver it so easily, so readily to the reader. I like to call this the “yawn effect”. What’s not said is that much more compelling than what is.
*Characters need voice: what they say & how they say it. How does a particular character word things? Evoking their speech is important, however, don’t go overboard. D’Ambrosio abhors the use of dialect and accent in dialogue – he feels it too easy, that the narrative and the words delivered by the reader aren’t strong enough to have the reader imagine the speaker’s voice/accent. He gives the example of a wonderful story where the writer’s main character stuttered. The writer proceeded to draw out the speech impediment, literally. Live, it sounded wonderful, but on the page, dicey.
*NO summary, no exposition. Dialogue is not a means to deliver information and backstory.
Problems/Tips:
*Don’t use “no”. Quite frankly, D’Ambrosio believes, it’s a waste of white space. Rather, imply “no”. There is an element of compression in short stories, dialogue should be as compelling as narrative.
*One sided exchange: one character’s dialogue is favored over the other. Q&A affect.
*Don’t treat dialogue like a shy person stuck in an elevator, it shuts down conversation. Allow the character to speak up (D’Ambrosio kicked off the seminar by noting that he was an incredibly shy child, and once, while over a friend’s house, the friend’s mother asked the author if he’d like something to eat. No was the easiest answer, D’Ambrosio said, because I was terrified that if I said anything else, it would lead to another question and the fact that he would be forced to speak!)
*Timing: get the heat of the scene. Don’t want warm up dialogue the “hello, how are you” business
*Don’t set up expectations of character’s dialogue and meet it. Deliver personality, irony
*Tyranny of relevance: don’t kill of individuality of characters via flat dialogue
