Dialogue (2 page)

How?

In later chapters, we'll explore how to create the kind of dialogue that succeeds at all of the above, but for right now, it's enough to try to understand what we owe our readers when we engage them in a scene of dialogue.

We need to understand what it looks like to create dialogue that delivers before we can learn how to actually make it happen.

Effective dialogue, the kind of dialogue that connects with readers and makes them care about our characters and their struggles, can accomplish many purposes simultaneously. Let's take a look at them one by one.

characterizes/reveals motives

We introduce our characters to our readers through dialogue. Dialogue combined with facial expressions and body language indicates to readers who our characters are. In real life, this is how we get to know one another. We start interacting. Sometimes this goes well, sometimes it doesn't. Through dialogue, we decide if we like someone or not. This is also how our readers decide if they like our characters. As they listen to them and watch them interact with each other, they decide if these are good guys or bad guys or a combination. It's in our power to evoke positive or negative feelings in our readers for our characters through the dialogue we create for them.

When a character speaks in a controlled tone, every word clipped and enunciated clearly, it could be that he's right on the edge, momentarily suppressing a ton of internal rage. On the other hand, if a character's voice is warm and inviting, this could reveal an internal sense of security and well-being. A character who rattles off words faster than the speed of light could be running away from himself, and a character who talks painfully slow may be unsure of himself, experiencing depression, or lacking in social skills.

Every one of your characters is driven by something—they all have agendas, motives, and reasons for what they want in your story. In some sense, motive is the most important element in a story because it drives the character from the inside to go after what he wants. It's the impetus behind and the reason for his goal. Without motive, there's no story. That's how important it is. Let's say you're writing a children's story. The protagonist's goal could be to win the spelling bee. The motive? To earn her father's approval. This could also be an adult story. The goal would be different, but the motive could be the same.

The most effective way to reveal your characters' motives is through their own mouths. Again, in real life, we do this all the time. I remember a friend once telling me that another person had insinuated she had done something rude. "I don't want everyone to think I'm not nice," she told me.

Right away I knew that it wasn't that my friend actually cared if she was nice or not; what she cared about was how others perceived her. What she cared about was her image. I'm not making a value judgment here. I don't have to. She opened her own mouth and revealed her motive herself—wanting others to think well of her. We do it all the time. Whenever your characters open their mouths, they start telling the truth about what's motivating them. This is what you want to do. This is good. You want your dialogue to deliver your characters' motives to your reader. Again, this is how your reader is signaled as to how to feel about your characters. Motives, even more than behavior, reveal whom our characters are deep down inside because behavior is external and motives are internal. Effective dialogue brings up who our characters are at their core. It's powerful stuff.

The following scene of dialogue shows the motives of the antagonist, Sean Dillon, in Jack Higgins' novel
Eye of the Storm.
Dillon is a terrorist, has been one for twenty years, and "he hasn't seen the inside of a cell once," according to KGB agent Josef Makeev. After going undercover and trying unsuccessfully to catch Dillon, Makeev discusses the terrorist, who was also once an actor, with another KGB agent, Michael Aroun.

"As I said, he's never been arrested, not once, and unlike many of his IRA friends, he never courted media publicity. I doubt if there's a photo of him anywhere except for the odd boyhood snap."

"What about when he was an actor?"

"Perhaps, but that was twenty years ago, Michael."

"And you think he might undertake this business if I offer him enough money?"

"No, money alone has never been enough for this man. It always has to be the job itself where Dillon is concerned. How can I put it? How interesting it is. This is a man to whom acting was everything. What we are offering him is a new part. The Theatre of the Street perhaps, but still acting." He smiled as the Mercedes joined the traffic moving around the Arc de Triomphe. "Let's wait and see. Wait until we hear from Rashid."

A character won't always admit his own motives in conversation with others, usually because he doesn't even know himself why he does what he does. This is often especially true of the antagonist. So having other characters talk about the antagonist's motives is an effective way to show the antagonist's motivation.

sets the mood in the story

Every story, no matter what kind, evokes emotion in the reader. Or it should, if you want to hold your reader's attention. The story's emotional pull ultimately creates the story's mood. The mood, the emotion, is what keeps pulling at the reader, compelling her to keep turning the pages. The mood can be setting. It can be the characters and their motives. It can be how quickly or slowly the plot moves.

Dialogue is a tool you can use to create your story's mood. In a mystery or horror story, the dialogue should evoke fear in the reader. In a romance, we're looking for that warm, fuzzy dialogue that budding love brings. In a mainstream or literary story, it may be one of any number of atmospheres we want to create and emotions we want to evoke as we go about creating a scene of dialogue. When characters are interacting, they're exchanging feelings. As the writer, you're in charge of creating the story's mood. Certainly, sometimes the mood just kind of evolves as our characters start talking, but you can also direct the dialogue so you're controlling the mood.

In Anna Quindlen's first-person novel
One True Thing,
the relationship between the protagonist, Ellen Gulden, and her father, the antagonist, George Gulden, is a hostile one. He has convinced Ellen to come and be her mother's caretaker as she wastes away from cancer. Ellen grudgingly agrees, and her attitude toward this task quickly becomes the story's mood. In the following scene of dialogue, we begin to see just what her attitude is.

"Ellen, there is no reason for the two of us to be at cross-purposes. Your mother needs help. You love her. So do I."

"Show it," I said.

"Pardon me!"

"Show it. Show up. Do you grieve? Do you care? Do you ever cry? And how did you let her get to this point in the first place? When she first felt sick, why didn't you force her to go to the doctor?"

"Your mother is a grown woman," he said.

"Sure she is. But wasn't it really that you didn't want your little world disrupted, that you needed her around to keep everything running smoothly? Just like now you need me around because she can't. You bring me here and drop me down in the middle of this mess and expect me to turn into one kind of person when I'm a completely different kind and to be a nurse and a friend and a confidante and a housewife all rolled up in one."

"Don't forget being a daughter. You could always be a daughter."

"Oh, Papa, don't try to make me feel guilty."

As the story progresses, we watch the plot events transform Ellen, and by the end of the story she's a different person. But this is the mood that permeates the story, and the author often uses dialogue to bring it out.

intensifies the story conflict

We can use dialogue to keep raising the stakes for our protagonist, to keep him in hot water, to keep propelling the story forward. Your character has a goal. He wants something—desperately. In the movie
ET,
we remember one line vividly: "ET phone home." This one line of dialogue—three words— contains the essence of what ET is all about. This little creature just wanted to go back home. Desperately.

Now, it's up to you to keep throwing obstacles at your protagonist to keep him from easily getting what she wants. These obstacles come from within and without the character. The other characters come against your protagonist. The protagonist sabotages herself. This is called story conflict, and you can reveal it and keep intensifying it through dialogue. You want to use dialogue to keep reminding the reader just how desperate your character is to achieve her goal.

Every scene of dialogue, in some way, needs to move the story conflict forward. We need to be in a different place at the end of a scene of dialogue than we were at the beginning. The situation should grow continually worse every time our characters open their mouths to talk to one another. Our protagonist is becoming more desperate. Our antagonist seems surer of victory; we know because of the confidence we give to his tone of voice. Our supporting characters keep reminding our protagonist of his goal, of where he's headed on the Hero's Journey. This is dialogue that does not stand still but moves the story forward with each scene.

In Jude Deveraux's romantic suspense novel
High Tide,
the protagonist, Fiona, is being set up for murder. A businesswoman, she is visiting her wealthy client, Roy Hudson, on his boat, when he starts hitting on her. She fights him off, eventually falling into an exhausted sleep on the boat and waking up in the middle of the night with his body on top of hers—his very
dead
body. The hero, Ace Montgomery, and Ellen are talking about the murder in the following scene of dialogue.

She took a deep breath. "I want to know what's going on," she said as calmly as she could. "I am wanted for murder. The newspaper—"

"No, we are wanted for murder." He'd put the frozen packages back into the freezer and was now looking in the cupboards. "You know how to make pancakes?"

At that Fiona put her arms straight down to her sides, her hands in fists, opened her mouth, and let out a scream.

Ace had his hand over her mouth before she'd let an ounce of air escape her lungs. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded. "If someone heard you, they might investigate." Slowly, he removed his hand and nodded toward the countertop in the kitchen. "Now sit down while I make breakfast."

She didn't move. "So help me, if you don't tell me what's going on, I'll scream my head off."

"You really do have trouble with anger, don't you? Have you thought of seeing a counselor?"

At that Fiona opened her mouth again, but this time he didn't move. Instead, he just looked at her speculatively.

Closing her mouth, Fiona narrowed her eyes at him. "So why aren't we at the police station, Mr. Do-Gooder? Just hours ago you were telling me that I couldn't be a fugitive from justice, that I had to turn myself over to the police. But now that you're also accused, we're hiding."

"You want blueberries in your pancakes?"

"I want some answers!" she shouted at him.

Since this is a
romantic
suspense, Deveraux has to do double duty in intensifying the conflict in each scene; she has both the plot—the murder— and the relationship between the hero and the heroine to develop. This scene works well on both levels as Fiona is screaming at Ace to give her some answers about the murder—she's scared to death at being a suspect— while furious at him for not being more direct with her. As you probably know, when writing romance, the hero and heroine often start out intensely disliking each other. A scene of dialogue showing this is a lot more fun than the protagonist simply telling us from inside her head.

creates tension and suspense

As a writing coach, I have worked with hundreds of fiction and nonfiction

writers over the years, and the weakness I see most often in scenes of dialogue is the lack of tension and suspense. Nothing is at stake. The characters are just chatting about something or other. Making small talk. Having a tea party. Ho-hum.

Dialogue's purpose, and there is no exception to this, is to create tension in the present and build suspense for what's to come. As a fiction writer, you want to remember this. No matter what kind of scene you're writing, no matter the genre, tension and suspense must be included, most often at the core of the scene. Successful authors know this. Robin Cook, the author of a number of successful medical mysteries, is such an author. His stories are full of tense dialogue scene after tense dialogue scene. The following excerpt is one from his novel
Fatal Cure.
It illustrates the kind of tension and suspense in a dialogue scene that grabs the reader by the gut so she couldn't stop reading even if the house was on fire.

The protagonist, Angela, is on a personal mission to find a killer. The reason this is personal for her is because her husband, David, has just discovered a body buried in the basement of the house they recently moved into. Prior to this scene, she confronted the Chief of Police about what she sees as incompetence and indifference in the police's search to find a suspect.

"Don't you dare paint me as an hysterical female," Angela said as she got into the car.