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The Pleasures of Dialogue

By Marciano Guerrero

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Published: 25Feb2010
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Just because dialogue 'brings characters to life through their speech' doesn't mean that it has to be used throughout.

The great novelist Edith Wharton even had her own rules concerning dialogue:

"The use of dialogue in fiction seems to be one of the few things about which a fairly definite rule may be laid down. It should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narratives breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore (Wharton, The Writing of Fiction 55)."

So here we find a practical rule for the writer of fiction: reserve dialogue only for the "culminating moments" (moments of high tension) of the narrative. But that isn't all that Edith Wharton has to say about the use of dialogue. In her memoirs, A Backward Glance, she states: "The vital dialogue is that exchanged by characters whom their creator has really vitalized, and his instinct will be to record only the significant passages of their talk, in high relief against the narrative, and not uselessly embedded in it (203)."

A second practical rule that we can extract from the above quote is that dialogue should stand out "in high relief" and not blended and lost in the narrative. In the poignant and concluding chapter of The House of Mirth, one can only find a few sprinklings of dialogue; about a dozen lines.

The abundance of dialogue mars many novels. When the readers are forced to wade through long stretches of dialogue, they lose interest, their attention drifts, and boredom ensues. The prolific Victorian novelist Anthony Throllope produced lengthy novels with an excess of dialogue; many of these novels today are totally unappealing to readers.

No one can say that Jacqueline Susan's Valley of the Dolls is boring, yet there are long stretches in the novel that is nothing but continuous dialogue, which I'm sure readers skip. Elmore Leonard, the popular writer whose snappy novels are often made into movies, says that to make his books interesting he leaves out the parts that readers skip. Besides, the writer's artistry doesn't really project through dialogue, but only through narrative and description because there's no artistry when one speaks—unless one is orating. Furthermore, often a skillful writer can tell in one sentence what pages upon pages of dialogue cannot.

Elizabeth George, in her useful, how-to book Write Away, explains how she uses the ingenious THAD (Talking Heads Avoidance Devices). With them she invents occupations, places, and visual settings so that the characters aren't just two talking heads jabbering away divulging information. This is a piece of advice that budding and professional writers cannot afford to ignore, lest they allow their scenes to become but a chain of clumsy he said/she said attributions.

Dialogue should be not only engaging, but also thought-provoking; it should be participatory; it should drag readers into the action; it should keep them guessing—on their toes, so to speak.

The best tag to use is "said;" and never with adverbial attributions —she snapped murderously, he exploded violently, etc.— that we find in many works of fiction. Furthermore, don't ever use (in dialogue) impossible words that have to be looked up in a dictionary, or searched for in Goggle or Yahoo.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is quite stingy with his use of dialogue. And this attitude allows him to enchant the reader with a prodigious production of narrative and description that can probably only be matched by Scheherazade.

Each writer is different and will use dialogue in different ways, as long as common sense prevails.

In summary, I have four suggestions: (1) follow Edith Wharton's advice; that is, reserve dialogue for culminating moments, make it vital, and in high relief (2) emulate Garcia Marquez's stinginess with dialogue, (3) make it participatory, and (4) avoid cliché, exclamations, and commonplace expressions that add little or nothing to the story.

Marciano Guerrero is a retired investment banker, Columbia University-educated. The only writing textbook I consult is Mary Duffy's e-book: Sentence Openers. To read my book reviews of the Classics visit my blog: Writing To Live

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