Dialogue (36 page)

A couple of years ago I took a class and learned to ride a motorcycle. The instructor was like a drill sergeant, constantly yelling at us and berating us for life-threatening mistakes we were making: cutting each other off, cutting corners too sharply, looking at the ground instead of around the next corner, etc. I couldn't wait until the class was over and I could ride my bike without someone watching me. I promptly dumped my bike while trying to make it up a hill and turn a sharp corner at the same time. I took off too fast one time and crashed into and through the brush in front of my apartment, but I kept my balance and rode off down the street quite proud of myself.

Someone once told me that if I didn't dump my motorcycle a few times, I wasn't taking any risks.

Just write. Take risks. You'll make mistakes. That's how you learn.

In chapter thirteen, we're going to tie up some of the loose ends about

The John-Marsha syndrome. There are a few too many direct addresses in the following passage. Rewrite it, taking out most of them and making any other adjustments to make it read smoothly.

"I'm going to the store, Ellen. Need anything?"

"There's a pad and pencil over by the phone, Tom. I'll make a list."

"Ellen, I think we should get some chocolate milk in case Teddy stops by."

"Tom, good idea." She wrote that down. "Oh, and Tom, how about some Oreo cookies to go with the milk?"

"That's too much chocolate, Ellen. Let's get butter cream cookies instead."

"Tom, yes, butter cream cookies." She wrote down butter cream cookies.

"Do you think, Ellen, we should check and see if we' re out of sugar? It was pretty low last time I looked."

"You go ahead and check, Tom, I'll just keep making out my list here."

The adjective, adverb, and inappropriate tag addiction. The dialogue that follows has just a few adverbs and adjectives, explaining how the character spoke the dialogue. I've deliberately overdone it so you can have fun rewriting it.

"We're going to Hawaii!" Curtis said excitedly as he came through the back door and threw down his briefcase. "My boss is sending two guys from the office and—"

"I hate Hawaii," Patty answered tiredly.

"You hate Hawaii?!" Curtis enunciated in shock. "How can anyone hate Hawaii?"

"Easy," Patty reiterated. "It's too hot."

"Too hot?" Curtis repeated hotly. "So what? It's Hawaii, for Pete's sake. It's supposed to be hot."

"I'm just telling you why I don't like it," Patty flusteringly muttered.

"I don't believe this," Curtis shrieked as he sat down hard on one of the kitchen chairs. "We have a free trip to Hawaii and you don't want to go."

"I didn't say I didn't want to go," Patty argued resistantly. "I can sit in the hotel room and eat ice cream bars while you're out snorkeling or whatever."

The disconnect. In the dialogue that follows, the characters disconnect a few times. See if you can fix this passage so the characters are responding directly to each other.

"Mom, do you know which direction Dad's going to his meeting? Is he going down Fourth Street?"

"Would you mind emptying the garbage?" Mom said as she passed through the kitchen on her way to the living room.

The phone rang and she answered it. "No, he's not," she said. "You're welcome." She put the phone down and thought for a moment. "I need to go to the store before dinner."

"Can you get some Fruit Loops? We're out."

"I think he is," she said as she grabbed her purse.

"I'll do it after dinner."

The as-you-know-Bob tendency. Rewrite the following dialogue so the information about Sarah is delivered to the reader in a way that feels natural, not contrived.

Rachel leaned across the table toward Pam. "They're letting Sarah go, you know," she whispered, looking around to make sure no one was listening.

"Oh really?" Pam said through a mouthful of pastrami.

"Yeah, you know how she's always taking those long breaks and on the phone all the time. She talks about her retarded son, but I've never met him. You know how she always says she's calling to check on him. Remember that time we drove her home after work and saw her house—that huge two-storied rundown place on the other side of town? Remember what she said when she got out of the car?"

"Uh-uh."

"That she lived in the house in the back, and remember how we drove around the back down the alley and there weren't no house in the back? Remember that?"

"Kind of." Pam wiped her mouth with her napkin.

"You see how she comes to work every day in that same dress and how her shoes are all worn out and she never wears stockings, you know."

"Yeah."

"I don't think that's her real hair color, do you? That red color? And she needs to lose some weight. She's bad for the image of this company, having her working at the front desk."

You might want to consider having Sarah show up on the scene, which would be a much more immediate way to describe her to us.

In the following passage, the viewpoint character is making a speech about something she feels strongly about--men. Rewrite this passage from this character's viewpoint, breaking up the speech with other characters interruptions and the vp's musings and actions.

"Men are like that, you know, always thinking about sex. That's all they think about. I've been dating a few men I've met on the Internet lately, and it comes up every time. Why is that such a big deal with men? Why can't

they just relax and, you know, get to know a woman? I've had it with men. I'm never going out again. It's too stressful, constantly having to play games and hide who you really are in case a guy might be turned off if you,

like, show you have a brain or are actually interested in furthering your career, interested in anything, really, besides the guy. Why do they have to be number one all of the time? I hate to think I might be an old maid or

something. I really want to find a man, but it's so hard. Oh, and another thing, you can't be better than they are at anything because they all have this thing called an ego. It drives me crazy. I' might just be talking about

something I'm good at, but I have to play it down because I wouldn't want the guy to think I might actually be better than the guy at something."

Blah, blah, blah. Even if a character's personality is to talk on and on like this, you can still show this trait, while inserting the viewpoint's thoughts and showing the viewpoint's actions as well as the actions of the

other characters and letting them interrupt once in a while, or at least try to get a word in.

pense, and/or conflict, so it's interesting to read because there's something at stake. You can use either Lyle's or Alice's viewpoint. Oh, and one other thing—your imagination.

Lyle joined Alice out on the porch, where she was eating popcorn.