The Fiction Writer's Guide to Dialogue

by John Hough

  This trick isn’t for everyone. Lee Smith is generally averse to altered spellings and syntactical oddities and finds other ways, as we’ve seen, to evoke the backcountry speech of her mountain people, Proulx’s rodeo riders and hard-luck ranchers don’t say “would of,” but McCarthy’s young cowboys do.

  • • •

  It comes down to intuition. It’s just one Elvis: look at it, listen to it—does it sound like your character? Does it give his or her dialogue the tone, the flavor, you’re looking for? Does it hit a right note, or an off one? It’s just one Elvis. Put it away and don’t lose it. You never know.

  • • •

  Improvise your own vernacular.

  Improvise your own vernacular. I didn’t invent Elisha Smith; he did grow up on a farm on Martha’s Vineyard, and did enlist in the Union Army in 1861 at the age of sixteen, as happens in my novel. Little is known of him—there are no photographs—and I imagined the character with the help of several letters he wrote in the weeks before Gettysburg. The letters reveal him as earnest, sweet natured, and scantily educated. His mother had sent him a cake, which he’d shared with his comrades, and he thanked her for it and reported that they’d all enjoyed it: “The boys praised it up very high.”

  I never found an occasion to use the line, but it was a gold mine nevertheless. Praised it up very high: the adverbs are unorthodox as well as redundant, and there’s something quaint and homespun in their application here that seemed to me to be the key to Elisha’s dialogue. He isn’t good with words, but he isn’t at a loss for them. The language in his letters seemed improvised, slapped together, but expressive nevertheless. In the novel the others are asleep, and Elisha and Thomas Chandler are talking quietly the night before the regiment arrives in Gettysburg:

  “Got them scopes long as their gun barrels,” Elisha said. “Infernal things. Put a ball between your eyes at half a mile.” He unbuttoned his haversack. “Look what I got, Tommy. Been savin it.” He lifted out a thick soft slab of something wrapped in newspaper. “It’s cherry cake,” he said. “Lady give it to me in Taneytown. We’ll go halfs on it.”

  “I ain’t hungry,” Thomas said.

  “You ain’t hungry for cherry cake? Here.” And he tore the limp wedge in two very gently and lifted a piece into Thomas’s cupped hands.

  “She was a pretty lady give me this. Wore her hair down long. You didn’t see her?”

  “I might have.”

  Elisha brought his cake up with both hands and took a large bite. “Damn that’s good,” he said, with his mouth full. “Go on have you some, Tommy.”

  Thomas nodded. He took a bite of cake.

  “Lady told me what it was,” Elisha said, “or I wouldn’t of known. Cherry cake. I never heard of such.”

  This last sentence was stolen from the great John Ford western, The Searchers, which I’ve seen more times than I like to admit. The circumstances are unimportant; the line, by a Texas rancher, is a vehement denial: “I never said that! I never said such!”

  I was ten the first time I saw The Searchers. Not then, but somewhere over the years of repeated viewings, the line stayed with me. Praised it up very high. Never said such. Keep listening.

  CONVEYING REGIONAL PATOIS

  Huckleberry Finn has been attacked for its portrayal of Huck’s companion Jim, the runaway slave. Jim’s credulousness and superstition, captured entirely in his dialogue (he never does a stupid or senseless thing) have been cited as racial stereotyping, a demeaning of African Americans.

  These critics somehow miss one of the glaring truths of the novel. Huck’s father is a drunken tramp and a bully. Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas are pious nitwits. The high-toned Shepherdsons and Grangerfords are waging a mindless blood feud. Colonel Sherburn is a cold-blooded killer. The Arkansas townsfolk are ignorant, idle, mean, and cowardly. The King and Duke are seedy swindlers and treacherous, to boot. If Huckleberry Finn demeans any race, it is the white one.

  Jim occupies moral ground well above this rogues’ gallery. Near the end of the novel he comes out of hiding to help the doctor remove the bullet from Tom Sawyer’s leg, knowing he’ll be recaptured. Huck’s belief in Jim is vindicated: “I was glad it was according to my judgment of him, too; because I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I seen him.” No one else in the novel except, perhaps, the doughty Mary Jane Wilks, rates such deep respect from Huck, or Mark Twain, and we can dismiss the idea of Jim’s speech as caricature.

  Higgins’s maxim that dialogue is character is every bit as true in Huck Finn as in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and it is the content of Jim’s dialogue, not its idiom, that defines him. He thinks of home and tells Huck about the time his four-year-old daughter, who had just recovered from scarlet fever, stood smiling at him when he asked her to close the door. He asked her again, and still she stood there, smiling:

  “En wid dat I fetch’ her a slap side de head dat sont her a-sprawlin’. Den I went into de yuther room, en ’uz gone ’bout ten minutes; en when I come back day was dat do’ a-stannin’ open yit, en dat chile stannin’ mos’ right in it, a-looin’ down and mournin’ en de tears runniun’ down. My, but I wuz mad. I was a-gwyne for de chile, but jis’ den—it was a do’ dat open innerds—jis’ den, ’long come de wind en slam it to, behine de chile, ker-blam!—en my lan’, de child never move’! . . . Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, ‘Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Almighty forgive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as long’s he live! Oh, she was plumb deef and dumb, Huck, plumb deef and dumb—en I’d ben a-treat’n her so!” . . .

  Eighty years later came Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. Nat is a preacher, steeped in the Bible and highly literate, and he speaks flawless English when he wants to. His fellow-slaves, condemned to illiteracy by law and convention, sound very much like Twain’s Jim:

  “‘Tain’t nothing, Nat,” he said weakly. “Hit jes’ de misery I gits ev’y springtime. I gwine be awright come next week.” After a pause he went on: “But nem’mine dat. Marse Samuel done told me I gots to take dem four boys up to whar de trace begins at two in de mawnin’, What time hit now?”

  Times change. Sensibilities change. However authentic Twain’s and Styron’s slave dialects may be, they come across today as unnecessarily inflected and ungrammatical. The escaped slaves living in Cincinnati in Morrison’s harrowing ghost story of a novel, Beloved, sound literate by comparison. Here, Stamp Paid is trying to dissuade Baby Suggs, worn out and grieving, from quitting preaching:

  “You got to do it,” he said. “You got to. Can’t nobody call like you.”

  “What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world.”

  “What world you talking about? Ain’t nothing harmless down here.”

  “Yes it is. Blue. That don’t hurt nobody. Yellow neither.”

  “You getting in the bed to think about yellow?”

  “I likes yellow.”

  “Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?”

  “Can’t say. It’s something can’t be planned.”

  “You blaming God,” he said. “That’s what you doing.”

  “No, Stamp. I ain’t.”

  All of the major characters in Beloved are former slaves or their children, and Morrison gives their dialogue a colloquial flavor without Twain’s and Styron’s extreme idiom and manipulations of pronunciation. Morrison’s characters—all reared in slavery, all in some way damaged by it—speak a shared language. They don’t sound colloquial to each other, and Morrison wants the reader to hear them in the same natural, grammatical-seeming way they hear each other.

  You have a world of leeway, but never make the mistake of equating dialect or vernacular with unintelligence. Jim isn’t stupid, and neither is Galene, in It’s Just One Elvis. Eddie Coyle is as shrewd as any professor across the river at Harvard. Colloquial speech, or vernacular, is about time, place
, and learning. It is the sound of where your characters come from.

  TO CURSE OR NOT TO CURSE

  There are no restrictions on profanity in fiction these days, as you surely know. The sky’s the limit, but be judicious. Just because you can use an expletive doesn’t mean you should. Profanities can work against, as well as for you.

  The modern teenager and college student—even with the most genteel upbringing—typically garnishes his or her speech with expletives. Kids swear, and everybody knows it. So what about the kids in our novels?

  A student of mine, the father of teenagers, was writing a novel—it was a good one—in which the male and female protagonists were fifteen. The girl had led a protected upper-middle class life. She went to a good school. Her father was a successful businessman. The boy’s family was odd and dysfunctional but erudite; the boy, who was brought up on the water, could quote Melville and Joseph Conrad.

  The dialogue was generally excellent, but after a while something began bothering me. It was the profanity: it felt randomly placed, gratuitous. It didn’t sound like Travis and Christina. Their frequent expletives, sometimes angry, sometimes not, were projecting character that wasn’t theirs. The words were giving out the wrong message.

  Consider the implications of the words your characters use. The dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is laced with expletives. Crooks and lawmen alike use the “f” word constantly, usually in its adjectival form—their way of underlining a word. We understand that for them it is de rigueur—a password in the pragmatic and unforgiving world they inhabit. It’s the only world they know, and the word comes naturally to them.

  Where is your novel set? What circles do your characters move in? The profanity of the movie people in Didion’s Play It As It Lays projects their life style; they live intemperately, they speak intemperately. They’re flashy; profanity is flashy, it’s hip. Didion’s Hollywood is as predatory in its way as Eddie Coyle’s Boston, and her characters speak an aggressive, abrasive language. McCarthy’s cowboys swear, of course, but his women, who have an old-fashioned propriety, a dignity that brings out good manners in the men, don’t. Proulx’s women, on the other hand—ranch wives, female ropers, and honkytonk prowlers—salt their speech with expletives.

  Does Annabel, the Wellesley College junior in your novel, swear a blue streak when she finds out she failed chemistry? Okay, but if she does, it isn’t because she’s a college kid and all college kids swear; it’s because she’s Annabel, and Annabel has a notably foul mouth. Maybe obscenities for Annabel are a fashion statement, like loud lipstick or skirts halfway up her thigh. Maybe it’s a feminist thing, a defiance of old boundaries. Maybe it’s sheer mischief, Annabel’s way of getting a rise out of people. Maybe there’s anger, aggression in her cussing. Whatever the reason, her language can’t be gratuitous. Dialogue, remember, reveals character.

  Enjoy the freedom but use profanity artfully. An expletive can give a line of dialogue just the right touch of grit or earthy panache. It can give it a sawtooth edge. It can make it vehement, angry. It can even bring a smile. From Eddie Coyle:

  “You do not have to answer any questions,” Moran said. “You have a right to remain silent. If you answer any questions, your answers may be used in evidence against you in a trial in a court of law. Do you understand what I have read to you?”

  “Of course I understand,” Jackie Brown said. “You think I’m a fucking idiot?”

  Allow your characters to swear, but don’t force them to.

  Allow your characters to swear, but don’t force them to.

  All dialogue is an invented language, and colloquial speech, vernacular, is your license to turn your imagination loose. Look for words in odd conjunction as you write. Invent your own grammatical oddities and solecisms. Some extravagance is okay.

  Keep your sense of humor. The proprietor of Slick’s Bar and Grill on the south side of Chicago, Alphaeus Jones, produces a shotgun from under the counter when two racketeers posing as community organizers come in to shake him down in James Alan McPherson’s short story, The Silver Bullet:

  Now R.V.’s lips curled into a confident grin. He shook his head several times. “Let me run something down for you, brother,” he said. “First of all, we’re a nonprofit community-based grass-roots organization, totally responsive to the needs of the community. Second”—and here he again brought his fingers into play—“we think the community would be very interested in the articulation of the total proceeds of this joint vis-à-vis the average income level for this area. Third, you don’t want to mess with us. We got the support of college students.”

  “Do tell,” Jones said. “Well, I ain’t never been to college myself, but I can count to ten. And if you punks ain’t down the block when I finish, that street out there is gonna be full of hamburger meat.”

  Venacular can’t sparkle in every line, but often it will. Don’t pass up the chance.

  8

  GREAT LINES: WHY I LOVE TO WRITE DIALOGUE

  Dialogue is an art form, and it surprises me that so many writers, even successful ones, don’t rely on it more than they do. This is personal: I’ll grant that fiction can be good without a lot of dialogue, but the choice not to write dialogue seems inscrutable to me. Dialogue is as useful as you want it to be; get along without it if you can, but why would you want to? It’s so much fun to write!

  “It is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it,” Dickens observes in an aside in A Christmas Carol, “and would unquestionably have done it too.”

  Dickens could have been describing the pleasure of writing dialogue. How many times have you wished you, or someone with you, had spoken up? Afterward, you hit on the astute remark, the apt wisecrack, the withering rejoinder, which would have turned a dull or one-sided exchange into something worth telling. I should have said . . . I wish he’d told that nosy cop to . . . If only she’d stood up and . . . Your story or novel is your chance. Our characters, depending on who they are, don’t always say the smart thing, the brave thing, the witty thing, the poignant thing, but whatever they say is what they ought to have said, to paraphrase Dickens. And when they do make the apt wisecrack or that withering rejoinder, the satisfaction is as real as if you’d said it yourself.

  Your characters have to respond immediately, but you have all the time you need to craft that response.

  Whatever our characters say, we write their dialogue with a freedom amounting to the hindsight Dickens is talking about. The freedom is time to think about what your character is going to say. “Proceed slowly, and take care,” advises Annie Proulx. A good line of dialogue might take twenty minutes to sketch out, shape, and fine tune. Your characters have to respond immediately, but you have all the time you need to craft that response. Take the time. Don’t be in a hurry.

  My wife, who is a reader, says she can tell when the writer is having fun. Twain had fun writing Huck Finn, she says. Mark Harris had fun writing the Henry Wiggen novels. Higgins had fun writing Eddie Coyle. Tom Wolfe always has fun.

  The common denominator here is some humor and a large dose of idiosyncrasy, either in the writing or the characters or both. What’s fun to write is fun to read. The dialogue in The Friends of Eddie Coyle—blunt, profane, spiced with wit and sarcasm—is immensely entertaining. Who doesn’t savor the self-serving and mendacious bombast of those two scamps, the King and the Duke, in Huckleberry Finn? Who isn’t eager to hear what Atticus Finch will say next, and how he will say it?

  All good dialogue affords pleasure, if not fun. McCarthy’s dialogue is engrossing in the way that Hemingway’s is: there’s pleasure in its succinctness and clarity, in the vigor of the language itself. It’s alive. Didion’s is equally spare and clean, and nobody is better at saying what ought to have been said than her jaded and intelligent heroines, masters of the mordant, dead-on observation or rejoinder. Lee Smith loves country music, and to read her dialogue is to hear the sweet ache of a country song.

 
• • •

  The scraps of dialogue that follow are favorites of mine. Some are funny, some are sweet, some tense, and one is famously moralistic. All of them give satisfaction—what ought to have been said. They’re fun to read and could only have been fun to write.

  Treasure Island’s old pirate, Billy Bones, is a nightly nuisance in the Admiral Benbow Inn until Dr. Livesey has a word with him:

  The captain flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey’s; he went on as before, speaking clear and kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath, “Silence, there, between decks!”

  “Were you addressing me, sir?” says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, “I have only one thing to say to you, sir,” replies the doctor, “that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

  That exchange has stayed with me from childhood, and so has Jim’s line, called across the water from the raft as Huck paddles away to reconnoiter a town:

  “Dah he goes, de old true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.”

  Lonesome Dove is a sprawling epic rife with the violence of the old West, but in its quiet moments Larry McMurtry was able to have fun with his dialogue. Early in the novel Augustus McCrae has erected a sign at the entrance to the ranch in Lonesome Dove; the sign, like Augustus, is wordy. He has appended, UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT:

  “What’s it say, that Latin?” Call asked.