The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  I made this point in a workshop one time, and later, on another subject, read this exchange aloud from McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of his Border Trilogy:

  What did you do?

  I walked up behind him and snatched it out of his belt. That’s what I done.

  And shot him.

  He come at me.

  Come at you.

  Yeah.

  So you shot him.

  What choice did I have?

  What choice, said John Grady.

  I didn’t want to shoot the dumb son of a bitch. That was never no part of my intention.

  After I’d read this, a student jumped all over me. Come at you. What choice—John Grady Cole is repeating what Jimmy Blevins just said.

  “Look at it again,” I said. “These aren’t questions. John Grady heard him loud and clear.”

  John Grady—he is John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain—repeats what the boy Jimmy Blevins has said, affirming it both times in a spirit of both incredulity and challenge. He come at me: John Grady can scarcely believe what he’s heard, and he throws Blevins’s answer back at him as if for further consideration. As if to say, Listen to yourself. Blevins’s question, What choice did I have? is rhetorical, and it is also preposterous. What choice. John Grady repeats it in amazement, again turning the question back on Blevins, who had plenty of choices besides killing the man.

  Try it this way:

  He come at me.

  Come at you?

  And again:

  He come at me.

  Come at you.

  The repeated line, without a question mark, is tendentious. With the question mark, it sounds mildly, and oddly, puzzled. It turns the line slack.

  Repetition can be useful to drive a point home, or to hold on to it, keep it in play. In McCarthy’s The Crossing, the second volume of the Border Trilogy, Billy Parham, a civilian, goes into a Texas bar during World War II and receives a chilly reception from the barman and a soldier:

  Do you know how old I am? the barman said.

  Billy looked at him. No, he said. How would I know how old you are?

  I’ll be thirty-eight years old in June. June fourteenth.

  Billy didn’t answer.

  That’s how come I aint in uniform.

  Billy looked at the soldier. The soldier sat smoking.

  I tried to enlist, the barman said. Tried to lie about my age but they wasnt havin none of it.

  He dont care, the soldier said. Uniform dont mean nothin to him.

  The barman pulled on his cigarette and blew smoke toward the bar. I’ll bet it’d mean somethin if it had been that risin sun on the collar and they was comin down Second Street about ten abreast. I bet it’d mean somethin then.

  The repeated insult, I bet it’d mean somethin then, keeps the derogation and challenge in the air. The barman isn’t allowing Billy to ignore him.

  Think of dialogue in fiction as what is left when the extraneous verbiage is stripped away.

  CONVEYING HESITATION OR HALTING SPEECH WITHOUT INTERJECTIONS

  In the Watergate Tape Nixon and Haldeman intersperse their lines with “ah” or “uh,” as we all do in real life. Don’t be tempted to insert either of these empty interjections into your dialogue as a way of conveying hesitation or uncertainty. It’s the easy way, but not the best one. Instead, write halting dialogue—dialogue that moves slowly, that sounds uncertain or groping. “Ah” and “uh” are clutter of the worst kind. Add “um” to that list of prohibited interjections and consider adding “hmm” as well. I say “consider” because some fine writers do use it in their dialogue, but “hmm” is a sound we make while we’re thinking something over, and there are far better ways to convey a moment of reflection, as you’ll see in chapter five.

  How does it go, then, with no uhs or ahs or ums, when a character is thrown off balance, made hesitant? The boy, Bobby Guthrie, is undergoing a probing interrogation by the old woman, Mrs. Stearns in Plainsong:

  Who’s your teacher?

  Miss Carpenter, Bobby said.

  I don’t know her.

  She’s got long hair and . . .

  And what? Mrs. Stearns said.

  She always wears sweaters.

  Does she.

  Mostly, he said.

  What do you know about sweaters?

  I don’t know, Bobby said. I like them, I guess.

  Bobby, flustered under this scrutiny, gives answers that grope without pausing. They aren’t quite the right answers, and he knows it. The hesitation—uh, ah—is implicit. We can feel it in the marginal relevancy of Bobby’s answers, and, especially, in the diction itself. It’s slow. Try reading those lines, brief as they are, fast. You can’t.

  A good dialogue writer is a counterfeiter, fashioning currency that is more perfect than the real thing.

  In Play It As It Lays, Didion puts the hesitancy of discomfort, and a loss for words, as much between the lines of the dialogue as in the words themselves in this colloquy between Maria Wyeth and her ex-husband, Carter. Maria has just found out she’s pregnant:

  “You were afraid to call back about it.” He was speaking in a careful monotone, a prosecutor with an open-and-shut case. “You thought if you didn’t call back it would just go away.”

  She closed her eyes. “I guess so. I guess that’s right.”

  “But now it’s certain anyway. Otherwise the shot would have made you bleed.”

  She nodded mutely.

  “What doctor. Who was the doctor.”

  “Just a doctor. On Wilshire.”

  “A doctor you didn’t know. You thought that was smart.”

  She said nothing.

  Maria closes her eyes. She nods. She says nothing. Carter is pressing her, and she’s having trouble shaping her responses. The answers, when they come, are uncertain and listless but never broken up with an interjection.

  THE PARADOX OF GOOD DIALOGUE

  Consider this biting colloquy from Play It As It Lays:

  “Listen to the music from the Kuliks’. They’re having a party.”

  “You going?”

  “Of course I’m not going. He’s a gangster.”

  “I just asked you if you were going to the party, Maria, I didn’t ask for a grand-jury indictment.” BZ paused. “In the second place he’s not a gangster. He’s a lawyer.”

  “For gangsters.”

  BZ shrugged. “I think of him more as a philosopher king. He told me once he understood the whole meaning of life, it came to him in a blinding flash one time when he almost died on the table at Cedars.”

  “Larry Kulik’s not going to die at Cedars. Larry Kulik’s going to die in a barber chair.”

  Few conversations in real life are this spare and incisive. A reviewer might praise dialogue as “realistic.” It isn’t, of course; it only sounds real to the ear of the reader. This is the paradox of dialogue in fiction: the better the dialogue, the less realistic it is likely to be, and the more realistic it will sound. Think of dialogue in fiction as what is left when the extraneous verbiage is stripped away. It is what we mean to say, what we do say, in essence. Think of your written dialogue as a form of shorthand that preserves the most vivid and succinct lines of an exchange or conversation. A reviewer described the dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle as “so real it spits.” It “spits” because of its intensity, the emotion compressed into every line. The dialogue in Eddie Coyle is so idiosyncratic, so colorful, so loaded, that its authenticity seems self-evident. It’s evocative and compelling: how can it not be real? A good dialogue writer is a counterfeiter, fashioning currency that is more perfect than the real thing.

  THE WRITER AS HOARDER—WHERE THE PICKINGS ARE GOOD

  There’s no one way to perform this trick of counterfeiting, once you’ve put aside real-life dialogue as your paradigm. You’re on your own, with the opportunity—think of it as one—of creating a language that will seem so real it spits. It will be
yours, and will mark you as a writer. There’s no Esperanto in fictional dialogue; just as every writer has his or her own narrative voice, his or her characters have their own way of talking. Hemingway’s dialogue is instantly recognizable. No one could confuse Anne Tyler’s emotive dialogue with the wry plain-spoken speeches of Annie Proulx’s characters. Joan Didion’s dialogue is mordant and ironic, like her novels; Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue is similarly edgy, but with more lilt and a frequent laconic note. Lee Smith’s dialogue has a sprightliness, reflective of her resilient characters, and in it you can hear the soft accent of the Virginia hills.

  Invent a spoken language—dialogue—that is a synthesis of what you read and what you hear, and that is appropriate to your characters and their time and place. Begin by reading good dialogue—lots of it—and noting how the words fall together. Study cadence, the ebb and flow of speeches, listening as you read. Hemingway’s dialogue still has tracings in contemporary fiction. Cormac McCarthy now is influencing a generation of writers.

  Listening to people talk is equally important, but the process here is different. You’re a scavenger, a collector, picking up the bits and pieces that will enliven and enrich your dialogue: expressions, turns of phrase, slang, exclamations, the odd locution, the colorful solecism. Store them up; you never know when they’ll come in handy.

  In her 1972 interview with The Paris Review, Eudora Welty put it this way:

  “Familiarity. Memory of the way things get said. Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you’re into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you’re writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story. I guess you’re tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized—if you can think of your ears as magnets.”

  As a child I once heard someone say, “That’s all well and good, but it don’t feed the bulldog.” It doesn’t suffice, the man meant, and I understood that. I was planning to be a baseball player, not a writer, but the line, which struck me as interesting as well as funny, caught forever in my memory. Fifty years later, while I was writing Seen the Glory, it fell into the novel as if it had been waiting for just that moment. Lilac and Iris Purdy are identical twins, living alone on a farm in wartime Virginia and doing what they can to make ends meet. Here they are propositioning Thomas Chandler, a young Union soldier on picket duty:

  “Y’all come back down tonight and bring four dollars. Two for each girl, you see.”

  Thomas swallowed. He roused himself and looked again at the woods and decided there was no one up there . . .

  “I guess he ain’t interested,” one of the girls said.

  “I might be,” Thomas said.

  “Might be don’t feed the bulldog.”

  I have no idea if this is an old expression, or peculiar to the South. The man who said it in my presence wasn’t southern, and for all I know it was his own invention. No matter. It had a rural and old-fashioned flavor. It was assertive. The twins are unlettered, but shrewd and plucky, and this sounded like them. It sounded just like them, no matter where it came from.

  Listen to police officers, truck drivers, high school kids, ex-convicts, ballplayers, exotic dancers, social outcasts, debutantes, corporation presidents. Sort through their discourse and find the term, the phrase, the esoteric allusion that could be useful to you. Listen to politicians. If you heard Nixon and Haldeman in the Oval Office you might take note of Nixon’s saying that Liddy isn’t “too well screwed on,” an unusual locution and oddly humorous. In Haldeman’s parlance, news doesn’t come from the CIA; it comes “from across the river.” Good to know. Euphemisms are as useful in fiction as in real life. “Take this other step,” Haldeman says, meaning flagrant suppression of evidence. He refers to the possible discovery of what they are up to, which would mean political disaster or worse, as “some directions we don’t want this to go.” Your characters, too, will resort to euphemism now and then.

  Nixon sums up the machinations around him as “hanky-panky.” One can imagine Joan Didion hearing the President of the United States using this quaint and unlikely word, and jotting it down in her memory—saving it for just the right moment, just the right character. The masseur “who wanted to be a writer” is whining in Play It As It Lays:

  “Don’t be draggy, Helene, run down the beach and ask Audrey Wise for a couple of lemons. Ask Audrey and Jerry for Bloodys even. I mean we could definitely stand a few giggles.”

  Draggy, bloodys, a few giggles. The masseur is a poseur, and Didion uses words she heard somewhere, transposing them, to reveal his superficiality.

  3

  TENSION: SURPRISE IN EVERY LINE

  The American Heritage Dictionary offers five definitions of tension, among them, “A strained relationship or barely controlled hostility between persons or groups,” and “Uneasy suspense.” These two meanings often fit the tension in fiction, but the concept is usually more subtle and hard to define. You might not even recognize it as tension, but if it weren’t there, you’d miss it.

  • • •

  Tension is the substance of drama. The moment it disappears, your narrative turns slack. It becomes uninteresting. No matter what the conversation is about, no matter who is speaking to whom, no matter what the situation, tension must inhere in the dialogue, and it must be constant. If there’s no tension in the scene you’re writing, and if there’s no way to create it, throw the scene out. It isn’t helping your novel.

  Suspense, minus the dictionary’s “uneasy,” gets close to the idea of tension in most dialogue. Suspense, in this loose definition, means not knowing what’s coming. No line of dialogue should be easy to anticipate. Every line should contain some nugget of surprise.

  Don’t take this as a call for startling revelation every time a character speaks. The surprise in most dialogue is quiet; the point is unpredictability. Your characters cannot speak to each other, cannot respond to each other, in any easily assumable way. There has to be some wrinkle, some contradiction, some evasion, something of questionable relevance. Think of your characters as stage actors, playing off of each other. The audience at a play is in a state of suspense, in that it is wondering what’s coming next. The moment that curiosity turns to indifference, the play stumbles. So does your novel.

  No situation, however tranquil or steeped in good feeling, exempts you from the obligation to sustain the tension in your dialogue. A boy and girl sitting on a park bench, holding hands. A couple on their honeymoon, in a rowboat on a moonlit lake. A father tossing a baseball with his son. The idea of tension in moments like these seems counterintuitive, but if you need the scene you have to find the suspense in it—the dialogue that can’t be anticipated, and that keeps us reading.

  WHEN LOVERS TALK

  Plainsong’s Guthrie and his fellow teacher Maggie Smith run into each other at a dance in the Legion Hall. They already like each other, and they are in fine moods tonight:

  Maggie said, You better ask me to dance.

  You’d be taking a hell of a risk, Guthrie said.

  I know what I’m asking. I’ve seen you dance before.

  I can’t imagine where that would’ve been.

  Here.

  Guthrie shook his head. That would’ve been a long time ago.

  It was. I’ve been watching you for a long time. Longer than you have any idea about.

  You’re going to scare me now.

  I’m not scary, Maggie said. But I’m not a little girl either.

  I never thought you were, Guthrie said.

  Good. Then keep that in mind. Now ask me to dance.

  You’re pretty sure of this?

  I’m very sure.

  All right, Guthrie said. Would you care to dance, Mrs. Maggie Jones?


  That’s not very goddamn gallant, she said. But I guess it’ll have to do.

  It’s a scene comprised of fun and incipient romance, but there’s tension in every line. Maggie asks Guthrie to dance, and we know he’s going to say yes—no suspense there. But the form the conversation takes—the verbal dance that precedes the actual one—is a playful joust which, in its archness and wit, gives the exchange its lovely tension.

  They’re playing off of each other, and we never know, from line to line, what the other is going to say. Guthrie’s invitation, Would you care to dance, Mrs. Maggie Jones?, is framed in a faux and teasing formality which includes a nod to the fact that she, like him, was once married. Maggie’s rejoinder—That’s not very goddamn gallant. But I guess it’ll have to do—bristles with sass and swagger, in counterpoint to Guthrie’s sudden gallantry. There’s tension in the contrast, and there’s mutual delight. They’re feeding each other good lines, challenging each other to respond in kind. Write a good line of dialogue—a smart one, a funny one—and you challenge yourself to write another.

  Later Guthrie and Maggie find themselves in bed together:

  Why, Maggie you look beautiful, Guthrie said. Don’t you know that? You take the breath out of me.

  Do you think so?

  God, yes. Don’t you know that? I thought you knew everything.

  I know a lot, she said. But that’s very nice to hear.

  This is an earnest conversation, nothing like their playful banter at the dance, but again the tension is as constant. Maggie doesn’t know how lovely she is, and, because she’s so wise and self-assured, this surprises Guthrie—and the reader. A few moments later, Maggie is speaking: