Show me, don’t tell me—it’s one of the first rules of the fictional road, yet one of the hardest to master. How do you show the reader your protagonist is strong-minded to the point of being argumentative or that your heroine tends to bite off more than she can chew? Yes, you could just say it: “Justin was strong-minded to the point of being argumentative.” “Matilda had a tendency to bite off more than she could chew.” But these statements are meaningless if your character doesn’t insist on his own way of doing things or constantly try to over-reach her capacity.
Before you can either tell or show the reader anything about your characters, you must know them yourself—know their history, their educational level, their loves and hates and foibles. You must know how they feel about life, the universe and everything.
The Puppet Master
Knowing these things, you must be able to portray your characters as individuals, which means, simply, that they should be distinctive. Further, the reader should never see the “strings” by which the characters are connected to you, the writer. Your heroine is strong-willed, savvy, self-assured ... until a scene requires her to whine and grovel. So she whines and grovels. You are playing (evil laughter) the Puppet Master.
Like a real human being, a fictional character must seem to be the product of both nature and nurture. Some of the best moments of high drama, in real life and in literature, occur when flawed human beings do incredible things. By having a character’s flaws imposed from outside the story by the (evil laughter) Puppet Master, you rob yourself and your reader of this drama.
If you really need this character to whine and grovel at this point, let the weakness come from inside, and show the reader the genesis of that weakness. Have your strong-willed, savvy, young protagonist be weakened by grief over the loss of a loved one. This weakness is contrary to her self-image, which in turn makes her angry at herself and the universe, and gives birth to guilt. These forces can make a normally rock-solid personality resemble gelatin. This character’s greatest struggle may be to rediscover herself, and she may be less than consistent as she goes about it.
“I’m wounded!” she said lightly.
Dialogue is, at once, one of the most essential tools of characterization and one of the easiest ways to undermine it.
The title line of this section was in a manuscript I got at a writer’s conference some years back. In the context of this story, the coupling of this exclamation with an inappropriate modifier suggested that the speaker was so much a Mage that she had ceased to have a human appreciation of pain. Since this was not the case, it made the narrative voice (and hence the writer) seem unreliable.
“You’re so smart!” he snorted wryly.
They call it “said-book-ism”: People snort and exhort when perhaps they ought to just say something. Snorts are fine once in a while, but unwatched, they proliferate like March Hares.
A close companion of said-book-ism is “adverbitis,” which can affect both dialogue and action. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, “If you see an adverb, kill it.” Extreme, but some stories have led me to suggest that if the writer cut about three-quarters of them, the manuscript would improve dramatically.
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In the kitchen, he found Constance preparing their meal. He watched her quietly. He found that he was still anxious and closed his eyes tightly and sighed, loudly.
Constance jumped. “Jerrod!” she cried anxiously.
“I’m sorry, Constance.” Jerrod smiled nervously.
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The adverbs disrupt the dialogue and produce shallow characterization. We know these people are nervous or anxious, but couched in weak adverbs instead of strong verbs their anxiety is barely felt.
Here’s the same passage, reworded:
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Constance was in the kitchen preparing a simple meal. He watched her in silence for a moment, anxiety digging pitons into the wall of his stomach. What he meant as a cleansing breath came out as a melodramatic sigh.
Constance jumped and turned to face him. “Jerrod!”
His smile dried and set on his lips. “I’m sorry, Constance.”
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The image of anxiety using mountain climbing gear provides a mental image for the reader. It conveys much more than “he said anxiously.” It’s through dialogue, thought, and action that your reader knows your characters and gauges their feelings. If these essentials are not fully formed, your characters will not be fully formed. If your dialogue lacks emotional depth, so will your characters. Strong verbs are better tools for building depth into dialogue than are weak verbs qualified by adverbs.
I challenge thee to a duel (of words).
Poorly constructed dialogue can cut down reader comprehension, hamper pacing, and make characters seem like bad high school actors flogging their way through scenes in which no one understands his lines or motivation. Worse, it may seem as if the lines have been forgotten altogether, and the characters have resorted to ad-libbing ... without listening to each other.
Here’s an example:
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JERROD: “Constance, I’d like you to meet my friend, Peter Harrar.”
CONSTANCE: “I’m glad to meet you.”
PETER: “The pleasure is all mine, my lady. (He tries to read her mind.) Oh, that was dumb!”
JERROD: “I agree!”
PETER: “I apologize, my lady.”
CONSTANCE: “No need, sir.”
JERROD: “What’s the matter, Peter? Forget that she’s a level five Psi?”
PETER: “One of these days, friend! .... Would it be too rude JUST to bow?”
CONSTANCE: “No...no. I don’t think so.”
JERROD: “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit?”
PETER: “No, I don’t think so.”
CONSTANCE: “I don’t think so either. Leave him alone, Jerrod. At least he knows the meaning of the word respect.”
JERROD: “Him???”
PETER: “Yeah, me.”
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What’s wrong with this conversation? Simply that it’s not a conversation—it’s a duel (or the three-participant equivalent). It’s also repetitive, trivial, and long.
The original scene staggered under the weight of stage business that seemed to exist only to give the characters something to do with their bodies. When I stripped away all the aimless movement that accompanied this dialogue what was left was a barrage of small talk that took up several pages and failed to either advance the story or reveal character.
“It is a matter of life and death!”
Avoiding the use of contractions in an academic paper or essay may be a good idea, but in fictional dialogue it is a bad idea simply because real people generally do use contractions in their speech.
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“I have to talk to Matilda.” Justin tried not to let his desperation show.
“She is not receiving visitors,” the guard told him.
Justin balled his fists against the desire to use them. “This cannot wait. I have got to speak to her. I am telling you—it is a matter of life and death.”
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The lack of contractions here does two things. It stiffens the prose (a stale meringue comes to mind) and it sucks any urgency out of the scene. Ultimately, poor Justin does not come across as a man desperate to see his beloved. The narration—his suppressed desperation, his desire to manhandle the guard—is at odds with the carefulness of the dialogue. Desperate people are not careful in their speech. They’re ... well, desperate.
Will the real Dinsdale please speak up?
Spoken words and thoughts, alike, should reveal character, show strength or weakness; truth, falsehood or ambiguity. They must seem like thoughts we might have or, at the very least, thoughts we can imagine that someone else could have. Likewise, we must use words our readers can imagine a particular character would use.
If a character is supposed to be callous, then the words he uses in both speech and thought should reveal his callousness ... or his compassion.
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Ariel followed Dinsdale down the long, dark flight of stairs. At the top of the third landing she slipped and fell.
Below her, Dinsdale stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. “What’s the matter?” he asked callously. Good God, she might have broken her neck.
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Dinsdale’s dialogue could just as easily have read: “What’s the matter?” he asked fearfully.
The only difference between Dinsdale being a rogue or a gentleman is in the adverb chosen to modify “asked.” This should raise a few red flags.
Let’s try a different approach:
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Ariel followed Dinsdale down the long, dark flight of stairs. At the top of the third landing she slipped and fell.
Below her, Dinsdale stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. Hell, he thought, she might have broken her neck and stuck him with having to dispose of the body. “Trying to reach the bottom more quickly, my lady?” he asked.
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I don’t have to tell you Dinsdale spoke callously, his thoughts and words are snide and uncaring. They make even a simple glance over the shoulder seem heartless. An acid test for dialogue, then, might be to ask: If I strip away all modifiers, what do these words tell me about the character?
Get real!
You have to develop an ear for dialogue. You can do several things when you write dialogue to make it sound real:
1. Strip away all stage business and action. Try to write dialogue as if you were eavesdropping in the dark. No movement, just people talking.
2. Read your dialogue aloud to see what it sounds like if spoken by a real person. Imagine your characters in a real-life situation, saying these words.
3. Ask if everything you’ve written is necessary. Does it advance the plot or reveal character? Real people “um” and “uh” and “y’know” their way through life, and they indulge in conversations that wander. Fictional characters can’t afford those luxuries.
4. ‘Run the scene’ in your mind and put in the action and atmosphere only after you’re satisfied that the words work. If necessary, modify the pacing of the dialogue to work with the action.
Obviously, there are other things that contribute to realistic dialogue. Here are a few of them:
Get your plot straight. If you don’t know where your characters are going, or where they’ve been, it will be reflected in what they say. Don’t contradict yourself or your characters. Make sure the plot is sound, that the elements are clear and flow logically. Then, cut any elements that don’t advance the plot, develop or reveal character, or give the reader necessary information. A single plot flaw can make your entire story unravel.
Establish a definite point of view. You may wish to “be” your point of view character when you write dialogue so that his conversational thoughts reveal to the reader who he is.
Watch the pace. If the pacing of a scene is off, the gist of conversations can become lost, and important clues about character, missed. Don’t let “stage business” get in the way of dialogue. We don’t need to know whether a character brandished his revolver in his left or right hand. Nor, once informed of the fact, do we need to be reminded of it every time he speaks.
Stay focused. Don’t toss chunks of narrative into the middle of action/dialogue sequences.
Tighten your prose. You’ve heard the phrase, “elegant in its simplicity?” Good dialogue can be the very embodiment of this. Unless you’ve created a character who is known by his very penchant for tangled phrases, keep the dialogue as direct as possible. The purpose of speech is communication. For a writer this is true on two levels: characters communicate with each other and through them, you communicate with your reader.
Start by concentrating on how to use the language. Make sure you know what a word means and how to use it before you put it down on paper.
Know your characters. Learn who they are, then introduce them to the reader. Put words in their mouths that will make us like or dislike them (depending on their roles in your story), but which, above all, will make us care what happens to them for better or worse. Above all, don’t pull their strings. Give them distinctive personalities and motivation, put them in a situation, then stand back to watch what they do and listen to what they say.
There’s a story in that.
