Dialogue (5 page)

Be honest. Have you ever experienced at least one of these fears when you're about to launch into a dialogue scene? The purpose of this book is to make you so comfortable with writing dialogue that there will be no place for fear. Once you're comfortable and relaxed, you'll find that fear will no longer be present.

I've always found that the best way to deal with fear of any kind is to face it straight on. So let's take the above fears and look at them one by one to defuse their power over us.

What if I let my character talk and he sounds stupid, not at all like I want my reader to perceive him?
Okay, what if he does? There is more than one way you can look at this if it really happens, which it seldom does. Our characters don't often sound as stupid as we think they do. It's usually our perception of how they sound that's the problem. The real issue could be that we fear we sound stupid when we talk, so we project that fear onto our characters. But people just talk—sometimes saying stupid things and sometimes saying brilliant things. Do you know anyone who talks brilliantly 100 percent of the time? Or stupidly 100 percent of the time? Sometimes I amaze myself, I say such profound things. Other times I sound like the dumbest character on
Saturday Night Live.
What's my point?

That whether your characters sound stupid or not, which is purely subjective, they have to keep talking. Because that's what characters do. Characters in a novel talk.

You have to know your characters well. Let's say you've created a tough guy. You perceive him as tough and you want your reader to perceive him that way. You want your protagonist and your reader to be scared of this dude. Yet he comes onstage and sounds like Elmer Fudd: "Where is that wabbit anyway?" Sure, this is probably the worst it could get, but we're going for the worst scenario possible here. You have three options: (1) You fire him and create a new antagonist, someone who really is tough, (2) you let him provide the comic relief for the story, or (3) you stop drinking when you're writing because you write crap when you do.

Even worse, what if you suspect that your characters might sound stupid but you're not absolutely sure? First, try reading your dialogue out loud. If that doesn't work, try reading it to another person, preferably another writer. Another "cool" writer. Cool people always know when other people sound stupid. I'm only half kidding here. It's kind of a sixth sense.

All jokes aside, I understand that this is a serious problem, but it's not the end of the world. We can fix all of this stuff in the second draft. Keep writing.

What if my characters start talking and they all sound the same?
This can be a real problem. Sometimes I wish I were an actor and had to worry about being only one character. When you have to be ten people at once, sometimes all in the same scene, well, it's schizophrenic, and you're in danger of your characters all sounding the same, unless you know each of your characters on an intimate level. After all, you're the one writing this story. It's your voice. You only have one voice.

At least that's what we think. Have you ever gotten mad at your kids? Made love? Worked in corporate America? Is your voice the same for all of these situations? I didn't think so. You can play different roles and your voice is just a little adjusted for all of them. Not your personality—your voice. This is what you have to understand in order to create all of these different characters and make sure they don't all sound the same.

When you sit down to write, you're in one character's head—hopefully, that of your viewpoint character. But you still have to jump around and play every role in the scene when you're actually writing. You have to do what works for you. I heard Barbara Kingsolver on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
talk about how she wrote
The Poisonwood Bible
five times, each time from a different character's point of view. Now, that's some serious writing, to make sure she knew each of her characters and how they viewed the situation in her story. I don't suggest you go to that extreme, but do whatever you have to do. If you just can't get into a character's head, then go hang out with someone like your character long enough so you can adapt your voice and make it authentically that character's. You might want to try writing the scene from one character's point of view and then another character's point of view so you're inside of each of the characters for that scene. Maybe you'll only need to do this a few times before you "get" the distinct voice of each character.

You can also stop writing for a moment, pull up a new page, and just start writing like a mad person in the character's point of view that you're having trouble with. Don't think about what you're writing. Write about anything. Explode. Write quietly. Hang back and then cut loose. Be that character for a few moments. Let him talk to you about how he feels about the state of the economy or his next-door neighbor, his bartending job, or his addiction to pornography. Then come back to your scene. I guarantee this character won't sound like anyone other than himself because you've actually
been
him for a moment in time. Hung out inside of him. Sometimes I wish writers would do this more often with their antagonists so their antagonists wouldn't always come across as one-dimensional.

Another thing that might help is to make sure that your characters have vastly different careers and lives. This isn't always possible, of course. For example, your viewpoint character might be a teacher who works at an elementary school. Some of the supporting characters may be fellow teachers. If this is the case, you might want to go back to your character sketches and make sure that you build into each of the other characters something different that would show up in their dialogue with each other. Maybe one could be from the South, even though the story takes place in Idaho. Maybe another could be a jazz musician in his spare time. Spending time developing your characters can ensure that they won't be carbon copies of each other.

What if my characters don't sound like my reader expects them to?
Our

reader immediately starts to create a picture in his mind of our characters the minute we introduce them, so we need to get our characters talking as soon as possible. If we wait too long, our reader will start to create a picture

in his mind of our characters and then when the characters do start to talk, the reader is surprised because, well, that's not how she imagined this person would communicate at all. Have you ever really admired someone from afar and when you heard the person speak it was nothing like you expected?

I was "in love" with a Marine when I was in high school. He was very good-looking and would write the most romantic letters and send romantic gifts. When he would come home on leave (oh, this is painful to remember) he would show up on my porch and start talking—and, well, he had the worst lisp. I would always forget about that part, and when he spoke the fantasy would immediately crack open and I would be crushed. He was a really nice guy, but I couldn't get past that.

That's how your reader feels when you've described your character vividly in narrative and when he finally speaks it's just not at all what your reader expected. So, as I said above, get your character talking as soon as you can after you introduce him.

Also, be sure to paint a physical picture of him that connects to how he speaks. If he's in a suit and tie most of the time, he probably won't talk like a farmer. Likewise, if he wears bib overalls a lot, he probably won't be talking about the latest version of Microsoft Windows. I say
probably,
because you never know. But if you're going to break a stereotype, you need to somehow indicate that to the reader so when your character starts talking, your reader doesn't have to suspend disbelief. Along with his physical appearance, make sure the background you create for him connects as well. Your character is an entire package and when he speaks, your reader will only be surprised if one part of the package doesn't fit.

What if my dialogue sounds flat and boring and doesn't do anything to move the story forward?
This is an understandable fear. In real life, we sometimes say things and then walk away from the conversation knowing that we didn't connect with the other person the way we wish we had. This happens to all of us. But then there are other times that we speak brilliantly, surprising even ourselves. Does our real dialogue always move our lives or "stories" forward?

What happens is that we walk away knowing what we "should" have said. Don't you hate that?

If we want our characters' dialogue to be interesting and move the story forward, we have to know our stories very well. We have to know exactly where we want our characters to go and how we want them to get there. We have to know what our characters' intentions are in every single scene, and we have to cut away every single word of dialogue that doesn't in some way contribute to the plot we have planned for them. Taking characters on detours is what causes flat and boring plots. If you keep your characters and story on track, this is not something you'll have to worry about.

So chill. This is really a second-draft question. When our characters sound flat and boring in our first draft, we can take another look at the dialogue in our second draft and fix it. It's often not until our characters sound flat and boring that we even know what we want them to say and how we want them to sound. Sometimes that's all it takes. Even flat and boring isn't the end of the world. We see it, measure it against what we want our characters to come off like, and once we have something to measure it against, we know what to do. So, in that sense, flat and boring isn't so bad.

What if my dialogue sounds stilted and formal and the reader can tell I'm trying to write dialogue rather than just letting my characters talk?
This is one of the worst fears because it's very real. I do happen to read a lot of dialogue that sounds stilted and formal and I know immediately that the writer is trying too hard. The writer is trying to write dialogue.

The dialogue has to emerge out of who the character is and his needs in the story, not out of the writer's need to tell a story. Do you understand the difference?

Stilted dialogue happens when we perceive what needs to be accomplished in our story and we set out to accomplish it. What happens is that we're writing the dialogue out of our need to tell the story rather than out of who our character is in the particular scene we're writing. We can definitely change this if we can just let go and quit trying to control the story.

If you're the kind of person who thinks through all of her words before she speaks them, this is probably your biggest dialogue challenge. I have a friend who recently started writing. She's a very calculated person. You can actually see the wheels in her mind turning in the middle of a conversation as she thinks through every sentence before she speaks. I wasn't surprised to read the dialogue in her first story and see the same thing.

Many of us are full of inhibitions when we sit down to write. Part of letting go of our inhibitions is letting go of our stories so our characters can act them out. Sometimes stilted dialogue only shows up when we reread what we've written. We recognize it when it happens, and that's what's important. If we can recognize it, we can fix it.

What if I let my characters start talking and they run away with the scene?

That would be just terrible, wouldn't it? To lose control of our characters, and therefore the story, just undoes us, doesn't it? Whoever told us we had to be in constant control of our stories, especially on the first draft? What if Fred's dialogue takes him toward Sally, that other woman, the one who was just a walk-on in your cast of characters? Now what? What's the worst that can happen? You might have to rewrite your outline or think through the story again to see if there's something that's supposed to happen that you're not letting happen. That would be terrible.

Dialogue tends to go that way. People start saying things they didn't expect to say, things get a little out of control, and sometimes people even end up fighting. Of course, in a story, that's not all bad. Actually, it's usually good because it means tension and conflict, which are definitely good for a story. So go ahead. Let your characters talk and quit interfering. If you were a character in a story, would you want someone looking over your shoulder every minute, making sure you were saying the "right" thing? You couldn't even be yourself. Let your characters be who they are. One way to get to know them is to bring them onstage and turn them loose in a scene of dialogue.