The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  I’ve said that dialogue must be unpredictable—that every speech should, if only in a mild way, surprise us. Eduardo’s syntax and diction can’t be faulted at any point, and yet nearly every line contains some peculiarity in its construction. Direct objects don’t immediately follow transitive verbs. Words are repeated when their antecedent is clear—story, dream—as if Eduardo enjoys their sound. It isn’t just Eduardo’s speeches that are unpredictable; it is his sentence structure. His diction is unusual—elaborate, inventive, polished. It is unmistakably foreign.

  USING THE VERNACULAR

  Consider the sentence, “I’m going to fool him.” What does it sound like when you read it to yourself? When you read it aloud? What would it sound like if you spoke it to a friend, in an unheated or casual conversation? I’m an educated man with a high regard for linguistic propriety, and I would say, conversationally, “I’m gonna fool him.” I would not pronounce the g, and to would be mashed down to a vague a or uh.

  I bet you would do the same. Who doesn’t? College professors, ballplayers, construction workers, writers: do any of us pronounce “going to” as it’s written, say, in “I’m going to fool him,” or “She’s going to be sorry,” or “You’re going to wish you’d listened to me”?

  We don’t. Not usually. So should we write dialogue this way? Never? Sometimes? If so, when?

  Here’s the opening of Hemingway’s short story Fifty Grand, about the aging prizefighter, Jack Brennan:

  “How are you going yourself, Jack?” I asked him.

  “You seen this Walcott?” he says.

  “Just in the gym.”

  “Well,” says Jack, “I’m going to need a lot of luck with that boy.”

  “He can’t hit you, Jack,” Soldier said.

  “I wish to hell he couldn’t.”

  “He couldn’t hit you with a handful of bird-shot.”

  “Bird-shot’d be all right,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t mind bird-shot any.”

  “He looks easy to hit,” I said.

  “Sure,” Jack says, “he ain’t going to last long. He ain’t going to last like you and me, Jerry. But right now he’s got everything.”

  Three times Jack Brennan says “going to,” not “gonna,” and even so, Jack’s dialogue sounds as real and raw as any you’ll read. Hemingway is the inventor of modern dialogue, and it was his genius that enabled him to write hard-edged, colloquial-sounding dialogue without resorting to altered spellings like “gonna.” All of the dialogue in Fifty Grand is worth reading: the brief speeches, the one-syllable words, the quick, erratic rhythms. There’s tension and a sour dissonance pervading every speech. Jack Brennan is entering the ring at Madison Square Garden for the fight that is the story’s climax:

  All of the dialogue in Fifty Grand is worth reading: the brief speeches, the one-syllable words, the quick, erratic rhythms. There’s tension and a sour dissonance pervading every speech.

  Jack climbed up and bent down to go through the ropes and Walcott came over and pushed the rope down for Jack to go through. The crowd thought that was wonderful. Walcott put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and they stood there just for a second.

  “So you’re going to be one of those popular champions,” Jack says to him. “Take your goddamn hand off my shoulder.”

  The “So” at the front of the first line, rather than softening it—there’s no comma after it; a comma would give the line a hesitancy, turn it cautious—floods it with disdain. I see you’re going to be one of those . . . it says. You can see Jack’s lip curl. The following line is abrupt, overtly hostile. The expletive gives it the force of a blow. The speech sounds tough; who notices “going to?”

  I have a theory about Hemingway: he was so devoted to language, so averse to corrupting it in any way, that he set himself the task of achieving the effect of “gonna” without writing it. Consider this the ideal, meet it when you can, and use “gonna,” or some equivalent, only when it seems necessary.

  • • •

  The idlers in the “one-horse” Arkansas town in Huckleberry Finn speak one of the several dialects, probably “Pike County,” described by Twain in his “Explanation” at the front of the book. They’re sitting under awnings, whittling, chewing tobacco, when the drunken buffoon, Boggs, comes galloping into town:

  All the loafers looked glad; I reckoned they was used to having fun out of Boggs. One of them says:

  “Wonder who he’s a-gwyne to chaw up this time. If he’d a-chawed up all the men he’s ben a-gwyne to chaw up in the last twenty year he’d have considerable ruputation now.”

  Another one says, “I wisht old Boggs’d threaten me, ‘cuz then I’d know I warn’t gwyne to die for a thousan’ year.”

  Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out:

  “Clear the track, thar. I’m on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise.”

  Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn America’s “best book,” so he presumably had no objection to the flamboyant inventiveness of its dialogue, which is so unlike the surgical precision of his own. “Going to,” in the Arkansas loafers’ parlance, becomes “a-gwyne to.” Twain paints these men as degenerates—“an ornery lot”—and loads their dialogue with mispronunciations and grammatical eccentricities, giving it a reek of ignorance and idle malice. (They sic dogs on pigs, and light dogs on fire with turpentine for their amusement.) Boggs is as ignorant, if not as mean, as they, and speaks the same language.

  Boggs hollers threats at store owner, Colonel Sherburn, who comes out and gives him an ultimatum, effective in fifteen minutes. Boggs continues his drunken rant. Sherburn returns, shoots him dead, and goes back inside. The loafers talk themselves into forming a lynch mob, and in one of the novel’s great scenes, Sherburn, cool and contemptuous, confronts them with a shotgun from the gallery roof of his store. Twain uses “going to” in Sherburn’s withering disquisition to the crowd, which goes, in part:

  “You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along . . .”

  The speech is a page and a half long, and its diction establishes Sherburn as educated and, in a cold-blooded way, genteel. Twain was as aware as you and I that even people as refined as Colonel Sherburn say “gonna,” but he was making a distinction here between Sherburn and the bumpkin mob. The choice, “going to” or “gonna,” matters.

  William Kennedy’s Ironweed protagonist, Francis Phelan, says “gonna,” his voice and diction roughened by age and hard knocks, as well as a meager education. So do his pals and fellow bums. But Francis’s off-and-on-again girlfriend, Helen Archer, who has descended to dereliction and homelessness from the upper middle class and Smith College, says “going to.” The cultivated and beautiful—and finally mad—Katrina Daugherty, who appears briefly but significantly in Ironweed and is the female protagonist of The Flaming Corsage, says “going to.”

  Scout Finch, getting taunted in the schoolyard, says, “You gonna take that back, boy?” And when a man grabs her brother roughly by the collar: “Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way.” But Scout speaks more articulately when she gets on Atticus’s lap after he has taken on the case of Tom Robinson. Atticus advises her:

  “You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but d
o one thing for me if you will: you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No matter what anybody says to you, don’t let ’em get your goat. Try fighting with your head for a change . . . it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.”

  “Atticus, are we going to win?”

  “No, honey.”

  The question and its answer comprise one of the novel’s many poignant moments, and “gonna” would weaken it. Scout is working out a profound moral perplexity, and she’s speaking thoughtfully, slowly. “Going to” is commensurate with the moment.

  • • •

  To read Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue is to understand that syntactical touchups like gonna for going to are as much about the visual—the appearance of the printed words—as about the sound. The absence in McCarthy’s novels of quotation marks, commas, and apostrophes—don’t for don’t, cant for can’t—makes no difference if you hear them read aloud; McCarthy writes for the eye as well as the ear.

  John Grady Cole is talking to his boss, Mac McGovern, in Cities of the Plain:

  What were you goin to say?

  That’s all right.

  You can say it. Go ahead.

  Well, I guess I was goin to say that I didn’t think I could keep him out of trouble on no part time basis.

  Read this aloud. Your tongue barely clicks on the t in goin to, if it clicks at all. But the to is conspicuous to the eye. Goin to: it’s McCarthy’s gonna, with a visual difference. It’s precise. It’s tidy.

  Here’s another exchange between John Grady Cole and Mac McGovern in Cities:

  You don’t know or you ain’t sayin?

  I don’t know. If I wasn’t sayin I’d of said so.

  I know you would.

  Sir.

  Yes.

  I feel kind of bad about Delbert.

  What do you feel bad about?

  I guess I feel like I took his job.

  Well you didn’t. He’d of been gone anyways.

  I’d of said so and I’d have said so sound the same, but they don’t read the same.

  I’d of said so, I’d have said so. He’d of been gone, he’d have been gone. Read them aloud: there’s no difference. You can’t broaden the o in of without warping the sentence. I’d of said so and I’d have said so sound the same, but they don’t read the same. Of for have in the conditional tense is a purely visual device that conveys, or represents, a plainness or lack of sophistication in the diction of the speaker. It’s a signal.

  In Seen the Glory, Elisha Smith, a semi-educated Martha’s Vineyard farm boy, says would of. So do the hayseed Virginia twins, Lilac and Iris, who may not be literate. My thought, writing their dialogue, was that the characters themselves aren’t aware of a distinction between would of and would have. Maybe they mean to say would of. Maybe they mean to say would have. Maybe they don’t know the difference. Whichever, their grammar is rudimentary, and would of says so, in writing.

  • • •

  Dave Foley, the federal agent in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is conversing with a colleague:

  “That’s what made me wonder,” Dave said. “I dunno whether Eddie Fingers is telling me all he knows about the militants or not.”

  Foley is talking to Eddie:

  “I’ll be right here.”

  “No,” Coyle said. “I wanta see you, make sure I know everything that’s going on.”

  Eddie again:

  “You said you hadda have a reason. So I give you a reason.”

  As with “would of,” the effect of these contractions and compressions of two words into one is visual. Say “I don’t know” or “I want to see you” as if you were speaking to your spouse, your kid, a colleague at work—say them right now, out loud, conversationally—and you hear yourself say dunno and wanta. Hadda is more robust and distinctive; most of us don’t coarsen had to to hadda, but how distinctly do we usually pronounce the o in had to?

  The characters in Eddie Coyle are without affectation, to say the least, and dunno, wanta, hadda, and so on give their dialogue a careless aspect. They tell us that these guys are indifferent to how they sound. I wanta go: we say it all the time, but to read it is to hear that indifference in the voices—an indifference to etiquette, social norms, the ethics most people live by. Their dialogue is hard-edged. They have an urban toughness, a grit; these aren’t country boys, by a long shot.

  Hemingway won’t misspell “going to,” but his prizefighters, gangsters, and others on the outer edge of society say “ain’t” and “don’t” instead of “doesn’t,” and these common solecisms resonate through all of their dialogue. They go a long way, in other words. Begin with them when your character is semi-educated or otherwise rough around the edges, and from there decide how much tinkering you want to do with his or her grammar and pronunciation—if any.

  • • •

  The tricks vary from author to author. Jaxon Dunmire, the cowboy turned windmill salesman, is soliciting a distant neighbor in Annie Proulx’s short story, People In Hell Just Want A Drink of Water:

  “Mr. Tinsley? Howdy. Jax Dunmire. Meaning a come out here for two years and persuade you about the Mornin Glory windmill. Probably the best equipment on the market and the mill that’s saving the rancher’s bacon these damn dustbowl days. Yeah, I been meanin a get out here, but I been so damn busy at the ranch and then runnin up and down the state summers sellin these good mills I don’t get around the home territory much.” The smile lay over his face as if it had been screwed on. “My dad and my brothers and me, we got five a these Mornin Glories on the Rockin Box.”

  Meaning to get out here becomes meanin a get out here, which is conspicuous on the page but not so very far from the way most of us would say it, speaking normally. It looks colloquial, is the point. Say Five of these, casually, and it sounds a lot like five a these. It might sound just like it.

  “I find out this fella runs a sports book, loves the game of baseball and has a head fulla stats,” says Chickasaw Charlie Hoke in Leonard’s eponymous short story.

  “It hurt a lotta bums,” says Francis Phelan’s pal, Rudy. “Ain’t many of the old ones left.”

  “I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” says the barbershop loafer, Freddie, in Song of Solomon.

  Head fulla stats. Lotta bums. Shoulda kept his mouth shut. We all say these things in real life, but when you write them they characterize your dialogue in a very specific way. They become vernacular.

  • • •

  The dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle was, at the time, revolutionary. No one had read anything like it—Higgins had a new agent; his previous agent had said he wouldn’t be able to sell the novel, and dropped him—and no one has quite duplicated it. I wouldn’t try to copy George V. Higgins; constant syntactical touchups like dunno and wanta can become overly conspicuous to the reader, if not plain annoying. Higgins incorporated them into his dialogue so skillfully and thoroughly—he makes words out of them—that they quickly become natural to his characters. We can’t imagine them talking any other way. Higgins turned wanta and dunno into gold and gave the vernacular of the underworld literary respectability; Elmore Leonard acknowledged a debt to him. It’s hard to imagine Proulx’s odd but convincing colloquialisms before Higgins broke the ground he did.

  Emulate these masters, borrow from them, steal—it is what writers do—but with caution. Remember how distinctive, in a line of dialogue, these phonetic contrivances are, and save them for the cowboys and their wives, the crooks, the molls, the hard-bitten cops, the hicks, the waitresses in hash houses, the prostitutes and strippers. Do not have your Wellesley College English major say “gonna” because kids talk that way, or because she’s excited, or in an effusive mood. It’s the wrong message to the reader—a visual message. And remember that one hadda, or wanta, or shoulda too many can be ruinous, for the very reason you use them: the reader notices.

  • • •

  And then there is language that does change the sound, as well as the look, of a line.r />
  A for an suggests an imperfect education. “Don’t be a ass,” Rawlins says in All the Pretty Horses. “They are callin our place a entertainment ranch,” says Cody Joe Bibby in Proulx’s story, Pair A Spurs. I used it in Seen the Glory as standard speech for characters from the backcountry and small, poor towns. “You don’t want a Enfield rifle,” Elisha Smith says. Lilac Purdy, the country prostitute, asks Thomas Chandler, “Are you a abolitionist?”

  It sounds more common than it probably is in real life. I don’t recall ever hearing it, but so what? It sounds real—rustic and ignorant but not necessarily unintelligent.

  Some years ago I came across a short story by Bo Ball entitled “It’s Just One Elvis.” The sentence struck me as both odd and interesting; in a moment I understood it was a colloquial rendering of “There’s just one Elvis.” The story is about a family pilgrimage to Graceland. It’s comic and finally poignant, and the title introduces the protagonist, Galene, whose line of dialogue it is. Galene is a sexy young Tennessean, a wife and the mother of an adolescent boy named Son. She’s an Elvis lover and the catalyst of this tragicomic odyssey:

  Galene teeth-hummed “Long Black Limousine.” She twirled the radio dial onto a station that sounded a little country, a little rock. “It’s just one Elvis,” she said and shook her head at a grief now six years old.

  It’s Just One Elvis, the story and the line, stayed with me, and when the time came, there it was—made to order for Lilac and Iris Purdy, southern country girls, unlettered but shrewd, like Galene:

  “. . . with Pa gone it wasn’t nobody to run the slaves and then some partisans come through and something happened, some argument, I guess, and next thing happened they hung one of em and took the other two off with em. They’d got right troublesome with no one to run em but what happened was pitiful, and we warn’t no party to it. They hung the one and left him, and Iris and me helped his woman get him down and bury him. It wasn’t no call to hang him.”