Dialogue (9 page)

Let's look at the following scene of descriptive dialogue from
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver. Leah has just put her little sister in the swing outside of their hut in South Africa and is combing her hair when the village schoolteacher, Anatole, comes by. He's trying to explain to Leah, not so successfully, about the state of the Congo at this point in time.

I drew the edge of the comb slowly down the center of Ruth May's head, making a careful part. Father had said the slums outside Leopoldville would be set right by American aid, after Independence. Maybe I was foolish to believe him. There were shanties just as poor in Georgia, on the edge of Atlanta, where

black and white divided, and that was smack in the middle of America.

"Can you just do that, what they did down there? Announce your own country?" I asked.

"Prime Minister Lumumba says no, absolutely not. He has asked the United Nations to bring an army to restore unity."

"Is there going to be a war?"

"There is already a kind of war, I think. Moise Tshombe has Belgians and mercenary soldiers working for him. I don't think they will leave without a fight. And Katanga is not the only place where they are throwing stones. There is a different war in Matadi, Thysville, Boende, Leopoldville. People are very angry at the Europeans. They are even hurting women and little children."

"What are they so mad at the white people for?"

Anatole sighed. "Those are big cities. Where the boa and the hen curl up together, there is only trouble. People have seen too much of the Europeans and all the things they had. They imagined after Independence life would immediately become fair."

"Can't they be patient?"

"Could you be? If your belly was empty and you saw whole baskets of bread on the other side of a window, would you continue waiting patiently, Beene? Or would you throw a rock?"

The descriptive dialogue in this passage reveals an important part of the setting and the story situation without bogging down the action, which happens when the author uses only narrative to dispense this kind of information. In literary, historical, and mainstream stories, the bantering of descriptive dialogue between characters keeps things moving forward.

You may have a lot of background you need to insert in the story in order for the reader to understand the context of your setting and plot, but if you use only narrative to get it in there, the reader can feel like she's watching a documentary. If you're writing this kind of story, look for ways to
show
the history, description of setting, and/or cultural situation through the characters' conversations with one another so the reader is engaged in the story.

Throughout any passage of descriptive dialogue, you'll want to include narrative thoughts and reactions of the viewpoint character's, of course, but this is so much easier for the reader to absorb when this kind of narrative is woven into dialogue rather than doled out in long, boring paragraphs of exposition.

The pitfall of descriptive dialogue is that sometimes we have our characters going on a little too long because we may have an entire historical situation we want to explain to the reader. Sometimes we get caught up in wanting to dispense all of the research we've done, so we decide to put it all in one passage of dialogue that goes on for pages.

I believe that one of the reasons literary novels are known to have such a small number of readers compared to other kinds of novels is because of the long passages of narrative description. I wonder, if more literary, mainstream, and historical authors used less narrative description and more descriptive dialogue in their stories would they attract a wider audience? You don't have to sacrifice engaging dialogue just to make your novel fit into one of these categories.

shadowy

The horror and mystery writer's goal is to scare the bejesus out of us, and these authors take their jobs very seriously. Occasionally, a mainstream novel has enough horror and mystery in it to warrant this kind of dialogue.

Getting hold of the purpose of a passage of dialogue will help you write it more creatively because you know it's not just filler. In shadowy dialogue, your character's role is to keep your reader in a suspended state of suspense and a kind of terror, although you periodically tighten and loosen the tension. This is generally achieved with an ominous tone of suspense or foreshadowing of things to come. Things that are a little more intense than a walk in the park. The kinds of things you find in your worst nightmare: creepy, crawly things that attack, maim, and kill. Shadowy dialogue always has a foreboding threat of danger looming over the protagonist.

Check out the following example from Stephen King's
The Shining.
Here we have Danny, the son of the unsympathetic protagonist, Jack, in dialogue with his imaginary friend, Tony. He has imagined Tony into being to cope with life with his insane father. In "reality" (you never really know what's real and what isn't in a Stephen King novel), Tony is actually Danny in a few years, a suspended character between he and his father, all in Danny's imagination. In this scene, Tony is trying to warn Danny of impending harm to his mother, possibly her death.

He began to struggle, and the darkness and the hallway began to waver. Tony's form became chimerical, indistinct.

"Don't!" Tony called. "Don't, Danny, don't do that!"

"She's not going to be dead! She's not!"

"Then you have to help her, Danny...you're in a place deep down in your own mind. The place where I am. I'm a part of you, Danny."

"You're Tony. You're not me. I want my mommy.I want my mommy."

"I didn't bring you here, Danny. You brought yourself. Because you knew."

"No-"

"You've always known," Tony continued, and he began to walk closer. For the first time, Tony began to walk closer. "You're deep down in yourself in a place where nothing comes through. We're alone here for a little while, Danny. This is an Overlook where no one can ever come. No clocks work here. None of the keys fit them and they can never be wound up. The doors have never been opened and no one has ever stayed in the rooms. But you can't stay long. Because it's coming."

"It." Danny whispered fearfully, and as he did so the irregular pounding noise seemed to grow closer, louder. His terror, cool and distant a moment ago, became a more immediate thing.

One reason the shadowy dialogue in the above passage works is because while Tony seems like a friend, we're not always sure. He's what's known as a shape-shifter, the archetype in Joseph Campbell's
The Hero's Journey,
that keeps the reader in the dark as far as whether the character is really for the protagonist or against him. The protagonist can never quite trust the shape-shifter, so when the shape-shifter speaks in dialogue, we're always questioning him, wondering whether he's speaking truthfully or not. Here Tony is delivering bad news. Should Danny even believe him? Another reason the dialogue works is because it's cryptic, so we have to keep reading to find out what Tony is even talking about. And the last reason it works is because Tony is definitely delivering an ominous threat of something to come that could turn Danny's world upside down and change him forever. Shadowy dialogue's effectiveness is mostly in the tone of the character's words, but you can use setting and action to add to its creepiness.

The purpose of shadowy dialogue, used in mysteries and horror stories, is to keep the story as dark as possible. Horror and mystery readers are interested in the dark and supernatural, preferably both at the same time. The characters are usually somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness where the darkness is concerned. It's a zone where both character and reader teeter between the light and the dark, between what's real and what's imagined. And we all know scary things go on in our imaginations sometimes. Horror and mystery writers know how to develop those imaginary moments to where they feel more real than reality itself, and therein lies the terror we feel when we read this kind of story. The characters' dialogue reflects this mood.

breathless

The purpose of this kind of dialogue is to keep the reader on the edge of his chair, turning pages until the wee hours of the morning. The word you want to remember is
suspense.
Breathless dialogue is all about creating suspense, which is what readers are looking for when they buy an action/adventure or suspense thriller. They want every page to be full of spine-tingling, creeped-out, nail-biting suspense. It's your job, as the writer, to give it to them as the characters express themselves to each other in ways that turn up the heat. And turn it up. And turn it up.

Let's look at Michael Crichton's
Jurassic Park
for an example of how dialogue works in suspense thrillers. Here we have three characters trying to get from one side of the lake to the other without the most dangerous of all dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus, seeing them. But then Lex starts coughing. And coughing.

Lex coughed loudly, explosively. In Tim's ears, the sound echoed across the water like a gunshot.

The tyrannosaur yawned lazily, and scratched its ear with its hind foot, just like a dog. It yawned again. It was groggy after its big meal, and it woke up slowly.

On the boat, Lex was making little gargling sounds.

"Lex,
shut up!"
Tim said.

"I can't help it," she whispered, and then she coughed again. Grant rowed hard, moving the raft powerfully into the center of the lagoon.

On the shore, the tyrannosaur stumbled to its feet.

"I couldn't help it, Timmy!" Lex shrieked miserably. "I couldn't help it!"

"Shhhh!"

Grant was rowing as fast as he could.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter," she said. "We're far enough away. He can't swim."

"Of course he can swim, you little idiot!"
Tim shouted at her. On the shore, the tyrannosaur stepped off the dock and plunged into the water. It moved strongly into the lagoon after them.

"Well, how should I know?" she said.

"Everybody knows tyrannosaurs can swim! It's in all the books! Anyway, all reptiles can swim!"

"Snakes can't."

"Of course
snakes can. You idiot!"

Crichton uses this kind of breathless dialogue throughout the novel. If it lets up, it's never for long. I personally believe the dialogue to be one of the reasons for the story's success. These are real folks in real trouble—over and over again. Readers of suspense thrillers and action/adventures demand this kind of tension, so if you're going to write for these readers, you have to be able to give it to them.

When we are facing a difficult situation and have no clue as to the outcome, our breath can become short and shallow as fear, anger, or sadness increases, thus the term
breathless
dialogue. The key to writing effective breathless dialogue is to:

• cut away most of the description and explanatory narrative so the scene is mostly dialogue

• insert bits of action, as Crichton does in the above passage, so the

scene keeps moving forward in a physical way, but not so much that we lose track of the character's speech

• use short spurts of emotional phrases of dialogue rather than long speeches or contemplative verbal pondering

• make clear what's at stake for the reader as he's expressing himself

• hold back just enough information in the dialogue so the suspense is sustained throughout the scene

Is this you? Does this kind of dialogue come easy for you? All dialogue in all fiction, whether short stories or novels, needs a degree of tension and suspense, but for the suspense thriller and the action/adventure, it's at the core.

provocative

The
Nashville Tennessean
wrote of Wally Lamb's
She's Come Undone:
"Wally Lamb can lie down with the literary lions at will: he's that gifted.. .This novel does what good fiction should do—it informs our hearts as well as our minds of the complexities involved in the 'simple' act of living a human life."