by John Hough
I often advise students to read their dialogue aloud to themselves. There’s no better way to assess your dialogue tags than to hear them. Are they buttressing the dialogue, or tripping it up? The morning after the Grangerford family takes him in, Huckleberry Finn wakes up and realizes he’s forgotten what he told them his name is:
So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:
“Can you spell, Buck?”
“Yes,” he says.
“I bet you can’t spell my name,” says I.
“I bet you what you dare I can,” says he.
“All right,” says I, “go ahead.”
“G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n—there now,” he says.
“Well,” says I, “you done it, but I didn’t think you could.”
Days, but not many pages later, Huck sees Buck shoot at Harney Shepherdson from behind a bush, and wants to know why. Same characters, same voices, but the tempo now is very different:
“Did you want to kill him, Buck?”
“Well, I bet I did.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Him? He never done nothing to me.”
“Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?”
“Why, nothing—only it’s on account of the feud.”
“What’s a feud?”
“Why, where was you raised? Don’t you know what a feud is?”
“Never heard of it before—tell me about it.”
Every line of speech is tagged in the first scene. The scene is comic, and it unfolds in an almost leisurely way. Twain keeps the brakes on the dialogue, giving us time to enjoy it. There are no dialogue tags in the second colloquy: Buck’s blood is up, and Huck wants answers. Sometimes dialogue tags are of minor importance—the dialogue would work almost equally well with or without them—and sometimes they make all the difference.
THE WISDOM OF ELMORE LEONARD AND THE TALKING VERBS
The third of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing,” which were published in a primer-sized leather-bound booklet and are available online, is a blanket prohibition: “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.”
I run into some resistance to this commandment when I’m teaching, and there are some great modern writers—Eudora Welty, notably—who decline to subscribe to it. (Leonard’s dialogue, it should be noted, matches up with anybody’s.)
“The line of dialogue belongs to the character,” Leonard explains. “The verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But ‘said’ is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied.”
I’d go further: “said” isn’t intrusive, at all. It’s invisible. The reader reads it again and again and again, and never notices it. The dialogue, then, stands on its own. This forces you, the writer, to write dialogue that needs no help, and dialogue that needs no help is good dialogue.
I don’t know what Leonard would have said about “asked” and “answered.” Most writers use them, but an answer is obviously an answer, so why not stick with “said”? I’m not a stickler about “asked”—I may have used it myself a few times—but the question mark at the end of the line makes the verb redundant.
I do know what Leonard would have said about “continued” and “interrupted”—he never use them. “Continued” is a lumbering verb that treats the reader like . . . well, isn’t it obvious that the speaker is continuing? Likewise, an interruption is an interruption and doesn’t need to be identified as one. Beginners love the verb for some reason, and again and again I find myself pointing out that the line they’ve written isn’t even an interruption—the previous line is a complete sentence.
From Ironweed:
“If I come back tomorrow . . .”
“We’ll see about tomorrow,” said the preacher, who grabbed the doorknob himself and pulled it to as he ushered Little Red out into the night.
The preacher stops Little Red in mid-sentence, speaking over him and hurrying him out the door. Who needs to be told that the preacher “interrupted” Little Red?
AVOIDING ADVERBS TO MODIFY “SAID”
Leonard’s fourth rule says almost the same thing as his third: “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said.’” Adverbs—gravely, angrily, coolly, excitedly—are intrusive, like verbs other than “said.” They distract the reader, calling attention away from the dialogue itself. And, like those verbs, they give a line of dialogue help it shouldn’t need. Instead of “said gravely,” write a grave line of dialogue—a line with gravity we can hear in the words you choose, and in the rhythm and movement of the sentence. Write a slow sentence, a somber one. Write an angry line (this is easy). Write a cool line, an excited one.
I wouldn’t tell you never to use “loudly” or “quietly” with “said,” but before you do, consider whether it might be possible to write a line that conveys the raised or lowered voice.
A final word. Fitzgerald often modified “said,” and even Hemingway did, occasionally, but we chalk that up to their era and pass over it with a forgiving eye. Today, an adverb with “said” has a distinctly old-fashioned flavor. It fits, is at home, in a novel written back in the Jazz Age.
ITALICS IN DIALOGUE
Italicized words are emphatic, sometimes loud, sometimes shrill, and permissible in limited amounts. The best dialogue writers need them only occasionally. Higgins never italicizes dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He never has to. Here, Jackie Brown, the gun dealer, finds himself under arrest:
“Do you understand your rights?” Moran said.
“Yes,” Jackie Brown said. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Shut up,” Moran said. “Turn around and hold out your wrists.” Foley snapped the handcuffs on Jackie Brown’s wrists. “You’re under arrest for violation of U. S. Code twenty-six, Section fifty-eight-sixty-one, possession of a machine gun without being registered as the owner and possessor of a machine gun.”
“Hey,” Jackie Brown said.
“Shut up,” Foley said. “I don’t want to hear one more fucking word out of you. You keep your goddamned trap shut. Now get in your car.”
Read this aloud, and you can’t help raising your voice. Expletives usually raise the volume level; it’s hard to read them quietly. Moran’s voice is under control when he recites the charge against Jackie Brown—the length of the line, as well as the dry legal syntax, bring the level down—but the short lines are snappish. There’s voltage in them. They’re loud. The verb, you’ll notice, is always “said,” and it is never modified.
EXCLAMATION POINTS
And something else in the dialogue above: in all that heated back-and-forth, there isn’t an exclamation point to be seen. Exclamation points are the target of Leonard’s fifth rule: “Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” William Maxwell, novelist and longtime editor of the New Yorker, went quite a bit further, asserting that a novelist should be permitted one exclamation point in his or her career. Fitzgerald didn’t like exclamation points, though he was probably thinking more of exposition than dialogue when he advised a writer friend, “Cut out all those exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
I don’t think anything absolute can be said about exclamation points. Even Leonard adds a qualifier to his stricture on them: “If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.” Wolfe certainly does. From A Man in Full:
“This is so funny, because I was thinking about you just yesterday and wondering how to get in touch with you!”
“With me?”
“Yes! There’s something I need to run by you. Could I give you a ring?”
“Well—of course, Mr . . .”
“Peepgass!” he said. “Ray! Make it Ray!”
He produced a ballpoint pen from an inside jacket pocket and then began ransacking his tuxedo for a piece of paper. Finding none, he thrust out the cuff of the left sleeve of his
shirt and positioned the pen above it and grinned and said, “What’s the number?”
“Not on your shirt! It’ll never come out.”
“You’re right! Here—I’ll put it here!” He positioned the pen over the back of his left hand and grinned some more.
Tom Wolfe earns his exemption from Leonard’s fifth rule because . . . well, because he’s Tom Wolfe. Wolfe’s narrative voice, as well his dialogue, are so original and witty, and have been so influential, that Leonard steps back respectfully and allows Wolfe to go his own way. The man and woman in the colloquy above, Martha Croker and Ray Peepgass, are wooing each other awkwardly, both beset by nervousness. Wolfe slaps on the exclamation points, giving the dialogue a high-pitched, over-eager feel on both sides. If Elmore Leonard won’t fault Wolfe, I certainly won’t, but try this:
“Not on your shirt. It’ll never come out.”
“You’re right. Here—I’ll put it here.”
Martha’s voice jumps an octave with the italicized shirt, and Peepgass’s line comes tumbling out of him, rapid and jumpy, even without the exclamation point. It’s good dialogue, either way. Is it better without the exclamation points, or has it lost something? I’ll leave that to you.
Eudora Welty’s and Anne Tyler’s characters, like Wolfe’s, are exclaimers. Lee Smith uses exclamation points somewhat less frequently. Welty’s house in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark, open to the public as a museum. Tyler’s fiction has won a bouquet of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. And Smith, for my money, is the best American writer not yet to have won either the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. So, if you decide to part company with Elmore Leonard and William Maxwell when it comes to exclamation points, you’ll be in good company.
At most, use them sparingly. Don’t rely on them, automatically, to characterize a line of dialogue; try first to write an excited line, a nervous one, a loud one. There is also the option of breaking Elmore Leonard’s third rule—as Leonard does himself every once in a while—and ratcheting the verb up to a shout, a yell, a holler, a cry. These verbs make an exclamation point unnecessary, but they also accommodate it, when it is there. At the climax of my novel, Seen the Glory, Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, the boy Thomas Chandler, fighting for the Union, follows his brother, Luke, and his best friend, Elisha Smith, toward the pandemonium around the copse:
“Luke!” Thomas shouted. “Elisha!”
He could not hear himself. A shell went off in the air ahead of him and another on the ground, percussion, chucking a couple of men in the air, head over heels . . .
“Elisha! Luke!”
The noise I was trying to describe, gunfire and cannons and exploding shells, was beyond deafening—a percussive thunder that is like nothing Thomas has ever heard. He continues running toward the trees:
He could not see McNamara or Rivers or Merriman, just the two flags moving deeper into the sulfurous smoke, the gunfire, the exploding shells.
“Luke!”
I didn’t see any way around these exclamation points. I found it a challenge to evoke the noise at that moment—“There’s no way to describe it,” the chief historian at Gettysburg had told me—and I thought the exclamation points helped to summon up not just the desperation in Thomas’s voice, but the din he’s yelling into. They were the only exclamation points in the novel. I think there’s a happy medium somewhere between William Maxwell’s edict and Tom Wolfe’s exclaimers, one that we should all look for as we write.
QUOTATION MARKS: THEY’RE OPTIONAL
The dialogue in Kent Haruf’s first two novels, The Tie That Binds and Where You Once Belonged, is enclosed, as most dialogue is, in quotation marks. Then, with Plainsong, a finalist for the National Book Award, quotation marks disappeared. Haruf hasn’t used them in his three novels since.
There’s no rule that says you have to use quotation marks around your dialogue, but their absence is noticed. The reader takes note, adjusts, and reads on. It’s the smallest of impositions, but it is an imposition, and the writer must have his or her good reasons for asking it. He needs, as well, a certain amount of self-confidence: I’m doing it my way, and you’ll have to live with it. The Tie That Binds is a wonderful novel, but one can speculate that it wasn’t until his success with Plainsong that Haruf decided he could disregard the etiquette of quotation marks.
Cormac McCarthy disregarded it from the outset. There are no quotation marks in his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, or in any others. Raymond Carver uses quotation marks in most of his short stories, but not all. Charles Frazier, whose first novel, Cold Mountain, won the National Book Award in 1997 and was a literary sensation, invented his own alternative to quotation marks, a dash in front of every speech.
The omission of quotation marks is a visual matter, obviously. When read aloud, dialogue without quotation marks sounds no different than it would with them. McCarthy’s and Haruf’s dialogue is lyrical and clean, and their idea may be that quotation marks would clutter it, as perhaps they would. Frazier’s dashes give his dialogue little visual jolts without seeming to touch or compromise it.
Feel free to experiment. Three novels ago, I stopped using quotation marks in flashbacks. My idea was to set the dialogue of the past apart, visually, from that of the present. Flashbacks are memory, and it seemed to me that the absence of quotation marks would give that dialogue a less immediate, more settled, more final feel. Take the chance yourself if it seems right to you, but remember that you’re well outside the mainstream when you do.
2
HOW ART DOES NOT IMITATE LIFE
THE WATERGATE TAPES—WHY REAL CONVERSATION MAKES FOR POOR READING
In 1971 President Richard M. Nixon installed voice-activated tape recorders in the suite of rooms in the White House where he conducted business. This putative windfall for future historians was a windfall indeed, but not in the way Nixon intended. The tapes were still rolling a year later, when partisans of the president tried to burglarize the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the building called the Watergate, giving the ensuing scandal its name.
The burglars were caught inside the DNC offices and arrested, and before long Watergate was a household word. Nixon and his aides denied everything and, recording themselves, entered into a conspiracy to suppress all inquiry into the matter. A year after the break-in, the Senate Watergate Committee held hearings to get to the bottom of it.
It was during these hearings that a low-level White House employee inadvertently revealed the existence of the tapes—the moment that doomed the Nixon presidency. You can read the transcripts on line today: the president and his aides discussing hush money, subornation of perjury, money laundering, and the playing of dirty tricks on their political opponents.
On June 23, 1972, Nixon and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, discussed the burgeoning FBI investigation of the burglary attempt, which had occurred six days earlier. The recording of this conversation was called the “Smoking Gun Tape.” Here is Nixon, talking his way to impeachment, and Haldeman, talking his way to imprisonment for obstruction of justice, greatly redacted for brevity:
Haldeman: Now, on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back to the—in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control . . . and they have, their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money, not through the money itself, but through the bank, you know, sources . . . And, and it goes in some directions we don’t want it to go.
Nixon: Right.
Haldeman: . . . the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters call Pat Gray in and just say, “Stay the hell out of this . . . this is ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on it.”
Nixon: Uh huh.
Haldeman: . . . and, uh, that would take care of it.
Nixon: What about Pat Gray, ah, you mean he doesn’t want to?
Haldeman: Pat does want to. He doesn’t know how to, and he doesn�
��t have, he doesn’t have any basis for doing it. Given this, he will then have the basis. He’ll call Mark Felt in . . . Ah, he’ll call him in and say, “We’ve got the signal from across the river to, to put the hold on this.”
Nixon: Well, I mean, ah, there’s no way . . . I’m just thinking if they don’t cooperate, what do they say? They, they, they were approached by the Cubans. That’s what Dahlberg has to say, the Texans too. Is that the idea?
Haldeman: Well, if they will. But then we’re relying on more and more people all the time. That’s the problem. And ah, they’ll stop if we could, if we take this other step.
Nixon: All right. Fine.
Haldeman: They say the only way to do that is from White House instructions. And it’s got to be to Helms and, ah . . . the proposal would be that Ehrlichman and I call them in and say, ah . . .
Nixon: Of course, this is a, this is a hunt, you will—that will uncover a lot of things . . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Well what the hell, did Mitchell know about this thing to any much of a degree?
Haldeman: I don‘t think he knew the details, but I think he knew.
Nixon: He didn’t know how it was going to be handled though. Well who was the asshole that did? Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts.
Haldeman: He is.
Nixon: I mean he just isn’t well screwed on is he? Isn’t that the problem?
Haldeman: No, but he was under pressure, apparently, to get more information, and as he got more pressure, he pushed the people harder to move harder on . . .
