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Here it is: your chance to prove how good you are at writing dialogue — to enjoy the ventriloquist satisfaction of making other people talk. For the reader, it’s the opportunity to hear what the characters sound like when their personalities aren’t coming filtered through narrative interpretations; they now testify out loud on their own behalf. And — a bonus in this scene — eavesdropping on people in bed is often interesting.
You decide to keep it simple, at least at first. Save the bon mots and profundities for after they’ve had their coffee.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“What time is it?”
“Seven.”
“So. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Can we please turn up the heat?”
Seven quick exchanges and already our novelist is in trouble. Who’s saying what? Impossible to tell — we need some “he saids” “she saids” added fast. And while “said” is a bloodless, neutral kind of word, it’s valuable because of its very blandness; it’s doubtful if it even registers on a reader’s consciousness except as a traffic signal telling him/her to switch lanes. Line spacing and indents can help signal this, too, giving us visual clues as to who’s now speaking, but even these need the occasional explicit prompt or the switches become difficult to keep track of.
The good news is that “said” can be easily modified to give it more flavor. “ ‘Can we please turn up the heat?’ Jill said with sweet reasonableness” will do the job nicely. But many novelists get carried away with their add-ons, wanting not only to convey what their character is saying, but to slip in some narrative exposition while they’re at it. “’Can we please turn up the heat?’ Jill said with sweet reasonableness, patting the pillow she bought Jack for his thirtieth birthday from Bed Bath & Beyond five years ago when, at least in the fuddy-duddyish circles she moved in, presents like pillows for a man not yet your husband were still considered fairly risque.” Even if weary readers make it to the end of that sentence, they will have already forgotten what words were said out loud at the beginning.
If our writer gets bored with writing “said” so frequently, there are synonyms, but they fall into three increasingly problematic categories.
The first group consists of those surprisingly few words that can safely be used as variations on “said.” Whispered, yelled, shouted, announced, asked, replied, insisted, continued, promised, explained. (The last featuring in Ring Lardner’s famous throwaway line, “ ‘Shut up,’ he explained.”)
The second group includes words that should be used rarely and in very special circumstances. Commanded, muttered, pronounced, interjected, mumbled, drawled, growled, shrieked, cooed, enquired, responded.
The third group — careful now! — contains words that went out of fashion in l890, when authors didn’t just write “Jill” said, but “Jill expounded,” “Jill declared,” “Jill exclaimed,” “Jill rejoined, retorted, remarked, returned,” while, on the other side of the bed (an antique four-poster), “Jack commented, croaked, crooned, crowed, cackled, chortled.”
That’s on the technical, how-to side of things. In a larger sense, the author must remember that dialogue must be created with as much invention and imagination as you’ve invested in narrative and description; must remember, too, that everyone talks with subtly different speech patterns, rhythms, and idiosyncrasies you must try hard to capture.
Talk that is totally realistic — a literal transcription of everyday speech — sounds suspiciously false when written out. Our opening dialogue between Jack and Jill? If we’re trying to portray two laconic people a la Hemingway, it works just fine; if we’re trying to write about characters as expressive as Dostoyevsky’s, we’ll have to juice it up.
But you can’t make their dialogue too brilliant either, at least with most characters. The kind of dialogue that Aaron Sorkin uses on TV — every line sparkling in intelligence and wit — wearies us very fast when used in a novel that aspires to realism. Do staffers in the White House really exchange lines as sharp as those in West Wing? Do producers at CNN talk with Newsroom’s coruscating wit? I somehow doubt it.
And there’s length to consider. In the 19th century, needing to pad, Grub Street novelists wrote page after page of dialogue, since a single line, “Merry Christmas,” takes up an entire paragraph. By the same token, writers looking to prune their work should look to their dialogue first, since crossing out “Merry Christmas” saves you that same space.
Contemporary writers are falling back into Victorian habits, with page after page of talk very common now — something I expect is caused, not by the need to pad, but by authors imagining their novels as future movies and writing all the dialogue out ahead of time.
There’s something important to keep in mind here that affects both length and seriousness. A hundred years ago, when Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad teamed up to write a novel together, they decided that their characters would never answer each other directly, so when Jack asks, “What time is it?” Jill will not answer “Seven,” but “I wonder what people who are alone are doing today, what they’re feeling, how they cope?”
This kind of dialogue — characters talking around each other in their own separate monologues — turned out to be one of the key innovations in 20th-century literature, since this is how, in a non-communicative, solipsistic world, many people actually talk.
Should novelists be envious of screenwriters and playwrights who can get away with using dialogue in ways we can’t? No. We have a wonderful device no other art form can harness: paraphrasing — summing up dialogue in a double-duty way that combines a sense of what the characters are saying with descriptions of how they’re saying it.
“The coffee was ready, its smell waited for them in the kitchen, but they lay in bed talking. Jill, when the subject was trivial, always made her voice as deep and serious as she could — when the talk turned serious, she tended to giggle. Jack listened with only half his attention — he was trying to figure out the best time to take their buche de noel out of the freezer — and when he did offer something it was a mumbled ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ or ‘Maybe,’ words that wouldn’t scare away the sunshine so soothing through the glass.”
Our novelist goes on with this for a paragraph, then switches back to straight dialogue.
“ ‘Do you think people mean it?’ Jill asked, with a sarcastic frown that wasn’t like her. ‘About peace on Earth? Do they mean it’s going to happen soon, or is it just another of those lying cliches we’re told to swallow with all the rest?’
Jack closed his eyes, kept them shut long enough she thought he had fallen back asleep.
‘Two sugars,’ he mumbled. ‘Half a teaspoon of cream.’ ”
We’ll stop eavesdropping on them here, but not before wishing Jack and Jill well with their pillow talk, and a happier, saner New Year than the one we’ve all just been through.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist and short-story writer who lives in Lyme.