On Dialogue
Hi, friends.
How did we find ourselves in the middle of July? The storm of the school year is out there looming on the horizon. But let us grab a good book and a bowl of ice cream and get those words down while we can.
Story.
Get in friends, it’s roadtrip season. This week’s story is one my all time favorites—Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. It will make even your worst vacation seem like a fanciful dream.
Craft tidbits.
O’Connor weaves so many wonderful details in her stories. I especially love the way she uses clothing as a quick means to characterization. (Poor Bailey and his parrot shirt. He just wants to get away for a moment.) The generational divide is shown between the grandmother’s instance on being recognized as a lady (hat and gloves and all) and the mother’s choice of slacks (!) and use of jarred babyfood. Nature is personified to make it more foreboding (One of my favorite lines: The trees were full of silver-white sunlights and the meanest of them sparkled. And Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.)
But what she really does so well is dialogue. I’ve been writing and rewriting and wrestling with dialogue the last few weeks. Trying to get these conversations to do the things they need to do. I probably don’t have to tell you how tricky it is to nail dialogue.
Dialogue was probably the last tools in the writerly toolbox that I “got.” For a long time, it felt so flat. I knew it wasn’t my strong suit, so I didn’t write very much of it.
When it’s working, it can deliver a gut punch and really pinpoint the ways in which people hurt one another (intentionally and not). This last week, I found myself trying to puzzle out how to relay the contents of an out of scene conversation in direct dialogue. I totally blanked on how to do it.
One of the reasons my dialogue was so clunky, I was coming at it from the wrong angle. I was writing it for the reader (and thereby making it come across as information) instead of writing it for the characters to deliver and receive (thereby becoming an extension of their personality). Sounds easy, right?
Dialogue needs to do two things: it needs to advance the plot AND simultaneously reveal character.
O’Connor’s opening is a master class in this:
THE GRANDMOTHER didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”
Immediately we know who the grandmother is. She’s opinionated and conniving—trying to shame her son so that she can get her way.
Bailey doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look up from his paper. A non-response can be even more powerful than a response. One can assume that this is not the first time that he has heard this argument. If we know anything about the grandmother, we know she is a talker. Nagging is the only power she has.
The narrator does not need to tell us who June Star and John Wesley are. We easily see that in the way they sass the grandmother:
“If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?”
“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss
something. She has to go everywhere we go.”
Dialogue sets a rhythm to the work. It sets a tone. (Here, everyone speaks their mind—for better or worse.) The book I’m currently reading is a procedural. The dialogue is quick, ping ponging back and forth as the partners try and tease out clues and motivations. Earlier, I read a social novel that centers on a neighborhood where get-togethers and parties dominated the scenes. Dialogue, especially in the form of gossip, was the backbone of that story. Afterwards I read a quieter book, concerned with memory and making sense of the past. It had very little dialogue, the exchanges short when they occurred. All of these choices seem right for the kinds of books they are.
The exchange that the grandmother has with Red Sammy in The Tower comes across as realistic. I could probably go to a half dozen different diners around town this week and hear some variation of this conversation — the world is changing. We wish it weren’t and we don’t know how to make sense of it.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I
remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right.
When we think of dialogue, we primarily think of direct dialogue, but indirect dialogue (as in the grandmother’s opinion about Europe above) and summary dialogue (the stories that she tells in the car) have their uses too. (Especially useful when one character is conveying something the reader already knows or something that is so routine that the reader can fall back on their own experience.)
The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel.
The reader doesn’t need the exact phrasing. Only the chaos of it.
O’Connor is great at making emotion come through via dialogue.
“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!”
“But nobody’s killed,” June Star said.
Baily’s frustration as he says some variation of this over and over: “Listen,” Bailey began, “we’re in a terrible predicament! Nobody realizes what this is,”
The anguish of the grandmother when she calls out “Bailey Boy!” knowing that he’s been shot.
How do you get characters to sound like real people? Start eavesdropping. Go to those places where your characters hang out. Start noticing how people talk. In fragments. In paragraphs. With varying tics and catchphrases. (Think about how much is conveyed in Gatsby’s calling everyone sport.) Is your character an interrupter? Do they use slang? In my novel, I have one who is from the country and one who’s a know it all. One who’s very religious. A psychiatrist. Someone who’s quick to anger. All of these traits dictate how they talk and what they say.
We know that the grandmother is racist by the stories and language that she uses. Seeing her do this is far more effective than if the narrator told us she was.
Consider too, that most dialogue doesn’t match up precisely. That each character brings their own agenda to the conversation.
I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!”
The grandmother assumes that this is what The Misfit wants to hear because this is what she values most.
In general, it’s difficult to convey backstory via dialogue but The Misfit does tell the grandmother about his past. I think it works here because they are strangers. The grandmother doesn’t know anything about him. He’s trying to convey his past as a means to understand the kind of person he is. It’s not simply listing out the events of his life.
“Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!”‘
Sparks.
This is a very specific dialogue exercise I found years ago in the internet. I wish that I had source information. But alas.
A: a line of dialogue of six words or less
B: no spoken response- provide a gesture by B
A: a line of dialogue of six words or less
B: two complete sentences of dialogue
A: two words of dialogue
B: a line of dialogue of ten words or more
A: no spoken response-provide an action by A
B: a line of dialogue of six words or less
Provide description of the body language of A and B in relation to each other.
A: a line of dialogue beginning with "I remember..."
B: a line of dialogue commenting on something in the setting
A: a line of dialogue that is a question
B: a line of dialogue beginning with "I used to believe..."
Describe an object that is part of the setting
A: a line of dialogue that is a question
B: no spoken response-describe B handling an object in the setting
A: tells a brief story in dialogue
B: a line of dialogue beginning with "You never" or "I never"
A: no spoken response-describe a gesture by A
Or: Put your characters in a car and make them have a difficult conversation.
Revision: Find a spot where the dialogue is meh. How can you better convey what the characters want? Or what they definitely don’t want. (Consider their fears and how their fears might dictate what they agree to.) Perhaps a character needs to really speak their mind and break the other character’s heart.
Other tidbits.
A great Alan Shapiro poem about eavesdropping.
If you’ve got something on the theme of forgiveness, SubTerrain has a call that expires at midnight. Tiny Journal is looking for flash about climate change by the end of the month. Decomp is open for fiction, poetry, and CNF until Aug. 1. The Offing is open for fiction and micros until Aug. 2.
Barrelhouse Books has a call for novella length CNF that focuses on pop culture through Aug. 1. Doesn’t have to be completed manuscript.
Creative Nonfiction is looking for online instructors and course proposals through July 31.
That’s it from here, scribblers. It’s a beautiful day for making your characters talk. Pencil’s up~
Marsha