The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  “Those fellows in the striped pants saw the hick and they took him in. They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a dead-head and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest government. They told him that. But—” Willie stopped, and lifted his right hand, clutching the manuscript to high heaven—“do you know who they were? They were Joe Harrison’s hired hands and lickspittles and they wanted to get a hick to run to split MacMurfee’s hick vote.”

  Willie is leveling with the crowd. He recounts the lie that has been told to him, then pauses, gesturing dramatically, letting the lie hang in the air a moment before he demolishes it with the truth. The pause is calculated: Willie is onstage, literally, and he uses it for its effect on his audience, which includes the reader. But a politician is always onstage, in a sense. Willie, now governor, wakes the genteel and venerable Judge Irwin in the middle of the night and helps himself to the judge’s whiskey. Jack Burden, Willie’s aide and the protagonist of the novel, is narrating:

  When he was back in the leather chair with the fresh load in the glass, he said, “Yeah, Judge, I’ve heard you say it, but I wanted to hear you say something else. Are you sure you took it to the Lord in prayer?”

  “I have settled the matter in my own mind,” the Judge said.

  “Well, if I recollect right”—the Boss ruminatively turned the glass in his hands—“back in town” when we had our little talk, you sort of felt my boy Masters was all right.”

  Willie Stark is a master psychologist and knows how to manipulate people—how to keep them dangling, how to set them up, startle them, catch them off balance. Notice how slowly he’s speaking here; his dialogue is slow—Warren doesn’t tell us that; the lines read slow—and the artful pause slows time itself to a crawl. It’s a good visual, using the glass of whiskey as a prop, but the pause here is calculated, by both Willie and the author, more to be heard—an interval of silence—than seen. A good gesture, of course, gets you both.

  Don’t, however, write gestures that make the dialogue redundant, as happens in real life. Don’t have your character nod and then answer a question in the affirmative. (Nods are easy to write. Be selective; really, you seldom need them.) Your character doesn’t need to raise a hand, palm out, like a traffic cop, when she tells somebody who’s talking too long, “Stop right there.” The gesture is implicit, understood, in the command. If you insist on the gesture, cut the line of dialogue. Your character might raise her arms from her sides, palms up, and shrug, but she can’t also say, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” One or the other, you choose. I usually go with dialogue.

  A shrug can be useful, but only when it supplements the line of dialogue and doesn’t duplicate it. The indifference or resignation of a shrug can usually be captured in dialogue, making the gesture redundant. But a shrug also might make all the difference. A character, say, facing a firing squad, asked if he has any last words, might shrug and say, “Tell my wife I love her.” The shrug colors the declaration with a certain lack of feeling; let’s hope they don’t report it to the wife.

  Sighs, like nods and shrugs, are very easy to write—so easy, we sometimes barely notice we’re writing them.

  Sighs, like nods and shrugs, are very easy to write—so easy, we sometimes barely notice we’re writing them. In editing first novels I find sighs by the dozen, and few of them, if any, give the dialogue any needed help. A shrug is a better visual than a sigh—it is, in its way, an eloquent gesture. But use both sparingly. Sighs were a staple of the heroines of silent movies, and they can have a whiff of melodrama. Fitzgerald’s characters are dreamers and likely to sigh from time to time, but not Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s less sentimental heroes and heroines. A sigh would come off as saccharine and false amid the terse, edgy dialogue of Didion, McCarthy, or William Kennedy. It’s impossible to imagine Francis Phelan, the shrewd, life-hardened bum, sighing.

  Anne Tyler’s characters, on the other hand, are excitable and melodramatic by nature, so of course they sigh. Rebecca Davitch, the middle-aged heroine of Back When We Were Grownups, has invited an old flame, Will Allenby, to dinner. The date is bumping along awkwardly. The phone rings, rings again:

  “You certainly get a lot of calls,” Will told her.

  “Yes,” she said. She sighed. “Won’t you have more chicken?”

  The evening is disappointing and wearying Rebecca, but she’s too full of conflicting emotions, too naturally forgiving, to indicate this in words, as a Didion character could not help doing. Instead of the sly or mordant ironic remark, Rebecca sighs.

  Like exclamation points, sighs and their frequency are up to you, and your characters. I try to avoid them. You don’t have to, but keep the frequency to a minimum. They’re easy to write, as I’ve said—often too easy.

  INTERRUPTING DIALOGUE TO STOP TIME

  Very often, a single speech of even a few words turns the story. Such lines are revelatory, often startling, sometimes shocking, and, like surprises in real life, they take a moment to sink in. When this happens, you, the writer, have to stop time. Beginning writers tend to overlook this necessity. A character in the beginner’s novel might break some surprising news to his wife, and the scene might go like this:

  “I wasn’t at the Elks meeting last night,” Larry said.

  “Oh? And just where were you, if I might ask?”

  “I was with Tiffany.”

  “God,” Susan said, “how could you?”

  There isn’t anything wrong with this dialogue, in itself. What is wrong, assuming Larry is the uxorious type, is Susan’s immediate response. Susan needs a moment to absorb this new development, and so does the reader. Arrest the moment. Freeze it. A pause, and then the story resumes, taking a new direction.

  In Elmore Leonard’s darkly comic short story, When the Women Come Out to Dance, Ginger Mahmood, an ex-stripper married to a Pakistani plastic surgeon in south Florida, hires a shady Columbian maid named Lourdes. Lourdes, Ginger happens to know, recently had her abusive husband, a man named Zimmer, murdered. (Lourdes has useful friends who are also recent arrivals from Columbia.) Ginger would like to get rid of her own creepy husband, but there was a prenuptial agreement stipulating that she gets nothing if she divorces him. She explains this, in a veiled way, to Lourdes, sitting on the poolside patio. Leonard is writing Lourdes’ point of view:

  Lourdes believed the woman was very close to telling her what she was thinking about. Still, it was not something easy to talk about with another person, even for a woman who danced naked. Lourdes decided this evening to help her.

  She said, “How would you feel if a load of concrete fell on your husband?”

  Then wondered, sitting in the silence, not looking at the woman, if she had spoken too soon.

  The redheaded woman said, “The way it happened to Mr. Zimmer? How did you feel?”

  “I accepted it,” Lourdes said, “with a feeling of relief, knowing I wouldn’t be beaten no more.”

  Lourdes’ question is an offer to have Ginger’s husband murdered, and Leonard arrests the moment while the news sinks in. Ginger has no moral objection to the idea, but even so, she needs that moment to digest it. You have to create a pause after a line like this; if there were no interval here, Lourdes’ proposal would be cheated of the attention it deserves. How would you feel if a load of concrete fell on your husband? Give a line like that—it’s a beauty—some time. Give it some room.

  Robert Penn Warren arrests a different kind of moment, a deeply troubling discovery by Jack Burden, in All The King’s Men. Jack was in love with his neighbor, Anne Stanton, in his youth, and may still be. The very proper Anne has been referring to Willie Stark disdainfully as “that man,” and Jack strikes back at her in defense of his boss:

  “You take the same snobbish attitude all the rest take. You’re like the rest.”

  “All right,” she said, still not looking at me. “I’m snobbish. I’m so snobbish I had lunch with him last week.
”

  Well, if grandfather’s clock in the corner hadn’t been stopped already, that would have stopped it. It stopped me. I heard the flame hum on the logs, gnawing in. Then the hum stopped and there wasn’t anything.

  Then I said, “For Christ’s sake.” And the absorbent silence sucked up the words like blotting paper.

  “All right,” she said, “for Christ’s sake.”

  “My, my,” I said, “but the picture of the daughter of Governor Stanton at lunch with Governor Stark would certainly throw the society editor of the Chronicle into a tizzy. Your frock, my dear—what frock did you wear? And flowers? Did you drink champagne cocktails?”

  The timing in this interchange is perfect. Jack, annoyed by Anne’s superior-seeming attitude toward the populist governor, is blindsided by the news that she has sat down to lunch with him. Jack senses immediately what this might presage, and the presentiment prompts a rush of alarm and jealousy. Warren freezes time almost literally with his allusion to the stopped clock, then has us listen to the hearth fire while Jack struggles with this new circumstance. Anne Stanton is highly principled, and Jack has always idealized her both as a woman and a paragon of integrity. That she would do business over lunch with Willie Stark shakes Jack’s world. The story turns here, and Warren arrests the moment, bringing it into sharp focus.

  Jack finds his voice, finally, but it takes one more line, and a defiant reply from Anne, for him to recover enough to couch his displeasure in mockery. Once he does, Warren gets out of the way and lets the colloquy move briskly—and heatedly—to its end.

  The plot of Seen the Glory turns radically with a line of dialogue on the field at Gettysburg, the night before Pickett’s Charge. Thomas Chandler presses his older brother Luke to tell him the name of the girl he loved, and slept with, back home on Martha’s Vineyard:

  Luke, blanket-draped and hugging his knees, drew a deep breath.

  “Rose,” he said.

  “Rose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not our Rose,” Thomas said.

  Luke did not look at him. He nodded.

  “Rose Miranda?” Thomas said.

  “Yes.”

  “You liar.”

  Luke didn’t answer.

  “You Goddamn liar.”

  Thomas is secretly in love with Rose, the Chandlers’ slightly older—and beautiful—housekeeper, and Luke’s affair with her, of which Thomas had no inkling, staggers and enrages him—when it finally sinks in. The dialogue stalls here, like a stuck record. Thomas keeps asking the same question and getting the same answer; he’s hoping for a different answer, a clarification or retraction that will erase this sudden blow to the heart. It’s a vain hope, as he knows deep down, and when it is gone—when the truth has sunk in—he lashes out at his brother, and time begins moving again.

  McCarthy, in All the Pretty Horses, arrests a fateful moment, not after, but before John Grady Cole tells the lie that will turn the story in the worst possible way for him. The proprietor, the hacendado, of the ranch in Mexico where John Grady and Rawlins are now working, is querying John Grady with the idea of promoting him. They are drinking coffee and smoking expensive cigarettes in the big dining room. Four cats—McCarthy is setting something up—are sitting on the windowsill all in a row, “like cutout cats all leaning slightly aslant.” The hacendado tests John Grady’s knowledge of horses, and then:

  You are from Christoval?

  San Angelo. Or just outside of San Angelo.

  The hacendado studied him. Do you know a book called The Horse of America, by Wallace?

  Yessir. I’ve read it front to back.

  The hacendado leaned back in the chair. One of the cats rose and stretched.

  You rode here from Texas.

  Yessir.

  You and your friend.

  Yessir.

  Just the two of you?

  John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him.

  The hacendado nodded and stubbed out his cigarette and pushed back his chair. Come, he said, I will show you some horses.

  But, as the reader well knows, there was a third traveler, an enigmatic boy, possibly a criminal, who was running from a Mexican posse when John Grady and Rawlins last saw him. John Grady Cole is no liar—in two novels he tells only this one—and McCarthy arrests the moment while John Grady deliberates telling it. There’s terrific drama here; we know what John Grady is thinking, and we know that his answer will be fraught with consequences, either way. The moment of stopped time brings his dilemma, and his difficulty in dealing with it, into bold focus. It’s a turning point, and the reader doesn’t forget it.

  • • •

  You can arrest a moment, briefly, by having a character look at another between lines of dialogue. A caution, though: you can’t use “looked at” often or indiscriminately. Usually when a character is speaking, we assume she’s looking at the person, or persons, she’s addressing. No need to tell us; we see it that way unless you tell us otherwise—she’s looking off into the distance, say, or looking down at her lap. We assume, also, that the person being spoken to is looking at her.

  But when you spell it out, “Ed looked at Julia,” you’re telling the reader that more is going on than the natural way we look at each other when speaking. “Ed looked at Julia”: it’s a special look, quick or sudden, a look of new interest, or maybe of annoyance, maybe of appeal. Be wary of describing the look—“he looked imploringly,” “he looked anxiously,” “he looked longingly.” The nature of the look should be evident in what elicits it, for one thing. For another, an adverb limits it, preempting the reader’s imagination. “Ed looked at Julia”: there might be longing and anxiety, and more, in the look. Let the reader imagine the look—it will be more vivid and nuanced than your adverb can make it.

  No one word could nail the look which Inez Victor, the protagonist of Didion’s ironically titled novel, Democracy, gives her husband’s political aide, Billy Dillon, in the corridor of the hospital where Inez’s sister is on life support. A young doctor is being evasive about the sister’s condition:

  “It’s not necessarily an either or situation, Mrs. Victor.”

  “Life and death? Are not necessarily either-or?”

  “Inez,” Billy Dillon said.

  “I want to get this straight. Is that what he’s saying?”

  “I’m saying there’s a certain gray area, which may or may not be—”

  Inez looked at Billy Dillon.

  “He’s saying she won’t make it,” Billy Dillon said.

  The three characters here are looking at each other as they talk; people always do. But Inez’s patience runs out, she wants the truth, and her look at Billy is a particular look, which the imagination sees as inquiring, irritable, insistent. It creates a pause and elicits Billy Dillon’s blunt assertion of the truth.

  In Howard Frank Mosher’s comic and charming baseball novel, Waiting for Teddy Williams—set, as all of Mosher’s fiction is, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont—a stranger named Teddy begins showing up in town to school the boy, Kinneson, in the finer points of his beloved game of baseball:

  One morning a brand-new pair of size-eight spikes appeared on the mound. Inside each shoe was a new sweat sock. E.A. sat on the Packard seat to put them on.

  “Teach me something new today,” he wheedled

  ”All right,” Teddy said. “Wear them socks inside out the first few times.”

  E.A. looked at him.

  “Cuts down on the blisters,” Teddy explained.

  Looked at him: it’s a puzzled look, a look of sudden interest. They’ve been looking at each other, but this look is different.

  Later in Democracy, Inez and Harry Victor are having dinner in a restaurant with their children, Adlai and Jessie. Adlai says he wants to write an op ed piece for the New York Times. Don’t miss the tension here:

  “It’s something we’ve be
en tossing back and forth in Cambridge.”

  “Interesting,” Harry Victor said. “Let me vet it. What do you think, Jess?”

  “I think he shouldn’t say ‘Cambridge,’” Jessie said.

  “Possibly you were nodding out when I went up there,” Adlai said, “but Cambridge happens to be where I went to school.”

  “Maybe so,” Jessie said, “but you don’t happen to go to Harvard.”

  “OK guys. You both fouled.” Harry Victor turned to Adlai. “I could vet somebody at the Times. If you’re serious.”

  “Turned to” is like “looked at.” It signifies something more than the natural swing of attention from one person to another. When Harry Victor says, “What do you think, Jess?” we see him turning to her, without Didion’s telling us that he does. He’s speaking to her. He’s looking at her. He had to have turned to her. A few lines down, “Harry turned to Adlai,” and the turning this time is pointed—he’s speaking past Jessie, excluding her. He’s giving Adlai his full attention.

  “Looked at” and “turned to” are telling actions, but only if you save them for telling moments.

  “Looked at” and “turned to” are telling actions, but only if you save them for telling moments. Spend wisely, and you’ll get value every time.

  • • •

  In the speech that ignites both the barbecue crowd and his political career in All The King’s Men, Willie Stark pauses multiple times, for effect. Early on, “Willie paused, and blinked around at the crowd. And again: “He paused, steadied himself by the table, and took a deep breath while the sweat dripped.” Still later, “He paused and wiped the sweat off his face with his left hand, a flat scouring motion.”

  Each time, Warren tells us that Willie pauses—stops speaking, that is—then writes the action that occurs during the pause. Once, though, the word “paused” isn’t used: