8
DIALOGUE
Writing strong passages of dialogue, whether we’re telling true stories or crafting fiction, is an important skill to have as a writer. Dialogue moves plot forward, reveals information about your characters, and provides important story information. Because of its importance, you should never let your dialogue become mere fluff. Words between characters should always be more than a passing conversation.
When you’re writing an essay, you have the authority to pick and choose which conversations you reveal to readers. You also have the authority to edit these conversations using the same dialogue techniques that you’d use in fiction, as long as the overall “truth” behind what was said still remains. This means that if you remember someone saying something hurtful to you but you don’t remember exactly what he said, you can improvise or fabricate, as long as the dialogue still rings true to the event as you remember it.
But realistic dialogue in short stories and essays shouldn’t equal real speech. Written dialogue is only the impression of our speech, not a direct match to the garbled way we actually speak to each other. Have you listened to a conversation lately? There are plenty of “ums” and “wells” and super-long breaths.
Make sure your characters speak their minds—clearly.
The best way to hear dialogue authentically is to read it aloud. Omit any chit-chat. You don’t have time to have a character ask about the weather unless it matters to your story. No “How was your day?” either, unless you’re layering in subtext or you’re about to surprise your readers with the answer to that question.
“Weak dialogue undermines our narratives. In fiction, it can erode—sabotage even—a fine story. Dialogue should contribute and reveal character, and great dialogue serves the story. It is an element we can use to express conflict, tension, implication, subtext, microtension, and emotion. Used to sufficient effect, it is a tool to control pacing and contribute to momentum. Dialogue is a vital element of story, no matter the form of writing.”
—APRIL BRADLEY
PASSAGES OF DIALOGUE CAN ELEVATE YOUR PROSE
Let’s start with an example. Your main character, Amanda, wants to be invited to the dance by the cute older boy who works at the ice-cream parlor. You might have Amanda enter the ice-cream shop, spinning on her toes and humming his favorite song. When Jake, the boy, doesn’t react to her hints, Amanda decides to try harder.
If you write the next part of the ice-cream shop scene without dialogue, it might look something like this:
Jake barely listened to what Amanda had to say as he created an unstable two-scooped chocolate tower. It was obvious he was more interested in who’d be taking Lilly to the dance, just like every other boy at school.
This is an example of telling. Now, there isn’t anything wrong with telling some of the scene like this, but it’s not as compelling for what could be a significant scene. A summary paragraph tells the reader your story. Passages of dialogue allow you to show the story instead. Consider the same scene with dialogue:
Amanda leaned over the counter and watched Jake’s forearm flex as he shaped her scoop of chocolate ice cream. “I heard there’ll be two different bands on Saturday night for the dance,” she said. “The first one’s just a warm-up. They even ordered an ice sculpture.”
“Your sister Lilly’s in my homeroom,” Jake said. He didn’t look up from his task. “Is she going to the dance with you, or does she have a date?” He forced the scoop onto her crisp sugar cone. Amanda heard something crack.
“She’ll probably have a date. It’s that kind of thing, you know, formal. Everyone’s pairing up.”
“Everyone?” Jake worked on her second scoop. He held the cone upright, mostly.
“You know, for pictures and things,” she said.
Jake put the new scoop on top of the other one and tapped it down a little too rough. A small piece of sugar cone fell to the floor. “Lilly always orders strawberry when she comes in,” he said.
Amanda took the cone from Jake’s outstretched hand. “She’s into strawberry right now, but tomorrow she’ll decide that something else is better. She gets bored. By next week it’ll be chocolate chip, maybe even mint.”
Jake looked past her to the next customer. “Who is Lilly going with on Saturday?”
“Who knows? Lilly has a whole list of guys who want to take her.”
Jake nodded but didn’t ask more.
“She made a chart to decide. Height, car, popularity rating, that kind of thing. She said she won’t choose until Friday.”
Jake pointed to the cashier, who was waiting to take Amanda’s money. “We sell a lot of mint chip,” he said. “Tell Lilly I’ll make sure we have it in stock.”
The first example was intentionally boring to prove a point, but the difference between these two styles of revealing the same story is clear. In the second example, we are present and involved. We aren’t told that Amanda is jealous of her sister; we’re shown the jealousy, particularly when Amanda tells Jake about the dance-date chart. It’s a more interesting way for the reader to learn information.
DIALOGUE TAGS
A “dialogue tag” (or attribution) is the phrase you put before or after the dialogue (he said, she said, I replied, etc.). Almost every time, said is the right choice. Readers barely notice it, and it keeps your pace going strong. Throw in an occasional whispered or shouted if you need to—or maybe some short stage direction—but don’t get any fancier than that. It is easy to unnecessarily distract your readers with long or frilly attributions.
FORMATTING DIALOGUE
Dialogue should always:
Begin on a new line for each new speaker
Use double quotation marks around the words
Have punctuation inside the quotation marks
End with a comma if you’re adding a dialogue tag or with a full stop if you’re adding an action
For example:
“Lucy, please step outside,” the teacher said. “We need to talk.”
“What about?”
“The lemon on my desk.” She folded her arms.
Here’s a closer look at dialogue punctuation and some specific situations:
When punctuating dialogue with commas and an attribution before the dialogue, the comma is placed after the attribution and the appropriate punctuation mark goes inside the quotation mark at the end of the dialogue: David said, “I was asked to leave the museum.”
When punctuating dialogue with commas and adding an attribution after the dialogue, the comma is placed inside the quotation mark: “He walked me to my car,” Linda said.
When you’re punctuating dialogue with commas and adding a pronoun attribution, the comma is placed inside the quotation mark and the pronoun is not capitalized: “I love you,” she said.
For a non-dialogue beat to break up a line of dialogue, use commas: “And then I realized,” Jane said with a sigh, “that he’d lied to me.”
10 TIPS FOR MASTERING DIALOGUE
Every conversation takes place somewhere specific. Add a bit of action or description once in a while to ground readers in the setting and help them keep track of the speaker. If your characters are sitting in a restaurant, have the waitress stop by or have a patron drop his fork, that kind of thing.
Great dialogue occurs in a scene that contains conflict. Two nice characters congratulating each other on a victory isn’t nearly as fun as two characters from the winning team who not-so-secretly hate each other’s guts. Does one guy pat the other guy’s back a little bit too hard during the post-game celebration? Does the other guy use some belittling nickname as revenge?
Give two of your characters opposing agendas. Maybe a wife wants to arrive at her office’s fancy cocktail party before her boss figures out she’s absent, while the husband wants to stay home and watch the last ten minutes of the basketball game. Underlying tension between these two characters will spark great dialogue.
Cut your dialogue to the bone. Don’t write in c
omplete sentences, and don’t have characters say each other’s names very often (or at all). Phrases and fragments sound more natural. A good exercise: During revision, cut each line of dialogue in half, but keep the same meaning. I bet you can—every single time.
Silence is a choice in dialogue, too. When someone speaks and doesn’t get a reply, that means something. Use silence as a tool when you can.
Don’t let someone talk too long. If a character has a long passage of dialogue—like a politician giving a speech or a newscaster on TV—break it up a bit. Have someone interrupt him or pause to let the character perform an action—drink some water, raise his trophy, etc.
Use subtext. The text is about what’s happening on the surface; the subtext is what’s happening underneath. A great way to keep readers engaged is to have a character apparently talking about one thing when in reality she is talking (and thinking) about something else.
Use caution when approaching dialect and accents. When overdone, accents and regional dialects can come across as comic or worse, offensive. Sprinkling a wee or ain’t into a character’s speech once in a while is enough information for readers.
Make each character sound distinct throughout the entire story. To do this, keep your character’s dialogue consistent with her personality each time she speaks. If one of your characters is a bully, have him try to win every conversation. If you’re writing dialogue for a stressed-out mother, let her lose it once in a while. If your character is quiet or shy, keep his dialogue short. You get the idea. Make him real every time he speaks.
Let your characters say something they don’t mean once in a while. People can be contrary when they want to distract someone or when they feel overwhelmed.
DIALOGUE EXERCISE: OPPOSING AGENDAS
Great dialogue happens when two characters have opposing agendas. For this exercise, start fresh. Imagine a new essay idea or short story in your mind. Your idea must include two people in conflict. Each wants something, but only one of them will get it. Maybe you’ll write about a couple on a house-hunting trip, or maybe you’ll write about two people in love with the same person.
Think about what these two people would say to each other if confronted with their opposing agendas. Would one of them threaten? Trick? Seduce to get her way? What words would she use to get what she wants?
Take fifteen minutes to write this verbal confrontation. Make sure to add enough character movement and setting to prevent it from becoming two talking heads on the page.
9
THEME
Stories and essays are about people undergoing experiences. These experiences—their nature and the effect they have on the people involved—will cause the reader to draw conclusions. These conclusions are your themes. And your themes are what your writing means.
It’s a writer shining a flashlight on some aspect of life and letting the reader see what’s there. A theme is the central idea explored by your work, a message you leave in your wake.
A theme can be as short as a word or as long as a sentence. Some possible themes:
grief
societal pressure complicating marriage plans
a difficult childhood
the quest for food and shelter
the value of friendship
homesickness
coming of age
man vs. nature
love is blind
good vs. evil
unrequited love
power corrupts
claim your own future
the futility of war
the necessity of war
the nature of happiness
blood is thicker than water
money can’t buy happiness
A great way to study theme is to read widely. Think of the last book or essay you read or even the last movie you watched. Ponder the longest scenes, main conflict, and the epiphany. The epiphany moment is when the main character has a major realization. It’s usually a sudden intuitive perception of his situation in relation to the main conflict.
Next, ask yourself what these moments suggest about the human condition. What lessons do they teach? What conclusions can be drawn? What did the story make you feel?
How does this help you improve your short story or essay? The choices you make in identifying your own theme will strongly influence how you revise your written work. Theme will help you make sense of your first draft and help you make decisions about what to keep and what to delete.
You might start writing a piece with a certain theme in mind, but you don’t need to. Themes tend to emerge as you write. It won’t likely be until the editing stage that you even begin to recognize the themes you’ve developed. Themes are so closely tied to human nature that it’s almost impossible to tell a story without a theme of some kind, so don’t worry; you’ll have one.
“When you hear the word ‘theme,’ you may groan internally—isn’t that the old ‘moral of the story’ we’d get from Aesop’s fables? Well, in a way, yes, it is. But Aesop was onto something. He disguised the meanings of his tales by making them about animals rather than about people. In this way he … disguised his critical intent from the society he satirized. He created metaphors about human behavior by showing action and reaction. That is what authors do all the time—particularly with theme. Think of the plotted story as what the reader perceives on the surface, while the theme is the deep-sea creature felt swimming in the dark depths somewhere far beneath. It tells us not what you wrote about but why you wrote it.”
—SAVANNAH THORNE
DIGGING FOR YOUR TRUTH
If you’ve already completed the first draft of your story or essay, you’ll have an easier time identifying your theme and using it to improve your second draft.
Let’s say that you’ve completed an essay draft about that time at Lake Pleasant when your sister almost drowned. You’ve shown the family car trip that led to the campsite, your family setting up camp the first day, and then the actual incident where your sister fell through the rotted wooden dock and was trapped—barely breathing in the small space between dock and water—bobbing for her life.
As you study your prose, you notice that you’ve portrayed your father as an organized camper. Your sister, the daredevil of the family, talks about practicing holding her breath underwater at the local pool (which you explain was what your father did when he was a kid). And at the end of the essay, your father saves your sister because you alert him by blowing on the whistle he put around your neck—something he gave you to use if you got lost while exploring the woods.
You might look at these three items and decide that your theme is “always be prepared” or “father knows best.” Either decision will help you edit your essay.
Your next step is to focus the essay on this singular theme, refining your storytelling so that much of the essay relates back to the theme in some way. This is a great way to add depth. The repetition of thematic elements will naturally pile up, creating resonance within the story.
If you choose the theme “always be prepared,” you can go back to the car trip and show a bit more about how your family prepared for the trip. Maybe your mother always packs a gallon of water for emergencies and sandwiches, too. Then you could also show more detail when the family arrives at the campsite. Perhaps you could show something that happened when you weren’t prepared, like the wood being too wet to start a fire—so you ate cold soup instead. This adds a nice sense of balance to your story and also foreshadows the near-drowning by showing readers that not everything will go well for your family on this trip.
If you decide to embrace the theme of “father knows best,” you could make your father the focal point and revise the whole story accordingly. You could give him the majority of the dialogue during the car ride. Maybe he advises you and your sister about the proper way to build a fire and then tells you that you’ll need to wake up at 6 A.M. so that you can enjoy the sunrise—because a morning sunrise is really the best thing about camping. Perhaps you add
your own internal dialogue during the car ride, giving the reader a sense of how you feel about your father and his long-winded “my way is the only way” view of the world. You could lead readers through the setup at the camp through this lens, too, showing your father and his need to have things done a certain way. The readers will see him insist that you wear that embarrassing orange whistle around your neck.
Both of these revision choices will vastly improve on your original idea, and that’s the whole reason to stop and think about theme. When you have a theme, you are able to make editing choices with confidence and reveal the best version of the story.
“I teach students how to flesh out themes in the work they read for my courses, but thinking about themes and sub-themes is the last thing I want to do as I’m composing those first important ‘gut’ drafts of a story or essay. That said, taking time to deeply consider themes can make both the revision and editing processes enlightening and productive experiences. For example, I’ve written many pieces about my son and husband and their favorite sport: motocross. Each of these pieces has the overarching theme of ‘sport’ and, more specifically, ‘envy’ (how much I envy their talent and technique). However, when I decided to submit my work to the Prairie Schooner’s Sports Shorts series, I had to think about what makes this sport stand out from others—what are some sub-themes that set it apart? I came up with ‘daring’ and ‘fearlessness in flight.’ I looked through drafts I’d written, and I chose a piece that illuminated these sub-themes that weren’t necessarily present in other pieces I’d written. Furthermore, motocross is known for its memorable and exhilarating sounds, so I amplified the ‘sound’ in the piece using words like ‘yammering’ and ‘hammering’ that echoed the actual sounds on the track.”
Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays Page 9
