Fiction Writer's Workshop (24 page)

This back-to-back approach is confusing, and it can get even more so when the writer, with the intention of clarifying, places a dialogue tag in the middle.

"I've never stolen anything in my life," he said. "I believe it too. You're as straight as they come."

Whenever someone new speaks up, indicate the exchange by beginning a new paragraph.

"I've never stolen anything in my life," he said, eyeballing the jewelry display.

"Don't think of it as stealing. Think of it as larceny. It suits you better."

If a character speaks for an extended period and you want to begin a new paragraph, it is not necessary to close the quotes at the end of the first paragraph.
This sample is correct.

"Interrogations happen when you do something wrong," the agent said. "Retraining is all about doing it right. Look, we accept that the mind follows the body. Right? The mind follows the body! Poppycock. Bullshit. Rot and drivel. The mind
is
the body! Interrogations? Doomed to fail. You shock someone, I mean really shock him—cattle prod, 2.5 liter spray bottle of ionized water, metal chair, puddle of urine—the whole nine yards—and all you do is issue an invitation to the mind.

"You ask so little! Yet threaten with all your heart, and still the mind does not follow. The mind does not follow. Get me? State of mind. Know the expression? Sure, you do. State of being. State of mind. Coincidence? Hell, no! They're the same thing. You see? The mind
is
being."

One can always invent circumstances in which punctuating dialogue is more tricky than this. Some writers don't punctuate their dialogue and use only dialogue tags to do the work of indicating the exchange. The effect here is mostly aesthetic.

You can't kill me, she said. You just can't.

Some writers think it is somehow more elemental to strip away the punctuation. I suppose it is a matter of taste. Not using punctuation affects the pace of the writing and, in some cases, might blur the lines between speakers. But I can't see much to recommend it. Do it if you want, but do it consistently. My sense is that if you concern yourself with the act of typing in order to produce an effect in your fiction, you are creating a kind of flea circus with your characters and little more. Writing should be about writing, not typing. Learn the rules of punctuation, or set up some new rules, but in either case, live with them, then get on with the act of writing.

ITALICS AND FONTS

I can still remember the days, not all that long ago, when I was interested in italics. They seemed an elaborate and expensive device. The same with fonts. Less than twenty years ago, the word "font" was just another word for "fountain," and Times Roman would have been taken to be a reference to an Italian edition of
The New York Times.

I'm always happy when time passes and change limps through. I compose on a computer now, with seventy-four fonts a mere doubleclick away. Even italics just take a short mouse roll. I have no regrets. It's much better this way. But the truth is, I see so many young writers attempting to solve problems by manipulating the presentation on the page (students routinely manipulate font to increase page length, center justification is employed to make things look "neat," etc.) that I feel compelled to warn against it.

I like italics. As I said, they used to be a rare commodity, a tool of the published or the rich. I once had access to an IBM Selectric with a changeable typeface. I remember that in one weekend, I retyped all my poems that needed italics and then I wrote poems entirely in italics, then I alternated words, until changing the type wheel became so routine I tired of it and was left with my lousy poems to rewrite, which I began to do, using italics less and less. I came to a point where changing the type wheel was more trouble than it was worth. I happily gave the typewriter back.

When word processing programs came on the scene, italics were thrown open as a possibility to everyone, and that is the way it should be. There are uses for italics in dialogue. I like the standard use best.
Emphasis. Accent.
When you want the speaker to really lean into a word, italics are a good way of indicating emphasis. You can put a whole sentence in italics from time to time, but it ought to be short, the kind that can be accented naturally, without some elaborate read-back.

These are okay in my book.

"I'm talking about life on another
planet,
Simpson," he said.

"Cut it out!"
she said.

These are not okay in my book.

"I am concerned
with these
discrepancies,
Troy," he barked.

"There's
trouble
ahead." (Too elaborate.)

"I'm
feeling
a
pain
in my
chest,"
Gerry said. "It's like someone
punched
me." (Unnecessarily replaces natural points of accent.)

Many times writers will use italics to indicate the voice of another speaker, a voice from the past, a voice of the consciousness, a voice unheard by all except the protagonist, or even by the reader alone. This seems a reasonable variation to me, again prone to overuse. Use it with caution, as any typographic trick—including boldface and underlining—can become mawkish and confining when used simply for effect. If emphasis is what you are shooting for, a more active verb is almost always the best bet.

No trick is more tiresome than the font change, however. There are writers who use different fonts to indicate the voices of different speakers. Let me try to dissuade you from this bit of typographic pyrotechnics. It is tedious.

It's a product of self-publishing and 'zine culture. I love 'zines. I have created my own. But putting together your own magazine, "laying out" your story in a graphic-heavy environment, is an act more akin to painting than to writing. It's visual. It's valuable, just unrelated to the act of writing. Nothing against 'zines here. They rock.

Still, I don't care what anyone says, font changes are just exemplars of people with too much time on their hands and not enough interest in, or knowledge of, what they are attempting when they start to write.

Don't do them.

EXERCISES

1. Start a dialogue between two people purposefully using no dialogue tags whatsoever. Write two full pages. If you are stuck for an idea, use one of the following.

• an argument over a bag of money

• a minor revelation on a ski lift

• a conversation between a hitchhiker and the driver who picks him up

Now prepare yourself to rewrite the dialogue three times.

A. On the first pass, work to find ways other than dialogue tags to indicate who the speaker of a given line is. Use gestures, actions and elements of scene to help direct the reader. Be precise in the exchange. There's no need to indicate every exchange with a gesture

though. At the end of this pass, go back and eliminate any clumsy gestures or awkward movements.

B. On second pass, allow yourself to fill in with a limited number of dialogue tags. Say, five over the course of two pages. Use them only where they are needed most. Use no two dialogue tags the same way. That is to say, use one straight dialogue tag at the end of a line, use one descriptive dialogue tag, use one tag with adverb, bury one in the middle of a line, start one line with the tag if you can. Don't clump these variations together either. Use judgment.

C. Now, on the final pass, keeping everything in place, add straight dialogue tags ("he said," "she said" and "[name] said"). Add them for the sake of clarity. Try to leave several lines unadorned by tags. If that's not possible, march on and fill them all in. You should have enough variation built in already to avoid trouble.

Try to remember this sequence; it's helpful in creating dialogue that is varied and rhythmic. In any case, start with the words, stay with the words and let the dialogue tags serve you and the reader only in understanding the dialogue better.

2. Start a dialogue with a single line and work from there. Give the line a standard tag, for instance, "he said." Now add an adverb to that tag. If you need a situation, use one of these.

• Three people in a white-water raft, moving toward a dangerous set of rapids

• Two sisters who have discovered their father was embezzling money from his law firm

• A father and a son at the kitchen table about the sports page; the father is hiding something

Here's the twist: Add the first adverb and write from there. Write one page. Now go back and start again from the first line, changing only the adverb. In what ways does this small detail lead you to new places? Is it possible to recreate the dialogue even with this change in tone? If so, try for a stronger adverb, something quite the opposite of the first. If you can still work pretty much within the confines of your first dialogue, take a long hard look at the dialogue itself. In what ways can you charge the language? How can you vary the pace? Where can you pick up on new tensions? Try this two or three times. Then, using the strongest dialogue you create, remove the adverb and show the result to someone. Does he have any problem picking up on the tone and tension of the piece? Odds are, if he does, you were relying too much on the adverb and not enough on the words of the characters themselves.

There it is. You've gotten ray best advice on writing dialogue. Now let me give you my advice from the introduction again. Work.

It's my hope that this book didn't merely give you a sense of what's wrong with bad dialogue, but that it helped you to see what's right in yours. After you teach creative writing long enough, you start to recognize the "rules" junkies, those people who want to have a rule for every circumstance. What they quickly learn is that there's no point. For every suggestion I make in this book about what doesn't work, there's probably a living writer who is doing just that and doing it well. For instance, in the introduction I said, "Or one writer's characters sound like fortune cookies . . . ," implying, I think, that there's something wrong with that. I was in New York last month, standing in a bookstore, when the person I was with picked up a book by Mark Leyner, whose work I like very much, and said, "This is great. Everything sounds like an infomercial and everyone talks like a fortune cookie."

"And you like that?" I said.

"Sure," my companion said. "That's my world in a nutshell."

I shrugged. That's the way it is. Good dialogue, like good stories in general, captures part of the larger world and shows it to us. Feel free to work against everything I've told you in this book. But work. That was my advice, way back when I thought dialogue that sounded like fortune cookies was a bad idea. No wait, that was a rule. Work.

In this book we've looked at excerpts from fiction and film, radio and television, focusing on the role of dialogue in individual scenes. But to fully understand that role, we need to study an entire narrative, beginning to ending. This approach allows us to examine how dialogue works in harmony with other elements of storytelling, such as exposition and description.

The following story, "Bliss," appeared in
Bliss and Other Stories
by Katherine Mansfield, published in 1920. Mansfield was an innovative story writer who, as you'll notice when reading "Bliss," relied much on dialogue. She's worth studying. Though her characters use trendy slang that is now, of course, dated—as are their pretensions and pos-turings—their voices are still vibrant and particular.