All too often, it seems, I hear something that isn’t working in fiction justified because “that’s how it is in real life.” That may be, but fiction is not real life. Fiction has to be believable, consistent and have a point. Oh, and be interesting. I don’t think my life has ever felt like all four of those things at once.
Dialogue in fiction has to be all of those things, too—and dialogue in real life seldom is.
“Hi. How are you?”
“Good. You?”
“Fine. Really coming down out there, isn’t it?”
“Yep. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“Nah, I’m good. What have you been up to this week?”
“Not much. Cleaned the basement.”
Is it boring? Let’s face it—we all have conversations like the one above, probably several times a day. And yet there’s almost never a place for something like this in fiction.
Much of the time, we can skip to the heart of the conversation. We don’t need the warm-up parts—and including them may be a sign we’re starting the scene in the wrong place.
[27 pages of the above . . . aaaaaaaaaaand scene]
Boring multiplied, yes—but more importantly, there’s no point, no conflict here. Conflict is necessary—something most of us try to avoid in real life conversations. As Nathan Bransford says:
A good conversation is an escalation. The dialogue is about something and builds toward something. If things stay even and neutral, the dialogue just feels empty.
Dialogue in fiction is like a symphony or a theorem. (Sounds appealing, eh?) A symphony will develop musical themes and work to a climactic point (often with a literal crescendo). Similarly, a theorem builds on each previous fact to reach its apex, the conclusion. Extraneous arguments and points aren’t included. Well-known theories can be summarized (AAS for triangle congruity) (oh, come on, you remember eighth grade math, right?).
“Vanessa, you drive me crazy!”
“Shut up, Jerica! Or should I say Jerk-ica?”
“I swear, if you ever pull that kind of stunt again, so help me, Vanessa—”
Okay, that looks ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet when we’re really upset in real life, we do use the other person’s name surprisingly often. (Or maybe it’s just me; I’m pretty sure I’ve argued with my husband by only saying his name.)
These jump out when we read fiction. I read a book six months ago where the author apparently didn’t know this (though it wasn’t his first book). Entire scenes of dialogue had the characters calling each other by name in literally every line of dialogue—sometimes up to three times in a mini-speech. Even non-writers commented on this in the online reviews.
What do you think? What else doesn’t belong between the quotation marks?
Photo by Adam Bindslev
