Dynamic Characters by Nancy Kress
YOU WEREN'T LIKE THAT YESTERDAY: CONSISTENCY IN DIALOGUE
This is a tricky subject. Yes, you want your character to speak consistently from one page to the next. A teenage girl who says, ''So I go, 'He didn't tell me that!' I was, like, totally grossed out,'' is not the same teenage girl who says, ''I respond to the alienation in the novels of Camus.'' If you try to make her the same girl, we probably won't believe it.
on the other hand, everyone has more than one mode of speech. You undoubtedly use different language and sentence structures to your best friend, your six-year-old niece and the cop who has just stopped you for speeding. Good dialogue should capture this difference—while still sounding like the same person.
An example. Two characters are having an amiable discussion about where to have lunch. They decide, walk down the street to the restaurant, and one ducks briefly inside the post office to buy stamps. The other, waiting outside, is suddenly lunged at by a mugger who kicks him in the kneecap and grabs his wallet. The character falls to the ground, scraping his left hand and right palm. He no longer sounds amiable. In fact, he yells something unprintable in this book.
Has the dialogue become inconsistent? It doesn't match the previous diction or sentence structure. But it does match the new circumstances. Furthermore, it's still recognizable as something that a basically amiable person would say, in that it doesn't employ racial epithets, or go on for pages of invective, or lapse into Victorian epithets or outdated slang or threats of retaliation—none of which would have been in keeping with what we'd already been shown of the character.
In short, consistency is another one of those partly-true, partly-not statements about writing. Make your dialogue consistent—but not so unvarying that it ignores specific circumstances.
YOU'RE FROM THE SOUTH, AREN'T YOU: THE DANGERS AND DELIGHTS OF DIALECT
This aspect of fiction has both literary and political connotations. Consider the following uses of dialect:
• You 'ave it, guv'nor!
• Sho' will, massa, suh!
• At your service, old chap!
• Faith and begorra, but yer right, me fine lad!
• That's-a the way, paisano!
• Rike you rike it, A-san!
• Sa vah kum sa vah, sir!
None of those dialects are convincing, all of them are hackneyed, a few of them are offensive, and the last one is incomprehensible: a good catalogue of the pitfalls of using dialect.
So does that mean a writer should avoid dialect completely?
No. Just write it carefully. The goal is to capture the feel of nonstan-dard English by judicious variations of diction, word order, spelling and sentence rhythm, and by moderate use of common phrases. This works better than wholesale and probably stereotypical distortion of language. Here's a good example, from Eudora Welty's ''old Mr. Marblehall'':
''I declare I told Mr. Bird to go on to bed, and look at him! I don't understand him! . . . After I get Mr. Bird to bed, what does he do then? He lies there stretched out with his clothes on and don't have one word to say! Know what he does? ... He might just as well not have a family.''
Can you hear the regional flavor, definite but not overdone? The guideline here is that a little dialect goes a long way. It should suggest regional speech, not bludgeon us with it.
Dialect has another use, as well. Simple or very young characters may have only one mode of speech, the one with which they grew up. Older or more sophisticated people, however, frequently retain the ability to speak in their native dialect but also acquire the ''standard'' American network-news-anchor speech. Such a person can choose which speech he wishes to use when—and those choices alone may say something about him.
He may, for instance, deliberately pile on exaggerations of his own dialect to confuse, embarrass or otherwise gain psychological advantage over his listeners. Here, for instance, is Bruce Sterling's Grena-dian character Winston Stubbs, from the novel islands in the Net. Stubbs is perfectly capable of standard business English, and he uses it when he wishes. In the following speech, however, he's making sure that his listeners, Laura and David Webster, know that Stubbs's culture and beliefs are radically different from those of everybody else at an international banking conference:
Laura had become seriously worried. She greeted them in the front lobby. ''So glad to see you. Was there any trouble?'' ''Nuh,'' said Winston Stubbs, exposing his dentures in a sunny smile. ''I-and-I were downtown, seen. Up-the-island. . . . We could use a public relations,'' Stubbs said, grinning crookedly at Laura. ''I-and-I's reputation could use an upgrade. Pressure come down on I-and-I. From Babylon Luddites.''
Even if you know that in island patois i-and-i means we and that seen is the equivalent of you see, this dialect feels foreign and striking. Laura and David are put on notice that Stubbs and his bank operate by different rules—which is just what Stubbs intends. He exploits his own awareness of his own dialect for his own purposes.
Everything that applies to dialect, incidentally, also applies to accents. ''Those are your papers of identification, isn't it?'' is preferable to the fake French of ''Zat ees yourrr papeeyas of. . . how you say it? Bah! . .. l'identification, n'est-ce pas?" Only the staunchest reader will stick with you through pages of that stuff.
SHE JUST GOES ON AND ON: HOW MUCH DIALOGUE DO YOU NEED TO CHARACTERIZE SOMEONE?
It depends. Whom are you characterizing?
You can reveal character not only through what a person says, but through how much they say. Does your protagonist hoard words as if they were gold pieces? Does she have verbal diarrhea? or is she somewhere in between?
The taciturn character can come across as ''the strong silent type,'' or as uninterested in communicating with other people, or as in a very bad mood. Let us know which is correct through the content of the dialogue. In other words, quality and quantity should work together to characterize. Is this guy Gary Cooper, or is he James L. Page in John Gardner's October Light, who ''was never a great talker—not like her, she'd lecture your arm off'' (her is James's sister).
Similarly, volatility can indicate nervousness, self-centeredness or just high spirits. Is your great talker like Miss Bates, Jane Austen's spinster lady in Emma, who can rattle on for entire content-free pages, out of sheer pleasure in having company? or is she more like Anne Tyler's Muriel (The Accidental Tourist) who also overwhelms her listeners with a flood of talk, but because she's so desperate to make human connections? or is your talker like W. Somerset Maugham's Hayward (Of Human Bondage), who gives his opinions on and on because in his heart he believes he's the only one who possesses any valid opinions?
Let us know.
THE LAST WORD, ALMOST
Writing dialogue is a balancing act. Dialogue that characterizes is artificially informative—but not implausibly so. It indicates background—unless the character is trying not to do so. It's consistently interesting—except for the occasional brief break to discuss mundane topics that establish verisimilitude. It's emotional and individual—but not so much of either that it becomes parody. How do you learn this balancing act? The same way you learn everything else about writing—through reading authors you admire, and through practice. Write a lot of dialogue. Read it aloud. See how it sounds to you and to other people whose ear you trust. Rewrite it. Write some more.
And as if it weren't enough to concentrate on the content of a character's speech, you also need to think about its presentation. More on that in the next chapter. Meanwhile, the last word on using dialogue to characterize comes from a master of the art, Mark Twain:
When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the circumstances, and have a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
SUMMARY: USING DIALOGUE TO CHARACTERIZE<
• Rather than telling us what your characters are like, let them reveal themselves through what they say about their own tastes, hopes, dreams, prejudices, goals and worldviews, and their view of the other characters in the novel.
• Supplement dialogue with punctuation and narrative to fill in nonverbal clues.
• Make your characters speak consistently—but don't be rigid about it. Everyone alters his speech for different audiences and circumstances.
• Use dialect and accents with a light hand.
• Remember that how much your character speaks works along with the content of his speech to create a definite impression in readers' minds.
Good dialogue, everyone agrees, seems natural. Note the verb: It seems natural. But, in fact, it's not.
Consider great beauty. The Parthenon, perhaps. Or Sophia Loren. Or Babe Ruth hitting a high sweet curving home run. You know best what you consider heart-stirringly and memorably beautiful. Whatever it is, it probably looks completely natural: perfectly proportioned, radiantly curved, a gift of nature (that's the Parthenon I'm talking about, not Loren). And, almost certainly, it is not.
In art, the completely natural seldom works. Instead nature is refined, trained, pruned, heightened, unspontaneously considered and rehearsed. The perfect building, the liquid aria, the gorgeous football play—these are carefully composed. Choices are made, adjustments are constant, training counts. The results may look natural, but they are in fact artificial, which is itself a term derived from art.
Dialogue is like that, too. Writing dialogue that sounds natural is the result of artifice. Even though we talk all day, good dialogue is more than talk written down. In fact, it differs from real speech in several important ways.
TIGHT AND CLEAN:
GOOD DIALOGUE IS ARTIFICIALLY CONCISE
In natural speech, nearly all people repeat themselves, interrupt themselves, start over midway, stutter, use an inexact word and then spend four sentences explaining what they really meant. But when you reproduce all this on the page, the character will sound (depending on the content) boring, scatterbrained or under great stress.
If you want that effect, fine. (To see it done to perfection, read any speech by Miss Bates in Jane Austen's novel Emma.) But if your character is supposed to sound like a person of substance who is not in emotional crisis, you will have to edit his speech to a concision most people can't achieve in unrehearsed spoken communication (which is, after all, usually a first draft).
Here, for instance, is an actual phone call between friends, both writers. This is an unedited transcript of the recording:
FRIEND: Nancy? Have you got a second? I just got a letter from Rick [her agent] about—where is it, I had it right here, where is that. . . here it is. I just got this letter from him about electronic rights. [Publishing Company Z] is interested—he says they've ''expressed interest''— in electronic rights to my first two novels. I'm not sure.
NANCY: Not sure they're really interested?
FRIEND: No, I'm not sure ... I don't really know too much about electronic rights, I wasn't paying attention when it was being discussed so much, when everybody was talking about it . . .
NANCY: Last year? No, that big flap was—
FRIEND: I don't remember. But anyway, Rick says they're interested, and I'm not sure what's involved or—but, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to ask! How did it go yesterday?
NANCY: A disaster.
FRIEND: Oh, I'm sorry. Again?
NANCY: The electronic rights thing—
FRIEND: I just should have been paying more attention when that big flap was going on.
If you can read this stuff with interest, you should consider going into phone tapping. This dialogue is repetitious, long-winded, and elliptical. It doesn't tell anything of interest. (What disaster happened again yesterday?) It doesn't make information clear. (What was the big flap about electronic rights?) Worse, it gives the impression that both people are twits, unable to organize their thoughts or complete a coherent sentence. This is not true. In fact, in real life, the phone conversation was completely satisfactory: The friends settled the issue of electronic rights to one's novels; they both understood what yesterday's disaster was; the whole conversation took only a few minutes. It's only on the page that the dialogue lacks concision.
So how should this dialogue appear on the page, if it were part of a story about two writers? Perhaps like this:
FRIEND: Nancy? I just heard from my agent. Company Z is interested in electronic rights for my first two novels. I don't actually know much about electronic rights. Should I be interested?
NANCY: You should be if you're interested in the future. That's where it lies. Have you heard about the Readerman that Sony is developing? It will be like a Walkman, but for books on disk.
FRIEND: That does sound interesting. Better—it sounds profitable. I'll tell Rick to talk more with them. And oh, by the way, how was the latest go-round with the insurance company?
NANCY: A disaster. But believe me, you don't want to hear about it.
FRIEND: (laughs) Sure I do. But maybe another time.
Of course, if this were part of a story, both the friend's electronic rights and Nancy's fight with the insurance company would have to be part of the plot. Maybe the insurance is life insurance on someone who turns up mysteriously dead, and the electronic clues . . . all right, all right, we won't get carried away here. But you see the point.
Edited dialogue is not ''natural.'' Instead, it is more informative, concise and detailed than natural speech. People may speak in near epigrams (''If you're interested in the future, you're interested in electronic rights''). Characters get to sound the way you wished you'd sounded when you couldn't think of the right thing to say until the next morning.
However, even a competent character may sound repetitious and disorganized when under great stress. Save the ''natural'' dialogue for those moments.
BUT GOOD DIALOGUE IS NOT TOO ARTIFICIAL
However, neither do you want to go to the other extreme: dialogue so edited and revised that the reader rejects it as implausible. Following are several categories of overly artificial dialogue.
Too Concise
You can overdo a good thing. If your character always speaks in precise, perfect epigrams, he is either Shakespeare reincarnated or Joe Friday from Dragnet. Everybody else's speech should include a few extra phrases, words not strictly necessary on topics not very consequential, to keep spoken dialogue from sounding like Western Union.
Here, for instance, are FBI agent Robert Hart and Department of Justice investigator Elizabeth Waring, in Thomas Perry's award-winning novel The Butcher's Boy. The two have just arrived in Denver because a United States senator has been killed.
''I suppose all we can do tonight is wait for the forensics people to work their way through the other rooms, then.'' ''That and wait for our replacements to arrive,'' said Hart. ''As of an hour ago we're no longer here just to establish presence.''
''So they'll send in the first team?'' said Elizabeth. ''We haven't done so badly, considering we've hardly had time to begin.''
''No, we haven't,'' said Hart. ''But just the same, I'm not going to do much unpacking.''
''Speaking of that, has anybody told you where we're supposed to be staying?''
This is not epigrammatic dialogue. There are phrases with little information content (''I suppose,'' ''Speaking of that''). There are phrases with more words than strictly necessary (''That and wait for our replacements to arrive'' could be shortened to ''And wait for our replacements''). The subject matter (which hotel?) is unimportant to the plot. But by including some of this—by being less concise than he could be—Perry has made his investigators seem more like real people.
Too Stilted
The native-born character who never uses contractions, the uneducated man whose diction is all multisyllable Latinate words, the woman who sounds as if she's addressing a joint session of Congress rather than her bridge club??
Too Informative
This is called the ''As You Know, Bob'' Syndrome. The author attempts to make dialogue informative and detailed so that he can slip information to the reader. But this must be done with a very light hand, because people do not commonly tell each other things they both already know. If you aren't careful, you get dialogue like this:
''As you know, Bob, after Mom died we were very poor.'' "Yes, Martin. I had to leave school and take a job at the mall. And you had a paper route and grew rutabagas to sell at the farmer's market.''
''And then after Marie got in trouble with the law, nobody would hire us, so we moved away and didn't return to this town for ten years.''
At this point, your reader won't return, either. Find another way to convey background information besides artificially sticking it into dialogue. But... just to complete the picture, I should add that there are some
times—a very few some times—when ''As You Know, Bob'' dialogue is indeed effective. It all depends on the emotional tone of the characters' exchange. People who are angry, patronizing, sarcastic or self-absorbed often do tell things to others of which both are already perfectly aware, although the reader may not be. Here is Tess Barnwell, from May Frampton's story ''White Wine,'' furious at her husband:
"You ask me to buy pot roast. Fine; I buy pot roast. Three days later you ask for German vinegar gravy on the pot roast. Fine; I buy all the ingredients for German vinegar gravy. Then you ask if we can have the pot roast and German vinegar gravy on Thursday night. Fine; I leave work early, rush home, and make the roast with German vinegar gravy. And then you're two hours late and don't even call! Ethan, what are you trying to do to me?''
Whatever Ethan may be trying to do, what the author is trying to do is have one character fling at another a long list of already-known grievances. And Frampton succeeds.