Write Relevant Dialogue

Your story has just begun. The conflict is terrible, the plot superb, and the characters fascinating. It's time for the major scene, bringing together arch-nemesci in the same setting: the protagonist and antagonist. To pull off the ensuing confrontation, you'll need dialogue.

Dialogue is nothing more than words. But many of the conventionals of traditional prose are waived or modified for dialogue. If you write a story using third-person point of view, for example, the words of your characters may provide an entirely different tone from the rest of the text. For example:

The town's cathedral was an imposing monument of God and tradition. The mayors from time-before-memory had each held their inaugurations on the cathedral steps, quietly dodging questions from outside reporters about the separation of church and state. Even Holly Muhammed, the first Muslim female mayor-elect in the state, had asked the deacon's blessing for her administration. The announcement of her upcoming inauguration was posted inside the cathedral's brand-new bulletin board - a gift from Mayor Muhammed's husband.

Patrick ran his fingers over the bulletin board's rough-hewn lumber. Then he yanked back his fingers in pain. "Dag-nabbit! Another splinter."

"Dad," Sharla asked, "you want me to get the tweezers?"

"Lay off, will ya?" Patrick shot back. "Can't you see a grown man dyin'?"

Sharla looked confused. Her gaze went from the embossed invitation to all local residents before returning to her father's face. "You don't look like you're dying," she said.

Patrick jabbed his thumb against the invitation. "You see that? Do you see that? We're all dying, girl, every last one of us."

Sharla shook her head. She wondered if Mayor Muhammed would follow tradition and invite the local quartet to play a bit of Brahms for the celebration. Every mayor did it - it was tradition.

The key to good dialogue is twofold: it must convey relevant information while sounding true to natural speech. Dialogue that lacks sufficient information sounds too wordy - if it doesn't sound true-to-life, it sounds forced, as if the writer had to make the characters share information. In the example above, the dialogue conveys information on multiple levels. We see that Patrick has misgivings about the new mayor even though he never mentions her directly. The tone of his dialogue is brusque, a strong contrast to the smooth, reflective tone of the narrative. Note also the use of physical gesture and expression to heighten the emotional impact of his words - he jabs the invitation to shift the reader's attention, and then speaks. In this way, the dialogue avoids unnecessary reference to the mayor - the kind of reference that a regular person speaking would never actually say.

Another key here is that each character has his or her own way of speaking. Sharla, the POV character in this dialogue, speaks little, and her words lack the heightened emotions of her father. Instead, her words have the more measured tone of the narrative because the narrative is from her own point of view. Yet does she talk about the traditions of the town with her father? Nope. There’d be no point. It’s clear her father would argue with her, and it’s clear that she’s not the confrontational type.

There are two key ways to improve your mastery of dialogue. The first is to listen to people talking. Seek out people who are different from yourself and listen to the words they say. If you find someone who talks with the same mannerisms you use yourself, you won’t learn as much – we hear the novelty of human speech best when the words are unfamiliar. For myself, I learned the most about dialogue after I finished college and joined the Army. In the army, soldiers don’t always use no proper English, and we can’t be wasting no time with words, we gotta be out the door and in formation at oh-four-thirty.

As you can see, dialogue like this has a rhythm of its own, a rhythm that you can pick up and incorporate in your own work only by hearing it and learning to feel the meaning deep down. But in addition, you must bear in mind the second rule of human dialogue – all words are spoken with a purpose. When a character in your story speaks, he or she should be saying words to achieve a goal – and the tone and diction must match this goal. A new baby is born – the proud aunt will announce the news at the top of her lungs in the hospital waiting room. Why does she do this? Because she’s excited, because she wants to world to know she’s an aunt, because this is the happiest day in her life so far. Will she calmly take the stage beside the artificial plants and explain the baby’s birth weight? Heck no. She’ll belt it out at the top of her lungs from inside her sister’s maternity room as the doctors shove her out the door, and then she’ll turn pink at the sight of all the onlookers turning to face her. Her voice will drop to a squeak. “Um…sorry?”

Keep these points in mind as you write, but don’t slow your writing to adjust until it’s time for editing. After you’ve completed your first draft, read your work aloud. In real life, dialogue is a tool of the ear. You will hear missteps in dialogue far better than you can read them, especially in your own work. Listen for how natural the words sound. Listen for whether the characters are speaking to convince other characters. Most importantly, decide if you believe in the words you hear, if they sound “right.” If they don’t, remember the true beauty of writing – you can edit the words until they do.

This article is part of the FICTION 101 workshop sponsored by 1-2-Writing. Information regarding this free workshop and other courses may be viewed at http://www.12writingworkshopsonline.com/.

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About Ryan Edel

Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character

I remember setting as the bread and butter of my days in Reading class. Setting was the most wonderful (and most analyzed) part of every fiction story we read. Were there trees? What did they look like? How do they make you feel?

As you move up in the writing world, so to speak, setting begins to take a back seat in writing classes. Not that good setting is easy to write, but it becomes neglected as a tool. Setting is usually the one part of any story that is most easily grasped and understood. If you read a book that has too much setting, you still know exactly what's going on in the story - you can see everything. If there isn't enough setting, then you don't see and understand the imagined world. Oh well. It wasn't a very interesting story to begin with.

So we have a dichotomy with the teaching of how to write setting. One the one hand, it's taught early because it is so "simple" to understand. As a child, I couldn't have told you the first thing about character development, but I could read a story and describe the setting. On the other hand, setting is somewhat ignored later because a story can survive without it. In my experience, workshop stories often have problems with the setting (most of my own stories have setting issues, as well), but readers don't give much feedback on how to fix those problems. Larger issues take precedence. Is the main character fully realized? Do we see the conflict in light of the protagonist's inner development? "Oh, by the way, I wasn't clear on where this story was taking place - was it in the hospital room? Okay, if you can just fix that for next time." Sometimes we hear "you know, the description of the flowers in the vase on the bedside table was a little too much exposition." Okay, too much setting, so what? Don't you want to know where the story takes place?

Fortunately, we have a yardstick to judge whether you have "too little" or "too much" or "just enough" setting. In any work of fiction, setting must contribute to the story. It can set the tone, it can establish the character's mood, it can be a part of the action, and sometimes it acts almost as a character itself. The task of the writer is to identify the role played by the setting and to ensure that the setting fulfills that role without going overboard. The best way to understand this is through example.

Tone and mood are relatively straightforward. Let's say you have a detective novel - a young girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Is the kidnapper a terrible villain? Are the parents worried? Is there a strong possibility that the girl is already dead? You can hint at all these things through your choice of setting:

The parents, they lived up on a mansion at the edge of the bay. I drove up in the rain. All I could see through the storm was the road - the sky and water to my right merged into a wall of black, and the mountain on the left looked like it might fall in any time. Lightning flashed - suddenly I saw the house, white like a corpse in the rain. The back end was a box floating in space over the bay. I figured it was only a matter of time before the whole place slipped away into the ocean.

Dark and brooding, with rain for tears - it's blunt, and such a setting builds the expectation that something terrible has happened or will soon happen. But you can go for a more subtle effect. Say the kidnapping happens in a small town - you may want to give the impression of innocence lost:

One by one, the clowns gave out balloons - long puppets twisted into lions and parrots and puppy dogs. The cotton candy vendor smiled and pointed over to her treats - clouds of syrup sweet pink and blue and yellow waited. A hand-lettered sign with a smiley face advertised "Hot Dogs, Too!" I looked away. In the corner of her stall was the garbage stuffed to overflowing. A pile of cigarette butts had been left on the counter by the ketchup. Obviously, no one had told these people the news.

What do cigarettes have to do with kidnapping? Nothing. But through the eyes of the protagonist, they take on a new meaning. Just as people always remember the clouds at funerals and the sun at weddings, your protagonist will see the world through the lens of mood. Beware of clumsy techniques in writing - it's rarely good to simply tell the reader exactly what the protagonist feels. "I was frustrated because the girl had disappeared, and it was my watch" abuses the reader's intellect. Instead, by focusing on setting, your narrative accomplishes two tasks as once. In the example above, it's clear how the protagonist feels - the readers don't yet know that the girl is gone, but they don't need to. By withholding this information and establishing a dark tone to "the news," you build immediate suspense. As you continue to answer questions and build more suspense, you will gain the trust and more importantly the interest of your readers. If you tell your readers everything right away, then there's nothing left for them to read.

Naturally, once you've got your readers hooked in the opening lines, you need to keep their attention. Setting alone cannot do that (unless of course you're writing a pure landscape...though painters normally have better luck with that than writers). Reader interest requires action, and setting is crucial for establishing the context of events. In speculative fiction genres, setting is often half the story - what would the science fiction masterpiece be without starships and plasma cannons? How can one read a fantasy tale without magic? Some authors confuse the need for setting with an excuse for exposition. When you need setting to establish your story, incorporate it with action:

Deidre climbed faster. The ladder's narrow rungs pinched her skin and bruised her shins. She could hear them below - their voices echoed up the narrow shaft. They couldn't have been closer than twenty feet - they sounded practically on top of her. She pulled herself up too fast, and the spin of the ship knocked her into the wall. Dazed, she kept up her climb.

Compare that to the following exposition:

The decks of the ship were linked by a ladder shaft. The ladder had metal rungs, and the shaft's interior carried echoes across decks. Coriolis forces from the ship's spin prevented objects from falling in a straight down the shaft.

Both examples provide the same setting details, but the first offers excitement and danger while the second provides a description without reference. Why should the reader care that the shaft carries an echo? If the reader has no reason to care about a detail, that detail will be forgotten, even if that detail holds critical importance later (and you don't want your reader leafing back to figure out "what the heck?" after getting to the exciting part).

There is, of course, a drawback to incorporating all setting into action - a good action scene is often too quick to adequately explain the setting. Readers may become confused by the spin of the ship knocking Deidre into the wall, and breaking out of the narrative to explain Coriolis forces interrupts the action. You can use judicious exposition establish the setting you need for upcoming action scenes. Build the tone and mood of the story tone to make details memorable:

Deidre avoided the long shafts between decks. The cramped metal walls and the narrow ladder left her claustrophobic. The echoes of voices from the other decks made her imagine ghosts inhabiting the ship. Most of all, though, she didn't like the Coriolis forces, as the engineer called them. She understood how the spinning ship provided a sense of gravity, but she didn't understand why nothing could fall in a straight line. She had tried it with a quarter, dropping it down the center of the longest shaft. The quarter's ricochets off the walls had nauseated her with a sickening ping!

Finally, we come to perhaps the most complex use of setting - establishing a world or a place with the force of character. You can cheat with personification, but most readers distrust stories told with "the glowering eyes of the thunderclouds" and "the chatter of the power lines as they exchanged the gossip of electrons." When setting takes on the element of character, if must fill the duties of a character from the background - it must drive plot, is must react to events in the story, and it should give opinion of its own. And it must accomplish these tasks without a body or dialogue. To pull off this feat, you must successfully provide your setting with a believable voice of its own. The key is in the interaction between your characters and their surroundings - the reactions of the characters become the window for viewing setting's character traits:

Turtle stared up at the clouds gathering overhead. He pointed
the end of his walking stick at a funnel cloud beginning to come
down.

"You've angered the sky," he said.

John rolled his eyes. "What, you think global warming will go away all on its
own? We expected the mirror to leave a storm front."

Turtle lowered his stick, leaned his weight upon it. Through the ground, he
could feel the vibrations ofdistant lightening. It struck the Earth
harder, now, than before. Like a freight train, the sound of it
carried through rock and soil. It was only a matter of time before
this new lightening found a city for its hunger.

"Look at the bright side," John said. "All this lightning's a great source of
renewable energy."

Here, the raging storms are a reaction to something the characters have done, and we can see that John's last line ensures an ongoing conflict. Can the sky really be angry? No, of course not. But for the story, Turtle will perceive it as angry, and Turtle's reaction to this setting establishes both his and the storm's attitude.

Ultimately, mastery of setting in your writing will come down to obeying the one rule: everything in your writing must work in terms of the story. Too much setting will drown a story in detail just as easily as an undeveloped sense of place will leave the reader thirsting for context. Use the examples here as a guide, but push forward in your own direction. If you fear that you are writing too much setting, keep going - you can always edit later, and sometimes it is harder to write in new setting than it is to pare down the words already on the page. Conversely, if you fear that you are not writing enough, keep going in the direction you are on. In the first draft, you are looking for the core of your story, the essence, and sometimes an aspect like setting gets left for later as you sketch out your plot and characters. Whatever it is you are writing, write it - that alone is the only sure way to success.

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About Ryan Edel

Fiction 101 Workshop Curriculum

Fiction 101 - Introduction
Learning to write fiction provides a unique challenge to any writer. Unlike nonfiction, which is based on established facts, or poetry, which can be entirely imagined, fiction depends upon rooting an imagined story in reality. Good fiction allows readers to suspend their disbelief - for the duration of the story, readers believe in the story, they believe in the characters. It might be a story about vampires or it could be aliens fighting for control of Mars, but if it's well written the readers will set aside their doubts and allow the question that drives all imagination: "what if?"

In Fiction 101, we examine the fundamentals that allow suspension of disbelief. For this class, each student will write a prompt-directed story. First, we root the story with setting, providing a stage for all that occurs. Then we establish our characters: the protagonist, the antagonist, their conflict. We use dialogue to flesh-out the story further, to develop the conflict and reveal the sides of our characters that are not seen directly. Finally, we bring the conflict to a head and resolve the story.

Throughout this workshop, students will receive feedback from the instructor after each assignment. Through ongoing discussion forums, the instructor will provide topics for consideration and fellow students will discuss their progress. There will opportunities for questions and feedback throughout. At the end of the course, students will share their stories with classmates for critique.

Fiction 101 - Activities:

Setting - Set Location
Pick a Room that has strong memories for you. It could be your own room now, you're parent's bedroom, the principal's office, your grandfather's attic. It should be a room that holds personal meaning to you, a room from which you can draw personal connections. Describe this room. What's in this room? What's missing that should be there? How do the contents of this room represent it's inhabitants? How do the habits of the people affect this room, the way it's been laid out? The aim is 250-750 words.

Character - Pick a Protagonist
Imagine your protagonist in the room you've described. This protagonist can be someone you know, or a stranger who fascinates you, or simply someone you made up. Think about what your protagonist looks like. What does he or she wear? How do we see the life of this person in his face, in her hands? What does this person want or need most right now?

Now write your protagonist into the room. You may use first or third person narrative, but limit your point-of-view to information that your protagonist would personally know and care about. Your reader will see the story through this character's eyes. The goal is 250-750 words.

Conflict - Insert Antagonist
Insert character two. Consider how this character prevents your protagonist from fulfilling his or her needs. Why do your protagonist and antagonist hate one another? What topics will they never discuss? Write about this from your protagonists perspective. Write about how these to people avoid one another while inhabiting the same room. Remember that in developing conflict, you must continue to uphold setting along with descriptions of both characters. What are these two characters doing in the room? How do their actions display the turmoil? What do they say - or not say - to one another?

As you write this, you are revealing an important aspect of your protagonist. Make sure that you write about the key change that your protagonist must make in his or her life. Think about the lesson you want your protagonist to learn from this story. What plans does the protagonist make while sparring with the antagonist? Are these plans good or bad?

The goal is 500 words, but you can go longer.

Dialogue/Description - Introduce Outside Party
Dialogue is one of the most potent literary tools at your disposal. It is dialogue that drives scene by defining the relationships between characters. Description may indicate feelings and setting can influence tone, but the words that your characters exchange will leave the most lasting impression on the reader. Your characters must sound believable, and they must exchange information which drives the plot forward. For this exercise, your protagonist is still in the room, but the antagonist has left. Briefly describe why the antagonist has left - is it something the protagonist said? Or is it part of your antagonists plot to rule this world?

Insert a third character, a neutral party, someone who is not part of the conflict but should be aware of it. The first part of this exercise is the way your protagonist views the third party. What brief detail defines this third person? How does the protagonist think of this person?

Next, use dialogue to reveal who this character is. What does this person care about? Does the protagonist need to win this character as an ally? Does this person have valuable information for your protagonist? Or has the antagonist bought him off? Your protagonist is trying to justify his own point of view in the conflict with the antagonist - this dialogue is his chance to justify himself through words. The goal for this exercise is 500 words, but you can go longer.

Dialogue: The Three-Way
Uh-oh, the antagonist returns…and now we have a three-way dialogue. Remember that conversations consist of short sentences - everyone wants to be heard, even those afraid to speak. While your protagonist and antagonist are duking it out for supremacy, your third character will have his or her own agenda. What is this agenda? We don't know because we see the world through the eyes of the one protagonist only. Using dialogue, description, and your protagonist's intuition, reveal as much as you can about your antagonist and his relation to the third character. As in other exercises, the setting of the room continues to evolve - has anything changed in the room since assignment one? How does the change affect the arena of conflict? (e.g. if the AC goes out and everyone's sweating, will tempers be lost?) Remember that you do not need to resolve your story just yet - that's the next assignment. The goal for this one is 500 words or more.

Resolution: The Clean-Up
The key to ending a story is resolving the conflict. Somehow, the energy driving the protagonist's desires must dissipate. Does the guy get what he wants? Does the girl realize she needed something else entirely? Does our hero oust the antagonist from an ill-gotten throne, or has compromise postponed our battle? The goal is 250-750 words.

Looking Back: Revision and Critique
Now that you've completed your story, the final portion of the workshop is dedicated to examing what you've accomplished. Each student will complete revisions and submit a second draft of their story for student critique. The writing assignment for this portion is to provide feedback for fellow students. The instructor will lead the story critique with leading questions for each story and highlights. Ground rules will be maintained to establish an open and welcoming environment for critique.

Click here to Register for Fiction 101.

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About Ryan Edel