Dialogue Episode 5

I'm still on the topic of fantastic dialogue, and still sucking wisdom out of Chris Roerden's book, Don't Murder Your Mystery. Today I'd like to discuss what Roerden calls Informational Dialogue. In genres that rely on intelligence gathering, writers can't toss in scenes where data is the primary reason for dialogue. Data dispersal contains no conflict.

Roerden says, "Confirm that each scene has been built around opposing agendas... Put your characters in situations that produce anxiety. Making two characters focus on different priorities lets you write bypass dialogue: two people talking but not communicating." Roerden goes on to say that transforming allies into adversaries also builds reader empathy for the protagonist. Remember to establish motive for the opposition, though, or you won't pull it off. The reader needs to understand why the miscommunication exists, or they won't believe it.

Another way to add tension to informational dialogue is to use unmet goals. Your protagonist needs to gather information to solve the crime. Any time he goes digging for information and comes up with nothing, that adds tension. You can't play this every time, though, or you'll never get the mystery solved, but used judiciously at a point where the stakes are high, this can create tons of conflict and mess with the reader's nerves.

A third method is what Roerden calls "other business." The protagonist is digging for information from a witness who is focused on something else: "other business." Maybe they're watching a football game on tv. Or trying to keep an eye on a rambunctious child. Or worried about how their spouse will react when he comes home and finds that dinner isn't ready. Then, when the protagonist asks a question, the witness says something that could refer to either context: the protagonist's question, or the "other business." If you can fool the reader into believing the answer was directed at the protagonist, even for a few seconds, when it was actually directed at the "other business," so much the better.

Finally, Roerden admits that not every development merits a scene of it's own. She says, "Instead of inventing a situation solely to bring tension to an information exchange, try paring the information to its essentials and merging those essentials into another scene." In other words, blurt it out quickly and move on to something more important or tension-filled. For example, if the protagonist needs a bit of information from a secretary, instead of outlining the entire phone call, go for something like this:

He called her.

"Sure, I've got that. Hang on." A few seconds later, she came back. "The address is 1660 New Vines Road."

Short, simple, tension-free, and on to better, more interesting things.

Challenge: use one or more of these methods to inject some tension into your informational dialogue.

-Sonja

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

She said what?

I've been working on improving my dialogue and came across a chapter in the book Don't Murder Your Mystery by Chris Roerden. I thought I'd share a few things I learned in the next several posts.

The first thing that struck me was the sentence "Dialogue is a form of action, a potent technique for expressing conflict." Silly me, I thought dialogue was what people said to one another. Chris went on to say, "It's the mightiest power tool on the writer's workbench for making characters come alive."

It's all about having the characters reveal themselves, their feelings, their attitudes, and their personalities through their words. But I think the key word is "conflict." Emotions and attitudes are revealed much more clearly in a heated discussion, a disagreement, even a full-blown argument than what's revealed in a dull, non-confrontational conversation.

For example, in my current work-in-progress, two friends are speaking. These ladies have been friends their entire lives, and know each others' greatest weaknesses, strength, and, of course, their secrets. In one of the first scenes in the book, the protagonist, Cassie, has had a particularly nasty nightmare that's affected her morning mood. Her friend, Talia, recognizes that something is wrong and wants to know the reason for her friend's funk. Here's how I could have written the scene (FYI, it takes place in a bakery while they're baking bread):

Tala buttoned a white smock over her clothing and grabbed a sack of flour from the pantry shelves. "Want to talk about it?"

"I had a nightmare and it really upset me," Cassie answered.

BORING! No conflict, no tension, no reason to continue reading. So I revised it to add some conflict:

Tala buttoned a white smock over her clothing and grabbed a sack of flour from the pantry shelves. "Want to talk about it?"

"No." Cassie dumped the required sugar and salt into the mixer.

"Spill it."

"I don't want to."

"You have to. We can't have secrets."

Cassie grinned. "Some secrets can be good. Like that time you ducked behind the bleachers with Chad--"

"You know about that?" Talia looked horrified. "You didn't tell anyone, did you?"

"Of course not."

Talia set her jaw. "Tell me what's wrong and forget all about Chad Barlow."

Granted, it's not an Earth-shattering argument, but it's much more interesting than the original, and it reveals something about these women and their friendship. It reveals their attitudes and personalities while they have this seemingly inconsequential argument. In just a few lines, the reader discovers that this argument is actually the key to something much bigger, but I won't spoil the surprise for you now.

So I challenge you to go through your dialogue and find the boring, non-confrontational conversations and jazz them up a bit. Add some misunderstanding, or innuendos, or misdirections. Add some anger, or disbelief, or jealousy. Pit best friends and lovers against each other, at least verbally, and see if it doesn't improve the scene.

-Sonja

Resolutions vs. Habits

It's been awhile since I've blogged, and with the new year comes the idea of the resolution. Last year, I resolved to blog more. Oops. Failure accomplished. Experience now tells me NOT to make the same mistake this year. I will not resolve to blog more.

Instead, I resolve to change my habits. If I can institute a few new habits, maybe blogging will become second nature and I'll actually do it.

Sounds easy, but I know it won't be. To work properly, I can't pick a whole bunch of stuff I'd like to work into habits. The key is to pick one, work on it, focus on it for four to six weeks. After that habit's been formed, I can work on another.

In my writing life, I've decided to work on my dialogue techniques. Hopefully, by pairing my study of dialogue with blogging, I'll accomplish my goal of making blogging a habit.

For what it's worth.

-Sonja

NaNoWriMo, oh my!

Only 2 days left until NaNoWriMo!

If you don't know what that is, I'd be happy to explain. Twelve years ago, some writers declared November National Novel Writing Month. All you have to do is write a 50,000 word work of fiction, from scratch, during the month of November. That's 30 days to bang out the first draft of a completely new, original work. Not something you've worked on in the past, but brand-spanking new.

My friends at the NOVEL Writing Site.com said this: "The idea is to conquer fear, hesitation, overthinking, writer's block, analysis paralysis, or anything else that's holding you back and JUST WRITE!" Easier said than done, but a bold and daring challenge none-the-less.

Since I just finished the first rough draft of my newest thriller, NaNo comes at a fabulous time. I'll pull out an old idea that's been stewing but hasn't gotten any screen time, and I'll see where it takes me. Then, when November is over and I've had some distance, and I can pull out the old thriller and edit.

Accept the challenge, writer friends, and participate in NaNo this year.

-Sonja