A Dialogue about Dialogue - A Novel Matters Roundtable Discussion

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This month, the Novel Matters Roundtable is a true roundtable discussion. What follows is a transcript of the six of us in discussion about the topic of dialogue in fiction. We got a bit silly a couple of times, but that is how it goes whenever the six of us get together. We laugh a great deal. We sincerely hope you enjoy this transcript. When we were done, Patti Hill remarked, “It makes me want to have a retreat with all of you.”

Bonnie: Rich discussion this month on Novel Matters—I’ve noticed that dialogue has cropped up a number of times in different posts. Strong dialogue. Believable, driving plot, revealing. A tall order. When you sit down to write (or edit) a scene with lots of dialogue, how do you know your characters are ringing true? There is what is being said, and then there is conveying the manner in which it is being said, and the manner in which other characters perceive it’s being said.
Uh... What was I saying?

Katy: For me it's like being an actress, and getting into character. If I crawl into my character’s skin, take on the past that she has lived and feel what she must be feeling in the moment, then I can open my mouth and the words will come out. The tricky part is to inhabit more than one character at the same time, so I can carry all sides of the conversation. Sometimes I have to type quickly.

Bonnie: In theater that is called method acting. Method writing! I’d love to see you in action, Katy! So, for each character, you write an extensive history? Or how does that work?

Katy: Ha! I shut the door when I write - it looks too crazy. After I’d done my first novel this way, I discovered that Brandilyn Collins had written an excellent book on method writing, titled "Getting Into Character." She suggests writing very extensive histories by interviewing your characters, asking them questions and accepting as normal reality the fact that they answer back. I don't do it quite that way. I start off with just highlights of their past, because I know they will tell me more as the story progresses - and would do so even if it contradicted what I had already scripted for them.

Patti: Uh, is this the roundtable discussion going on? Is this the official start? Still waking up!

Bonnie: It has officially started, yes. Jump in!

Sharon: I don't have to shut the door, because I'm mostly home alone when I write. Which makes talking to myself all the more crazy. But I definitely do work out loud on my dialogue, and rehearse it over and over till I get it right. Because it's hugely important to get it right. When I'm not alone, I do a lot of whispering to myself. The point is, my lips are moving a lot, but it's often not because I'm involved in dialogue with real people, or real people who might happen to be in the same room with me. My family doesn't even question it anymore.

Bonnie: Katy, Love this. Reminds me of Arthur Plotnik’s guest post about Stage Business. The line he wrote that has always stuck with me is: "I love you," he told her. She checked her cell phone. No messages. "Love you, too." Sharon, I read aloud too. Not just dialogue, but especially dialogue. There’s authenticity to test, as you point out. I also listen to the character’s dialogue to ensure it’s unexpected, surprising, and interesting. I want my characters to say what they are saying without saying it in a way a reader would expect it to be said.

Sharon: Exactly, Bonnie. Straightforward dialogue can be extremely boring. I've read a number of manuscripts as contest entries this spring -- and a few books up for awards -- and I find this problem in the dialogue of novice writers all the time. Sub-text is a vital element to good dialogue in fiction.

Patti: Funny how so many of us have method-writing in common. And I agree, you must close the door if other people are in the house. If I don’t, hubby calls up from downstairs, “Did you say something?” Uh, yeah. Uh, no. That little contradiction reminds me of what’s so important in dialogue and deepens characterization. In good dialogue, the characters have opposing goals. One wants to talk about a new treatment for cancer. The other has already decided to forgo treatment but isn’t ready to say so. One wants to learn more about their relationship. The other would rather talk about anything else, so she talks about the high price of tomatoes. One is pleading for help, the other is squirming, changing the subject, interrupting, leaving the room. I’m not talking about arguments, but all of our characters want something, sometimes they want the same thing. They just go after it differently, and this shows up in dialogue.
I love writing dialogue.

Latayne: Recently I went back and looked at what I consider an exemplar for dialogue, The Help. Since it is all first person with multiple POVs, technically it's all dialogue. Stockett does a great job, I think, of creating distinct characters all participating in the same scenario. However, large sections of the book are each character's recounting of "quotation marks" dialogue where each recalls conversations. That's a bigger challenge for a writer, I think, when the narrator is already showing biases and distinct voice, and then conveys conversations.

Debbie: Maybe because I'm a visual learner, I love good movies (and some funny ones that wouldn't win any awards). When I sit down to write a scene, I 'see' it like it would play out in a movie from a script in front of me. I'm usually an onlooker, not a character, though I have to get into their heads. I'm a voyeur? :)

Katy: A voyeur that gets into people's heads. Sounds like a great plot for a movie...

Bonnie: ‘Being John Malkcovich’ is a movie about that very thing. Adult content—but an interesting movie if you like indie films.

Katy: I was thinking about the X-files, and that creepy guy that slithered through people's heater vents. Are we off topic?

Bonnie: Mildly. Just a titch. LOVED that episode. Creepy! Remember the toilet scene?
Okay, we should backtrack to Latayne’s excellent observations of dialogue in THE HELP—which was so clever, I’m not sure that it didn’t just sail right over my head.
I read THE HELP last year. I’ll have to revisit it and then interrupt, I mean, interject my (assuredly) intelligent observations.

Latayne: No, I’m not being clever. (But I’d love to be clever) I’m thinking through some of my frustrations with trying not to insert too much of myself into my narrator. Or dialogue. Or narrator’s dialogue. I hate this indecision.

Katy: Patti and Latayne both bring up what I consider to be the best kind of dialogue, the kind that tells the reader more than the characters themselves know, by use of cues other than words. It's one of the best ways a writer "tells it slant" that I know of.

Bonnie: Dialogue that is made up of non-verbals. Okay, Katy, you’re going to have to ‘splain that one more!

Katy: Non-verbals are the best part of dialog. What people don't say. (He says "I love you." She spoons sugar into her coffee and stirs.) Or, as Patti showed, what they say that has little or nothing to do with what was just said to them. A man tells his wife, "I'm worried about that lump in your breast." The wife says, "Do you think the blazer would look better than the cardigan?" and we know she would rather think about her breasts as fashion problems than health problems. Or she avoids the issue altogether and says, "Do you think it's too early to plant marigolds?"

Latayne: Remember a while back when we had a post about ways to insert “extra beats” of silence into dialogue? Like the verbal equivalent of a rest in music? That’s a non-verbal. Well, it’s a verbal way of conveying silence, which is by definition non-verbal. Right?

Bonnie: Okay, what about someone reading your dialogue to you? Anyone tried this? This is more difficult because while still writing the writer is still in don’t-day-anything-negative-about-my-stuff-or-I-will-cry-and-you-will-sleep-on-the-couch-tonight mode. Uh. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.

Patti: I’ve recorded passages, including dialogue, to play back. Especially if I wait a day or two to listen, the words come to me raw and stilted and wooden, all things that can be fixed during revision. Am I being too negative? Did I already say that I love writing dialogue? I meant it! It flies onto the page. I don’t do any attributions in the rough draft. I do my voyeur best to take dictation. The key is to really know your characters and what they want and what they want to hide. We all want to hide something.

Katy: Today I have a very sore throat and it hurts to read aloud. So I'm using an old trick I often use when revising: I get a text-to-speech program to read what I've written back to me. I like TextAloud because it adds the function right into Microsoft Word. It's not the same as "performing" the dialogue myself, but I do catch things that I can fix.

Bonnie: And all the coolness of living in the future when all librarians will be robots. So that rocks.

Patti: So, like, having a painful sore throat isn’t even an excuse not to write? What’s left?

Debbie: Katy, I've heard that those programs are a great way to catch saggy spots in your dialogue, or your manuscript in general. When we read aloud, we tend to put inflection where we want it, but the reader won't necessarily do that. The dialogue has to be written so that the meaning comes across clearly without it, maybe using tags. I haven't tried one yet, but I'll try the one you suggested.

Katy: Good point, Patti. And good point, Debbie. I started using it because I like to hear what I'm writing. That may come from my days reading to my sons, when I steered them toward books that were fun to read aloud. To my mind, if it doesn't crackle when read aloud, it just doesn't crackle. Dialogue, especially, should crackle. No matter the age of the reader.

Patti: As a reader, I love dialogue too. All that white space and the immediacy of overhearing a conversation that is making things happen. Rarely does anything so satisfying happen when I’m eavesdropping in real life. Dialogue is like stepping out of a forest, especially like the one in The Princess Bride and coming to an open meadow with lots of sunshine. It’s a place to sigh.

Sharon: I agree, Patti --- and love the analogy of the forest in Princess Bride, which is one of my very favorite movies. I can overlook other shortfalls in a novel if the dialogue is right. It must be snappy, straightforward only when it must be, and it must do so much more than deliver facts. Good dialogue is a must if a book is to have lasting value.

Bonnie: Princess Bride has the best, most quotable dialogue (so does the book).
Patti, you used the phrase “white space”. When I read that, I thought maybe dialogue serves the reader as a kind of “relief” from the density of the novel. Except when I say that it doesn’t sound right.... Maybe it’s like when you’re writing a lengthy part in the novel (and no dialogue), you ensure you use different sentence lengths, and even interject questions instead of straight declarations. Dialogue serves to enliven the readers experience.

Am I close?

Patti: All of that, Bonnie. The white space around the dialogue does give the reader a break from the slower pace of narrative, but that doesn’t give us license to have plodding narrative. Yes, read everything you write out loud. Vary sentence structure and length. It’s always a good idea to shake it up, or your writing will sound like a Dick and Jane reader. Nooooo!
~
And what about you, faithful reader? What have you learned about writing good dialogue? Do you act out in front of your computer? Do you remember that episode of the X-files? We look forward to continuing the discussion with you!

Take Your Character to Lunch Day

I'm going to share some quotes with you, short snippets from two of my favorite novels. When you have read them, you will want to know the characters who said these words. You will want to read their stories:

"Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning me up all my life. Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling."
— Kathryn Stockett in The Help

"...and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!"
— Nicole Krauss in The History of Love

See what I mean? Don't you want to know what might have happened to somebody to make her so passionate about truth that she feels it on her skin? Or why another person might jubilate over such an ordinary moment of time? In a few words whole characters have materialized in all their mystery and complexity. Wonderful, isn't it?

I read passages like these and determine to create story people just as rich. And then I look at the character creation sheets they pass out at workshops:

Place of Birth:
Height:
Favorite Color:

Questionnaires like these might help me track certain details so I don't turn the blue Toyota that drives through Chapter 6 into a green Honda by the time it arrives in Chapter 14. But by themselves they do little to help in character formation, not if what I'm after is the texture of a human soul.

For that, I might want to take my character to lunch. Sure, I'll ask her place of birth and favorite color, just to break the ice. But eventually I'll want to know about her childhood, and I won't let her get away with a simple answer. You know characters, don't you? She might answer, just peachy, when I suspect it wasn't, not living in the town she lived in, with a brother who ate salamanders on the back porch... So I study her body, searching for clues. I lift the cuff of her gabardine jacket to reveal a tiny tattoo on her wrist, a salamander swimming inside a teardrop. "Tell me about this," I say, and then wait out her silence while she looks away and studies her fingernails, till at last she tells me about the summer day when she was ten.

Once the ice is broken, any character will spill her guts if you listen. She wants the story to get out; otherwise she never would have brought it to you in the first place.

Let it go deep enough, and this gut-spilling will give you a story-tellers dream come true: characters with histories and scars, attitudes and points of view, and the little spark of something that makes us stand in wonder at their uniqueness, their transcendence.

And all of these things will lend a priceless quality to your novel: subtext. It's the way your characters say the things they say, the things they never say or always say, that tells us that there is more to this story, an untold past that the reader may never know but only guess at.

One of the best books I have ever read on the creation of story-people is Getting Into Character by Brandilyn Collins. Here's a bit of what she has to say:

"Understanding the use of subtexting in dialogue is particularly difficult for inexperienced writers. Often a new novelist's tendency is to use WYSIWYG conversation because he has not yet grasped how to convey meaning without actually saying it. Since novels call for at least some dialogue in the majority of scenes, a lack of subtexting presents a major problem for a story. When a novelist learns how to employ subtexting effectively, dialogue that had once been lifeless and on-the-surface is transformed into vibrant interchanges between characters, pulling the reader into the story."

I'll bet you've found some vibrant characters in your own reading. Why not share snippets from their stories that made them leap from the page?

We love to read what you have to say.

Upmarket Fiction: The Non-Genre Genre?

Latayne's post on Monday generated much enthusiasm in the writers among us, and not just the six of us at Novel Matters. It was an aha! moment for those of us who had never heard the term, but seem to fit the category with our writing. I had to laugh at Patti's comment (if you haven't read it, please do), because I find myself exactly in that position when someone asks, "What do you write?" Well, it's certainly not Seatbelt Suspense like the one and only Brandilyn Collins, or Legal Thriller, or Romance, or Futuristic. In fact, it's easier to say what it isn't than what it is. And when you try, it invariably loses in the translation. But Upmarket Fiction, well, that's something you can work with.

~
As a refresher, Upmarket Fiction blends the line between commercial and literary novels. I Googled the term and found pages and pages of literary agencies looking for this genre that really isn't a genre, because genre is, well, more defined. And since we've brought up the "L" word -- which seems to be something we're supposed to avoid -- I'd like to pull back the curtain and talk about it. In the article Latayne highlighted, Chuck Sambuchino says literary fiction has a harder time selling than commercial (or genre) fiction, yet according to Judi Clark of Mostlyfiction.com,* literary fiction is a book "that really draw(s) you in with language, imagery, character insight and a sense of place." Call me crazy, but that's exactly the kind of book I want to read -- and certainly what I aspire to write.
~

I often hear people say, "I prefer plot-driven stories to character-driven stories." Yet when they sink their teeth into a really good character-driven novel, they're easily won over. Not that there's anything wrong with plot-driven books. I like them as well as the next guy. But love? No, I don't love them. I want to know the protagonist from the inside out when I invest time in a book. I want to BE her. I want to ride the roller coaster of her life.
~

Up until Monday I'd have considered the work of authors such as Jodi Picoult, Maeve Binchy, Sue Monk Kidd, Chaim Potok as literary fiction. Chuck categorizes it as Upmarket, in the case of Jodi Picoult at least. He says Upmarket books do well as book club selections and have the "ability to infiltrate lots of book clubs and start discussions..." In her comment to Monday's post, Judy Gann confirms this when she says, "Upmarket books are exactly the type of books we choose for our book club kits at the library." What writer among us isn't up for that?
~

The term isn't new. I found articles written several years ago about Upmarket Fiction. But I can't help asking myself, is it a case of a rose by any other name perhaps? If so, I'll take it. Because literary fiction, whatever name you give it, is the mouth watering, creme de la creme of fiction. And this reader/writer longs for more.

~

I'd very much like you to weigh in on this, particularly readers who are not also writers. Do you lean more toward genre fiction? If so, what type? Or do you prefer more literary books?

~

Book club members, what are you reading this month?

~

*Clark, J. (n.d.) a guided tour to mostlyfiction.com, retrieved July 2004, from http://mostlyfiction.com/index_more.htm

Creating Brands that Stick

Today we're continuing our posts on branding and slogans, and I thought I would get the creative juices flowing with some examples, since there seems to be much anxiety and wailing and gnashing of teeth involved in the process (mine included). Now, don't peek, but try to guess which products these slogans represent without looking at the answers below:


Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is
The San Francisco treat
Breakfast of Champions
You're gonna like the way you look
The quicker picker upper
Reach out and touch someone
Finger lickin' good
Betcha can't eat just one
It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking
You're in good hands with _______
It's _____ time
The ultimate driving machine
Invent
Just do it
It's the real thing
Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't
A ______ moment

I was struck by the use of strong verbs and the references to the senses (mostly taste) used to make the above slogans or brands memorable. People who are successful in business today often create personal branding statements to include in resumes and they use key verbs. Examples of strong key verbs would be: created, established, organized, revitalized, championed, dominated, leveraged. These are strong verbs rather than passive ones, such as helped, assisted, and maintained. Some slogans are easier to remember because they rhyme, or are just plain fun to say (quicker picker upper!). It's even more memorable if it's put to music. Remember the jingle J - e -l - l - o? Some incorporate the name of the product, and some leave you with a visual instead.

It's probably easier to come up with a slogan or brand for a tangible product rather than an idea, but there are some great examples here. You probably know the last one - 'A Kodak moment.' Kodak is referring to the experience created with their product, not the camera itself. And you probably recognize 'reach out and touch someone.' It humanizes their electronics by recalling friends and family from whom you are separated. These engage the senses and emotions.

Once you have decided on a brand or slogan, it is important to carry the ideas through into the design of your website. Check out these authors' brands and visit their websites:
Rugged faith, radiant God - Karen Ball
Tales of wonder - Marlo Schalesky
Catch the wave - Julie Carobini
Sharing His heart, one page at a time - Pamela Dowd
Honor the past, embrace the future - Tricia Goyer
Seatbelt suspense - Brandilyn Collins (one look at her head shot and you know what she writes!)
And also non-fiction - "Mother of 12 lives to write about it" - Barbara Curtis

Some of the brands are very specific to a genre or topic and some allow for a more liberal interpretation. What are the concrete things or ideas about your writing that could be included in a slogan or brand?

(answers: Alka Seltzer, Rice-a-Roni, Wheaties, The Men's Wearhouse, Bounty, AT&T, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lays, Timex, Allstate, Miller (time), BMW, Hewlett Packard, Nike, Coca Cola, Almond Joy/Mounds, Kodak)