Writer's Report 2.0

This is the second part of Dialogue and the Art of War by Randy Ingermanson. Yesterday, you saw what poor dialogue looks like. Today you’ll get a look at how Sharp and Snappy Dialogue is done.

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Dialogue and the Art of War–Part 2

Sharp and Snappy Dialogue

Dialogue, as I said last month, is war. It’s not fought with guns and tanks. It’s fought with words. But it’s all about the same thing. Conflict. If you don’t have conflict, then you don’t have dialogue.

Dialogue, by the way, is a series of a special kind of MRU, in which rational speech figures more prominently than normal. (If you’ve never heard of MRUs, then you can find out all about them in the following article on my web site:)
http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/perfect_scene.html

Last month, I gave an example of poor dialogue by a writer we’ll call “Tom Clancy.” This month, just to show that I’m a fair-minded guy, we’ll work through an example of sharp and snappy dialogue, and we’ll call this writer “Tom Clancy” too. It’s a common name, after
all.

This excerpt is from the book PATRIOT GAMES. The setting is the UK in the early 1980s. Our hero, Jack Ryan, is in London on holiday and just happens to see an assassination attempt in progress against Prince Charlie and Lady Di. The bad guys are some IRA terrorists armed with grenades and AK-47s. Jack barges in barehanded and foils the attempt, wounding one of the terrorists and killing another, thereby saving the royals. For this service to the crown, he is given an honorary knighthood.

In the scene we’ll be analyzing, Jack is the star witness in the trial of the terrorist he wounded. He’s given his testimony, and now the barrister for the defense is launching a cross-examination on him. The lawyer’s goal is to discredit Jack. Jack’s job is to stay calm and not have his testimony voided by losing his temper. He wants this terrorist put behind bars for good.

“Tom” has set things up nicely. The conflict is sharply defined. The two characters have opposing goals and the stakes are high. If the barrister, “Red Charlie” Atkinson, succeeds, then his client walks free. If Jack convinces the jury, then the hood goes to jail for life.

We begin with Atkinson addressing Jack in the witness stand:

“Doctor Ryan — or should I say Sir John?”

Jack waved his hand. “Whatever is convenient to you, sir,” he answered indifferently. They had warned him about Atkinson. A very clever bastard, they’d said. Ryan had known quite a few clever bastards in the brokerage business.

Randy sez: Atkinson begins probing Jack by referring to his recent knighthood. The goal here is to make Jack seem snooty to the jury, who are all commoners. Jack counters by making it clear he’s not too stuck on himself. Notice that “Tom” is writing here in well-formed MRUs. The comment by Atkinson is objective and external. Jack’s response is interspersed with interior monologue, since we are inside his head.

“You were, I believe, a leftenant in the United States Marine Corps?”

“Yes, sir, that is correct.”

Atkinson looked down at his notes, then over at the jury. “Bloodthirsty mob, the U.S. Marines,” he muttered.

“Excuse me, sir? Bloodthirsty?” Ryan asked. “No, sir. Most of the Marines I know are beer drinkers.”

Randy sez: Atkinson now goes for the throat. His goal is to persuade the jury that Jack is a violent man (he shot two terrorists, after all) and therefore not to be trusted. Jack parries this with politeness and humor, making Atkinson look silly. Jack has scored a point with the jury here, as we see next.

Atkinson spun back at Ryan as a ripple of laughter came down from the gallery. He gave Jack a thin, dangerous smile. They’d warned Jack most of all to beware his word games and tactical skill in the courtroom. To hell with it, Ryan told himself. He smiled back at the barrister. Go for it, asshole . . .

Randy sez: Oops, a couple of boo-boos here, “Tom.”

First, you’re showing the cause AFTER the effect in the first sentence. The cause is the laughter from the gallery. The effect is Atkinson spinning back toward Ryan. This is a minor glitch which takes your reader ever so slightly out of the present, since the flow of time is temporarily reversed.

The second problem is that you need a paragraph break after Atkinson’s action (in which he gives Jack a thin dangerous smile) and Jack’s reaction (his interior monologue). A break would cue the reader to switch from the objective to the subjective. Again, it’s a minor glitch. A visual cue for the reader is nice but not essential.

We pick up with Atkinson pressing his attack.

“Forgive me, Sir John. A figure of speech. I meant to say that the U.S. Marines have a reputation for aggressiveness. Surely this is true?”

Randy sez: Another attempt by Atkinson to make Jack look bad. There follows some more back-and-forth in which Jack explains what a bunch of good guys Marines are and Atkinson expresses skepticism. We’ll pick up a few pages further on, when Atkinson tries to make Jack the aggressor against an innocent Irishman bystander who might very well have been coming to the rescue of the royal family.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been told that my client has never been arrested, or accused of any crime?”

“I guess that makes him a first offender.”

“It’s for the jury to decide that,” the lawyer snapped back. “You did not see him fire a single shot, did you?”

“No, sir, but his automatic had an eight-shot clip, and there were only three rounds in it. When I fired my third shot, it was empty.”

Randy sez: Atkinson is working Jack hard, playing off the fact that Jack didn’t actually see the terrorist firing the gun. Jack is responding with both humor and logic. He’s doing a fine job and the lawyer is getting angry with him.

There aren’t many wasted words in this dialogue. No small talk. No convenient exchanges of information. Just war, straight and simple. That’s good dialogue.

Nice job, “Tom.”

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Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, “the Snowflake Guy,” publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine every month with nearly 5000 readers. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, make your writing more valuable to editors, and have FUN doing it, visit: http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com
and download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing.

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Tomorrow: “Dialogue Tags”
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I was going to put together an article about eliminating dialogue tags in your story, but remembered where I originally learned of it myself.

This first part of “Dialogue and the Art of War” comes from Randy Ingermanson’s Advanced Fiction E-zine, of which I have subscribed to for the last few years.

Part 1 – covers Poor Dialogue
Part 2 – will go over what Sharp and Snappy Dialogue looks like
Part 3 – discusses Dialogue Tags
Part 4 – Point of View
Part 5 – The Subtlety of Subtext

Enjoy this great series of articles:
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Dialogue and the Art of War

Poor Dialogue

If you write fiction, then you have probably gone through a stage where you tried your best to make your dialogue sound like Real Conversation.

The problem is that Real Conversation is boring! Go ahead. Test me on this. Next time you’re in the subway or on the bus or in line at the supermarket, eavesdrop on the conversations around you. If you’re listening in on teenage girls, you’ll get something like this:

“And then he said, ‘No way!’ And I’m like, ‘Yes way.’”

“No!”

“Yeah!”

“So whatcha gonna do?”

“I dunno.”

We interrupt this wretched Real Conversation now, before you die of sleep apnea. Let’s tune in now on two middle-aged guys talking sports:

“Could be the year for the Dodgers.”

“Yeah, maybe. If they can get a decent #4 in their
pitching rotation.”

“Ain’t gonna happen. They’ll have to do it with
hitting.”

“So whaddaya think about the steroid thing?”

“Terrible. The commissioner shoulda done something ten
years ago.”

Again, this Real Conversation works better than Sominex at putting you out. If your fiction sounds like this kind of Real Conversation, then you are slitting your novel’s throat.

So what’s a writer to do?

Well, duh! It’s obvious! Don’t write Real Conversation.
Write Dialogue!

You’ll notice that I just capitalized the word Dialogue. I didn’t capitalize it at the beginning of this article, but I capitalized it here. I did that to make it clear that in this context it is an RTT (Randy’s Technical Term). The term Real Conversation is also an RTT.

I better define those two RTTs. Real Conversation is that informational sort of back-and-forth that you saw in the two snippets above. There is no conflict in Real Conversation, and that’s the problem. Fiction is about conflict. More precisely, fiction is about characters in conflict.

Now I’ll say it again: Don’t write Real Conversation.
Write Dialogue.

Real Conversation is RARELY about conflict. Think about the Real Conversations you’ve had lately. You’ll find they fall into various boring categories like these:

a) People making small talk to pass the time.
b) People exchanging information.
c) People avoiding conflict.
d) People trying to solve a problem.

Why are these boring? Simple. Look for the conflict in each one:

Small talk has zero conflict. Don’t put small talk into your fiction! It’s a killer.

Exchanging information also usually has no conflict. If one of the parties is trying to HIDE information, then there is conflict. If you MUST write a Dialogue in which information gets exchanged, then make the informer do his best to avoid informing the informee.

Avoiding conflict also has no conflict, unless you subtext the conflict. See, for example, just about any scene in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. If you like subtexted conflict (and I do), you’ll love Jane Austen.

There CAN be conflict when people are trying to solve a problem, depending on whether the problem is easy or hard (and whether one of the players isn’t too keen on the getting the problem solved). If you’re going to solve a problem in Dialogue, then make it a nasty,
vicious, horrible problem. Or make one of the players an obstructionist who would find it disastrous for the problem to actually BE solved.

The strange thing is that every author is tempted to put some Real Conversation into their novel, especially early in the story before the characters have figured out what the conflict is about. There’s a remarkable example of deadly dull Real Conversation in RED STORM RISING, by Tom Clancy and Larry Bond.

The book opens with an exciting sequence in which Islamic terrorists destroy a Soviet oil refinery, drastically cutting Soviet oil production (and eventually leading up to World War III). Meanwhile, over in the US, we meet Our Hero, Bob Toland, who hasn’t quite figured out that he’s the star of an international bestseller yet. Bob is engaging in some truly wretched Real Conversation, which I quote here verbatim:

Bob Toland frowned at his spice cake. I shouldn’t be eating dessert, the intelligence analyst reminded himself. But the National Security Agency commissary served this only once a week, and spice cake was his favorite, and it was only about two hundred calories. That was all. An extra five minutes on the exercise bike when he got home.

“What did you think of that article in the paper, Bob?” a co-worker asked.

“The oil-field thing?” Toland rechecked the man’s security badge. He wasn’t cleared for satellite intelligence. “Sounds like they had themselves quite a fire.”

“You didn’t see anything official on it?”

“Let’s just say that the leak in the papers came from a higher security clearance than I have.”

“Top Secret–Press?” Both men laughed.

“Something like that. The story had information that I haven’t seen,” Toland said, speaking the truth, mostly. The fire was out, and people in his department had been speculating on how Ivan had put it out so fast.
“Shouldn’t hurt them too bad. I mean, they don’t have mi11ions of people taking to the road on summer vacations, do they?”

“Not hardly. How’s the cake?”

“Not bad.” Toland smiled, already wondering if he needed the extra time on the bike.

Randy sez: Oh, Lordy, Lordy! Spice cake? Exercise bike? Where is a mean old editor with a blue pencil when you need him? This Real Conversation sucks, to be perfectly blunt. There is no Dialogue here, no conflict. There is a hint that maybe Toland knows something that he’s not telling, but it’s so far submerged that it’s useless.
I remember reading this book when it first came out. The first scenes read so fast I could hardly flip the pages fast enough. Then I got to this scene and WHACK! It felt like I was swimming in sand. There is NOTHING go on here! Spice cake? An overweight NSA analyst? Journalist jokes? Please, Tom, give us some Dialogue here!

And what’s the cure for this scene, you may be asking? Simple. Cut it. There is no hope for a scene like this. No conflict. No opposing interests. No nothing. Neither character really gives a rip about this dialogue, so why should the reader? Scissor this monstrosity right out of the manuscript and you have a better novel.

Luckily for Tom, he already had about a billion fans from his previous book, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. Plus this novel began with some serious zing. But what if this was Tom’s first novel? What if he’d started out the book with this Real Conversation? Poor Tom would have sunk like an Elbonian sub.

Let me say it straight. Dialogue is war. There is never an excuse for writing Real Conversation that has no conflict in it. Such informational tripe is not Dialogue. Slash it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s perfectly legitimate to write Dialogue that ALSO transmits information or reveals character or backstory or the story world. But all Dialogue had better have conflict in it FIRST. That means two characters talking who have opposing interests.

If you look at the Real Conversation above, you see that that’s exactly what’s missing. Bob Toland’s interest is the spice cake. (And how pitiful is that?)The unnamed co-worker’s interest is to make small talk about the fire, which he doesn’t think is serious. (And how much more pitiful is that?) These are different interests, but they are not in opposition. No conflict.
No Dialogue.

If you’re Tom Clancy, you can get away with this except that you will still be mocked in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine if you write this badly). But you aren’t Tom. Neither am I. Write Dialogue, not Real Conversation.
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If you have my Fiction 101 CD/MP3, you’ll be delighted beyond words to be reminded that I discuss the fundamentals of Dialogue in lecture #6. If you don’t have my Fiction 101 CD/MP3, I invite you to listen to lecture #1 for free on my web site:

http://www.kickstartcart.com/app/adtrack.asp?AdID=214702

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, “the Snowflake Guy,” publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 15,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit
http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.

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Tomorrow: “Sharp and Snappy Dialogue”
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