OPWA: Episode Fourteen · 6:13pm Apr 10th, 2018

Overpriced Writing Advice
Where you can learn the stuff I paid thousands of dollars to have taught to me, for free.

Dialogue

I'm going to be frank-- I didn't plan on writing this until this morning, and even then, my original thought was to make this an ordinary blog post. I'd been watching the Nerdwriter's video on Noah Baumbach's dialogue from the film 'The Meyerowitz Stories' and it got me really thinking about how we approach dialogue in writing. The Nerdwriter even acknowledges that anything on paper is not going to be able to achieve the kind of multifaceted complexity that films can achieve. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't strive to bring our readers something dynamic and engaging. Of course not. But our methods will be different.

Reading is a participatory art. The reader is the one who gives flesh to the world, to the voices. The writer is simply laying the groundwork to make this possible.

Dialogue is the tricky tightrope we walk between showing and telling. How much of the accent should be inferred? Should I let the wording speak for the emotion, and how much is too much?

For instance:

"This coffee maker is going into the trash!" does lack the character saying, "I hate this coffee maker," which would totally be more telling.

But--

"You know what this coffee maker reminds me of? My aunt. She was a stingy witch who smoked and didn't work either."

Far less telling. You can infer what the character feels about this machine.

Now, it's true that people don't talk like that all the time. When I'm fiending for a cup and half-awake, the most I might say may very well be, "I hate this coffee maker." What we have to remember here is that we can still write realistic sounding dialogue like Noah Baumbach's (or even idealized dialogue like Quentin Tarantino's) but the real point is that it has to entertain.

Typically, a conversation has someone leading it for a time. What this means is that, whatever subject is being discussed is being primarily driven by one person, with others listening and responding. If the conversation is functional and isn't being interrupted, the leader of the conversation will either exhaust the topic and start a new one, or allow someone else to lead for a while. Interjections and dialogue takeovers are typically kept to a minimum in prose. In film and tv, like in the above example from the Nerdwriter, it is easier to convey dysfunctionally chaotic conversations (i.e. people talking over each other, more than one person attempting to lead a conversation, etc.)

Advanced writing can demonstrate just about all of these things except the multiple speakers at the same time bit. I mean, you can say characters are speaking simultaneously, but it just doesn't have the same effect as in film or tv. To help keep a complex dialogue from getting overwhelming, you're gonna wanna demonstrate your characters voices through what they say without having to rely on dialogue tags (ex: Jack said,) and narrative descriptions. Lemme share an example from my story Her Collar, Her Love with the narrative descriptions taken out:

Rarity? Hi! Is something wrong? You look like something’s wrong. Something’s wrong isn’t it? Did Pinkie pretend she was a mad scientist again?

Of the Main 6, who do you think that is?

.
..
...

...If you guessed Twilight Sparkle, then you get a gold star!

Among Twilight's various traits are a sense of responsibility, a hyper intellect, and some good ol' fashioned anxiety. Before Rarity can even respond to her, she's jumped four steps ahead and dreaded the worst (implying that she's recently cleaned up an issue that likely involved Pinkie Pie). Recognizing your character's accent and demonstrating it is just part of the battle. The real trick is understanding their speech pattern, and how their personality manifests through that. A good exercise to try is to write dialogue by itself-- not even script format, but just:

"I like hamburgers."
"Really? Me too!"

Floating dialogue style. No descriptive tags, no narrative scene-setting, nada... The point is to make the characters sound distinct enough without giving away names or actions. After you write that, give it to a friend. Ask them what they can tell about the characters just from what you wrote. The goal is for your friend to be able to see two very different people having a conversation, and to be able to pick out details of who they are.

Another thing that can help with a complex dialogue? Mapping. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and groan, but I'm serious.

Take this scene from one of my longtime favorite shows: Dead Like Me

Mason is the fellow on the left, Roxy is on the right. Red indicates the one leading the conversation. I put a little asterisk every time this pivots and someone else takes the lead (or tries to take the lead).

Mason: Where's Betty?
Roxy: Baby-sitting.
Mason: I never had a baby-sitter.
Roxy: Doesn't mean you didn't need one.
*
Roxy: I'm gonna get a pet bird.
Mason: Don't get a bird.
Roxy: Why not?
Mason: They're weird. I can't relate to a bird. They're so far removed. They've got different chromosomes, and they come from eggs.
Roxy: They've got faces.
Mason: So do cockroaches.
*
Mason: What are you gonna do with a bird?
Roxy: Stick it in a cage and feed it.
Mason: You should at least get one you can eat.
Roxy: I'm gonna get a friend. I'm not gonna eat my friend.
Mason: They have brains the size of pistachios. It's not smart enough to be your friend.
*
Roxy: You don't know that. I saw this special on PBS called Animal Miracles. They did a dramatic re-enactment about a guy being robbed. He had a parrot or a cockatiel. That bird lost its shit when its owner was attacked. It opened its cage--
*
Mason: What use is a cage if it can open the door?
*
Roxy: Where else would you put it? It opened up its cage and went crazy. Pecked out the robber's eyes, scratched his face like he was Tippi Hedren. Don't you tell me that's not friendship.
Mason: How big was this parrot?
Roxy: I don't know. Parrot-size.
Mason: A parrot can't take on a man unless that man is a big pussy.
Roxy: I didn't say the parrot won. The robber stabbed it with a fork and killed its owner. The bird's dead.
*
Mason: So why get one?
Roxy: It's not about homeland security, you stupid motherfucker. I'm gonna get a friend! Jesus.

Notice how in the middle, Mason attempts to wrest control of the conversation again, and Roxy shuts this down. You see, leading a conversation (or 'driving it' might be the better term) isn't so much about who talks the most. It's who establishes what is being discussed and responded to. This was an easy example to help demonstrate the multiple pivots a conversation can have, and the little conflicts that can arise when people compete to steer it, but this 'mapping' would also work for more complex conversations. If you feel like something is off about your dialogue, or readers are complaining that it feels hard to follow and unfocused, then try doing the above exercise with your work.

(Originally I wanted to use a different scene from Dead Like Me where two conversations between four people were happening simultaneously, and the characters were getting confused as to what they were even responding to. Sadly, I couldn't find that clip and I'm a little pressed for time! If anyone else finds it, lemme know.)

Of course, sometimes tension and conflict can come up because a character refuses to follow the natural flow of conversation. Take the first coin flip scene from No Country For Old Men:

It's just... such a good scene. This linguist does a faaaar better job than I ever could on breaking down why this is so great with conflict and tension, but I will say this: people miscommunicate by way of accident. Some people refuse to communicate entirely by choice. Language as a form of expression affords us another way of exacting power over others. Demonstrating this in your dialogue will fascinate your readers.

Last thoughts on dialogue... play with rhythm. The cadence of speech in real life can be messy, but it's better to suggest chaos than give in to it. Remember that film can do things prose can't. Going for something more poetic and idealized? Read your work aloud and see how it sounds to you.

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