On Dialogue by Diana Abu-Jaber

Dialogue can be just as slick and slippery as everyday conversation, but what sets it apart from
conversation is that dialogue is shaped and that it exists to advance and deepen the story. Great
dialogue is a kind of sleight-of-hand: you create the illusion of eavesdropping on completely
natural speech. What’s not said is often as important as what is said, and when you combine
the words and the silences with body language-gestures, tics, poses then you have a fully-
realized form of dialogue.

Well-written dialogue is one form of action, and action is what keeps readers close and involved
in reading. Writing is, after all, a fairly abstract from of art: words on a page signaling the world
beyond. While straight narrative is descriptive and informative, dialogue allows characters to
speak directly for themselves. Suddenly things pick up; we break free from blocks of looking
and thinking and shift into faster slices of listening. Run your eye down the page and you’ll
notice that passages of dialogue have more “eye-appeal.” They signal a break from the hard
work of concentration into more performative and entertaining areas. There’s a sense of
spontaneity and unpredictable freeplay about well-written dialogue that mimics the spark of
real-life conversations. But, of course, that’s all an illusion.

A writer has to exert close control over her characters’ dialogue; it’s easy to fall into the
“talkative trap” where dialogue lapses into the patterns of everyday blather, or worse, chitchat,
small-talk, or speechifying.

So when Gary, a student in my fiction workshop, wrote the following lines in a story:

“Have you heard bout, oh, ah, hey hi, you know bout the guy, what’sisname. Yeah. Wait.
But I mean like have you?” Gary said.
“Yeah? What? What guy?” Walter said. “Who? Him? Old Jones?”
“Well, yuh, who else? I mean, who else would I even be wasting my time talking about,
okay?

he was erring on the side of realism. By faithfully recording the nuances of patterns of everyday
talk, it might seem as if he’d created a wonderfully authentic piece of writing. But remember (1)
recording is not the same as writing, and (2) real-life can be confining to a story. In so-called
real-life, we have more patience with conversation because we’re all in the same boat: thinking
on our feet. Have you ever seen courtroom transcripts? They’re full of umm’s and uh’s and you-
know’s and assorted other stammers and stutters. We have much less patience with that sort
of flotsam in literature because we want to read a story, not a transcript. And, unless for some
postmodern reason your story is about the fragmentation of conversation—or something
equally dull—it will not be advanced by that sort of detail.
Bear in mind that Dialogue should only SEEM spontaneous. Meanwhile you should cut out all
the filler. Sculpt it, bend it, mold it to reflect what’s happening. Write it spontaneously, but go
back and shape it up later. That’s the secret beauty of revision: nothing is unfixable.

So the writer above tightened the little exchange to:

“Have you heard about—what’s him name—that new pharmacist?”

“What guy?” Walter said. “You mean Old Jones?”

And the sequence was brisk and readable, with just a soupcon of realistic hesitation and
misdirection. It receded back into the momentum of the story, which is exactly where it
belonged, because it wasn’t that important an exchange. A story is an organic entity—all its
parts need to fit, and that goes double for dialogue.

Hence, dialogue has to do a couple of jobs at once. It should never simply exist for filling in
“local color.”

My student Charmane wrote a long monologue for one of her characters, a bored corporate
executive who spends a lot of time in one scene talking about a yellow coat she sees in a store
window.

“I’d love to get that coat. This time of year, a woman needs a good coat, that’s what I
say, and that’s what I’ll always say. A good coat made out of yellow cotton and wool. A winter-
into-spring deal. Just you wait. A good yellow coat like that, just waiting for me to come and get
it. It’s sayin’ hello-dolly, come and get me!”

The problem, as I pointed out to Charmane, was that her story was not about coats. If anything,
allowing a character to go on about a particular distraction or digression can become a bit of a
red herring. Readers will resent feeling that they’ve been misled, that some sort of big clue or
broad hint has been thrown out that really doesn’t lead to anything more in the story.

But Charmane claimed that this passage lent a kind of depth to the character. The monologue
was deliberately pitched to show the incongruity between the executive’s personal history of
growing up in poverty and her current station in the fast lane. Problem is, that’s not enough.
Even though this segment gave us some insights into the woman’s character, it gave very little
into the nature of the story. Remember, you can—and should—always make dialogue do
double-duty. To paraphrase Heide Fonda, make it work for you. Not only should the monologue
tell us about the character, it should give us important information about what’s happening to
her in the story. The monologue about the yellow coat would be fine if the yellow coat
somehow figures into the overall scheme of things—or possibly if the character had a tradition
of going off on tangents in order to avoid the main topic. Otherwise: make your dialogue
MATTER.
Bear in mind that when I say dialogue should matter, that doesn’t mean the characters should
be narrating, explaining, or describing the actual events of the story. Assuming that you’re not
Edgar Allen Poe and plan to have an obsessive-compulsive type sit down and reel off the creepy
family history, and assuming that you’re not writing a soap opera where characters need to
catch each other up constantly (“So you’re saying that Jermaia is not, in fact, Scurval’s second
cousin once removed. . .that Norbert never really loved Tessie Mae or their father . . . the actual
heir to the throne of Micronesia. . .”) it’s safe to assume that successful dialogue usually directs
through indirection. As in this section of dialogue from my student Deborah Reed’s short story:

“My lawyer said no way. He’s one of the best you know. He said it was clear as the day is
long that we could win so we took them on and boy did he know his stuff. You should have seen
him in that courtroom.”
“Why? What did he say?”
“Oh I don’t understand all the legal mumbo jumbo. All I know is he’s a charmer and that
was something the judge and jury just couldn’t deny either.”
“So what exactly did you sue for?” I ask her.
“Well, damages, of course. You know how my back is. I’ll be damned if I was going to let
them slave drivers kill me. They had no idea who they were dealing with. I’m considered
disabled now, you know?”

And so on. This is a mother and a daughter who seem to be saying one thing to each other on
the surface, but manage to be saying many other things hidden beneath the literal meanings.
The mother is slightly crazy and very manipulative and the daughter has been trying for years to
escape her mother’s emotional invasions. At first glance the conversation might appear to be
civil, rational—if a bit intense—and friendly. But in the context of the story, their exchange
gives us both character information—the mother is nuts and the daughter is fleeing—and story
information—the mother is a scam artist and the daughter may get dragged into her mother’s
web again.

Ultimately, if you want to write great dialogue you have to learn how to listen. Deborah’s
dialogue captures the little bits of slang, mumbo jumbo, just the right amount of cursing for this
mother, and the right sorts of silences and pauses for the daughter. Read authors who have a
great “ear” for dialogue, like Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Louise Erdrich, and notice the
way their dialogue is not only informative and textured, it’s also shapely and interesting. If you
learn to zero in on the key phrases, the hesitations, the parries and jokes, suggestions and
intimations, and to express what needs to be stated as well as what needs to be unspoken, your
dialogue will be eloquent indeed.