Irvine Valley College

Online Creative Writing Workshop

Writing 10 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Spring 2012 - Ticket # 64580

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Instructor

Week 15 - Dialog

Everybody's talking  

1.  Assigned Reading:  

2.  Class Workshop Critique

Dialog

Everybody likes to read dialog, and few writers actually like to write it!  Readers want to hear the character talk - writers often want to TELL us about characters without doing the difficult work of getting inside their heads and figuring out what they would really say in the situation of the story!  On the other hand, this talent does come naturally to some writers, who claim they hear a character talking at the beginning stages of a story coming to light.  Whether you write dialog with effort or it comes easily to you, though, you want to make sure that the dialog you write does the job it needs to do.  Dialog should move the plot.  (Note: this means it is not primarily a tool to illustrate character - if what your character is saying is not moving the story ahead, you don't need it.)

I used to say to students that there couldn't be enough dialog in a story!  But of course, there can be far too much dialog that does nothing.  Often we see, in unpublished work, usually, a scene like this:

Gary came into the room.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi Gary!," everyone else chorused.

"What's up?"  Gary asked.

"Not much.  How about with you?"  Melinda said.

"Oh, I am fine," Gary replied.

"Good!" Peter said.

"Yes, very good!"  Melinda said.

do I need to go on?  Think about every line of dialog.  Make it count.  Let's imagine that Gary is really uncomfortable in this situaion, and he feels embarassed because he hasn't been to dinner at his family's home in a very long time.  Also, there is going to be a little issue of the money he owes Peter.  So the dialog might go -

"Helooooo," Gary said, before he was even through the door.

"Oh, Gary, how nice of you to come," his mother said.

"Yeah, we were wondering how you were," Peter added on the next beat.

"Oh, I've been fine, just fine."  Gary assured them.

"That's real good."  Melinda came in from the kitchen.

"Working, now, are you?"  Peter asked.

Here, you see, we have built up plot tension even though the reader doesn't yet know about the loan, or why Gary has been so scarce, or anything. . . and we do know, already, that Gary is welcome, in a way.

No matter what is going on at the level of actual chronological action in the story, dialog can always be used to shadow elements of the plot - you can think of it like the shadows that you would cast behind a character if you were doing a painting.  In real life, we engage in a lot of dialog that seems transparent - but if you watch closely, not much of it really is.  The nuances of meaning in what we say are so interesting!  Instead of writing the exercise this week, perhaps you can spend your extra time just listening to folks around you.  Note whether they are REALLY glad to see someone or not; whether they really intend to call them for lunch, or not; and so on.  Writers do spend a lot of time listening to conversation - (the piece you are reading by Flannery O'Connor is a great example of a writer who catches every nanobyte of meaning.  

Dialect is when the writer uses a non-standard version of language to distinguish a character.  O'Connor catches perfectly the slang of the "poor white trash" on the bus with:

His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like talking. “Can it get any hotter?” she said and removed from her purse a folding fan, black with a Japanese scene on it, which she began to flutter before her. 
“I reckon it might could,” the woman with the protruding teeth said, “but I know for a fact my apartment couldn’t get no hotter.” 
“It must get the afternoon sun, " his mother said. She sat forward and looked up and down the bus. It was half filled. Everybody was white. “I see we have the bus to ourselves,” she said. Julian cringed. 
“For a change,” said the woman across the aisle, the owner of the red and white canvas sandals. “I come on one the other day and they were thick as fleas - up front and all through.” 
“The world is in a mess everywhere,” his mother said. “I don't know how we’ve let it get in this fix.” 

or, later, with the other woman in the hat:

“Carver!” the woman said suddenly. “Come heah!” 
When he saw that the spotlight was on him at last, Carver drew his feet up and turned himself toward Julianís mother and giggled. 
“Carver!” the woman said. “You heah me? Come heah!” 
Carver slid down from the seat but remained squatting with his back against the base of it, his head turned slyly around toward Julian's mother, who was smiling at him. The woman reached a hand across the aisle and snatched him to her. He righted himself and hung backwards on her knees, grinning at Julian's mother. 

“Isn’t he cute?” Julian's mother said to the woman with the protruding teeth. 
“I reckon he is,” the woman said without conviction. 

It's best not to attempt dialect unless you have a good ear for the spoken word - and a little bit of it goes a long way.  Once you have established the fact that the character speaks this way, you need to stick with it.  But you don't need to have the character say anything unnecessary to remind us - once we have imprinted a dialect, we are likely to remember that character by a speech pattern ever after.

Somewhere in between dialog that sounds like what we normally hear (whatever that is to you) - and a recognizable accent or dialectical marker - is the unusual speech pattern.  Here is where the issue gets more complicated.  There are a myriad of ways to establish speech patterns for characters, but I tend to use one from soft psychology theory.  It is said that folks normally have one dominant mode of apprehension of reality.  They can either be VISUAL, AURAL, KINESTHETIC, OR OLFACTORY.  When I am thinking about characters, I try to give each one a different kind of orientation - knowing that characters can be neatly distinguished this way.  Look at the difference:

A character who SEES will say "I hope you see it my way."

A character who HEARS will say "Can't you hear me?"

A character who FEELS will say "I want you to weigh in on my side."

A character who SMELLS will say "Are you turning your nose up at my ideas?"

And these habits of language, the propensity to reflect reality in the dominant mode of sensory operation, will be reflected in everything the character says - really!

Most writers are SEE folks, and they tend to ignore the other modes of sensory information - so this is a good way to at least begin to think about who your character is and how he talks about the world!

As I say, just a start - many different approaches can be taken to help you write better dialog - but essentially, thinking clearly about who the character is, making sure the dialog is doing some work, and, oh, making sure that characters DO respond to each other - will give you a good beginning for improving Dialog.

 

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California