The heart of dialogue is simple. The profoundness is to listen. — Lolly Daskal
Story Challenge | Week 9 | Dialogue... Dorothy Allison says that to create characters, we have to get them talking, so that's just what this week's inventive structured exercises will aim us toward!
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I’m thrilled we’re venturing into dialogue, because my god you never know what’s going to happen when you start let your characters (real or imagined!) speak for themselves. As the dialogue guru David Mamet says, “People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.”
Maybe that’s why letting our characters speak for themselves is a such a radical act. And letting our characters speak is not the same as “writing dialogue” for them. But, then, if you did last week’s Story Challenge exercise on conflict, the one in which you interviewed your main character, you have already begun to experience this crucial difference.
The only problem with dialogue is how difficult it is. A real pitfall on the page is when writers use dialogue as a device to give us “info dumps” or in which characters say unnecessary things to each other that neither reveal character nor advance plot. That kind of dialogue takes us out of the world of the story.
So, why is dialogue so hard?
On the psychological/esoteric level, dialogue presents challenges because it involves a necessary loss of control. If your characters are speaking for themselves, then you are not speaking for them. Yes, you are writing the words down—but they’re not coming only from you. You’re receiving them from the characters themselves. For many of us, that kind of loss of control (over our story and our lives) is unnerving. If you allow your characters to start speaking for themselves, who knows what might happen next?
And on a technical level, most writers and teachers of writing agree that dialogue is tricky—it’s hard to make it move and sing and do the work it needs to do, which should include, as mentioned, advancing plot and revealing character (at least one of those things at all times, and ideally both). I remember grad school advisors who, in workshop, seemed to err toward recommending the recasting of almost all dialogue into summary in order to avoid the awkwardness of stilted and boring conversations between characters.
But while avoiding dialogue might feel safer, it’s also a huge missed opportunity. Good dialogue can be nearly magical with regard to what it can do for the lifeblood of our stories.
While writing The Part That Burns, I discovered that letting my characters speak for themselves also felt more fair, somehow. Here’s a short snippet of an intense scene in my memoir where the narrator is trying to reconcile with her mother, who has made a rare visit to the narrator’s new home. The narrator wants her mother to praise her home, or even just notice it. Notice her. Instead, this happens:
“Mom?” I say again. “Isn’t it something? This house?”
“House, mouse, louse,” Mom says. “It’s fine. It reminds me of Florence’s old place in Duluth. Hers was smaller, of course. And not on the lake. Now she’s up on the Iron Range.”
“Interesting,” I say, with no interest.
As the scene unfolds, the narrator’s mother continues to speak in the particularly colorful and idiomatic way she has always been known for—a quirk that I hoped might somehow both ease and escalate the tension between the two women, which skyrockets as the scene progresses.
Since this example was memoir, I had a real-life character to build from, but it was still imperative to let my mother speak for herself in order to manifest her on the page in a convincing and compelling way. Dorothy Allison speaks of this in her talk with David Naimon on his podcast, Between the Covers, saying:
But I do know that to create a character, you got to try stuff out and that means you’ve got to get them talking so that if you’re imagining a person, we’re making up, oh, I don’t know, teenage girl from Kentucky whose brother has just—I want to give you some stereotypical predictable caricaturist stuff, get ready—whose brother has just rolled his daddy’s truck. She’s going to try to talk to you. She’s young and she probably doesn’t cuss much because teenage girls in Kentucky get slapped a lot if they cuss too much, so she won’t be my usual, but she’s going to start talking to you about who she is and she’s going to talk to you about your brother and she says, “He ain’t got a lick of sense,” you’ve heard that before, right? He ain’t got a lick of sense. “You know he rolled that truck because he was going too fast and mama has told him don’t go too fast. I’ve told him don’t go too fast but nobody listens to me. I’m 15 and ever since I cut my hair real short, nobody listens to a word I say.” Now, that’s how you build a character. Ever since I cut my hair real short, nobody listens to a word I say. Now she goes on talking, she goes on talking. In the creation of a character, I can do 10, 12 pages of this shit.
Two of my favorite examples of dialogue are found in a piece of flash by F.R. Martinez, “That Place on Daniel Island” (winner of the 2020 Insider’s Prize), and a short story by Jane Smiley called “The Age of Grief,” which can be found in her stellar collection by the same name.
In “Daniel Island,” Martinez uses fast-paced dialogue between two characters in a car—and nothing else—to portray the sense of loss and disorientation faced by an incarcerated man as he leaves prison. Here’s the moment the dialogue first starts to reveal to us the story’s premise and stakes:
So I said to her ‘Let’s go to that place over on Daniel Island where we used to go.’ And she said ‘What place?’ I said ‘You know, that place that was kinda like a beach bar or something.’ ‘Beach bar? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean the bagel place? The one that had the everything bagels?’ ‘No, no. Well— is that still there? We used to go there.’ ‘They only open for breakfast and lunch. Not dinner.’ So I said ‘I mean that place that had the jukebox with that Billy Joel song we like.’ ‘Juke box?’ ‘And there was a bar in the front, even though it was always half empty. They had good burgers.’ ‘You don’t mean the hotel? The restaurant in the hotel where we went with Nick and his wife before they broke up?’ ‘Damn. That must be like twenty years ago. No. Is that still there? I don’t even remember how to get there.’
‘Well, I’ll drive.’ ‘I sure would like to go to the other place though. I used to think of it when I was down for some reason.’ ‘Really. Were the burgers THAT good?’ ‘No. I mean they were good but—I don’t know I just liked the place because it was so laid back, so peaceful, so—Charleston. I mean, I know there was no beach there on Daniel Island, but when I remembered that place it felt like there shoulda been one nearby, like right down the road or something. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re locked up a place like that just seems like heaven, you know? To be away from everything. . . ’
“The Age of Grief” is a complicated, brilliant, and nuanced novella about marriage, love, betrayal, and forgiveness, and, most of all, about the power of words spoken or withheld in the shaping of our lived lives. In this story, Jane Smiley writes a main character who allows himself to be “possessed” by an angry side character in order to be able express the anger and desperation he’s been otherwise repressing. The scene that follows is so engrossing, so original, so captivating, and so unforgettable, that I have taught it dozens of times by now, yet still learn from it every single time (screenshots of my book pages containing this scene are included with this week’s exercise).
Speaking of this week’s exercises: I hope they take you by surprise, because they are purposefully inventive, playful, and even strange in hopes of truly animating your dialogue. Hopefully in the process of animating your dialogue, these exercises will help you discover something surprising about your characters, your story, yourself, or all of the above.