I’m not sure that HAPPY Veterans’ Day, is the proper term of holiday-marking, but I hope you are having a sterling day, nonetheless. To get myself into the proper spirit, I spent the morning re-reading splendid sections of ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, CATCH-22, and a couple of Louisa May Alcott’s short stories about being a nurse during the Civil War. I hope some bright author out there is busy scribbling away at the great Gulf Wars novel, so that something beautiful comes out of all this death. (Hey, I spent half the morning contemplating trench warfare. I’m entitled to be grim.)
But now I shall cast aside the gloom of the day in order to pursue my new kick, re-examining the old warhorses of writerly advice. Today, I should like to delve into the notion the dialogue should show everything necessary about a situation, without the added distraction of commentary, insight into thought processes, or physical reactions.
In many instances, this is a strategy that works brilliantly, particularly for comedy. Sticking solely to dialogue enables the reader to move quickly through banter, without having her attention drawn away by side comments from the narrator. Take, for example, this bit of self-sufficient dialogue from Joseph Heller’s CATCH-22:
“What’s your name, son?” asked Major — de Coverley.
“My name is Milo Minderbinder, sir. I am twenty-seven years old.”
“You’re a good mess officer, Milo.”
“I’m not the mess officer, sir.”
“You’re a good mess officer, Milo.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll do everything in my power to be a good mess officer.”
“Bless you, my boy. Have a horseshoe.”
“Thank you, sir. What should I do with it?”
“Throw it.”
“Away?”
“At that peg there. Then pick it up and throw it at this peg. It’s a game, see? You get the horseshoe back.”
“Yes, sir, I see. How much are horseshoes selling for?”
Now, I find this use of pure dialogue admirable. It tells us everything we need to know about characters that the book is not going to explore in much depth: Major — de Coverley is a whimsical commander who regards his own word as law, and Milo is obsessed with the art of the deal. Not bad character development, for only thirteen lines of dialogue.
As a technique, then, no-frills dialogue can undoubtedly be extremely useful, and I applaud its use in moderation. However, like the rule about perspective in third-person narration, a lot of writers, teachers, and editors get carried away with it. You can’t throw a piece of bread at a writers’ conference without hitting someone who will tell you, with an absolutely straight face, that dialogue should NEVER be encumbered by non-spoken information.
Those of you who have been reading the blog for awhile should be able to predict my reaction to this: I’m no fan of the hard-and-fast stylistic rule, generally speaking. The rules of grammar I can respect as immutable (as I wish more writers, particularly for magazines and newspapers, did), but I am always mistrustful of any rule that tells me that I must dismiss a particular piece of writing automatically, without really reading it, on the basis of a stern stylistic preference.
Personally, I find long stretches of pure dialogue rather boring, but I know I am in the minority on this point. Movies and television have accustomed us to stories told entirely by dialogue, visuals, and background music; if you took that same piece of bread you were trying to fling above and cast it at the speakers’ table at the same average conference, you might well hit some expert who had come to tell novelists that their work would be best served by embracing screenwriting techniques with vigor, and keeping thought and physical sensation reportage to a minimum.
I can tell you the source of this advice: a very common fledgling writer tendency to get so bogged down in reporting every thought the protagonist has that the text slows down to the rate of molasses flowing uphill. It is definitely possible to stay too much in a character’s head. Yes, yes, we all know about Proust and Dostoyevsky’s characters who languish in bed for scores of pages at a stretch, contemplating their lives. It was fresh when they did it, but it’s been done so many times now that it’s bound to seem derivative.
For my sins, I once sat through a five-hour version of HAMLET that so catered to the title character that the actor (who, since he is now a rather famous political columnist and former editor-in-chief of THE NEW REPUBLIC, shall remain nameless) was allowed to take FIFTEEN MINUTES to get from “To be or not to be” to “Soft you now, the fair Ophelia” — a mere 33 lines of text, according to the Riverside Shakespeare that every college student of my generation owns. And this for a speech that, as any Shakespearian actor can tell you, half the audience knows well enough by heart to chant softly along with the actor. It was a bit de trop. (Truth compels me to own that since it was the late 1980s, the audience of this particular production of HAMLET was also plagued by repeated playing of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s dubious hit, RELAX, DON’T DO IT. There has been more subtle directorial symbolism.)
From the reader’s perspective, a too-long sojourn into any character’s thoughts, feelings, and doubts (a particular favorite for writers of literary fiction, perhaps due to too many viewings of HAMLET in their early youths) can feel interminable. I am not necessarily an advocate of the hard-and-fast rule that some conflict should occur on every single page (although it’s not a bad rule for a first-time self-editor to follow), but most readers do tend to get a bit restive after the fourth or fifth page of a character’s sitting around and thinking.
If you are not of the sit-and-ponder school, but are still wondering if you are staying too much in a character’s head in a third-person narrative, here’s a self-editing tip: go through the text and note every time the reader is given information outside dialogue by the protagonist’s specifically NOTICING something. Pay attention to whether the text lets the narration mention that the truck stop waitress has red hair, or whether Joe Protagonist SEES her have red hair. If you find that more than about a tenth of the information is conveyed as protagonist sensation, you should think about moving the perspective outside him more. Or consider switching to first-person narration.
All that being said, I am still a fan of exposition alternated with dialogue, particularly in emotionally-charged scenes. We writers live so much in our heads that we tend to create characters who do so, too. However, in real life, people have physical reactions to things: discomfort in their guts when meeting someone smarmy, tightness in the chest when yelled at by the boss, slumping of the shoulders when receiving the news of the death of a friend. These are legitimate pieces of information to include in characterization, and I find that they often add depth to dialogue-based scenes.
Also, I’m skeptical about the idea that dialogue can ALWAYS convey everything that is going on in a scene, either emotionally or factually. People very frequently do not say what they are thinking, and Freudian slips, though common in post-war literature, actually do not occur with great frequency in real life. Frequently, what a character is NOT saying can be as telling as what she is. Even in comedy, where speed of exchange is most desirable, adding exposition amid the verbal exchanges of wit can considerably heighten the tension of a scene.
Take, for example, this excerpt from E.F. Benson’s LUCIA IN LONDON, the second installment in Benson’s brilliantly funny Mapp and Lucia series. Here, social climber Lucia is sitting in the boudoir of duchess Marcia, chatting with her newly-acquired friends about lovers; she has been pretending to be having an affair with fey Stephen, to make herself appear more interesting, and Marcia et alia are trying to grill her about it. Lucia has just finished saying:
“If you all had fifty lovers apiece, I should merely think it a privilege to know about them all.”
“Marcia longed, with almost the imperativeness of a longing to sneeze, to allude directly to Stephen. She raised her eyes for a half second to Adele, the priestess of this cult in which she knew she was rapidly becoming a worshipper, but if ever an emphatic negative was wordlessly bawled at a tentative enquirer, it was bawled now. If Lucia chose to say anything about Stephen, it would be manna, but to ask — never! Aggie, seated sideways to them, had not seen this telegraphy, and unwisely spoke with her lips.
“If an ordinary good-looking woman,” she said, “tells me that she hasn’t got a lover or a man who wants to be her lover, I always say, ‘You lie!’ So she does. You shall begin, Lucia, about your lovers.”
“Nothing could have been more unfortunate. Adele could have hurled the entire six rows of Whitby pearls at Aggie’s face.” The effect of her carelessness was that Lucia became visibly embarrassed, looked at the clock, and got up in a violent hurry.
“Good gracious me!” she said. “What a time of night! Who could have thought our little chat had lasted so long?”
There is a LOT of information conveyed in this excerpt, and all of it contributes to Benson’s comic effect. Now look at the same passage after the dialogue-only rule has been applied to it:
“If you all had fifty lovers apiece, I should merely think it a privilege to know about them all.”
“If an ordinary good-looking woman,” Aggie said, “tells me that she hasn’t got a lover or a man who wants to be her lover, I always say, ‘You lie!’ So she does. You shall begin, Lucia, about your lovers.”
“Good gracious me!” Lucia said. “What a time of night! Who could have thought our little chat had lasted so long?”
Quite a bit flatter, isn’t it? Aggie’s fluke and Lucia’s reaction are still there, but the other two women might as well not have been in the room. We have entirely lost the delicious sense of conspiracy between Marcia and Adele, and Aggie’s blunder has been reduced to simple gaucherie. It’s substantially less funny.
Again, the enriched dialogue method should be used in moderation, just as the dialogue-only method should be. Like profanity, stylistic restrictions are far more effective when used sparingly than constantly; who pays attention to the profanity of a constant swearer? Select the time when your dialogue choice will have the greatest effect.
Keep up the good work!
– Anne Mini