Susan Rivers's Blog - Posts Tagged "dialogue"

I'm just returned from a writers conference where I led a workshop called "'You Talking To Me?' Why Less Really Does Mean More When It Comes to Dialogue."

I'd been meaning to put my ideas about dialogue in a coherent form for some time, and the 90 minute class provided exactly the right opportunity. In boiling down dialogue's essential place in fiction, I was surprised to see how many of the same rules apply to dialogue in prose that I used as a playwright, writing scripts. As I see it, then, there are five essential purposes for dialogue:

1) To illustrate INTENTION (illuminating character goals, sometimes directly expressed but otherwise through sub-text)

2) To allow ACTION v. REACTION (no response is still a reaction), which creates a progressive dynamic in your story. This dynamic provides tension/conflict and illuminates the obstacles to characters' goals/intentions

3) To illustrate RELATIONSHIPS. Answers the question of Emotional Control -- who has it and why? (Conflict, intentions)

4) To provide VOICE (illuminating character origins & background, attitudes, state-of-mind)

5) To provide EXPOSITION (illuminates essential plot information… but exposition must be used sparingly!)

I'll talk about each one of these purposes in detail beginning with the next blog post. Stay tuned!

When reading fiction I'm often struck by the pronounced difference between an author who understands how RELATIONSHIPS control and define dialogue, and an author who is less aware of this.

The skilled author, for instance, understands that people who know one another very well, such as lovers, conspirators, work colleagues, old married people, members of the same family or best friends, don't need to share facts that are held in common (these facts are called 'exposition'). What they do share is a manner of communicating that has been developed over time and contact through shared experiences or shared feeling.

It may be very fully, positively developed, with the exchange of feelings and intentions intuited on certain levels and with understanding complete, or it may be well developed but in a negative manner, a manner that typically has forced one person to adjust over time for the toxic characteristics of the other in order to have any meaningful communication at all. The latter relationship will rely less on shared intuition than on shared history and will involve varying amounts of guilt, antipathy, recriminations, and the like.

Whether the characters engaged in dialogue know one another well or not, the skilled author will also be conscious of and will make it clear to the reader which person holds emotional control in the relationship. By "EMOTIONAL CONTROL" we mean: who has the power? The leverage? Who has information the other one doesn't have? Who may be withholding something that the other one wants or needs? It's critical that the writer understands this component of control when crafting the relationship in order to provide dynamic movement to the scenes within a novel, the mechanical plot-generator of action v. reaction that we discussed in the previous blog post (The Trigger and the Heap).

In my opinion, the talent and skill of a particular writer can be measured by his or her ability to delineate the small relationships a primary character has with secondary ones. The fact that these relationships may occupy less "floor space" than the major relationships in no way excuses them from being less believable, and may in fact allow for insights just as breathtaking as those offered in the dialogues between key characters.

Consider how this is done in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. The title character in the novel is a strange, prickly, repressed, and not very likable middle-aged woman. And yet in this novel-in-stories she emerges as somehow admirable because of how fearlessly she "owns" who she is, and in the process of being Olive she emerges as remarkably funny and relatable.

Because so many of her interactions with people are characterized by few words, much must be conveyed in her laconic lines, especially when the interaction is emotionally intense or highly charged. I love a particular, concentrated section of dialogue between Olive and a fellow teacher at the junior high school in her small Maine town. We learn that when she was 44 Olive found herself "swept off her feet" by the 53 year old Jim Casey when he began giving her a ride to school every day. They have never kissed or been intimate; have never even touched, and yet an understanding -- a powerful mutual attraction -- has grown palpable between them. One day when the two of them are eating their lunches in Jim's office he says:

"If I asked you to leave with me, would you do it?
"Yes," she said.
He watched her as he ate the apple he always had for lunch, nothing else. "You would go home tonight and ask Henry?"
"Yes," she said. It was like planning a murder.
"Perhaps it's a good thing I haven't asked you."
"Yes."
(Strout)

Nothing more needs to be said at this point. Olive's feelings are crystal clear, and because of this, she holds emotional control. In a tricky way, however, she lets Jim know in this exchange that she is GIVING control to him. She lets Jim Casey know that she is willing, without a doubt, and now HE must decide if they will be bold together and follow their hearts, if they will abandon their jobs, families (he has a "shoe full of children") and homes for each other and run away to start new lives.

Instead, a few days later, her husband Henry breaks the news to Olive that Jim drove his car into a tree and is not expected to survive. He dies the next day.

"I don't believe it," she kept saying to Henry. "What happened?" (Strout)

But she knows what happened, and so do we, because of the dialogue Strout crafted between them. Jim wasn't as resolute as Olive. He wasn't brave. Instead of making a choice between staying with his wife, his children, and his job at the school or eloping with Olive, he chose death, which is no choice at all. It was simply his way of NOT MAKING the choice Olive offered to him. Olive is furious with Jim for disappointing her -- for turning out to be so ordinary in his indecisiveness. Not brave at all.

And all of this human drama is accomplished with a spartan economy of dialogue: the best kind.


Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. New York, Random House, 2008.

Mary Cox, a woman born on a hardscrabble farm in Sylva, NC, early in the 20th century, led a hard life. She fled her mother's dysfunctional family when she was young and came down from Appalachia to live with her father and stepmother in Spartanburg, SC, where they worked in a textile mill. Mary married and quickly regretted it, but divorce was illegal in South Carolina until 1949, so she moved through a series of three "husbands" before settling with a man she called 'Babe.'

Babe had a job at the time they met, but once they were married he drank more than he worked, and Mary had to drum up income for the pair of them any way she could, including raising chickens. One day she took some of her egg money and went into town with Babe in order to get a permanent wave done on her hair. On the way home, however, Babe's three grown children blocked the road, one of them brandishing a shotgun. They ordered her to get out of the wagon and lie in the road. Mary relates that she did what she was told, at which point the oldest son Lloyd put his foot on her neck to hold her down while his sister Ola "cut every inch of hair off my head, down to my scalp, with sheep shears, saying Babe hadn't never bought no hair-curlin' for their mammy and from now on I better look out."

This hair-raising tale is one of many oral histories set down by WPA workers when they roamed the south in the thirties interviewing the rural poor. In fact, I found the story and words of Mary Cox in a bound collection of WPA oral history out-takes when I went searching for voices of poor white women who lived in upstate South Carolina early in the 20th century, and Mary's voice jumped out as one deserving of special notice.

Not only was her life story compelling and darkly funny, but her unique way of expressing herself spoke volumes. The distinctive double negative commonly used by working class southerners ("Babe hadn't never bought no"…), the dropping of the "g" sound on words ending with "ing" ("hair-curlin") and the use of the pronoun "Mammy" for "mother" conjured a young woman who was the full-blown product of her class, her region, and her time. Mary's voice was preserved long past her death in the obscure profile I unearthed in the Kennedy Room's archives at the Spartanburg County Public Library, and I like to think it was given new life in influencing the voice of the fictional white southern woman, Calla Stout, who is my protagonist in the book that will be published next.

In crafting dialogue for this novel, especially dialogue between Calla and members of her troubled family, I had to find a way to create a shared vocabulary that was based in authentic experience but which allowed me some freedom to innovate. This could only be accomplished once I'd immersed myself in the relevant primary sources: oral histories, interviews, letters from state archives, first-person accounts from mill town dwellers and chain gang prisoners, notes on spoken phrases I heard from living descendants of farmers and factory workers in the area, and so on. I continue to revise these voices and their language, seeking to make them as truthful as possible while maintaining their effectiveness in advancing the objectives of the individual characters.

Here's a sample of dialogue from TROUBLEFIELD (soon to be published by Algonquin), from a conversation Calla has with her brother Tennyson, a volatile man who's just been released after eight months on the county chain gang for disemboweling a fellow millworker in a knife fight.

Seeing in his eyes what he'd been through in the last eight months, along with the proud look that promised he could handle that and eight months more without batting an eye, I got the balks. "Tell me how you been," I said when I could find my voice at last, and when he answered with the same old joke that had been our daddy's, "I been better but it cost me more," he laughed but I couldn't even smile.
"Your husband know you're here?" he asked, and added, before I had a chance to speak, "Right enough. He sent you, didn't he."
"I'd have you to the house, Tennyson. If I could."
Tennyson sighed, turning his back on me as he joined the pipe to the stove and fitted the other end to the length sticking out the chimney.
"Ain't a problem for me. I like Abernathy's. Her rules make sense, leastways."
"And you're making the rent all right?"
He nodded, plucking a screw from his mouth and twisting it into the joint. "Got work. Got a place to stay. That oughter keep me off the chain gang."
I winced. "Don't you miss us?"
He looked at me, but then turned away, swallowing hard. "Maude ever ask about me?"
"Sure she does. About when she's going to see you again." The thought came to me that we'd missed him for Thanksgiving dinner, thinking he was still in the camp out on Copperhead Hill. Where had he gone that day? Who would have been willing to take him in? Maybe that's why Juanita Reid took the gingerbread from me without so much as a "thank you."
"She's missed you. And she misses Dolphie. Wilbanks' friend. He got married a few weeks back."
"That McCready toff?"
I nodded. "He can't come 'round Dunnet Head no more."
Tennyson made a snorting sound. "I reckon not. It's just as well Maudie finds out what those stand-up-collar folks are like. She's not going to learn that from her ma."
"Don't start in on my husband, Tennyson. We been down that road already." To my surprise, the smug look on my brother's face melted away.
"The truth is, I don't have no chicken to pick with that lawyer-man of yours," he told me. "He's does for you and Maudie, which is more than Jimmy Goforth cared to do. More than I did, as your brother. I still believe you're owed better, but we got to do our best with what we're handed, don't we."
I bit my tongue when he said that, because I'd been this close to telling him about States Rights Ramseur and how I was thinking more and more that I might run off with the undertaker who found all my living parts so pleasing.
"I been thinking about what you told me in the courtroom," he went on. He was studying me now, to see if I remembered it. "Do you --"
"I told you not to be the mule."
He nodded, a tiny smile pulling at the edges of his mouth. His hair fell unevenly over his ears -- it looked as if they'd barbered him in camp with a dull handsaw. "That's right. I was too lobber-headed to hear it that day. But I hear it now. Always have had a powerful anger inside me. In the cage-wagon out at Copperhead I studied on how that temper might could do me some good, if I could only get a holt of it. I'm hurting for a plan. Otherwise I'm going to end up like Peckerwood Pennington, digging my grave with every day I spend in the back end of bad luck."
"What's the plan, then?" I asked. "What should you be doing different?"
He shook his head, easing the jointed pipe into the top of the dirty stove. "I'm not sure," he said. "I might just lay it to God, this time. Wait for a sign."
* * *
Out on the stoop I looked up and down the line before stepping down. Tennyson stood on the porch behind me, using a rag to clean the grease out of his fingernails. It troubled me that I'd made him feel low-class, showing up out of the blue at a run-down three-room, watching him fit dirty stovepipe together. It had been a bad idea to dress up. "Where's that mean dog gone to?" I asked. "I don't want to get bit."
Now he laughed again, but in a harsh way, like he'd just as soon spit. "Where do you expect him to go? This is home. The family who bolted out of here ahead of the rent left a pan of liver mush to spoil on the stove and that hound locked out in the yard." He shook his head. I tried to make some mealy-mouthed excuse for the tenants, like "those who have never known kindness..." but he cut me off. "Would you do that? Truly? Not even give the liver to your dog before you tied him to a tree and moved on?"
He didn't expect an answer to this, so I made none. I said, "Look after yourself, Brother," and walked home to Dunnet Head.

I will wrap up this series about the five purposes of dialogue in fiction with the last, and in some ways, the most elusive element of story-telling: exposition. How an author controls the sharing of information crucial to the reader's experience of the story and his or her understanding of the characters' roles in that story is critical.

Sometimes exposition can be directly expressed in dialogue, but in my opinion, the mark of a seasoned writer is one who is confident enough to use exposition sparingly, sprinkling it lightly into the mix as one seasons a stew, and not throwing handfuls of information at the reader that call attention through the artificiality of their delivery. (Like when the climax in a mystery novel, the key scene between the sleuth and the murderer, bogs down in a surfeit of exposition about who-did-what-when, or even worse, an explication of railroad timetables. At that point, all the air is let out of the scene, and, ultimately, the mystery. If you're a fan of the mystery genre, you recognize the kind of 'Big Scene Fail' I'm talking about…)

Here's a key point to keep in mind about exposition: some details about your principal characters might never be known, and that will be all right. Where they grew up, who was their first grade teacher, how many siblings do they have, what was their first job? Given the story being told, only a few key facts about the characters' lives might be relevant. And other facts, the characters may intentionally be concealing.

The rest can be inferred by your reader. Less is more when it comes to exposition, especially when it is conveyed in dialogue. Allow me to demonstrate how NOT to use exposition: "Oh Cedric, it's a beautiful autumn day in 1885 and I'm so glad we're seeing Paris for the first time as a couple"… "Yes Geraldine, it's too bad my father disowned me on the eve of our wedding but once I find a back-room card-game we'll soon have enough money to stay at the Ritz for our honeymoon."

Instead of turning your characters into mouthpieces for the story, let exposition take a backseat to what's happening between characters, working essential information into dialogue as seems natural for the events and the people involved. In other words, let much of the exposition come out in sub-text, the meaning and attitudes conveyed by means of implication. (See my earlier post on Sub-text for a fuller exploration of this important dialogue tool.)

An example of how this is done expertly in a modern novel is Hilary Jordan's masterwork, Mudbound, which was made into a film for Netflix in 2017. This exploration of racial difficulties set against the impoverished landscape of the Mississippi Delta in the post-WWII era is told in multiple first-person narratives. The dialogue is freighted with the emotional stances each narrator maintains in a particular relationship, with most of these relationships being fragile and problematic.

In one scene in the novel, a white land appraiser turned farmer, Henry McAllan, is forced to go to the house of his tenants, the Jacksons, and persuade Hap's wife Florence to come back with him to his own home. His two daughters have come down with whooping cough, which often killed children in the days before a vaccine was discovered (this is 1946 or '47). His wife Laura, who didn't want to leave Memphis and come down to the delta to be a farmer's wife, is furious with Henry and terrified that her children will die if they aren't treated by a proper doctor. On his way to town to fetch the physician, however, Henry discovers that the bridge has been washed out by a storm, and he's forced to turn around.

Remembering that Florence Jackson is a midwife and treats some of the African-Americans in the community with folk medicine, he drives in desperation to the Jackson's house. The dialogue that follows, told through Henry's point-of-view, teaches us some important aspects of the situation between the inhabitants of this troubled world: Henry, although new to farming, believes wholly in his superiority as the landowner and as a white man, but he is forced to adjust this estimation when confronted with Florence's own considerable pride and her commitment to her own children. The relationship is complicated by the fact that Henry needs Florence badly, and can offer her very little. It is not an easy conversation they share. Both are compelled to be circumspect: Henry because his pride will not allow him to plead for assistance from a black woman, and Florence, because in resisting McAllan it would be reckless for her to risk insulting him. As they engage with one another, we witness the balance of power shifting on the farm.

When Henry knocks on their door, Florence answers it and tells him that Hap is out in the mule shed. Henry says:

"Actually, I came to see you. My little girls, they’re three and five, they've taken sick with whooping cough. I can't get to town because the bridge is washed out, and my wife…"
"When they start the whooping?"
"This afternoon."
She shook her head. "They still catching then. I can give you some remedies to take em but I can't go with you."
"I'll pay you," I said.
"I wouldn't be able to come home for three or four days at least. And then who gone look after my own family, and my mothers?"
I'm asking you," I said.

This exchange is followed by Henry's 1st-person account of his uncomfortable awareness, as he "locked eyes with her," of Florence's powerful will and spirit, "a deep-running fierceness that was almost warrior-like." He sees Florence's daughter standing behind her in the kitchen, and notices that the girl is watching them, waiting "like I was, for her mother's answer."

"I got to ask Hap," Florence said finally.
The girl ducked her head…and I knew that Florence was lying. The decision was hers to make, not Hap's, and she'd just made it.
"Please," I said. "My wife is afraid."
… If she said no, I wouldn't ask her again. I wouldn't stoop to beg a ni***r for help. If she said no --
All right then," she said. "wait here while I get my things."

(Jordan, p. 80-81)

Isn't that strong? And effective? Go easy with the exposition in your dialogue, being guided by what's essential, and avoiding extraneous information. Your reader will be glad you did.


Jordan, Hillary. Mudbound. Chapel Hill, North Carolina.Algonquin Books, 2008.