“Writing dialogue is tough. Real tough,” I wrote, hammering the keys of the cheap typewriter so that the desk rattled. “Part 3,” I growled.

How accurate should dialogue be? How close to how people really talk? There’s precedent here. A vast number of novels have been written, most of them packed with dialogue. Millions and millions of imaginary conversations. How many of them could be taken as transcriptions of a real conversation? I would say, approximately none.

It’s an interesting thing about fiction. A serious writer about modern social issues might sneer at your novel about vampire kittens on Mars, but his conversations are every bit as other-worldy. They don’t correspond with the way people really talk. He might spend years observing how people behave, how they walk, their little gestures, how they wash, how they get dressed – but once they open their mouths, it’s fantasy land.

Nobody in a book talks like somebody out of it. However – dialogue can still be realistic – in a way.

When people in real life talk to each other, they are exchanging ideas. But it’s in real time, and it’s highly interactive. When I say something to you, I have no idea what you will reply. I can’t have a clever answer ready. I have to react to what you said – and I have to do it instantly. You have to do the same. Considered reasonably, it’s surprising that conversations make any sense at all. In fact, objectively, they often don’t. It’s not what I say that matters, it’s what you hear. If we are talking about something of mutual interest, we pluck the meat out of the other person’s words, and grasp the meaning.

When we try to write a conversation, we need to write what people hear, and what they mean – not what they say. When we listen, we filter out the stammering, the misspeaking, the sentences that stop in the middle and start again. Try remembering a talk you had with someone. You’ll remember the substance of it, not the false starts and mistakes. Then try to notice what somebody says when you’re talking. It will be very different.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have hesitations in a conversation. It’s just that they are there for a reason. If someone speaks slowly, or trails off a sentence, it’s to tell us something about him. It’s almost never because that’s how people really speak.

Here’s this week’s example. I thought I might use someone of genuine stature this time. The best writer of the twentieth century, king of the modernists, chronicler of the American South, master of the historical novel, creator of some of the longest sentences ever outside of Joyce – William Faulkner.

“What’s this, corporal?” the American captain said. “What’s the trouble? He’s an Englishman. You’d better let their M.P.’s take care of him.”

“I know he is,” the policeman said. He spoke heavily, in the voice of a man under physical strain; for all his girlish delicacy of limb, the English boy was heavier – or more helpless – than he looked. “Stand up!” the policeman said. “They’re officers!”

The English boy made an effort then… “Cheer-o, sir,” he said, “Name’s not Beatty, I hope.”

“No,” the captain said.

“Ah,” the English boy said. “Hoped not. My mistake. No offense, what?”

“No offence,” the captain said quietly.

And so it continues. Faulkner has five pages of conversation. There’s two American officers, and a drunken young British officer arrested by an American military policeman. After a couple of pages, a British policeman appears.

All five characters are talking, but Faulkner arranges it that the conversation revolves around the captain, even though the boy gets to drunkenly ramble, and the American policeman gets to have a lengthy monologue. We aren’t surprised when the policemen disappear from the story. They’ve done their bit. In the course of the conversation, they mutate.

The first policeman is identified as an American Military Policemen. Then he’s just referred to as “the Policeman”. Then, when the British Policeman arrives, they are both identified by nationality. The captain starts to refer to the American policeman as “corporal”. When the American policeman leaves, the British policeman is just “the policeman”. However, through all the changing, where some speech is almost monosyllabic, and sometimes it’s paragraphs long, we get the steady beat of “the captain said,”, “the captain said,”, reliably inserted. We know that when we’ve finished with these interchangeable policemen, and the mostly silent lieutenant, we’ll have some kind of interaction between the captain and the English boy.

Good dialogue will do all this. When it’s done by Faulkner, he can convey multiple meanings and many layers of information with the simplest of language. In a way, he does it almost too well to be a good example.

“Writing dialogue is hard,” he said. “No it isn’t,” she asservated. “It is!” he exclaimed darkly.

I’ve been drawn to discussing dialogue, because, apart from anything else, it’s possibly the most technically difficult part of writing. How difficult is it? Well, the first great novel ever written was Robinson Crusoe. Defoe was so intimidated by dialogue that he decided he’d have just one main character alone on a desert island, and when he was finally ready to bring in someone else, he made sure he’d be unable to converse.
Why is it difficult? Because rather than being just text, saying what’s happening – ‘The dog chased the cat. The cat ran up the tree.’ – which operates at just one level – with dialogue, we have bits of language, in the same sentence, which have quite different statuses. There’s the normal language, saying what’s happening – and there’s what the people are saying, or thinking – which has to be segregated from the normal flow of the text. Different rules apply. Dickens can write perfect, grammatical English, but his characters can say what they like, between those quote marks.
Because these chunks of text are independent, they have to be tethered to the rest of the document. They have to be attributed to a particular person, in most cases. They have to be coordinated with the descriptions of whatever is going on. The easiest way to do this is to write a play. Shakespeare and his contemporaries had a very simple system. They wrote down the name of the character(s) and what they said. If somebody did something, he wrote that down. It’s not surprising that plays preceded the modern novel by a long time.
If you have to write a story to be read, though, instead of a play to be performed, you’re expected to come up with something a bit more fluid. There are a number of ways to do this, and they are far from controversial.
It is possible, when one or more people are talking, to just have the various dialogue chunks, broken apart when someone different speaks.

“Good morning, Mrs Smith. A lovely day, is it not.”
“Good afternoon, Mr Jones. I think not. Bermondsey has been destroyed by giant ice meteorites.”

That particular dialogue has the character identification built in. This isn’t always possible, and when it isn’t, we need to attach the dialogue to the people. Indeed, fragments like the above might work well for a few lines, but it’s very easy to lose track of who is speaking. An alternative is to give the person who is speaking something to do, in the same paragraph.

“You are looking uncommonly beautiful today.” George opened his umbrella and held it upside-down to gather raindrops.
“You disgust me.” Alan spat in the umbrella with practised ease.

This is all very well, but if it’s a lengthy conversation, it becomes tedious and distracting coming up with things for them to do. When they’ve finished grimacing, pulling their ears, shrugging (one of my favourites), and lighting cigars, they still need to interact for a while longer. When this happens, we are in the realm of “he said”.
I’ve been looking on the internet to see what the consensus is. My daughter came home from school having been told that she should use a variety of words to express speech, each one accompanied by a guard of adverbs. This view is opposed by the likes of Elmore Leonard and Stephen King. Leonard and King are very clear. The right word is “said”. No adverbs are to be used. To the purists, even “asked” is considered excessive, the question mark at the end of the sentence being sufficient. When writing such dialogue, the repetition of said…said…said can seem dull. The claim is that it becomes invisible to the reader. Instead of reading
“I am going to go for a walk now,” said Dr Campbell.
“Go! Go, then, and I hope you choke on it,” said Lady McGonegall.

as big chunks of text, the reader simply attaches the spoken phrase to the person saying it. The “said”s vanish. Or at least that’s the theory. Compare with

“I am going to go for a walk now,” sneered Dr Campbell with a sibilant hiss.
“Go! Go, then, and I hope you choke on it,” angrily exclaimed Lady McGonegall.

I decided to do a thorough analysis. Then I decided to not be thorough, but to do a cursory inspection. My books mostly live back in Ireland, and since I just moved house, the handful of books I have over here are still in boxes. No matter. I chose a box at random, plucked out a handful of books, and chose random examples of dialogue.
Firstly, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, by Alexander McCall Smith. There are five characters in the scene I randomly selected, four of whom are talking. All their dialogue is firmly attached to the speaker. It simply wouldn’t be practical to present simple chunks of text. Each character is quite distinctive, but not sufficiently to make it that comfortable for the reader. Smith has to allocate the dialogue between his five characters, and he does it with elan.
He starts off with Mma Makutsi and Mr Mateloni doing little bits of business. Mma Makutsi sips tea, Mr Maketoni nurses his mug. However, this isn’t quite enough for Smith. Both have a “said” to make certain. Mma Maketoni’s “said” comes with an adverb. She “said brightly”. Mr Maketoni is adverbless and hence a bit more down to earth. He is the only person whose dialogue is attached to an action only. He frowns, and the frowning means that what follows is said by him. Mma Makutsi also has actions, but they directly relate to the attached speech. She continues twice, she speaks slowly and deliberately – at one stage she pauses. Fanwell ventures. Mr Maketoni mutters. Finally Mma Ramotswe, the lead character, finishes it all off with a blurt. The only one who is given just “he said” is Mr Maketoni, and this tells us that he is considered, phlegmatic, less given to outward emotion.
The result is busy, colourful, bright. Is this the only way to do it? More examples next week.

Meanwhile Back at the Monastery

Greetings and Salutations Glorious Readers of the Blog,

As you can see Mischievous Raven and I have finally been granted entrance into the Monastery of the Werewolf Monks.  I know, right it’s pretty cool if you haven’t been before.  Let me show you around, Brother Lon will accompany us but he cannot talk, there is always a vow of silence after the full moon hunt.  Lead on Brother Lon.  This is the library and the thing the Monastery is most well-known for.  As you can see it is packed with books and scrolls going back thousands of years.  The best stuff is up ahead here.  Scholars from all over the world come here to study about the strange and sometimes horrible creatures that roam  the planet right under the noses of the unsuspecting general public.  This is where I did my research on Vampires.  They have an entire section on Vlad The Impaler.  Rumor has it that Vlad himself comes over to review the library from time to time.  You know of course he stays at the Dakota right off Central Park most of the year.  He does, I’m not kidding.  You should come back and spend some time here.  Libraries are the best places to meet interesting people.  Down those steps is where the wines are made.  You can only go there once a year when they turn out their new vintages.  They have a big tasting it’s a regular who’s who event, very A list.  The rest of the year it’s off-limits.  No, I’ve never been, I’m sure it’s a clerical over site.  That’s the chapel,  up here are the quarters for the monks.  The guest rooms are on the next couple floors.  Above that is the observatory where they plot the moon and star movements.  You can visit Brother Al up there after sundown and he’ll show you around.  You can even have a look through the peeper if you like.  Brother Lon is directing us toward the dining room.  It must be dinner time.  Go have a bite I’ll see you later.  I’m going to catch up my muse and go over a few things we wrote last week before he ditched me.

I just wrote a short piece which came right out of nowhere for me.  The strange thing about the story is, it has no dialogue.  That in itself isn’t strange, but it is strange for me.  I’ve been told that I have a gift for dialogue.  So to write a piece without a single spoken word for over 2,500 words was really odd for me.  It got me to thinking about what makes dialogue flow.  Now if I have a gift it is God-given and not something I learned, and my friends will tell you I was out to lunch when God was giving such gifts as Grammar, Spelling, Point of View, and Tenses, among other things.  But they seem to agree I do pretty decent dialogue.

This is what came to me,( totally my opinion here folks).  I thinks that when writing is flowing for me I’m in the characters head.  Almost like a movie is playing out the scene.  I hear what the character is saying and it comes out in his/her voice not mine.  And if I’m really there I hear the replies from whoever as if I am the character.  This makes the other voices authentic because they have to sound right to the POV character or I get pulled out of the scene.  When I struggle the most is when I’m not hearing what my character is hears.  This all sounds very WOO-WOO, but it’s the best way I describe what happens.  When I put myself in the scene and hear what is said I know if it sounds right or not.  One trick I use to help with this is I read my dialogue back out loud.  I’ll never be one who reads for audio books, but I try to put inflection in the speech.  In effect give the character a voice, not one I hear in my head but actually hear.  I am but a lowly scribbler and I don’t want this to sound like a lecture so I’m going to quit here.  If you have some thoughts on dialogue send me a comment.  And if you struggle with getting your characters to sound natural try hearing it, listen for the nuances.  As is our custom here at the swamp I’ll leave you with this appropriate quote.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; not characters. A character is a caricature.

Ernest Hemingway 

Write On,

Eerie