by John Hough
You don’t actually think I’m scary, do you?
Yeah, I do.
Tell me the truth. I’m serious now.
That is the truth. At times I can’t say I know what to make of you.
What do you mean? Why not?
Because you’re different than anyone else, he said. You don’t seem to ever get defeated or scared by life. You stay clear in yourself, no matter what.
She kissed him. Her dark eyes were watching him in the dim light. I get defeated sometimes, she said. I’ve been scared.
Suppose that, in answer to You don’t actually think I’m scary, do you? Guthrie said, No, of course not. Maggie’s interesting question would be settled to her satisfaction, and the tension would vanish. Having said yes, Guthrie has to explain himself: Maggie doesn’t ever seem to get defeated or scared, he says. Maggie responds with a qualified admission: I get defeated sometimes. I’ve been scared. The speech is good because she qualifies it. She gets defeated sometimes. She’s been scared, which doesn’t mean she will be again. It isn’t quite a flat denial, and that gives the line a slight, unpredictable twist. Maggie then reaches for Guthrie. Tension gone, scene over.
• • •
Dissimilarities between lovers are a natural source of tension in their dialogue—even the most trivial or insignificant differences. The protagonists and eventual lovers of my historical novel, Little Bighorn, are eighteen and sixteen. The year is 1876. Allen Winslow has had some sexual experience, Addie Grace Lord has had none:
“I wonder you don’t kiss me good night,” she said.
“I’m a gentleman.”
“I wonder you don’t try, even so.”
“If I did you might slap me.”
“I might. I might not.”
“I don’t want to risk it.”
“I bet you’ve kissed a smart of girls,” she said.
“I thought you were tired,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “if you’re not interested . . .”
“You’ve been kissed plenty, I take it,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I’ve not.”
“They must have wanted to,” he said.
“None that I cared to be kissed by. Anyway, where was I to meet them? Chartwell’s like a prison, as far as that goes.”
“I thought you liked it there.”
“I liked being away from Uncle Gordon, and don’t change the subject.”
Allen would indeed like to kiss her, and it wouldn’t be out of character for him to suggest it, but there’d be no tension in the dialogue if it went that way. If she refused him, he wouldn’t press her—it would be out of character—and the tension would be gone. I wanted them to kiss, but not without some tension leading up to it. The solution was to have the girl take the initiative and let the more worldly boy demur. Her forwardness surprises and amuses him; his coyness surprises her, and makes her a little bit indignant. Tension.
Whatever the situation, dialogue between lovers has a built-in tension that makes it some of the easiest dialogue to write. From the moment they notice each other, the two characters’ mutual physical attraction adds an electric current to their dialogue. There’s always something going on between lovers, at any stage in their relationship—some frisson of emotion that gives their dialogue a subtext, a meaning just beyond the literal. Characters in fiction take their lover’s words to heart, as we do in real life. Every utterance matters. Angry words strike deep. Endearments whisper of things to come. Ambiguity charges innocuous-seeming words and phrases. Sexual tension is tension amplified. Give your lovers good lines, and you double your money.
KEEPING AN IMBALANCE BETWEEN FRIENDS
Tension in dialogue between friends, absent any physical attraction, may require a bit more thought and invention. Find the disparities between the characters—in temperament, outlook, opinion, background—and find ways to set these differences in opposition to each other—to dramatize them. Two best friends, John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins, are lying under the stars and talking in this low-key and comic scene in All the Pretty Horses:
My daddy run off from home when he was fifteen. Otherwise I’d of been born in Alabama.
You wouldn’t of been born at all.
What makes you say that?
Cause your mama’s from San Angelo and he never would of met her.
He’d of met somebody.
So would she.
So?
So you wouldn’t of been born.
I don’t see why you say that. I’d of been born somewheres. How?
Well why not?
If your mama had a baby with her other husband and your daddy had one with his other wife which one would you be?
I wouldn’t be neither of em.
That’s right.
Rawlins lay watching the stars. After a while he said: I could still be born. I might look different or somethin. If God wanted me to be born I’d be born.
And if He didn’t you wouldn’t.
You’re makin my goddamn head hurt.
I know it. I’m makin my own.
The argument here, if it can be called that, is character-driven. John Grady Cole is an existentialist, though he wouldn’t know the term. Lacey Rawlins is literal-minded and stubborn, up to a point. McCarthy arranges a painless collision of the two intellects, dramatizing a difference that becomes crucial later on. The argument never becomes heated—there’s affection in their unguardedness with each other—and yet the tension is constant. We have no idea what each will say next.
We have no idea, either, when young Sanders Roscoe comes to Sunday dinner in order to ask “old Raymond Pickett” for his daughter’s hand in marriage in Haruf’s The Tie That Binds. Sanders and Raymond adjourn to the parlor of the farmhouse after the meal:
After a time I said to him, “I suppose you know what I’m doing here.”
“I see you got your tie on,” he said. “I figured there was some reason for it.”
“There is.”
“More than just to eat Mavis’s chicken dinner, you mean.”
You understand the old son of a gun, that old wheat farmer, wasn’t going to help me any. He was enjoying himself . . .
“That,” I said. “And also to see what you thought of Mavis and me getting married.”
“Tell the truth,” he said, “I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Mavis has,” I said.
“Has she, now?”
“Yes. Considerable.”
“And what does she think about it?”
“She’s in favor of it.”
“But you ain’t said nothing about yourself yet. Most times I believe it takes two to get married.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I said.
“Well, now,” he said, looking at me. “She’s in favor and you say you don’t mind. I guess that’ll have to do, won’t it?”
Raymond now changes the subject—his Sunday shoes are hurting him. He recalls seeing Sanders’s late father at farm sales. Then:
“Well, now. About this marriage business—it sounds like Mavis has her mind all made up.”
I nodded.
“She’s like that. So I don’t see where it would do me much good to object even if I wanted to. Can you?”
“No.”
“I thought as much. Well, it’s nice having girls in the house. I believe I’ll miss that.”
Each line of this dry colloquy takes us pleasantly by surprise. You can’t see it coming. We know Raymond Pickett is going to say yes to the marriage, but “the old wheat farmer” is amusing himself, and there’s no predicting how long he’ll do this, or what twists the conversation will take. We read on, to find out.
Even though the subject is the suicide of an elderly woman in T. R. Pearson’s A Short History of a Small Place, this interview by “Miss Bambi Kinch of Action News Five” with the local sheriff is a treat for everyone who picks up the novel:
“Who is the victim, sheriff?” she asked him.
“Well, Bambi,” the sheriff said and hooked his thumbs in his front beltloops, “the victim is a female Caucasian, approximately sixty-five years of age.”
“Was she a resident of Neely?”
“Well, Bambi, yes she was an indigenous native.”
”Do you suspect foul play, sheriff?”
“Well, Bambi, at this point we think it’s a suicide brought on probably by moral derangement.”
“Did she have a history of this sort of thing?”
“Well, Bambi, not that we know of. She’s never done this before.”
Bambi’s questions are comically—and surprisingly—unimaginative, and the sheriff is in over his head and doesn’t know it. He prefaces every answer with a pompous and self-conscious Well, Bambi, and as the repetitions accumulate they become more and more unlikely—he can’t keep saying it, we think—and funnier and funnier. It’s tension that makes us smile.
WHEN THE TENSION IS HIGH
And then there’s open hostility, which simplifies things for the writer. Quarrels and confrontations are relatively easy to write; there’s nothing subtle about the dialogue, nothing veiled or indirect. But the stricture against the predictable line still applies. Your characters shouldn’t know what’s coming any more than the reader does. They should keep each other off balance.
Ernest Hemingway’s famous short story, The Killers, was published in 1927, and the dialogue might have been written yesterday. Two gangsters, Al and Max, come into a small-town diner at suppertime and tie up the cook and young Nick Adams in the kitchen. Al sticks a shotgun through the opening where food is passed to the front. Max and George, the owner of the diner, are at the counter:
“Talk to me, bright boy,” Max said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”
George did not say anything.
“I’ll tell you,” Max said. “We’re going to kill a Swede. Do you know a big Swede named Ole Andreson?”
“Yes.”
“He comes in here to eat every night, don’t he?”
“Sometimes he comes here.”
“He comes here at six o’clock, don’t he?”
“If he comes.”
“We know all that, bright boy,” Max said. “Talk about something else. Ever go to the movies?”
“Once in a while.”
“You ought to go the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.”
“What are you going to kill Ole Andreson for? What did he ever do to you?”
“He never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us.”
“And he’s only going to see us once,” Al said from the kitchen.
“What are you going to kill him for, then?” George asked.
“We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.”
“Shut up,” said Al from the kitchen. “You talk too goddamn much.”
There are twelve speeches here, and none is more than two sentences long. The short speeches keep the interaction going with no letup, sustaining the tension from moment to moment. Short speeches keep both sides in the game. Don’t give characters any breathing space. They need to react, not think; don’t give them time.
A sinister stranger accosts Billy Parham, who is still a boy, and his younger brother, near their ranch in the opening pages of The Crossing:
Howdy, said Billy.
The Indian spat. Spooked everything in the country, aint you? he said.
We didn’t know there was anybody here.
You aint got nothin to eat?
No sir.
Where you live at?
About two miles down the river.
You got anything to eat at your house?
Yessir.
I come down there you goin to bring me somethin out?
You can come to the house. Mama’ll feed you.
I don’t want to come to the house. I want you to bring me somethin out.
All right.
You goin to bring me somethin out?
Yes.
All right then.
Again, short speeches keep the tension incessant. The Indian’s lines drip with menace. Billy is trying to propitiate him, but the Indian won’t let him out of the conversation. Billy is caught in it, and has to return line for line, with no time to collect himself. The speeches in this exchange, like those above in The Killers, are never more than a sentence or two long.
Short speeches keep the tension
There’s no menace in this Sunday dinner scene from Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, but the hostility is overt, nevertheless. The narrator and protagonist, a schoolteacher named Grant Wiggins, has brought his girlfriend, Vivian, home for the first time. Grant lives with his formidable aunt, and she starts right in on Vivian:
“You go to church?”
“I’m Catholic.”
My aunt looked at Vivian and nodded her head, as if she was thinking, What else could you possibly be?
“You went to church today?”
“I went to nine o’clock mass,” Vivian said.
“You going next Sunday?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sunday after that?”
“I hope so.”
“This one,” my aunt said, nodding toward me but still looking at Vivian, “he don’t have a church. What y’all go’n do then?”
“We’ll work it out,” Vivian said.
“”You go’n leave your church?”
“I hope I don’t have to,” Vivian said.
This is an inquisition, and Vivian doesn’t flinch from it. Her answers are courteous, but they aren’t the answers Grant’s aunt is looking for. The aunt presses the inquisition, Vivian remains unruffled. She answers truthfully, unapologetically, standing her ground. The tension never flags.
KEEPING THE SUSPENSE IN MONOLOGUES
Tension eases when a character holds the floor for a while, but it shouldn’t disappear. Hold on to the notion of “suspense,” and write monologues that not only surprise us, but keep us wanting to know what’s coming next. No one will ever write anything equal to Shakespeare’s soliloquies, but their power to cast a spell—to draw us in and keep us engaged, as a matter of both pleasure and curiosity—is the gold standard. Dennis Lenahan, the high diver in Elmore Leonard’s Tishomingo Blues, is no Lear, but he can grab our attention and hold it. The target of his dives is a twenty-foot-wide tank eighty feet below. He’s applying for a job as an entertainer at a resort casino here:
“I’ve got eighty dives from different heights and most of ’em I can do hungover, like a flying reverse somersault, your standard high dive. But I don’t know what I’m gonna do till I’m up there. It depends on the crowd, how the show’s going. But I’ll tell you something, you stand on the perch looking down eighty feet to the water, you know you’re alive.”
We don’t know what a flying reverse somersault is, but we know Dennis performs it through eighty feet of air, into a small tank, and that is enough to stir our imagination and pull us into the circus-like drama of Dennis Lenahan’s profession. The fourth and last sentence tells us all we need to know about why Dennis is a diver.
Dave Foley, the federal agent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, has taken an interest in a rumor he’s been hearing about Eddie. He talks about it to a pal in law enforcement:
“You remember Eddie Fingers,” Dave said. “Eddie Coyle? Fellow got his hand busted up after they put Billy Wallace away for a long time on a gun that he bought from somebody. Got himself in a whole mess of trouble up in New Hampshire trucking a little booze that didn’t belong to him about this time last year.”
Foley and Dennis Lenahan, the high diver, are entertaining characters whose dialogue is textured by their professions. Dennis’s monologue is self-promoting and full of swagger, with an affected nonchalance—the daredevil talking. Foley’s monologue is laconic, deadpan. It’s cop talk. Neither repeats himself, or wanders off subject. We never know what’s coming next.
Atticus Finch, the s
mall-town defense attorney and hero of Harper Lee’s iconic novel of bigotry and moral courage, To Kill a Mockingbird, delivers a very different sort of monologue in his summation in the trial of Tom Robinson, the black man accused of raping a white girl:
“But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are our great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.
“I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.”
It’s one of literature’s signal speeches, for obvious reasons. Note its economy. Look for a word or phrase that you could cut without losing anything; you can’t find it. Suspense keeps us reading—that constant unpredictability, that lurking surprise. What comes next? If it’s an empty word, an unnecessary one, the monologue stalls, the tension vanishes.
4
HEARING IS SEEING
How soon after entering the novel does an important character speak? Do we need to hear him or her in those first moments? Where do dialogue and physical description converge in the creation of the outward character?
Captain Ahab finally appears on page 120 of the Modern Library edition of Moby Dick, after several days of wondering and speculation among the crew:
