AMONG THE THINGS I REMEMBER HEARING WHEN I WAS beginning to write was the following rule: you shouldnāt, and actually canāt, make fictional dialogueāconversation on the pageāsound like actual speech. The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichĆ©s and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude. Unlike us, they should say what they mean, get to the point, avoid circumlocution and digression. The idea, presumably, is that fictional dialogue should be an āimproved,ā cleaned-up, and smoothed-out version of the way people talk. Better than ārealā dialogue.
Then why is so much written dialogue less colorful and interesting than what we can overhear daily in the Internet cafƩ, the mall, and on the subway? Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page, or when they are trying to make the characters on it speak.
Once I assigned a class to eavesdrop on strangers and transcribe the results. I decided to try it myself, in a university coffee shop. Within moments I overheard a young woman telling her male companion about a dream in which she saw Liza Minnelli arrayed in white robes and a starry crown, dressed as the Queen of Heaven. What made the conversation doubly engaging was that the girl seemed to be romantically attracted to her friend, and was using her story as a means of seduction, unaware that he was, insofar as I could tell, gay. This fact was not unrelated to his lively interest in Liza Minnelli, yet another connection that his companion was preferring not to make.
Like this one, most conversations involve a sort of sophisticated multitasking. When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying, which is often not merely distracting but, we fear, as audible as what we are saying. As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.
A PIECE of good advice that beginning writers often receive warns against using dialogue as exposition and inventing those stiff, unlikely, artificial conversations in which facts are being transmitted from one character to another mainly for the benefit of the reader:
And so forth.
In nearly every case, this is a mistake. But there are, as always, exceptions to the rule, instances in which a writer employs dialogue not so much as exposition but as a sort of shorthand that obviates the need for whole paragraphs of exposition.
John Le CarrĆ©ās A Perfect Spy begins:
The paragraph goes on, at length, tracking Magnus Pym, whom we learn, has been en route for sixteen hours and is headed toward one of several āill-lit Victorian boardinghouses.ā At last Magnus Pym rings the doorbell, and is greeted by an old woman who says, āWhy Mr. Canterbury, itās you.ā
Thus one line of dialogue informs us that Magnus Pym has been here before and, more important, is traveling under an assumed name.
Even when novice writers avoid the sort of dialogue that is essentially exposition framed by quotation marks, the dialogue they do write often serves a single purposeāthat is, to advance the plotārather than the numerous simultaneous aims that it can accomplish. To see how much dialogue can achieve, itās instructive to look at the novels of Henry Green, in which many of the important plot developments are conveyed through conversation.
Throughout Greenās work, dialogue provides both text and subtext, allowing us to observe the wide range of emotions that his characters feel and display, the ways in which they say and donāt say what they mean, attempt to manipulate their spouses, lovers, friends, and children, stake emotional claims, demonstrate sexual interest or unavailability, confess and conceal their hopes and fears. And it all passes by us in such a bright, engaging splash of chatter that only slowly do we realize how widely Green has cast his net, how deeply he has penetrated. Greenās work not only demands close reading but also provides a paradise for the close reader who can only marvel at the wealth of information each line of dialogue provides, and the accuracy with which it shows people interacting with one another. No one else so fully inhabits his characters or writes them more from the inside, so that we feel that every line a character speaks expresses, and is fully determined by, the characterās circumstances and emotional state.
In this passage from his final novel, Doting, nineteen-year-old Annabel Payton has invited Peter Middleton, a student two years younger than herself, to have lunch at an inexpensive Indian restaurant near her office. Annabel has a crush on Peterās fatherāas the awkward, somewhat thick-headed Peter may or may not be awareāand is attempting to extract information about Peterās parents from her lunch companion. Word by word, the dialogue captures the rhythms of someone trying to discover something without disclosing something else, of an interlocutor who cannot stop pushing until she finds what she is seeking. Itās a model of social inquisition carried out by someone who doesnāt much care about the person she is interrogating, except that she would like to keep him from forming a low opinion of her and from figuring out what she is doing.
After a brief pause to discuss a mutual friend, Annabel persists:
Annabel describes her parentsā endless quarreling and asks Peter if his parents are like that, then goes on:
A few lines later, Annabel asks Peter if he thinks his mother is beautiful.
Itās hard to limit yourself to discussing just one scene from Greenās masterpiece, Loving. How can we possibly choose the passage that best illustrates the subtlety, the depth, the originality and complexity with which Green uses conversation to create character and to tell the minimally dramatic, low-key story that, thanks to the dialogue, seems positively riveting? In fact, would-be dialogue writers might want to close-read this entire novel about a group of mostly English servants (and in the background, their employers) on an estate in Ireland during the Second World War. One reason itās hard to stop quoting this book is that each scene keeps turning and turning in tiny delightful increments, and it seems unfair to deprive the reader of the next marvelous development.
In this touching, sweetly comic, intricately choreographed moment, the two pretty young housemaids, Edith and Kate, have gone to the beach with the pantry boy, Albert, who is the assistant to the butler, Raunce. They have taken the three children they have been assigned to watch, one of whom is also named Albert. Raunceās Albert, as he is called, is a melancholy, retiring boy who is unrequitedly in love with Edith, who is in love with Raunce.
In the hierarchy of the estate, a caste system in which gradations of rank and influence are precisely calibrated, Edith enjoys the power (at least, the power to tease) that she has over Albert. But the empathetic, decent Edith has no wish to hurt him. As Edith tells Kate in a later scene, Albert suffers from ācalf love,ā a concept that Kate mocks as something too hoity-toity and time-consuming for the likes of working people like them. Edith explains her kindness as the sympathy one might feel for a mouse that had caught its little leg in a wheel.
At the same time, something extremely complex is being suggested here: namely, the notion that Edith half-welcomes Albertās attention because new love has made her more open to the pleasures and possibilities of the world, including the eroticāa sophisticated observation from life that runs counter to the received notion that the beginning of love always makes one more exclusive, more monogamous, more fixated on the beloved.
Until the following scene on the beach, Albert has hardly said a word about himself, let alone about his background or his personal history. Nor has the book given us much information about the boy, other than that he has yellow hair and often looks illāthough his real malady, we suspect, is an acute case of embarrassment and homesickness rather than any physical ailment.
The quiet interlude on the shore has been immediately preceded by a noisier minor event involving the three children, a āfair-sizedā aggressive crab, and a riled-up pet dog named Peter, which Albert has called an ugly bastard and has shrunken from, a bit ignominiously. Now, to protect his brand-new blue serge suit, which (doubtless for Edithās benefit) Albert has inadvisably worn to the beach, the thoughtful Edith invites him to lie beside her on her raincoat. She sits up to watch the children, and Kate snoozes beside them in the sun. Itās only a raincoat, so they are very close, though Edith has made it clear that their proximity is for the sake of the suitāwhich, we feel, is just the sort of thing that Edith would think of, and do.