Bradel Bookwork – On Dialogue and Character · 3:12am Dec 12th, 2013
So, I gave y'all a new chapter. Tonight, I give you a blog post. On December 23rd, with any luck, I give you a new story.
This is one of those rejoinder blog things. Bad Horse went up with a couple nice posts today, one on comedy vs. humor and another on dull dialogue. If you're new to my blogging and/or the site, Bad Horse is one of those people you should be keeping your eye on, because he frequently has fantastic things to say about writing. I don't always agree with them, but they're still worth the attention of anyone interested in the craft of writing.
The one I'm interested in today is his piece on dull dialogue. Let me excerpt his organizational statement, for those of you who haven't already gone and read his post:
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 gradually realized 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.
Mr. Ed Bad Horse provides a couple examples from his own work (he's a pretty good writer, y'know), giving a scene both pre- and post-revision. He takes a bit of exception with Bickham's framing, and on this point we're in total agreement.
Because if you ask me, Francine Prose has hit the nail on the head here, and Jack Bickham is full of crap.
Ignore for a moment that Bickham's construction requires a very broad definition of either "character" and "goal" or "scene" to make any general sense. Ignore that it basically denies the usefulness of any large-scale use of narrative setup and foreshadowing, requiring conflict in every scene. It still states that the protagonist's scene-level goals must always be transparent and that every scene must end with a setback for the protagonist.
I could continue at length on how wrongheaded I think this is, with some examples, but I suspect that'd get old quickly, so let me instead lay out my own attitude on the matter.
During my misguided abortive tenure as an EQD pre-reader, I saw a bit of the dialogue advice Bad Horse mentioned above, and it always rubbed me the wrong way. Your dialogue is boring, so you should start breaking it up with descriptions of body language or environmental stimuli? That's... some dodgy advice. There are certainly particular instances in which this is a reasonable proposal, but they miss the crux of the problem: boring dialogue is boring. You might be able to make it look a little less boring by dressing it up in fancy imagery, but there's an important difference between circumventing a problem and fixing it.
Here's the thing: writing should be dense. Wasted words are a no-no. Ideally, what you write should simultaneously communicate important information about (1) character, (2) setting, (3) plot, and (4) theme. Obviously, it's hard to capture all of these at once, but the more buttons you can press together, the better—within reason. Hitting a lot of hot points at the same time in a clunky fashion is probably worse than hitting a couple smoothly in a way that doesn't screw with the reader's immersion in the writing, so of course skill level plays into this.
One thing that's important here, though, is that any passage that doesn't at least build on one of these four areas is probably a passage you should cut. Nobody wants to know how Twilight Sparkle gets from Golden Oaks Library to Sugar Cube Corner, unless there's something important at play. Describing the route she takes is probably not a good use of your words or your readers' time.
But to get back to the topic of dialogue and Bad Horse's blog posts, I think that the advice by Francine Prose hits on one of the best things writers can do to multi-task their words.
In all good writing, characters have a life of their own. They aren't simply tools by which the writer can drive a plot, they're independent agents acting in a scenario. To my mind, one of the keys to interesting stories is the particular arrangement of character traits and situational cues that funnel characters, naturally and unobtrusively, in the direction of the plot.
This should be a familiar idea to anyone who's ever run a roleplaying session with a pack of unruly characters. You can either steamroller them in one direction (which makes for unhappy players / boring writing), or you can find a way to tap into the common motivations they share so that they'll all legitimately choose to do the thing you want them to do. The key, as always, is motivation. And motivation means getting inside a character's head.
Brandon Sanderson (yes, yes, I know I belong to the Cult of Sanderson) wrote up a series of posts on his own site recently about the experience of finishing the Wheel of Time series, and he made an observation that I was a little surprised by, given that I thought he'd have figured it out earlier on. It's the same observation Bad Horse credited to Francine Prose above. When you're writing from a character's perspective, you need to inhabit that perspective. What you describe is what they notice, and you describe it in the way that they notice it[1].
Here's a thought exercise for you. Whatever room you're in right now, look around it for a moment. Notice the details. Not just what's in that room, but how neat it is, how objects are laid out.
Now imagine that Twilight Sparkle walked into that room. What would she notice. How about Rarity—what would she notice? What parts of the room would they explore and learn more about? How about Pinkie Pie? Rainbow Dash?
I'm in my bedroom right now. Twilight would probably notice the massive array of books and the research notes for statistics lying about. Rarity would probably notice the mess. Pinkie Pie would either latch on to the candy bowl I keep on the end of my study desk or, in true fourth-wall-breaking fashion, the framed MLP season one poster hanging on my wall.
Rainbow Dash would probably just walk out in boredom, since all my tennis equipment is in my car. That, or she'd take a guess at the fact that my bed is comfortable (it is, very) and settle down for a nap.
I don't think dialogue requires characters to be in conflict. I think you can have great ships-in-the-night dialogue where two parties interact in a fashion that gets both of them nowhere. I think you can write collaborative brainstorming sessions and make them compelling quite easily.
What you can't do, is write dialogue without tapping into who your characters are as people.
Dialogue should be intrinsically interesting. It should be about something, so it gives you a chance to hit on buttons of plot, setting, or theme. And it should be organic to the people talking, so it should have a fundamental substrate of characterization. Dialogue is an easy way to check two Useful Prose boxes at the same time, and it's not hard to get up to three when you start picking your words to tap into theme (most dialogue fundamentally being about plot or setting). And when you're doing this, you don't need to hide your dialogue behind stage directions. Most of the best dialogue can be accomplished with little more than two words: [character] said. And if your characters have distinct, engaging voices like much of the MLP cast, you can often get by without even touching dialogue tags.
Again, I encourage you to go read Bad Horse's blog post on scene and dialogue. It's good stuff, and it'll be instructive to glance through his examples from his own writing. I personally feel like the second passage is better in some places and worse in others, that it works harder at being meaningful than at capturing the characters, but the whole thing is from a story I like and I think everyone would be well served to go take a look.
[1] This sentence deserves some serious unpacking, but I'm not going to do it right here. In any case, my point is that the way a character perceives things (beyond the simple fact of what they perceive) is one of the most integral forms of characterization you can touch on. Is a new design by Rarity beautiful, or is it impractical? Frilly? Quaint? Dynamic? Elegant? The way a character describes the world around them, in their own thoughts (their perspective in a story), says a lot about who they are and what their goals are.
Heh, I actually just posted something that touched on this last night, talking about character perspective and voice in a work. In fact, yours makes the third post I've seen today that touches on the topic. Well, at this rate, it's bound to sink in!
1598159
Off-topic but dah, I need to remember to go read some more of your stuff when I get a bit more free time back so I can decide whether to follow or not. Missing blog posts can make me sad.
That Penny Arcade strip you linked was frustrating because it fails to explain why the author hates Sanderson's books. The blog post doesn't help, because he spends most of it talking about the new Amnesia game instead. Tycho's inability to focus and elaborate on one thing is a recurring irritation inherent in his blog posts. It's as if he's decided that he's the comic's subject matter perfectly well in the strip itself, whether this is the case or not.
I rolled my eyes when he sneered all over China Mieville, but at least he gave some kind of reason why Mieville annoyed him as a writer.
Since you're jokingly defensive about your like for an author whose books I've never read, you've clearly endured criticism from more sources than Penny Arcade, and I'd be curious to hear the pros and cons of this particular author.
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Oh, no, actually I don't know that I've ever endured any criticism.
But Bad Horse goes around citing source after source about writing. Any time I talk about writing, it's basically, "This one time at BYU, Brandon Sanderson said..."
It... feels a little myopic. But I agree with so much of what he said, and I've found it so helpful in general, that it really tends to be my go-to thing.
If you want to go read some Sanderson, I'd recommend either checking out some of his short stories or The Way of Kings. The pre- Wheel of Time long fiction doesn't show as much maturity in terms of characterization and setting work, I think.
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Thanks. I feel like I need to find a way to get at the core of what each author is about, what drives them and what they write like. I'm kind of getting there, enough that I was getting a serious Stephen King vibe from The Reality Dysfunction even though that book has quite a bit of hard sci-fi elements to it.
That pony-walks-into-room example is great writing advice. It reminds me of a favorite writing exercise of mine which is to imagine, very carefully, how a character does a very mundane thing. My go-to example is "peel an orange." Grand dramatic actions are all well and good, but character really peeks out from these little everyday things we do.
1598533 Adding to GoH, it's not only what a character sees when they go into a room, but their reactions to the scene depends on how they perceive the scene, and their actions will flow from that. As an example, if Rarity walked into the room I'm in right now, she would notice the colors of the walls first and how they clash with the drapes (Ok, they're beach towels sewed into drapes. Sue me), and she would want to change the room, not for her, but because nopony should be forced to live in such squalor. It would distract her from what she came into the room for in the first place and allow an author to interject a second distraction inside a dialogue-heavy section.
Me: Blah, blah, blah.
Rarity: Excuse me, but while you're talking, I just need to do something with your drapes. Carry on.
Me: Blah, blah, blah.
Rarity: How fascinating. Could you hold the end of this curtain rod?
Me: Blah, blah, blah.
Rarity: Wonderful. Hold that thought, I'll only be a moment. Do you have a furnace?
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Now that's some enjoyable dialogue, that!
I...
really want to write something doing just what you describe in this journal. c.c
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And he did! See this comment and this story.
Does that make Bradel the grandfather and me the great-grandfather of that story?
Eh? What's that? Speak up, sonny!
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I suppose it does. :O TIME FER YER MEDICINE GOOMPAW
I am very, very aware at the moment that you wrote this blog a little over two years ago and your thoughts on things may have shifted, but I feel like commenting on it, so I'm gonna.
No, I'm not blog diving in the middle of the night, shut up.
Anyway, I'm left at the moment ruminating on Brickham's advice about conflict inside of scenes. I agree that his outlined ideals are...um...iffy is kinda generous. It's a highly restrictive view of the purpose and intention of story construction that feels more at home in one of those get-rich-quick formulaic "guides" to writing, like Save the Cat. Anyone who tells you such specific advice for scene construction as 'every scene must have opposing viewpoints' or 'it must end with a setback for the protagonist' is trying to sell you something. But this is tangential to what's interesting to me.
There is something to be said about likening dynamic dialogue to 'conflict.' I agree that boring dialogue is difficult to cover up with nice window-dressing and that the real solution to the problem is fixing the dialogue, but the question then becomes how to fix boring dialogue. Certainly a piece of great importance when setting about doing that is having a solid, foundational understanding of the characters who are speaking, knowing their wants and goals just as much as their general personalities and vocal affectations, and letting them drive the conversation rather than railroading them to an end goal. But I feel that advice is a much more bedrock puzzle piece of writing advice in general than it is specific to fixing dialogue. If any element of a story's structure is driven by railroading, the story as a whole suffers for it, and having clear and understandable goals driving the action leads to a more structurally resonant plot as well. Formless characters led from one end of a story to another by the plot strings can be just as boring as a conversation led in the same way.
But circling back to dialogue and specific advice on fixing it, there is a kernel of interest in the notion of scenes needing to contain conflict. Because, on a certain level, dialogue is in and of itself a form of conflict, complete with 'opposing' goals, even in an amiable conversation between friends. The conflict is one of conveying meaning and communicating ideas. Character A has something they wish to explain to character B, that's their goal, and the method they pursue it is through talking. The conflict then derives from the fact that human beings (or ponies, same dif really) can't beam their thoughts into each other's heads fully understood, so they have to make do with the tools they have at their disposal for communicating those ideas. The difficulty of this is as variable as any other sort conflict; Superman can punch out a random mook with very little effort, just as Twilight could articulate that she is at the really good part of a Daring Do book to Rainbow Dash almost instantly. She'd have a harder time explaining that with the same depth of understanding to, say, Pinkie, though. And Twilight is very articulate. Rainbow Dash would have an even harder time explaining the same thing to Pinkie, especially since she'd have the added baggage of feeling that it's maybe not a great reason to be indisposed at the moment.
So in a pretty bare bones mechanical sense, dialogue does function as a conflict between two characters. They trade blows, resolving individual exchanges both quickly or slowly, react to each other's moves, shift momentum, gain and lose the upper hand, and end the fight with a win, lose, or draw. Even fluffy conversations proceed like this, because aimless and goal free conversations feel awkward. That's what people find uncomfortable and unsettling about smalltalk most of the time, there's no goal in the communication for either side and they're left filling an empty void with words that aren't seeking to communicate anything, and it's why all the advice from extroverts given to try and teach shy people how to smalltalk better involve drawing out stuff about the other person. You're attempting to inject a goal into the conversation and make it an actual conflict of articulation vs. understanding.
Having this structure of communication in mind when writing or revising dialogue is a great tool for overcoming boring and stilted sections. Conversation that is just there to advance the plot and deliver information to a reader is that formless smalltalk. There's no goal in communication from the character piping it off, it's just plot grease. Either that or it really is smalltalk that's there taking up space because the characters should be saying something, even if they don't have anything they want to communicate with each other. Understanding the foundational aspects of the characters involved is still terribly important, as it dictates what goals they would have in communication, as well as what tools they have at their disposal for attempting that communication, but if the conversation doesn't have a framework of goals, it can still be aimless.
Not to mention that all the best parts of dialogue between characters is directly derived from the conflict of communication. It's the source of humor, where one character misunderstands the words of another either accidentally or intentionally, the source of anger, where what's being communicated doesn't agree with the character's world view, good feelings, bad feelings, strife, catharsis, all the emotional elements that can be achieved in dialogue come from the moments where characters either triumph in making their goals understood, or fail to understand each other.
...That was a lot of blathering. Hope I gave you something to chew on, but if not, I'm going to scare the crap out of you now by following you.
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I'm on my way to bed, and I'm going to want to look at this again in the morning, but I really like your take on this, and it puts me in mind of some sort of chess match metaphor for dialogue interactions, although that's probably something only Twilight (or Celestia) could consciously express.
It also makes me think of this comic in relation to Pinkie dialogue.
I've been really wanting to get back into a story I abandoned halfway through that has a lot of adversarial dialogue in it, and I'm hoping this can spur me to finally get some good progress on that tomorrow.
That's thing one. As for thing two, here's a running timeline: