The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue: A Fresh Look at an Essential Ingredient of the Craft

INTRODUCTION:

Dialogue is Character

A friend of mine, an emeritus professor of American history at one of the country’s best liberal arts colleges, decided to write a novel in his retirement. It was a reasonable ambition; he was the author of four books and a lecturer of considerable eloquence and subtlety. He wrote a hundred pages, and an agent read them.

She declined to represent him. His characters, she said, lacked nuance and depth. They weren’t alive. He considered the criticism, looked again at his novel, and abandoned the idea of writing fiction.

Why?

I can’t write dialogue, he said.

He was giving up too easily, but his appreciation of dialogue as essential to good fiction was on the money. A man or woman who does not write good dialogue is not a first-rate writer, declared the late George V. Higgins, and while it may not always have been true—the musty dialogue of Henry James comes to mind—I can’t think of a first-rate writer today who doesn’t write good dialogue. Think of it as one of your most efficient tools, if not the most—a component that by itself can elevate your story or novel to literary excellence.

There is no great fiction without great characters, a truth going back to Odysseus and beyond. In the end, it is characters, far more than story, that make fiction great. Characters are the novelist’s lifetime gift to the reader. Think of Charles Dickens and you find yourself wandering a portrait gallery of old friends: Mr. Micawber, Lady Dedlock, the Artful Dodger, Ebenezer Scrooge, Betsey Trotwood, and on and on. Who remembers the plot of Treasure Island years after reading it, beyond a general idea of the voyage and mutiny? But Long John Silver, one of literature’s most winsome villains, is as alive in our memory today as the day we put the book down. To read Huckleberry Finn at any age is to acquire a lifelong intimacy with Huck, Jim, Huck’s drunken, snake-mean father, and the two cunning rapscallions who call themselves the Duke and the Dauphin. Story does count, of course, but our investment in a story, our capacity to care what happens, runs only as deep as our belief in the humanity of the characters.

Dialogue puts that humanity on vivid display. Characters are never more alive than when they’re speaking. To hear them is to see them up close: their physiognomy in fine detail, their expressions, the animation, or lack of it, in their eyes.

Whosoever of ye, says Captain Ahab, exhorting his crew on the deck of the Pequod, raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke—look ye, whosoever raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!

Ahab’s obsession, his encroaching madness, ring out in that passionate utterance. We can hear his rising voice, we can see him: his avid face, the manic light in his eyes. Could a moment, or a character, be more vivid?

Action is character, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, meaning that characters in fiction define themselves most completely and reliably not by what they think and feel, but by what they do. Action is revelatory in a way that thought, opinion, emotion—felt but not expressed—are not. Your character may have an aversion to the killing of animals, which tells us she’s humane, moral, evolved. Important, sure, but what happens when she encounters a deer jacker gutting his kill in her woodlot? What does she say, what does she do? Now we find out who she really is.

A half century after Fitzgerald’s dead-on pronouncement, George V. Higgins revised Fitzgerald’s axiom: Dialogue is character. Higgins was really clarifying, not rewriting, Fitzgerald’s dictum, because dialogue is action, as Fitzgerald surely understood. There are telling moments of sudden violent action in The Great Gatsby—the death of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan breaking his mistress’s nose—but the novel’s two great characters, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, with her low, thrilling voice, reveal and define themselves throughout the novel with their pregnant and idiosyncratic dialogue. Nick Carraway has brought them together after their long separation, and Gatsby has led them from Nick’s house to his and is showing them around. Daisy notices a photograph on the bureau:

I adore it, exclaimed Daisy. The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour—or a yacht.

Look at this, said Gatsby quickly. Here’s a lot of clippings—about you.

They stood side by side examining it . . . The phone rang, and Gatsby took up the receiver.

Yes . . . Well, I can’t talk now . . . I can’t talk now, old sport . . . I said a small town . . . He must know what a small town is . . . Well, he’s no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town . . .

He rang off.

Come here quick! cried Daisy at the window. The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

Look at that, she whispered, and then after a moment: I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.

Dialogue is character: Higgins proved his point brilliantly in his first and best novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Nearly eighty percent of this rich and riveting crime novel is dialogue, and every character—bank robbers, a shady saloon keeper, a wily federal agent, and Eddie Coyle himself, family man and petty criminal—is intensely alive. Meet Eddie Coyle, the stocky man, talking to a young gun dealer, in the opening scene of the novel:

The stocky man extended the fingers of his left hand over the gold-speckled Formica tabletop. You know what that is?

Your hand, Jackie Brown said.

I hope you look closer at guns ’n you look at that hand, the stocky man said. Look at your own goddamned hand.

Jackie Brown extended the fingers of his left hand. Yeah, he said.

Count your fucking knuckles, the stocky man said.

All of them? Jackie Brown said.

Ah Christ, the stocky man said. Count as many of them as you want. I got four more. One on each finger. Know how I got those? I bought some stuff from a man that I had his name, and it got traced, and the man I bought it for, he went to M C I Walpole for fifteen to twenty-five. Still in there, but he had some friends. I got an extra set of knuckles. Shut my hand in a drawer. Then one of them stomped the drawer shut.

Eddie is philosophical about what was done to him. He accepts it as logical, even fair. He’s no crybaby, and he doesn’t hold grudges. Live, learn, and don’t make the same mistake twice. It’s a glimpse into the mind, if not the heart, of Eddie Coyle.

Characters often reveal themselves in their dialogue without meaning to. The dyed-blonde with the velvet flowers in her hair in Dorothy Parker’s acerbic short story, Arrangement in Black and White, puts her small mind on display without being prompted, and without knowing it. The reader knows her better than she knows herself. She is talking to her hostess at a cocktail party in honor of the black musician, Walter Williams:

That’s the way I feel, she said. I just can’t understand people being narrow-minded. Why, I absolutely think it’s a privilege to meet a man like Walter Williams. Yes, I do. I haven’t any feeling at all. Well, my goodness, the good Lord made him, just the same as He did any of us. Didn’t He?

Surely, said her host. Yes, indeed.

That’s what I say, she said. Oh, I get so furious when people are narrow-minded about colored people. It’s just all I can do not to say something. Of course, I do admit when you get a bad colored man, they’re simply terrible. But as I say to Burton, there are some bad white people, too, in this world. Aren’t there?

I guess there are, said her host.

Why, I’d really be glad to have a man like Walter Williams come to my house and sing for us, some time, she said. Of course, I couldn’t ask him on account of Burton, but I wouldn’t have any feeling about it at all.

Parker wrote Arrangement in Black and White in 1927, a year after the publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and two years before William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. All three—Parker, Hemingway, Faulkner—were writing dialogue in a brash new way, bringing to it a new bluntness and economy.

Hemingway was a master of the short story, and his dialogue was never more taut than in his short fiction. From The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber:

If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling, Margot said quietly.

No, you won’t

You can try it and see.

You won’t leave me.

No, she said, I won’t leave you and you’ll behave yourself.

Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.

Yes. Behave yourself.

Why don’t you try behaving?

I’ve tried it so long. So very long.

Dialogue has always revealed character, but now it was becoming cleaner and more relentlessly direct, as if the speakers were under orders to get straight to the point. The studied attention to dialogue by these three—and, a little later, by John Steinbeck, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and others—was transformational. Dialogue had become an art form.

It is worth remembering that Hemingway was writing closer to Dickens’s time than to ours. His dialogue is often sentimental and can feel mannered, as Faulkner’s and Parker’s can. The dialogue of all three feels dated at times. But the spare, confrontational dialogue of today’s best writers is their legacy. That legacy is their gift to all of us. Take advantage. If you can write good dialogue, you’re a writer.

It is worth remembering that Hemingway was writing closer to Dickens’s time than to ours.

1

THE MECHANICS OF DIALOGUE: TAGS, TALKING VERBS, AND PUNCTUATION

DIALOGUE TAGS AND WHEN TO USE THEM

Dialogue tags are for clarity, obviously—we need to know who is speaking—but when only two people are present, the dialogue is often tagged nevertheless. Why? There are no rules, and so dialogue tags are up to the judgment, instinct, or whim of the writer. They do matter, so consider them as you write. Don’t use or omit them automatically.

It takes about a second to read, she said, but that second checks the flow of the exchange, creating a minute pause. The reader hardly notices, but the pause is there. This can be a consideration when the dialogue is anxious or heated and your two characters are pressing each other. Do you want to touch the brake at all? Maybe not. The young man called Milkman, the protagonist of Toni Morrison’s rite-of-passage novel, Song of Solomon, is sitting in a barroom booth across from his friend, Guitar. Guitar asks Milkman why he has summoned him here, and Milkman says that he has just knocked his father down:

Hit him. Knocked him into the fuckin radiator.

What’d he do to you?

Nothin.

Nothin? You just upped and popped him?

Yeah.

For no reason?

He hit my mother.

Oh.

He hit her. I hit him.

That’s tough.

Yeah.

I mean it.

I know.

Guitar is having trouble believing what Milkman has told him, and his incredulity gives his questions an inquisitorial edge. Milkman is himself surprised by what he’s done, but his father had transgressed, and Milkman isn’t going to downplay hitting him, or apologize for it. Guitar is pressing and Milkman is pressing back, and Morrison dispenses with dialogue tags, letting the lines leap back and forth across the table, as fast as we can read them.

Now look at this exchange from William Kennedy’s Ironweed, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. The homeless protagonist, Francis Phelan, is walking down a street in Albany with his zany pal, Rudy:

There’s seven deadly sins, Rudy said.

Deadly? What do you mean deadly? Francis said.

I mean daily, Rudy said. Every day.

There’s only one sin as far as I’m concerned, Francis said.

There’s prejudice.

Oh yeah. Prejudice. Yes.

There’s envy.

Envy. Yeah, yup. That’s one.

There’s lust.

Lust, right. Always liked that one.

Cowardice.

Who’s a coward?

Cowardice.

I don’t know what you mean. That word I don’t know.

Cowardice, Rudy said.

I don’t like the coward word. What’re you sayin’ about coward?

A coward. He’ll cower up. You know what a coward is? He’ll run.

"No, that word I don’t know. Francis is no coward.