Writer's Report 2.0

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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