Wordcraft – Dialogue: let the characters speak for themselves

As befits a writer of thrillers (with a first novel, Yeager’s Law is out and four more in progress) Texas writer Scott Bell spoke tersely at his presentation on fictional dialogue at a recent meeting of the Writer’s Guild of Texas . He’d rather let characters speak for themselves.

“What I’m not going to do," he said, "is talk about punctuating dialogue. What I can’t do: talk about how to create dialogue. We all go at that creative process differently. What I hope to do is give you some tools and enhance your ability to write dialogue.”

So what is fictional dialogue? First, disabuse your minds, writers, of the notion that dialogue in fiction bears any resemblance to the way people actually talk. In fiction, there’s no such thing as throat clearing, no inane small talk, and for the sake of all the gods of writing, there’s no information dumping.

“You reveal rather than explain. Dialogue is the ultimate show versus tell. . . Readers’ eyes get kind of blurry when they see these big blocks of text. If you want the reader to get something specifically, just put it in dialogue.”

Only, with that specificity issue, the principle of dialogue is to “say it but don’t say it.”

How to say something without saying it? Try speaking in codes, such as this one Bell assured us “every woman in the South knows: bless your heart.” Yes, the world’s biggest put down, wrapped in a candy coating. Or let characters use dialogue to divert others from their real concerns, i.e., the classic, “How ‘bout them Cowboys?” And then there’s the often maddening non sequitur, which Bell “wouldn’t use often, but it indicates a disconnect (between characters). You don’t always have to directly answer questions.”

In case there’s still any lingering idea that fictional characters (or real people, for that matter) only talk to exchange information about, say, the latest findings in quantum mechanics, Bell suggested using it instead to convey emotion. As in this sample exchange from his presentation:

“Hey, doll, whatcha up to?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh, okay. Want I should walk the dog?”

“Fine. Go right ahead.”

There was more, of course, but you already know this conversation isn’t going to be about walking the dog. Not one little bit.

And for those who think descriptions can only be conveyed by having a character view himself in a mirror, there's:

“A real micro-manager, that guy. You see him this afternoon?”

“You mean with his comb-over slicked down? He had, what? Six hairs plastered over his dome?”

Dialogue can even express action:

“Mark, would you get a bag of sugar out of the cupboard? No, honey, the one by the sink. No, the other one, on the left.”

“Here you do. Oops! Dang it!”

And although he claimed not to tell us how to punctuate dialogue, Bell was happy to add some suggestions about some things, like speech tags (“I hate you,” he said) versus his preferred action tags (“I hate you.” He leaped to his feet.)

With examples as lean and mean as those, is it any wonder that when Bell is not writing (and maybe when he is), he's trying to answer this question: What would John Wayne do?

(See the Writer's Guild site for more about its programs, including a flash fiction contest and upcoming workshop with bestselling author Taylor Stevens.)

Wordcraft -- From thrilling life to thrills of books

Taylor Stevens has the life easier to read about than to live: brought up in a nomadic religious cult in countries across the world, she escaped the cult at age twenty-nine and became a New York Times bestselling author of the Vanessa (Michael) Monroe series of thrillers.

Would I have killed bad guys with my bare hands to meet her? Lucky for the bad guys (and me--I’d be liable to develop hangnails if I turned bare-fisted assassin) all it took to see and hear Stevens was a visit to Saturday’s meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers.

After escaping the cult, New York-born Stevens and her husband made their way to the United States, where she became the stay at home mom to their two small children. The cult had pulled her out of school after she finished the sixth grade, and the remainder of her childhood was spent doing unpaid labor for the group, including begging. Except for a few children’s volumes from elementary school, books were virtually unknown to her. Back in the U.S., while her husband worked, she became a stay at home mom to their two children, making additional money by reselling garage sale finds on the internet. And she found out about books, at first, “because I could mark them up so much on eBay.”

From buying and selling books, she started to read them. And discovered Robert Ludlum, whose Bourne series thrillers. “This was the first time I realized how intense an experience reading could be. I wished I could make other people have the experience in reading that I had.”

The catch was, she knew nothing about writing novels. After internet searching, she found the Gotham Writers workshop and books, and began writing. Her first novel, The Informationist, introduced protagonist Vanessa (Michael) Monroe. The book became a New York Times bestseller, followed by The Innocent, The Doll, and this year, The Vessel and The Catch.

Unlike most writers, who start with some idea of plot or character, the initial inspiration for her books was a country. (She has lived in several of the African countries that served as settings.) Then, since “everything in a book has to make sense, I started asking ‘why.’ Why do people go there? What makes them stay?” and more such questions to build the story.

They were questions she could answer, because as she said, “I’ve been in a lot of third world countries. I know what it takes for a single woman to survive in those countries.”

Her goal when she first started writing, she said (in words reminiscent of fellow bestseller Diana Gabaldon) was simply to finish a book. But during the writing, she began to research literary agents.

After studying the examples at the QueryShark site, she developed two query letters and told herself, “I’m not even going to sweat it until I’ve had a hundred rejections. I’d send one (query) version to five agents, wait two weeks, and send the second version to five more agents. By the time I’d sent to twenty agents I was getting requests.”

“I was very much an organic writer when I started,” she said. Now divorced, her need to write to support herself and her children has given her a decidedly businesslike attitude toward publishing. “Since then, I’ve become much more of a plotter. Plotting gives me much more clarity. I sit down and tell myself the story, building it off scenes. If you know what the key scenes are, you can get from place to place.”

Stevens will make two more appearances in the Dallas area this month--July 15 at Barnes & Noble in Frisco’s Stonebriar Center Mall, and July 26 at the Lewisville Public Library. For more about Stevens, her writing and appearances around the state, see www.taylorstevensbooks.com/.

And for more about the QueryShark site Stevens used, see http://queryshark.blogspot.com/.