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Tools and Tips #1 -- Dialoguing

Hello all -- on the subject of dialogue:  I once heard a panelist say to a roomful of prospective writers and readers, and I quote, "Dialogue stops action."  I was immediately on my feet, defending dialogue as "Dialogue IS action."

Dialogue is not just the words between the quotation marks.  It involves facial features, how the speaker looks when saying the words, where his eyes are cast, what his hands are doing, where the ticks are.  If he blinks repeatedly when he says it.  It's also about what the listener and second part of the dialogue is doing as well as saying -- as the DI in dialogue as opposed to the MONO in monologue.  What's the listener-responder's features and body language saying as well as her mouth.  Furthermore, just as important as what's being said is what your characters are DOING while the dialogue is ongoing, to maintain action within action.  Speaking is action but you want to compound it with what the hands, feet, body are up to at the same time.

I am teaching Dickens's Our Mutual Friend right now to high-schoolers, and I can tell you there is much to apologize for--say like the length--800 pages.  I tell my students to pay particular attention to dialogue passages as that is where two things are getting done--what dialogue must do or it is cut.  It must REVEAL character of the speaker, and/or push the plot along....or rather develop the storyline, and ideally it does both at once.

What is amazing about Dickens is that indeed his dialogue does both, but further, what happens around and outside the quoted line (the balloon if you will in the comic strip), the actions taken by his characters, where their eyes, hands, sometimes toes, etc. are directed as they speak reveals greatly as well.
 

Pick up any book by Dickens and read the dialogue and marvel--MARVEL--at what he accomplishes between the dialogue in the action lines ascribed to said speaker.

An exercise I use with all my students is to take a comic strip in which at least 2 characters are speaking.  Write the script out as a story and make each frame work without the benefit of the illustrations.  This way both speaking parts (balloons o'er the head) and action parts (what's in the frame) are put to work in tandem.  What a speaker says and what a speaker does in fiction tells us who he is.  What a character says and does = who he is.  Combine that with what other characters say and do for or toward or around a character and this increases our understanding of said character.  Imagine Tony Saprano of TV hoodlum fame without he had all dem udder guys in Jersey to talk to, without his kids, without his wife, without his shrink.

As to the best novelist with dialogue hands down Elmore Leonard, and you gotta love Stuart Kaminsky, Joe Konrath, Jay Boninsinga, Ken Bruen, Barb D'Amato, Raymond Benson, and Brian Pinkerton, and the incomparable Martin Cruz Smith, and Dean R. Koontz, my spiritual mentor alive, and Mark Twain, my spiritual mentor not alive.  Shakespeare wasn't too shabby with speaking lines either.  Study them all closely....and of course, study my dialogue.

Dialogue must REVEAL character of the speaker, and/or push the plot along....or rather develop the storyline, and ideally it does both at once.

Writing Assignment #1 -- The Challenge, a hands-on on

Section 1.

Begin a story opening with your character's hands; focus on where the hands are, what they're doing (what kind of `pie' are the hands deeply into -- involved with?) As you pull back from the busy or idle hands, and the story begins to unfold, allow this character's name, age, occupation or career to enter into the mix...allow setting perhaps some music to filter in. In other words, after the intense focus on the hands, the other body parts -- constituting character description and movement -- movement of legs and other limbs -- are put into motion (a built in dynamo for your beginning). With this initial body in motion, you can then easily focus on the main story of WHO did what to whom -- who's story is it anyway? WHAT -- what's happening? When -- year, night, day, date, time -- what time is it and do you have a ticking clock operating in the story? Where -- setting; we're not in Kansas anymore?

BEGIN a Story with a pair of hands in or on something, fingers clutching whatever as a boy rolling a tattered old baseball around in his hands...

Everyone must hear this question before a single word of your beginning is committed to paper: How long should it be? Pure melody such a question. Shows a thinking mind.

Section 2.

Let's give it a framework of from 1-3 pages or more if you so choose. A piece of writing in fiction is only as good as the effect it leaves on readers, and only as LONG AS IT HAS TO BE, yet every necessary sensory detail must be present to achieve this magic, this graceful lie, this artful irony of language.

We only learn by DOING, so now GO LEARN DO and have FUN with it in the bargain. If you get blocked by this assignment, or freeze up, do a bit of research -- search newspapers and magazines for a photo of someone doing something with his/her/their hands and use the photo to jump-start your opening pages and strive for five but settle for one page on the hands-on project.

Or seek out any one of my books and find opening passages describing a character and you will often find the hands as per chapter 2, pg. 12 of PURE INSTINCT when we are in the psychic hands of Dr. Kim Desinor.