by Chuck Wendig
SEEK AUTHENTICITY OVER REALITY. Some writers try very hard to capture dialogue exactly as it sounds between two real people, with all its local color, all its fits and starts, all its interruptions. Don’t do this. It almost never works unless it’s in the hands of a master storyteller. In dialogue, and really in all storytelling, you want to avoid reality because reality is bad. Reality is cheap and crass and often too dull or too weird to serve as fiction and, in reality, dialogue often sounds clunky and awkward because … honestly, that’s how people communicate. In fiction, you are afforded no such luxury, nor do you really want that. Instead, aim for authenticity. You want it to feel real. You want to ape a few patterns, and use a few choice contractions or tidbits of local color. You don’t want every uhhh umm well ahhh nnngh in there, but one or two, here and there, are fine. You want it to feel like it’s real dialogue without it actually being real dialogue. In fact, look at this dialogue from Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo:
JERRY: I’m, uh, Jerry Lundegaard—
CARL: You’re Jerry Lundegaard?
JERRY: Yah, Shep Proudfoot said—
CARL: Shep said you’d be here at 7:30. What gives, man?
JERRY: Shep said 8:30.
CARL: We been sitting here an hour. I’ve peed three times already.
JERRY: I’m sure sorry. I—Shep told me 8:30. It was a mix-up, I guess.
CHARACTERS DON’T WAIT TO SPEAK. Dialogue is a back and forth, but it needn’t be one that’s neat and tidy. People in real life—and so, also in fiction—do not neatly wait for one person to stop talking to properly and politely respond. They talk over one another and interrupt each other (as evidenced above in the Fargo bit). Further, how often they do that speaks to who the character is. In the Carl and Jerry scene above, you can see Jerry being hesitant and polite, whereas Carl is irritated, maybe even aggressive.
CONSIDER THE RHYTHM OF DIALOGUE. Rhythm is an important part of writing and storytelling overall, as noted on page 102. You want a sense of movement in a scene of dialogue—characters squaring off, feeling out each other’s positions, testing waters. Tension increases, and a revelation mounts—until suddenly one of them switches gears and changes the subject just as we get close to the truth. (Once more, the metaphor of the roller coaster is apt.) The shape of dialogue matters, too, and not just in determining pace—but our eye and our ear strive for variation. On a novel page, we want to see short spikes of text breaking into a longer paragraph. We want a handful of short sentences and declarations broken up with a longer confession or confrontation. You want the dialogue you read in your head—or, ideally, out loud—to sound the way it’s supposed to sound onscreen. It should ring true, or at least authentic, and rhythm goes a long way to making that happen. (I advocate reading your work aloud because you hear things that your eyes will miss.) You want to mix it up. Keep it variable. That variability—that rhythm—keeps the audience on edge. You want them always on their toes, unsure of where the dialogue is going, or where it will take them. Two quick exercises to follow rhythm in dialogue: First, listen to people having a conversation in public, and write it down. Second, write down the dialogue in a scene of a film or on television—don’t copy the script, write down the dialogue as they say it. You’ll see the ebb-and-flow of conversation. You’ll spy the rhythm at work.
DIALOGUE IS DNA. Every character is different … and here’s where you say, “Hey thanks, Captain Obvious, next you’re going to tell us that WATER IS WET or that OTTERS ARE ADORABLE.”2 What is important to realize, however, is not merely that characters are different, but how those differences are best expressed—and dialogue is one of the chief-most ways to do that. Characters distinguish themselves by their choices, and dialogue informs, explains, and bolsters those choices. What it really means for you as the storyteller is that dialogue needs to feel like it belongs to the person who’s saying it. It shouldn’t sound just like you. It shouldn’t sound like every other character. Some of this is surface impression: cadence, word choice, slang terms used. Some of this is deeper: the character’s passions, the character’s choices, what she chooses to talk about versus what she chooses to hide. One character is terse with a military precision to her language—especially when she discusses the military, since she’s a soldier. Another character is loose and rambly, and he goes on at length about conspiracy theories and other paranoid nonsense. One character curses. Another is unfailingly positive. You want all of them to feel like themselves when they speak.
No better test for this exists than simply writing down the dialogue and cutting out any kind of dialogue attribution, whether on the novel page or in a script. Write the dialogue without identifying who is saying what, and test yourself—and any beta readers or editors you have—with the task of figuring out who is saying what. If it’s difficult to determine, then you might need to do a better job making each line of dialogue like a fingerprint of the character that’s saying it.
Once again, look at that Carl and Jerry dialogue from Fargo above. Or the McClane and Gruber dialogue on page 63. Even if you hadn’t seen each film, each character’s dialogue stands out and feels unique.
ACTION, ACTION, ACTION. Give them something to do while talking. Maybe they’re running. Maybe one person is messing up the kitchen while the other is tidying up behind them. Maybe they’re all gathered around, getting drunk, grooming otters, or trying to disarm a nuclear bomb. The trick is to match the tenor and content of the dialogue with the action—postcoital bliss might be a good time for long ruminations, but not when you’re disarming a bomb. However, while disarming a bomb, characters might be more truthful or confessional. The action and the words need to make sense together. It needs to feel organic and connected to the situation.
WRITING FIGHTING IS LIKE WRITING FUCKING
Writing sex is like writing a fight scene.
Consider:
Sex and violence stare at one another in a warped carnival mirror. Both are intimate. Both reflect physicality. Heartbeats pulse. Fluids spurt—spit, blood, sweat.
Form and function do well together across all types of writing, but this is particularly true in terms of writing both action and sex. I find that when I write these, the form of my writing moves to match the pacing of the action.3 Something that’s meant to be fast and brutal—a short, sharp shock such as two pugilists pounding away at one another or two sexual partners in a one-night stand, erm, pounding away at each other might demand shorter sentences, or sentence fragments, or blunt and forward language.
Alternately, you may want to slow things down—stretching the narrative scene out with more languid pacing and language. To give the sense of a fight scene being slower and more strategic—or a sex scene being dreamlike or strange, the participants taking their time with each other.
There also exists the consideration of sensation: Both fighting and sex scenes aren’t just about the, ahem, mechanical blow-by-blow, but also about what the characters are experiencing in terms of feelings, both physical and emotional. The scene needn’t be described like a karate manual or a health class video on sexual intercourse. Some mix must be in play. I’ve read scenes that clarify every tiny detail—the story telegraphs every thrown punch, every grenade tossed, every penetrative moment, every bite, kiss, or scratch. This is nice in a lot of ways. Necessary, even, if only because it helps you maintain an image in the audience’s head of what’s going on.
On the other hand, that can get a little dull. A giant meaty paragraph dictating the cold and clinical step by step of a fight or sex scene is a paragraph I am going to ice skate over with my eyes. This is doubly true of those writers who know martial arts and write about it in a very granular way. No, I don’t know what a Wily Cheung Dragon Five-Toed Pylon Garrote-Kick does, and I don’t really care. Nor do I need to know what comprises various sex moves.4 Further, and perhaps more importantly, these fighting and sex scenes needn’t only be action scenes.
Any such scene is awesome when it’s doing more than just expressing physical
action (pain! pleasure! pizazz!) and a sequence of objective events. How can you reveal character in a scene of fighting or sex? How can you express theme and mood? During a scene of romance or battle, a character is ultimately exposed. A blustery character becomes suddenly timid. An uncertain character becomes bold and brave in the moment. A character reveals traits of being a caretaker—or a sadist. Themes emerge: competition between characters, lovemaking saving the day, the complicated nature of human interaction.
Just as dialogue and description are given over to subtext, sexy-times and punchy-punchy-times can be given over to subtler threads, too. Such a scene should never be there just because it’s obligatory: It should always have deeper purpose. Even if that purpose is just to reveal the interplay and power-exchanges between characters—and trust me, just as a scene of two people fighting is about an exchange of power, so is a scene of sex and love. Who is on top (literally and figuratively)? Who stands to gain from this? What will the consequences be when this scene of love or war concludes?
A scene of sex or fighting doesn’t stop a character from being who that character is. It reveals it. Selfish. Selfless. Nervous. Anxious. Afraid. Angry. Griefstricken. How characters fight or, erm, “do the sex” says a helluva lot about them. They’re not automatons. Such physical confrontations can be raw, abrasive, illustrative. They tear away our barriers, our armor. So show that as part of the story. Let it expose them. Let the plot change as a result of the scene of punching, kicking, shooting, kissing, groping, screwing.
There’s value in seeing the relationship between fighting and fucking, at least in terms of writing. Bring one into the other. Bring the intimacy and discomfort of sex into the fight scenes, and bring our culture’s comfort with violence into writing the bedroom scenes. An interesting exercise: Write a sex scene like you’re writing a fight scene.
Speaking of exercises …
EXERCISES FOR CHARACTER INTERACTIONS
One option to help you get a grip on character interactions in your story is to perform some exercises—no, not jumping jacks, not hot yoga, not pickleball5—that are focused on helping you understand the characters you’re writing and how they intersect. Use or discard at your leisure.
The Character Logline, Which Has Nothing to Do with Logs
A logline is this: It’s a single sentence meant to very loosely describe your book or your movie or whatever it is you’re writing (comic book, manifesto, diner menu). This is similar in a sense to an elevator pitch—a quick, 10-second hot-take on the story at hand. It’s not meant to give an entire scope of the book, but it’s meant to entice and excite. “A take-no-shit cop from New York travels to California to mend his broken marriage but must contend with terrorists who have taken his wife hostage in her office building.” Obviously, that is a logline I just made up for The Princess Bride I mean Die Hard.
Generally, loglines are story-driven. You get one per story. Easy.
Except I like to sometimes think of loglines too for each of my characters. Just to help me crystallize who they are, so when it comes time to have those characters interact with each other, I know their stories, I know their problems, I know what brings them to the page and what they want from each other.
So, a logline for John McClane might be: “Stubborn, impulsive New York City cop who will do anything to save his marriage—and save the day.”
A logline for Hans Gruber: “Smug Eurotrash thief who is a master strategist and who cloaks the theft of $640 million in bearer bonds as an act of political terror.”
Sergeant Al Powell: “Sad-sack, desk-bound LAPD cop who remains haunted to inaction by the last time he pulled the trigger and killed an innocent kid carrying a toy gun.”
Even if there were zero other characters in the movie, already I can start to envision how these characters might play off each other. (And to go back to our directional relationships, it’s easy to see how these characters might run perpendicular or parallel to one another.)
Post-It Notes as Far as the Eye Can See
If you want something less codified but more granular, I like to sometimes take a single Post-it note per character and write down on it a series of traits. What you write there varies by character, but I like to sometimes include:
Three adjectives that describe him.
His overarching problem and proposed solution.
Any limitations that internally complicate him.
And, if possible, an expected three-beat arc to drive home how I anticipate he’ll change over the course of the story.
Then I stick them all around me as I write—on the monitor, on my desk, to my elbows and knees, to the outside of my eyeglasses facing in. Okay, maybe I don’t get that extreme, but you get the point.
Then, as I write, I update them. Particularly, as characters interact, I may write more on that note—or add further notes—that indicate how characters are relating to one another. Which leads me to:
The Relationship Web
On a piece of paper, write down each character’s name in a circle. Then draw arrows from each character to each other character. Connect them with lines, and along those lines write a single descriptive statement indicating that character’s feelings toward the other character (the one the arrow points to).
So, Steve → is in love with → Becky.
But, Becky → believes Steve to be a stalker → Steve.
As other characters are added in, the web grows more complex:
Jeremy → worships his brother Steve → Steve.
Steve → uses and abuses his little brother → Jeremy.
Jeremy → has a soft spot for → Becky.
Becky → wants to save Jeremy and get him away from Steve’s influence → Steve.
And onward. The greater the web grows, the more of the push-and-pull you see amidst the weave-and-weft of connecting strands.
The Character Test-Drive, Vroom Vroom
This is a thing that I do, and it is a thing you may want to do, as well.
When we begin to write a story, it’s like meeting a new group of friends in an unfamiliar place. It’s you driving to a mall in a part of town you’ve never seen, then hanging out with a pack of strangers who you are now committed to remain with for a period of time. It’s weird and uncomfortable. And in a story, of course, you have to hit the ground running. You can’t dally. You gotta move, move, move.
What I do before I actually start the story is this:
I take the characters on a test drive. I open up a Word document, and I pick up the characters I want to write about, and I drop them into the wide-open white space of the page as if they are action figures on my living room floor. I give them a problem. I force them to interact. And then I write. I write for as long as I want to. But I do not write them into the story, and I do not focus on the tale I want to inevitably tell with them. Instead, I let them talk. I let them act. I let them interact. No limits. No rules. And no expectation that I will ever keep what I’ve written.
The value of this for me is that it establishes a baseline. I become familiar with the characters. I see tics and habits emerge. And, despite knowing full well that what I wrote should be garbage, I usually end up finding things in there I do want to keep—a funny joke, an unanticipated trait, an emergent behavior. Try it out. Report back. I’ll wait here. Trapped in this book because of an old wizard’s curse!
1 Search your heart, you know it to be true.
2 Otters really are adorable. I’m sure I’m misusing the footnote format to emphasize that, but c’mon. Let’s all just take a minute, lean back, close our eyes, and imagine otters. There. Yeah. Otters. … Boom, your entire day just improved by a factor of “otters.”
3 Or, “action.” Get it? Wink-wink? Nudge-nudge? “Action” *eyebrow waggle*.
4 Like the “Arizona Tugboat,” the “Schenectady Trampoline,” or the altogether more rare and ancient “Monkey Steals The Possum Toes.”
5 A waste of perfectly good pickles, if you ask me.
Interlude
THE FIFTH RULE
When it comes to writing advice, we are fond of slavishly roasting a number of old chestnuts again and again—we recycle and recirculate these tired old “unswerving laws of telling stories” as if they are gospel truth and to deny them is to deny the godliness of what we do.
We tell people: Writers write, storywriters don’t use adverbs, novelists always use the dialogue tag said. We say to open with a bang, we demand they don’t open with weather or a character looking at herself in the mirror (oops, I’ve done both), don’t have an unlikable protagonist (also oops), don’t use a thesaurus, don’t write a prologue, and so on.
One of the most famous, and most debated, is this:
Write what you know.
And of course, nobody knows what the hell that means. How would they? It’s a four-word proclamation—and, generally, short proclamations are a very good way to grind nuance down underneath a twisting boot heel. Does it mean that what goes onto the page is only information that I know? If I want to write about flying a dragon, does that mean I can’t because I’ve never actually flown a dragon? Or does it mean I should try to find some common experience, some aspect of my life that I can use to relate to what’s happening on the page? Does it mean I should never write characters who are unlike me? Should all my stories just be stories of dumb white dudes in semirural Pennsyltucky, dudes who sit in sheds and write books? Is this why Stephen King so often writes protagonists who are writers?
