Dialogue Part 4

In the last post, I wrote about question-and-answer sessions within mysteries. I'd like to continue that discussion. All the wisdom contained in this post is from Chris Roerden's book, Don't Murder Your Mystery.

Roerden identifies symmetrical dialogue like this: "Every question receives an answer." Symmetry suggests cooperation, and cooperation doesn't contain conflict or tension, one of the most important parts of dialogue. Roerden challenges writers to use asymmetrical dialogue, instead, or to begin with symmetrical dialogue and then jump to asymmetrical.

When the interviewer asks a question, in symmetrical dialogue, the interviewee would answer the question as fully as possible. In asymmetrical dialogue, the interviewee changes the subject, asks a different questions, maybe even a rhetorical one, or remains silent, refusing to answer at all. Here's an example from my thriller, Cassandra's Curse. The protagonist, Cassie, is speaking with a police officer after a traumatic event:

"Do you need a medic?" the female officer asked.

Cassie looked at the officer. Her name tag read Phelps. Or Phipps. Hard to tell. Tears clouded Cassie's vision, making reading difficult. Her hands shook from the adrenaline overload, but other than the pain of her scalp, she was unharmed. "No, I'm fine."

"Tell me what happened," Phelps/Phipps asked.

"I want to go home," Cassie said, clutching her coat more tightly around her body.

Granted, it's not the most tension-filled dialogue in the book, but it illustrates the point. Instead of telling the officer what happened, Cassie ignored the question completely and said what was on her mind. It also reveals a bit about Cassie's character, and mirrors another conversation that comes up later in the story between Cassie and a police detective.

Challenge: find a question-and-answer session in your WIP and identify the symmetrical bits, where every question is answered truthfully and fully. Then add some tension by inserting asymmetry.

-Sonja

Dialogue III

Mysteries always involve question-and-answer sessions, usually between the person trying to solve the mystery and any suspects or witnesses that come along. In my on-going study of writing excellent dialogue, I discovered that even these question-and-answer sessions should include tension.

Chris Roerden, in her book Don't Murder Your Mystery, says, "Any ordinary, amiable question-and-answer sequence can be given an adversarial flavor by having characters interrupt each other, answer a question with a question, give an unexpected response, and change the subject. Kill the words "yes," "okay," and "I agree," even when no disagreement exists. Merely the sound of an affirmative can breed a congenial, agreeable tone that takes the steam out of any encounter."

When the sap being questioned is a shady character, then the reader expects some tension in any conversation with the police (or PI, or amateur sleuth). But when the interviewee is a friendly witness, an upstanding member of the community, an innocent bystander, how do you incorporate tension?

Roerden says, "create disagreement and suspicion among your characters. Invent misunderstanding. Encourage misinterpretation. Add distraction."

Maybe something in the witness' past causes her to mistrust police officers. Her answers might be ambiguous or down-right misleading because of this mistrust.

Maybe she's romantically interested in the questioner, and will incorporate flirtation into her answers, making them not quite so truthful.

Maybe she'll completely misunderstand the question and give an incorrect answer based on that misunderstanding.

Maybe she needs to be somewhere in ten minutes. She'll try to hurry things along, offering curt answers, thinking of this appointment instead of concentrating on the questions.

I could play this game for hours, but you get the drift. Give the witness a motivation, and her personality will shine through her answers and lend conflict to an otherwise simple scene which needs to disseminate information or a lack of information.

More on this in the next post. For what it's worth.

-Sonja

Purposeful Dialogue

Continuing my study of the art of dialogue, I turn again to Chris Roerden and her book, Don't Murder Your Mystery. She's got a single chapter on dialogue, and it's loaded with good stuff. Here's a tasty morsel from the first page:

"Effective dialogue is purposeful--the means by which characters strive to realize their objectives, act on their strategies, and incite reactions from others."

The first thing I noticed is that "Hi, how are you," "fine, thanks," and "how's your day" do not fulfill the purpose of dialogue. Removing these unimportant bits of dialogue immediately sharpen the text.

That leaves me with the rest of the dialogue text. This gets especially tricky when the character speaking is a minor character, or worse yet, a throw-away character, like the waitress taking an order, or the guy in the ticket booth selling movie passes. How can minor characters strive to realize their objectives, or act on strategies, or incite reactions? Maybe by having them want something other than what the protagonist wants. Or they want to push the protagonist in an opposite direction. Or they want to hide something from the protagonist.

The key is conflict. Throwing conflict into any piece of dialogue automatically adds interest and tension. More about that in later posts.

Challenge: go through a section of dialogue in your WIP that you feel is weak, and analyze every speaker. Do her words reveal her objectives, her motives, her strategies? Is she trying to incite a reaction from the other speaker? Is there any tension between the two speakers, or are they getting along beautifully? Shake them up, and see if it doesn't improve the passage.

-Sonja