Scene structure cures dull dialogue · 12:20am Dec 12th, 2013
Dialog killed several of my stories. Long stretches where one character had to communicate something complex to another character. Boring.
Equestria Daily wanted me to liven up the dialog with more description and more body language. This never helped. But I found a different way to deal with the problem after reading chapter 4 (“The Scene”) of Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure and chapters 7 & 8 ("Dialogue" and "Details") from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, and from studying Augustus Burroughs’ thrilling prose about mundane things in Running With Scissors.
Every scene, Bickham says, must:
1. Have two characters who have opposing goals
2. Start by establishing the protagonist's goal in that scene and how it's important to the story goal
3. Have active conflict between the two characters
4. End in a setback for the protagonist.
Scene goals, Bickham says, must not be vague or philosophical, but specific and immediate, so that the reader can say at the end of the scene whether they were achieved.
Dialogue, Prose says, must always do several things at once. It conveys verbal information between characters, but also their attitudes towards each other, towards life, dominance and submission, attention and inattention, and, to the reader, their true intentions. Above all, each character in the dialogue must have a goal, a reason to be talking or listening, to determine what they say and don't say.
Description, she says (and I'm paraphrasing heavily), is not like setting a stage or taking a photograph. She emphasizes the use of small details, but the lesson I take from her examples from famous stories, and from Burroughs' writing, is a different one: Don't describe things because they're in the room. Describe things that pop out to the viewpoint character because of what they're thinking.
This requires you to know what they’re thinking. And that requires them to be thinking.
Similarly, body language should not be used just to space out the dialog. Filling out bland dialogue with generic body language–"she bit her lip," "he stamped his hoof," "she blinked"–is not very helpful. They're not bad. I probably use at least one of these three expressions in every chapter of every story. But if all the character experiences are generic emotions–anxiety, impatience, shock–then you don't have a character, but a plot device. A character has a goal in every scene, and that goal suggests what details the character notices and what they do with their body. Making every character have a goal or at least a train of thought will give you the body language, descriptive details, and conflict to keep dialogue exciting.
Here’s a version (story draft 3, revision 3, if you’re curious) of one scene in a story that gave me a lot of trouble called "Moving On". Twilight has just fled the palace after failing to get in to see Luna.
She wasn't sure how much later it was when a bright light shone in her eyes, the door pulled away from her, and she fell inward and landed sprawled on the tile floor of the donut shop. She wiped her eyes and saw Pony Joe looking down at her.
"Well! If it isn't Twilight Sparkle!" he boomed. "Ponygirl, just knock if you want a donut that badly."
"Thank you," she said quietly, taking the hoof he held out to her and pulling herself to all four feet. "Sorry to bother you. I was just leaning, on the door, you know. Catching my breath."
"Yeah, sure," Joe said, shutting the door behind her. "Come on, catch your breath at this table here." He led her to the table she'd seen through the window, then disappeared behind the counter. All the shop's shelves were bare. She heard him pulling trays out of racks, then shoving them back in with a huff of irritation, before finally saying, "Hah! Gotcha!"
He trotted back out with a large paper bag in his mouth, which he dropped onto the table. "Just what you wanted! Day-old muffins!"
Twilight opened the bag and drew out a muffin. She sniffed it. "Cranberry."
"Yeah, I save the left-over berry ones for Derpy. Otherwise she just digs through the trash for them." Joe shook another muffin out of the bag and took a bite out of it.
"Derpy's in Canterlot?" Twilight asked through a mouthful of crumbs.
"You didn't know? She was getting a little old to fly all over Ponyville. She's got a foot route now." Joe took another bite, grimaced, and swallowed. He grinned. "Hoo boy! These are terrible. I made 'em this morning."
Twilight laughed, spitting muffin across the table onto Pony Joe's white hat. "I wasn't going to say anything!"
Joe reclosed the bag. "Let's just save the rest for Derpy. She ain't very fussy, but that girl sure can eat." He leaned across to Twilight and touched her foreleg lightly. "Did I ever tell you about her 'banana split muffin'? One banana muffin, one cherry muffin, one chocolate-chip—all at the same time! Just stuffs them all in and starts chewing." Twilight giggled—it was all too easy to imagine exactly how Derpy would have grinned while eating it. "So just then this cello player from the orchestra comes in, mane all tidy, spotless grey coat. Derpy sees her and runs over to tell her how good it is! Only, her mouth's still full of muffin, see?"
Joe went on to describe the inevitable scene of muffin-induced shock and outrage. Twilight re-envisioned it in her mind. It was so easy to imagine Pinkie and Rarity doing the same thing.
She realized that Joe had stopped talking and was just looking at her, and that she was crying again. "It's nothing," she said. "Just thinking about some old friends."
"Nothing wrong with that," Joe said. "I bet you got some stories too."
Twilight wiped her eyes, and started talking. She told Joe about how special a treat donuts were when she was a filly, and how grown-up she'd felt when she could finally afford to buy donuts herself. "Even now, knowing that I can just walk into a donut shop and buy a double-glazed if I want to makes me feel powerful."
Then she told him about the night of the Gala. "In the end," she concluded, "all the fancy food and music and dancing wasn't as sweet as sharing donuts with friends."
"Aw, I coulda told you that," Joe said.
Bleah. This is realistic, the boring way life is realistic. Joe is trying to be entertaining, but why? He’s chatting, projecting some personality; but without a purpose, it’s just aimless small talk. He’s flirting, but only in the automatic, disinterested way habitual to dominant males. Twilight passively listens to Joe ramble aimlessly. The scene does what my outline said it had to do (“cheer Twilight up enough for her to make another try”), but that structural task doesn’t engage the reader. Nopony has a goal.
So I decided on a “grass is greener” scenario: I’d already shown that Twilight feels her life is empty because she’s given up having a family for meaningless and abstract academics. So she envies Joe for being a physical creator, and sees his creation of food that sustains life as analogous to creating life as a mother, though she feels no romantic stirrings. Joe, meanwhile, had a thing for Twilight in the past, and is eager to impress her, but feels his humble profession must seem boring to an important pony like Twilight. I didn’t plan any of that when I first put Twilight in Pony Joe’s shop. The setting and characters suggested it.
Twilight’s goal at this point in the story is to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The question running through her mind in the scene is now, “How does what I’ve done with my life stack up against what Pony Joe has done with his?” Pony Joe’s goal is to impress Twilight, and he achieves it even while thinking he’s failed. These aren’t the kind of specific, yes/no goals Bickham wants, and the scene isn’t a protagonist/antagonist conflict as Bickham wants, but I think that’s Bickham’s problem, not mine.
Here’s the final version (draft 3, revision 23) of the scene. Joe doesn’t laugh at himself so easily, or maintain continual good cheer. His muffins embarrass and depress him. When Twilight compares making muffins to giving birth, meaning it as a great compliment, and when she brushes crumbs off him as if he were a colt, it just insults his bruised masculine ego more. The things described—Joe's gray hair and bright eyes, the bakery’s bare racks waiting eagerly to be filled, the helpless muffin, the crumb on Joe’s hat, his scent of yeast (a living thing)—are described because they’re relevant to these goals and to the trains of thoughts they create. It’s much longer and yet, I think, more interesting.
(I described things relevant to Joe’s thoughts even though we’re in Twilight’s point of view. That might be the wrong thing to do for some stories. But Twilight is oblivious in these scene, and yet I wanted the reader to catch on to what Joe was feeling.)
She wasn't sure how much later it was when the door pulled away from her, a bright light shone in her eyes, and she fell inward and landed sprawled on the tile floor. She wiped her eyes and saw Pony Joe looking down and blinking at her. He had some gray in his mane as well, but his eyes soon lit up as brightly as ever.
"Well! I ain't going crazy in my old age! It is Twilight Sparkle!" he boomed. "Ponygirl, just knock if you want a donut that badly."
"Thank you," she said quietly, taking the big hoof he held out to her and pulling herself to all fours. "Sorry to bother you. I was just leaning, on the door, you know. Catching my breath."
"Yeah, sure," Joe said, shutting the door behind her. He ran one hoof over his cap, straightening it. "Come on, catch your breath at this table here." He led her to the table she'd seen through the window, then disappeared behind the counter.
The shop's shelves were bare. The counter, the drying racks, the narrow, downward-sloping wire trays on the back wall that were lined with paper and filled with donuts during the day, were spotlessly clean, waiting for the day, full of purpose.
"Joe? It's okay. I don't need anything. Really, I should be going."
"Just stay right there," he called. "Won't be a minute." She heard him pulling trays out of racks, then shoving them back in with a huff of irritation before finally saying, "Hah! Gotcha!"
He trotted back out with a large paper bag in his mouth, and dropped it onto the table. "Just what you wanted! Day-old muffins! On the house."
Twilight opened the bag and drew out a muffin. She hefted it, felt its weight. This was a real thing, that real ponies wanted, and Joe had made it, here in his workshop of wheat and hay. "Cranberry," she whispered.
"Yeah, I save the left-over berry ones for Derpy. If I try throwing 'em out, I have to bag 'em real tight or she'll like as not smell them and dig them right out." Joe shook another muffin out of the bag and took a bite out of it.
Twilight's muffin crumbled too easily, disintegrating into a dry, tasteless powder that stuck behind her gums. "Derpy's in Canterlot?" she asked through a mouthful of crumbs.
"You didn't know? She was getting a little old to fly all over Ponyville. She's got a foot route now. Still wings it sometimes. Don't have to, though."
"I don't know how she does it," Twilight said. "Trace over the same route, day after day."
Joe stopped chewing and swallowed. "Guess that seems pretty dull to somepony like yourself, Miss Sparkle." He checked his cap again, then glanced around the shop with the air of a pony who unexpectedly found himself entertaining Canterlot nobility in his home and hadn't even had time to clean up. Which, Twilight realized with a start, was technically the case here.
"I musta baked about a million muffins here," he said. "And three million donuts." His foreleg fell to the table, hoof up. The remaining half of his muffin rolled out, flopped over, and lay upside down like a helpless turtle.
Twilight reached over and laid her hoof on his. "Joe." He looked up. "Your muffins are amazing."
"Yeah?" Joe took another bite and grimaced, as if noticing its dryness for the first time. "Hoo boy. You're being nice, Miss Sparkle. These are terrible."
Twilight laughed, spitting muffin fragments. A large brown crumb landed in the center of Pony Joe's white baker's cap and stuck there. "I wasn't going to say anything!"
"I made 'em this morning. You shoulda been here then." Joe shook the muffins to the bottom of the bag. The crumb on his cap rocked back and forth as he folded it closed again. "Let's save the rest for Derpy. She'd eat a muffin-shaped rock and like it." He noticed Twilight's eyes on his cap, and felt around until he found the crumb and flicked it off. "Sorry I tried to give you these lousy muffins, Miss Sparkle. But I haven't got anything else."
"Joe. I don't mean these particular muffins are amazing. I mean, you take bags of flour, sugar, all those things, and you mix and knead and roll and bake. And then...." Twilight remembered once watching Joe take muffins out of the oven. She remembered feeling the warm air wash over her, and that powerful odor, the kind only things that are or have been alive ever have. The rows of muffins swiftly but carefully extracted onto a drying rack, small round tops perfect as foals' hooves, all the same yet all different. "It's like giving birth."
Joe scratched the back of his head. "Uh, thanks." He bit down on the bag of old muffins, yanked it off the table, and scuttled back into the kitchen.
"I mean, in a masculine way!" Twilight called out over the abrupt scraping and banging of metal shelves. "It's, uh, Joe? I mean, it matters. Baking food, feeding ponies—it gives you a purpose."
Joe shuffled back over to the table with a brush, held in his mouth as if he were an earth pony, and began whisking the crumbs off the table carelessly, getting several on Twilight and on himself. He finished and spit out the brush. "My purpose is to make you donuts?"
"Oh, Joe, I didn't mean it like that." She took a step toward him and brushed off the crumbs still clinging to his apron, ignoring those on herself. "I mean, look at me. I manage the library budget, hire and train and sometimes fire, write flattering letters to donors. But my purpose, my reason for being, is to help ponies check out books. If I ... vanished, all that would happen is that a few ponies would wonder how they were going to get their next bad romance novel."
Joe stared at her. "I don't get it," he finally said.
"You don't?"
"Making donuts is just what I do. You're a smart pony. You should know that." He moved on to the other tables and brushed them each off in turn, bending down low to inspect each tabletop from a low angle.
"Huh," Twilight said. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Ask Derpy. She knows," Joe answered without pausing in his work.
Twilight walked across the room to look over Joe's shoulder. "Joe? Are you mad at me?"
Joe sighed and set down his brush. "No, Twilight, I ain't mad. Just tired."
"Sorry." She headed for the door.
"Wait."
She froze where she was.
Joe walked up from behind and stood next to her in front of the door, breathing heavily. The entranceway was a little small for two ponies. He smelled like yeast and flour. "I ain't that tired. Can we start again?"
Twilight turned her muzzle towards his. "Do I have to fall down on the floor again?"
"You don't have to," Joe said. "But it was kinda cute."
Ooh, really informal. Thanks!
It's really interesting reading a proper deconstruction and learning why things sound right or wrong to me. Calling out scene details because they pertain to what the perspective character is thinking is something I tried to do by instinct. It's an instinct finely honed over millions of words reading, but you can't learn from an instinct. You've got to know why you do a thing if you're going to do it better.
I guess it's not just the character that has to be thinking.
I really love these sorts of blog posts. Mostly because, personally, I have a hard time reading writing guides such as the ones you mentioned because I get lost in the prose, but your blogs make it all much more clear and concise. Thank you for that.
The first version isn't bad for fanfic, but the second one's much better, I agree. More dynamic. More participation by both characters.
And of course you can't just blurt out the scene's central metaphor. You'd sound like a big nerd. So you let Twilight do it for you. Perfectly in character for her!
(" '...It's just like giving birth.' Christ, Horse, you can write this stuff but you can't say it--I TURNED DOWN THAT PETER S. BEAGLE PROJECT FOR THIS?..."
)
How are your followers supposed to have a conversation, when you keep kicking out new blog posts for us to read every 45 minutes!?
Moving On is a great inspiration of mine, incidentally. We all want stories to just sort of pop out of our heads in full battle-dress all Athena-like, but generally that's not how things work. Moving On shows that you can make a great story by perseverance and determined cleverness.
As for the point of this post, I think it stands quite well, though not in the way the original writers intended. What the quoted advice says is a bit too formulaic. I'm sure it produces a fine enough effect, but I am suspicious of any writing advice that lays out what you ought to do, step by step, as if writing was assembling a flat-pack piece of furniture[1].
What does stand, I think, is that you can't 'spice-up' a dull scene. I mean, you might be able to get away with doing it a bit--insert a beat here, reformulate a sentence there--but fundamentally there's no alchemy that takes a dull slab of prose and improves it by sprinkling descriptors. Instead, interest in a scene comes from within, it comes from serving the story.
By serving the story I think that all description, and, indeed, all dialogue should tell us more about the plot, tell us more about the character, tell us more about the theme, or tell us something that sets the mood of the story. The first few things are obvious--write your story, don't just mess about--but the last isn't. It's a little neglected seeing as how the contemporary short story, especially, is seen as at its best when an example of, ah, bonsai prose. All trimmed down and spare--not a word too much. But that's not the only way to write, and if you want a story that sounds garrulous or cheerful or whatnot you may need to add what appears to be extraneous description for, in some way, meta reasons.
But I digress. The point is, description isn't good on its own. Dialogue isn't good on its own. Nothing is. If it isn't serving the needs of the story, it's just chaff.
I have to admit, I don't take my own advice. My writing process is not very advanced sometimes, I fear. All too often I just write things in a certain way because, well, that's how they happened. It might turn out that they fulfill some criteria for good writing, sure, but that's a question that generally only comes up in editing. Until then I just sort of channel things from the Pony Dimension. It's fun, but I should probably come up with something a shade more repeatable.
[1] If it is, it is my curse to always lose that l-shaped spannery thing, and be utterly incapable of finding 'tab B.'
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I don't know what powers Bad Horse, but, damn it, I want some.
1598509
A lot of coffee with half and hoof? Maybe some sugar cubes?
1598517
'Half and hoof.'
1598509 1598517 But you know what powers me.
Evil. Pure evil.
That, and unemployment. I was funded by the Human Microbiome Project, which is now over. Must resist urge to pony 18 hours per day.
You've both pointed out (Bradel on his blog) that Bickham's advice is, er, imperfect. Bickham was a prolific writer of books on how to write, all geared towards writing bestselling action novels. I blogged about him in "My Strange Hero". All his rules sound like advice on how to avoid writing literary fiction. I think they're defaults: You should violate them sometimes, but not without knowing that you're doing it.
I have a similar rule of thumb for ensuring that I've got enough conflict, which is that every scene should have (1) a character the reader cares about, (2) something she wants, and (3) a reason she can't have it. (Well, my actual rule is just "have conflict," but the three-step thing helps me realize if it's missing and points towards how to fix it.) I think the "opposing goals" and "end in a setback" bits of Bickham's procedure are sufficient, but not necessary, for ensuring a conflict exists.
1598635
Yeah, I was pretty sure that I recognized the name from that blog—though not quite willing to dig through and check to be sure.
I can see what he's getting at, but to me it feels like some of the bad EQD advice I've seen (sort of as I alluded to on said blog). It's prescriptive rather than proactive—it tells you what to do, rather than asking you why you ought to do it.
I know my writing process is very different from yours, and I think perhaps different from Ghost's as well, but the rules he lays out above just feel inutterably alien to me. I can't imagine trying to force characters into those positions. It feels less "they should have sent a poet" and more "they should have sent a contortionist".
I feel like there's a lot I can learn from your process, and I've already started to become more aware of what I'm doing and more okay with the long editing process, rather than going to the old write, mad-dash-edit, and post style I learned, regrettably, while haunting the halls of ff.net. But to me, I've always found characters to be an organic construction, and I've always had an easier time with the mental geometry of shaping a situation to their personalities than of shaping them to a narrative.
This is a long-standing thing for me. Back in the day, I had a friend in film editing who would make anime music videos, and we'd often brainstorm which songs matched up well to the characters and stories of various series. On evidence, this seemed to be an unusual approach, since the AMV-makers of the day were more interested in mashing stories onto the newest hit song and creating questionable lyrical and tonal matches.
Character is the one thing I feel like I have a bit of a talent for. Plot, setting, and theme are all things that take varying degrees of work, and some characters are a lot easier for me than others, but I always find it to be easier to get inside their head and essentially role-play them into a flexible narrative situation until I can figure out the curves and bank shots that will get them where I want them to go. But, admittedly, that's my process and perhaps it's unfair of me to say that Bickham is full of crap on this, because it's not like I have a monopoly on correct writing technique.
That said, I just feel like—if you can do it—the Prose approach is a lot better. Inhabit your characters, let them think and live, and let the scene unfold naturally. This is why there are a few parts of your second version that, while I'm sure you like, I don't. They just feel forced on. And I think you kind of cut to the heart of some of that in the blog post above. The perspective is Twilight's, and I feel like it should be Twilight's. Giving us things that are external to what she'd notice, putting thoughts in her head and asking her to pursue them, that feels weird to me. What I'd find more natural—myself, anyway—is an unfolding of her perspective throughout the scene. It feels like that's in line with what you're shooting for in the scene, but for example, while I love the description of the empty shelves, it feels to me like it would flow more naturally as a bit of scene detail she observed during the birth conversation, that this environment she finds herself in is what's driving the thoughts about purpose and creation in her head. This is kind of present subliminally in the scene, so maybe I'm just taking sides for a less elegant and more heavy-handed approach—I don't claim that my ideas of craft are the best. But it feels to me that the whole conversation, which is a little weird, would feel more organic if the reader were able to witness the way this setting, these events, work on the known character of Twilight to effect this particular chain of events.
I'm not sure if this was the point of my comment here or if I've just become impossibly lost in my own tangent, but anyway, I thought it was a great blog post.
1598635
You know, you'd get a lot more converts to the Evil League of Evil among sciency-techy types if you marketed Evil as an energy drink of sorts.
Human Microbiome Project. I forget--sometimes--the true extents of your awesome.
Oh, that's him. I remember your strange hero--I was thinking of him just recently--but I forgot the name.
A sincere thank you, good sir, I learned a ton from those two scenes.
But a masterpiece must be born with effort, eh? 
Although... 23 revisions... kinda painful.
1598690 Thanks for the feedback about that scene! I don't think I'll rewrite it, for lack of time, but your analysis sounds plausible.
1598509
When I was about 19 I was working in the aerospace industry as a co-op, precisely where is a story for another time. As I was an Electrical Engineering major I didn't actually know much about aircraft construction so one kind soul took it upon himself to tell me an important principal of aircraft (and spacecraft) design:
Every line must do more than one job. For example a wing spar might also be a cable tray as well as a return path for an electrical circuit. Fuel tanks are pressurized to maintain structural integrity, and you can therefor dispense with heavy girders that might otherwise do the same task. Etcetera.
I was at the same time writing (bad) poetry, and it occurred to me that the same principle applied. Every line, every word must do more than one job. Each phrase has to advance an argument, extend a metaphor, fill out a character--how else can you cram a whole "season of sweet sad regret" into 140 syllables? And that's not even getting into the additional complexities of narrative poetry, which I was even then attempting.
And I quickly realized that this applied to prose, as well.
So that is how I write. Everything word of dialog, as natural as I hope it will seem, must do double and triple duty. Every prop or bit of scenery, the weather, what the characters smell on the breeze or hear in the background and the words that I use to describe these things--everything must multitask. And so my writing is laborious and slow and smells of the lamp, but with practice it will get better and come more quickly.
Right? O yet we trust...
I fixed it:
Every word must tell.
William Strunk would be proud.