Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (22 page)

How do learn to individualize with dialogue? The answer, of course, is that you listen, and that does mean
listen,
to people of all sorts talking in all sorts of situations insofar as you can manage it. Television and, in particular, the VCR are useful tools in this regard. By taping a program you can play chunks of dialogue that impress you over and over again until you get their pattern, their rhythm, their individualizing touches.

Beware, however, of putting too much trust in such. A TV performance is a carefully polished thing. The skill of writer, director and actors sometimes can throw you off center.

One way around this is to do some private taping with your own recorder. Hide the instrument in some place where people
talk—a teachers’ lounge, for example, or an office smoking area, or a garage waiting room, or by a feed store cash register—and study the results carefully.

The results may surprise you. You’ll discover that people seldom talk in a straight line, and that much of what they say is fragmentary, banal, and well-nigh meaningless. There’ll be a lot of what’s sometimes described as pre-symbolic utterance—words designed merely to evidence non-hostility and open contact on the “Nice day, isn’t it?” and “What’s new?” level: “Hey, Joe.” “Yo, Mack.” “Wife finally let you out?”

Men talk differently when there are no women present than when there are. So do women when there are no men. Teenagers hardly speak to each other in the same language they use around parents or other adults. Ditto for Blacks, druggies, doctors, soldiers—just about any group you can name. If you’re presenting characters from such a category, they must speak with the flavor of their “in” patois. But beware long, unreadable passages of word-for-word phonetic transcription. As pointed out before, such will tend to lose readers.

However intrigued with such you are, however, don’t ever forget to assign your people individual tags of speech, special phrases and patterns and topics that help identify them for your readers. (Did I say topics? Yes. A character who never can forget the Mets or Dodgers or his beloved ’66 Chevy is as clearly labeled as if he spoke Swahili.)

Listening to people, you’ll encounter endless empty conversations—“. . . and then I said, and then he said”—that merely fill time. (This world is full of people who can’t stand silence.)

All this helps you to grasp the flavor of speech. But beware of using it as more than spice when you write dialogue. So far as your story’s concerned, it’s “dead time”—waste space on the page that could be put to better advantage advancing your story.

Unless, that is, your object is to show how vapid and boring a particular character is. And even then, more than a little may prove too much. Putting readers to sleep is a cardinal sin!

On the other side of the coin, there are times in any story when you need what amounts to filler, in order to expand a moment of tension. Or perhaps you must provide Villain with some sort of cover to distract Hero while the bomb is planted or the files stolen, so you send in Villain’s accomplice to hold Hero away from the
action with chains of banality while Reader, who knows about the bomb or the robbery, is jumping up and down with panic-bred suspense.

Bear in mind, however, that the key to including empty words is to establish the time pressure and potentiality for disaster
before
you throw in meaningless, time-wasting dialogue which slows the hero.

Whatever the pattern you’re trying to achieve, practice is your key to improvement. To learn to write good dialogue, write dialogue endlessly. Then commandeer friends to read it back into a tape recorder. Inevitably, no matter how you cringe at the result, the work will sharpen your lines.

What about the relation between story and dialogue?

Your story moves from one state of affairs and state of emotion to another state of affairs and state of emotion—in other words, from beginning to end. And from beginning to end it’s a continuing process and reflection of change—specifically, the change of your character’s state of mind and situation.

Each scene, each episode, must reflect this. It must play a role in affecting this change.

As an important component of said change, ever and always dialogue must advance the plot.

How do you make dialogue do this advancing? By having it give the reader information needed to understand what’s happening.

In providing that information, most speeches should be designed to influence another character’s attitude or behavior.

It also will help if this data comes in bits and pieces, rather than indigestible chunks:

“Where could she have gone?”

“The bar, probably.”

“Thanks a lot. I doubt there’s more than a hundred bars in town.”

“Not on Denton Street.”

“Denton Street! My God, she couldn’t have gone there.”

“It’s Eddy’s turf.”

“Heimlich’s too! And if he gets hold of her—”

“Oh, Lord, I read you! We’ve got to move.”

“Like fast.”

They hit the door running.

You understand, it would have been simple enough to say, “There are a lot of bars in town, but probably she’s gone to one of the ones down on Denton Street. That’s Eddy’s turf. The only trouble is, Heimlich’s moving in there too. And if he gets hold of her—well, we’d better move fast.” But it wouldn’t have been as effective. Short speeches, sentence fragments, broken phrases read faster and hold audience interest tighter most of the time.

It’s vital, too, that in addition to conveying information, good dialogue should reveal and build emotion. It’s not just weather talk, it’s goal-oriented. The people who are talking want something: in the example above, to find the girl.

Further, finding her is important, and there’s an implied time factor to drive the searchers.

You may even come to feel that it’s not a bad idea to try, wherever possible, to center your dialogue around a character’s efforts to accomplish something, change something. Then let Character 2, to whom he’s speaking, either agree or disagree, be set up to help or hinder.

If Character 2 agrees, hold down the bit. Why? Because dialogue of agreement is dull. If he disagrees, the passage probably calls for greater development because it reflects conflict, and conflict with its potentiality of failure for Character 1 evokes emotion.

Does this mean that dialogue must always center around action scenes? No. The issue is merely that, as mentioned before, most speeches should be designed to influence someone’s attitude or behavior:

“It’s a good job,” he said. “I could go a million years and never get a better chance. Just because it means a move—”

“I know, John. Only . . .”

“Only—?”

“Mother.”

“Stell, we can’t tie our lives to her forever.”

“But her home, her church, her friends. They mean so much to her. She’d be lost without them.”

“Stell, we stay here with me in a dead-end job and our own lives are lost. Don’t they count too?”

“Please, John. Can’t we at least think it over?”

“All right, all right. We’ll think it over.”

Again, conflict. But a different kind of conflict. On a lower level at the moment, it paves the way for something more intense later on.

Note, too, how situation influences speech pattern. Urgent moments, bits loaded with action and tension, tend to be characterized by short words, short sentences, short speeches. An episode in which characters reflect, debate, try to decide what to do or to review past incidents, move more slowly and draw forth longer, more thoughtful speeches.

So there you have it where dialogue’s concerned: By the words your people say and the manner in which they say them, it should characterize and individualize them . . . give information to advance the plot . . . reveal and build the emotion that galvanizes the story.

Beyond that, always strive for the
provocative
line. Hunt for at least occasional new, fresh, original ways for your characters to say whatever it is they have to say. In their proper places, slang, colorful analogies, personification, and the like can prove very effective.

How do you find the provocative line? Write whatever dull clichés come handy, then go back and rework. “Complex” may then become “as tangled up as a meatball in a can of spaghetti.” “Jumpy” is reworked to “jerking like a crawdad on a hook” or “wriggling like a barefoot boy on hot cement.”

Which is fine within limits. Just don’t carry it so far that your readers label it as straining for effect.

Bear in mind also that only scientists and others trained to speak in facts do so. Others filter information through their emotional reactions. Most people think and talk more in terms of “great,” “awful,” “dumb,” “But, Mother, everyone’s doing it,” “I mean, it was the longest speech I ever heard,” “Hah, I wasn’t scared, but he was
big
!” And ask any policeman how precise the drivers in a fender-bender are in their accounts of the accident!

Never forget as you write dialogue that the situation—the state of affairs, and the state of mind of your characters—are changing continually as your story progresses. Your story people’s emotions are in flux. Their speeches should reflect this.

Try to keep reticence as common in dialogue as it is in life. Few of us will tell a woman how ugly she is save in a rage, nor lecture her husband on how badly brought up their children are. A well-bred man who flaunts his wealth shows poor taste, and so does a
woman who brags about her promotion, or any of a hundred other deviations from propriety. Nor do we reveal intimate or embarrassing moments easily. Our pattern, if we’re going to talk at all about such, is to divulge just a little, tentatively . . . wait for a reaction . . . then tell a little more.

Bad taste, bad manners, and rudeness have their place, however. Given the right character and situation, they may come through with truly shocking shock value.

Where do you use dialogue? In general, you may find it most effective when it reflects a certain tension, great or small, in at least one character. Thus, he’s likely to resort to it to break the ice when he meets someone new or feels nervous in a social situation. When he has a goal, wants something, or seeks to win information dialogue is a device to help him get it. In moments of crisis he may lose control and lash out at opponents or bystanders.

Just
don’t
use it merely to fill space or substitute for thinking through your plot!

How much dialogue should you include?

That depends on your story, of course. But remember what I said earlier about the value of white space and broken pages in helping to catch reader attention.

And don’t be tempted to try for the story told 100 percent in dialogue or totally without it. They’re literary stunts and not worth your time as a real writer.

How do you make the speeches in a dialogue episode hang together? In general, the trick is to let each one acknowledge the one ahead of it.

Sometimes, the first speech may be a question, the second an answer:

“Where did you go?”

“Oh, downtown and around.”

Sometimes the linkage is a repetition:

“I’m sorry, but I simply haven’t got the money.”

“You haven’t got the money? What happened to it?”

An “empty” word or phrase may serve as a bridge:

“I hate to make a move this way.”

“I know, I know. But there’s Edna’s sister to consider.”

An action often may take the place of words in any conversation:

“Sarah, I simply can’t understand you.”

Sarah turned away as if Cecile hadn’t even spoken. In wordless silence she looked out across the hills, the harbor.

There are all sorts of continuity devices such as these. Simply check the dialogue passages in any book or magazine till you become familiar with them, then practice using them in your own work. Soon they’ll become second nature to you.

Remember, too, that silence can be golden, as in the case of Sarah, above, if someone doesn’t want to discuss a matter further. And if you still want to introduce the information Character walked away from, you can always have another person hazard a guess as to what Character thought or felt.

Finally, when it dawns on you that a dialogue sequence has bogged down, don’t despair. Length quite possibly is the issue. Go back over the passage again and cut, condense, intensify, tighten. Believe me, another day will prove it was worth the effort.

Beyond dialogue, there’s another aspect of characterization every writer should consider: how to handle your people in stories of different lengths and genres, as well as in media other than the printed page.

Our next chapter, “Variations on a Theme,” surveys it.

So how do you build a character to fit a specific length, genre, or medium?

Length, first. What are the special problems you face in creating a character for each of the various specialties?

Space—wordage—is the primary issue in the short story. The shorter your story, the more limited your presentation of your character must be.

Samuel Armstrong, for example, may live in a variety of worlds. In one, it’s Sam and wife, in another Sam and children, in a third Sam and aging mother . . . Sam and job, hobbies, religion, recreations, dreams, intellectual interests—the list goes on and on.

But you can’t explore them all in a short story. Even though you make passing reference to other phases of his life, space limitations demand that you spotlight one—his concern with his wife’s increasing coldness or his drug-addicted teen-age son, his involvement with a mistress, his worries about whether he’ll be passed over for promotion, his nervousness over the badgering and sniping by Ed Sims at the next desk, his secret fears that the spurts of pounding in his chest foreshadow early death of a heart attack like the ones which claimed his grandfather and father.