by John Hough
Nixon: Pressure from Mitchell?
Haldeman: Apparently.
Nixon: Oh, Mitchell, Mitchell was at the point that you made on this, that exactly what I need from you is on the–
Haldeman: Gemstone, yeah.
Nixon: All right, fine, I understand it all.
Haldeman: Colson, yesterday, they concluded it was not the White House, but are now convinced it is a CIA thing, so the CIA turn off would . . .
Nixon: When you get in these people when you . . . get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that” ah, without going into the details . . . don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah, because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period!
If you skipped any of this—or most of it—I don’t blame you. Riveting reading, it is not. It’s meandering. It’s repetitive. There are pointless-seeming interruptions. Some of it is hard to follow, some of it is nearly unintelligible. What’s going on here? Richard Nixon, whatever you think of him, was educated and far from stupid. He was articulate in public. H. R. Haldeman was an advertising executive and a graduate of UCLA. So why is the dialogue between two powerful and intelligent men conniving in a felony so insipid in print?
The answer is all around you, in the dialogue you hear every hour of every day, and in the words you speak yourself. It’s the way we talk: the unfinished sentence, the sudden shift of topic, the empty pause, the repetition, the interruptions. In real life we digress. We ramble. We elaborate needlessly. We use three or four sentences, three or four words, where one would do. The three years of the Nixon tapes run to thousands and thousands of pages, and no wonder.
The dialogue writer is not a stenographer, writing down what he hears.
As the Watergate tapes demonstrate, dialogue in fiction is not derived from real life. If it were, you’d bore the reader, probably confuse him, and triple the length of your novel. The dialogue writer is not a stenographer, writing down what he hears; he’s an extrapolator, a rewrite man, bringing coherence to our oral discourse, condensing what we say and giving it shape and cohesion.
KEEPING IT SHORT AND SWEET
Economy is a cardinal rule. As a young newspaper reporter I learned that, whatever you’re writing, if you can cut words without losing meaning, you strengthen what remains. Less is more. Don’t crowd good words with unnecessary ones; the good words are diminished by the noise around them.
If you can cut words without losing meaning, you strengthen what remains.
This is especially true of dialogue. Not just every sentence or phrase, but every word should be indispensable to the meaning or the effect you’re aiming for. If you can cut it, you don’t need it; it is hurting, not helping. Train your eye to spot the words that sit there without pulling their weight. There might be very little left when you’re done, and the dialogue is likely to be excellent. This is from Song of Solomon:
“You want this for the baby’s name?”
“I want that for the baby’s name. Say it.”
“You can’t name the baby this.”
“Say it.”
“It’s a man’s name.”
“Say it.”
“Pilate.”
“What?”
“Pilate. You wrote down Pilate.”
“Like a river boat pilot?”
“No. Not like no riverboat pilot. Like a Christ-killing Pilate. You can’t get much worse than that for a name. And a baby girl at that.”
The artistry here is in the brevity, the compactness of the lines. Every speech but the last one is comprised of a single sentence. Some are two and even one word long. We don’t talk like this in real life. We don’t speak with such precision and clarity and directness.
You can’t always get away with giving a character a speech of one sentence, but do it when you can. And unless a character is musing out loud, delivering a rant, or telling a story, aim for speeches of no more than three sentences. Make this a rule—one to three sentences, preferably no more than two, per speech—whenever possible.
Make this a rule—one to three sentences, preferably no more than two, per speech—whenever possible.
The rule will help you discipline yourself. Follow it, and you won’t allow your characters to digress. You won’t allow them to repeat themselves. They won’t be likely to drop a subject and move to another in mid-speech, which can throw dialogue into confusion. The rule will also save you from what I’ve found to be the most common of writing students’ mistakes: the sentence that repeats an idea, emotion, or fact, expressing it in different words.
We do this almost automatically in real life. In the Watergate tapes Haldeman says he’s going to instruct Patrick Gray to “stay the hell out of this.” He will tell Gray: “This is ah, business here, we don’t want you to go any further on it.” Same thought—Gray has to be muzzled—expressed in a different way.
Nixon asks a question. “Well, who was the asshole that did? Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow?” Same question, three times, and note how its impact is diminished with each reiteration.
Short speeches keep the dialogue, and the narrative, moving at a brisk pace, which never hurts, and which is especially important in tense situations. The transcript of a real confrontation between a high school teacher and problem student would be more verbose and wandering than this exchange between the teacher Guthrie and his least favorite student in Haruf’s Plainsong:
That’s it? Guthrie said. You think that just about covers it?
Yeah.
That was pretty short.
I couldn’t find anything, the boy said.
You couldn’t find anything about Thomas Jefferson?
No.
The Declaration of Independence.
No.
The presidency. His life at Monticello.
No.
Where did you look?
Everywhere I could think of.
You must not have thought very long,” Guthrie said. Let me see your notes.
I just got this page.
Let me see that much.
The boy’s answers come across as sullen and disrespectful because they’re so brief. He isn’t bothering to explain himself, and Guthrie isn’t bothering to cajole the boy or offer him a chance to reconsider. Haruf boils the quarrel down to its essence—to short tight sentences that impel the exchange quickly along. You don’t hear dialogue like it in real life. You have to make it up.
WHEN SHORT AND SWEET ISN’T ENOUGH
Of course you need a fourth sentence sometimes, or a fifth, a sixth, and more. But by the sixth sentence, if not sooner, your character has begun to run on, and the interaction, for the moment, is suspended. The other character, or characters, have become listeners, and the drama shifts to the text of the speech itself. Drama requires tension, which I’ll get to in the next chapter; the point here is that economy is as important in long speeches as in short ones. Don’t let your characters ramble, or repeat themselves without reason.
The baby is sick, and Hank Smith and Katie Cocker, the country singer, are arguing in Lee Smith’s novel about a musical family from the Virginia hills, The Devil’s Dream. Katie is narrating:
“I’m going to take her to the hospital if I have to walk,” I said.
“You are not! You spoil that baby to death, Katie, that’s probably what’s the matter with her anyway. It’s nothing, I’m telling you. Get in bed. I’ve got to get up at six o’clock and go to work, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Hank shouts Katie down—what can she do but listen? He snatches her attention, and ours, and holds it with dialogue that is swollen with petulance and denial and plain laziness.
The chips are down and Hank is revealing who he really is; Katie is learning something, and so are we, and it’s more than enough to keep us reading. All this—count them—in five sentences.
William Kennedy’s admirable street bum, Francis Phelan, tells a couple of friends what he’d do if he had fifty dollars:
“I had fifty, I’d spend it on her,” Francis said. “Or buy a pair of shoes. Other pair wore out and Harry over at the old clothes joint give ’em to me for a quarter. He seen me half barefoot and says, Francis you can’t go around like that, and he give me these. But they don’t fit right and I only got one of ’em laced. Twine there in the other one. I got a shoestring in my pocket but ain’t put it in yet.”
This quiet speech is about as perfect as dialogue gets. There’s a little story in it of poverty and kindness. Each line is meticulously crafted in the spare vernacular of the hobo. Seven sentences.
In Song of Solomon the Reverend Cooper tells Milkman how he came by the permanent lump behind his ear:
“Some of us went to Philly to try and march in an Armistice Day parade. This was after the First World War. We were invited and had a permit, but the people, the white people, didn’t like us being there. They started a fracas. You know, throwing rocks and calling us names. They didn’t care nothing ’bout the uniform. Anyway, some police on horseback came—to quiet them down, we thought. They ran us down. Right under their horses. This here’s what a hoof can do. Ain’t that something?”
There’s a story here, containing racial bigotry, violence, and some American history, told in eight sentences. Three of these sentences are very short. There are longer speeches in Song of Solomon—some fill more than a page—but the speakers never repeat themselves, they never veer off the subject. Ten sentences, twenty: they should be as lean and substantive as the Reverend Cooper’s eight.
There’s no easy way to write dialogue like this. Superfluous words and phrases come naturally to us when we talk and when we write. Observe the one-to-three sentence rule as consistently as you can. Dole out that fourth sentence—and the fifth, and the sixth—grudgingly. Pretend that every line of dialogue is costly. Don’t buy it unless you have to.
KEEPING IT UNREAL: AVOIDING THE QUIRKS, TICS, AND HABITS OF REAL LIFE
We develop certain habits when we talk to each other, usually by common consensus; take a pledge against most of them when you write dialogue.
Don’t begin a question with “So,” as in, “So, Sharon, how do you like being the mother of triplets?” Or, “So, Eddie, did you win the game last night?” In real life we do this almost instinctively, as a matter of consideration or courtesy. That prefatory So, usually followed by the addressee’s name, makes the question less abrupt. It softens it, begins it on a tentative note, as if to say, If you don’t mind my asking . . .
This is the last thing you want in your dialogue. Dialogue should be abrupt. Every question, however benign, should be direct. It should demand an answer. With every question, your characters are putting each other on the spot, which is why their answers are revealing. Katie Cocker and Ralph Handy are sitting in a diner and falling in love in The Devil’s Dream:
“What are you grinning at?” Ralph asked me.
“You,” I said real bold. “I’m grinning at you.”
It’s the abruptness of Ralph’s question that makes it good. It catches Katie by surprise and she answers “real bold,” matching boldness with boldness. So, Katie, what are you grinning at?—write it this way, and you transform the question. You make it more casual, less probing. You put a note of hesitation in it. You make it easier to answer.
Keep your characters from stating the obvious.
Keep your characters from stating the obvious. Here is one of the major differences between dialogue in fiction and in real life. In real life we say, “That’s beautiful.” Or, “That’s funny.” Or, “That’s awful.” Or, “That’s sad.” Unless these observations somehow contradict the evidence, we’re stating what is obvious. “I’m so relieved,” you say, when it turns out you don’t need a hip replacement. Of course you’re relieved—it goes without saying. “This complicates things,” you say, when your lawyer tells you there’s a labyrinthine codicil to your father’s will. No kidding.
When it comes to dialogue in fiction, this natural impulse to say the obvious about the situation at hand is dead weight. There’s no need for your characters to tell each other, and the reader, that bad news is bad news, or that beauty is beauty. “I’m glad to see you” is a bad line when two old friends meet. So is “I’m sorry for your loss” when a friend’s father has passed. Of course they’re glad, of course they’re sorry.
An expletive as an interjection, spoken in anger or disappointment, is usually a bad line; the four-letter word when your character finds himself locked out of his house is an obvious response. (See more on expletives in chapter seven.) If your character is pounding on a door, never have her say “Let me in!” or “Open up!”—the pounding says it, the demand states what is already clear.
In beginners’ fiction I often come across the line, “I can’t believe this is happening.” Avoid this line like the plague. You hear it regularly in real life, and you probably say it yourself from time to time, in a wide range of circumstances. You’re at the airport, soon to board your flight to France, and you discover you’ve left your passport at home. I can’t believe this is happening. Your car breaks down on the highway at one in the morning. I can’t believe this is happening. You’re indicted for a crime you didn’t commit. I can’t believe this is happening. But it is happening, and it is so far from what you expected that you can’t help saying so, stating what is painfully obvious. Never use this line in your dialogue.
In real life we talk around things, we speak idly, but all dialogue in fiction has to reveal something. It has to contain news of some sort, and there’s no news in a statement of the obvious unless the statement itself is the news. The kindly elderly priest learns that someone has stolen Sunday’s collection money and states the obvious, “This is bad!” embroidering it with obscenities. There’s news in the line if we haven’t yet heard the priest cuss. If your characters are going to state the obvious, they must do it in a surprising way.
The sheriff’s deputy, Wendell, states the obvious in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, when he and Sheriff Bell come upon a crime scene in the desert, a strew of bodies, bullet-riddled cars and pickups, a dog shot and killed:
It’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?
If it ain’t, it’ll have to do till one gets here.
A mess: the laconic understatement makes Wendell’s line interesting. It isn’t a word we expect. Sheriff Bell’s laconic answer does him one better, so wry and whimsical it makes the reader smile.
OMITTING GREETINGS AND SALUTATIONS
Omit the pleasantries, greetings, and salutations that open conversations in real life. Go straight to the dialogue that matters. Maggie Jones, the schoolteacher in Plainsong, drives out to the elderly McPheron brothers’ farm:
They got down and approached her slowly, calmly, as deliberately as church deacons, as if they were not at all surprised to see her. They moved heavily in their winter coveralls and they had on thick caps pulled low and cumbersome winter gloves.
You’re going to freeze yourself, standing there, Harold said. You better get out of this wind. Are you lost?
Probably, Maggie Jones said. She laughed. But I wanted to talk to you.
Encounters in real life sometimes do begin as summarily as this; in fiction they must, always. Standard greetings and courtesies don’t reveal character or move the story, they only delay things. The reader might assume that your characters have already said hello to each other, or he might not. You’re fine, either way; the reader isn’t going to spend a moment wondering about it.
PHONE CONVERSATIONS
Strip telephone conversations down to what matters. Never, without a good reason, use “hello” or “good-bye.”
From The
Friends of Eddie Coyle:
In the telephone booth, Eddie deposited a dime and dialed a Boston number. He said: “Foley there?”
Someone speaks to Eddie first on the other end, but we don’t hear it. We don’t need to; if we did, Higgins would have written it.
The actress Maria Wyeth, the protagonist of Joan Didion’s short novel of excess and loneliness in Hollywood, Play It As It Lays, is on the phone with her friend Felicia Goodwin:
“Les finished the script?”
“I’ll get him,” Felicia said with relief.
“Never mind,” Maria said, but it was too late.
“Where’ve you been,” he said.
“Nowhere.” When she heard his voice she felt a rush of well-being. “I didn’t want to call because—”
“I can’t hear you, Maria, where are you?”
“In a phone booth. I just wanted—”
“You all right?”
“No. I mean yes.” A bus was shifting gears on Sunset and she raised her voice. “Listen. Call me.”
She walked back to the car and sat for a long while . . .
Do Les Goodwin and Maria say hello to each other when he comes on the phone? Do they say good-bye after Les ends the conversation with “Call me”? The question doesn’t occur to us.
WHEN AND HOW TO USE REPETITION
Don’t let your characters repeat what was just said in the form of a question, as a prelude to their response, as we often do in real life. I see this in beginners’ fiction almost as often as I hear it in daily conversation. It goes like this:
“What time is it, Joe?”
“What time is it? It’s nine o’clock.”
Or:
“I saw a giraffe yesterday.”
“A giraffe? Where?”
It’s the question mark that usually makes this repetition fatal. I say usually; a character might repeat what he’s just heard in a reaction of bafflement or incredulity. Short of that, the repetition is rhetorical and meaningless.
