carriejones

On Linda Urban’s blog, she recently quoted author Madeline L’Engle: "The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is that he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself."

She then quoted L’Engle as saying,

"When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves."

According to L’Engle, "A writer may be self-conscious about his work before and after but not during the writing. If I am self-conscious during the actual writing of a scene, then it ends up in the round file."

I begged Linda to talk to me about these quotes and about dialogue. She did.  Today I'm posting interviews of her and of author (former editor) Micol Ostow. Linda is up first.

Me: When I'm thinking of these L'Engle quotes in the context of dialogue, they seem particularly astute. Have you ever thought of these quotes particularly when trying to get to the core of conversation between characters?

Linda: I’m just now reading the book, so the quotes are new to me – but the sentiment isn’t.  And yes, when I’m really IN the story, IN the writing, I am also “in character” and the dialogue that comes out is honest and often on target for the scene.  If I AM the character, it is impossible for me to make a shy girl say a bold thing just because it would be better for the plot.

Also, if I’m really in there, surprises happen.  In CROOKED, I was surprised when one character, Wheeler Diggs, first called the main character Zoe “Goober”.  Goober was a teasing name that my brother sometimes called people.  It wasn’t cruel, exactly, it was almost affectionate, but at the same time it usually brought the addressee down a peg.  That one beautiful word, Goober, came out in play – and it allowed me to develop a shorthand way for readers to track the progression of Zoe and Wheeler’s friendship.  It also allowed me to understand the guardedly soft side of Wheeler in a way that I never would have if I’d have just been filling out lines in a character worksheet.  And it would not have happened if I had been all author-y and self-conscious.  

Me: Your dialogue is absolutely charming and focused, 100 percent in character and it's part of what makes your first book such a keeper. Do you approach dialogue crafting differently than description crafting or when you create action?

Linda: First of all, thanks.  That means a lot coming from you.

Dialogue is easier for me to slip into than, say, action.  I talk a lot.  And a lot of my talking is about what other people have said.  I talk about talk.  What I don’t do is describe action.  Never was I the kid shooting hoops in the driveway, doing play-by-play on my every move.  So, when I need to get a character up a ladder and onto an elephant, I labor over every footfall, every waver in balance, every handhold on the elephant’s reins.  (Do riding elephants have reins?  How do you hold them?  Where do you put your hands?) I live in my head. I don’t instinctively know the language of motion. More importantly, I haven’t developed an eye for editing action down to the gesture that implies the whole.  Does that make sense?  And when I write action, I feel as though I am looking AT it and attempting to describe what I see.  That is a step removed from my best writing.

Dialogue is often my best writing, because I am not listening to it, I am speaking it.  I feel it.  There is no remove.  In the case of the major characters, I AM those characters while I write.  It is being, not observing.  And minor characters I experience through one of my characters.  It doesn’t really matter what a salesgirl at The Gap would say.  What matters is what my MC would hear her saying. 

Me: Do you have any tips about writing conversations?

Linda: I think that the worst thing we can do when we write dialogue is forget that our characters have a history.  I’ve read (and written) many a scene of dialogue in which two longtime friends have a perfectly generic conversation about some plot point or other.  Longtime friends have a shorthand for things.  They speak in private jokes.  They tease.  They sidestep.  They shield.  We don’t want to write dialogue in which every sentence needs to be decoded for readers, but we also do ourselves a terrible disservice if we spend a paragraph talking about how Celia and Bix have been best friends since kindergarten and then have one say to the other “Hello, Bix.  How was your big date last night?”  “It was okay.  He wasn’t my dream guy.”   Anyone could say that.  And Celia and Bix wouldn’t – unless it is their own private joke to discuss difficult topics as if they were characters out of 50s sitcoms.  Which would be pretty cool, actually. 

I also try to remember that actions may tell us more about who a character is, but the words they use tell us who a character wants to be – or at least, who they want you to think they are. 

The last thing I want to mention is that dialogue not only allows us an opportunity to see how people connect, it is a great way to illuminate the disconnects between us.  We misunderstand each other.  We need things repeated.  We talk over and past one another.  And we hear what we want to hear.  Remembering this can add complexity to the structure of dialogue and – if used sparingly – is one more tool for underscoring the importance of a particular moment or theme.

Me: Where you always brilliant? 

Linda: I have not felt brilliant since I was a child.  As an adult, I have felt shiny from time to time.  I think I need to try a different moisturizer.

Me: When you read a book what is it that you want to see in dialogue?

Linda: I don’t want to see dialogue when I read.  I want it to be so much in keeping with the character and the mood and the narrative that I am unaware of it as that function of literary expression which we call dialogue.

But when I reread, I love watching how economical the best writers are with dialogue.  I love how they can move the plot, deepen the characters, establish a mood, underscore a theme and still craft a conversation that seems real and honest, never once making you aware of the author behind it all.

When you write dialogue on the page do you hear it in your head?

Yes, absolutely. I can see and hear the characters very clearly, to the point that if someone is saying something funny, or smiling, or grimacing, I usually am, too (this is why it is a good thing that I mostly work from home). Obviously book dialogue, like movie dialogue, needs to be dramatic and pointed, but if you can't imagine someone saying it out loud, it doesn't belong in your book. That's always been my rule of thumb.  

 Is there something that writers make dialogue do that they shouldn't?

A huge rookie mistake (that I have been guilty of myself) is to "over-tag" dialogue: "he retorted angrily," "she snapped thoughtfully," and etc., etc., etc. I always tell my students that 90% of dialogue tags should simply be "said," as it's the ultimate invisible tag. Save your retorts and snaps and yells and squawks for special occasions. Further to that, if you're doing your job, it should be clear via language and *body* language how someone is feeling--so be wary of excessive adverbs (which I think is true of non-dialogue writing, as well).  

Oh! Another thing I tell my students to watch came to me from the brilliant Tim Wynne-Jones, which is to avoid over-using dialogue as a means of "information dumping," ie: "hello, brother of my father's sister who went to college for veterinary medicine but dropped out after developing a gambling problem...."

There's always a temptation to cram exposition into dialogue but to do so is to give in to lazy impulses. 
 

Do you have any tips on how to be better at writing conversations?

Watch a lot of tv! Seriously. You can see what a good, concise back-and-forth is via most television (even reality tv, where the sound bite is king). Listen in on conversations around you. 

Resist the urge to over-write--dialogue should serve a purpose, either to forward the narrative, provide *some* exposition, or illustrate characterization. Don't let conversations go on just because you've fallen into a nice rhythm of writing. Or rather, have fun with it--but be willing to cut afterward.  

In your books how do you use dialogue? Is it to propel plot? To influence readers? To show character? Create conflict or humor? All of the above?

I suspect I accidentally answered that question above. Dialogue should definitely do all of those things. Each scene needs to take you somewhere in the story (or inside your characters' emotional journey), and  dialogue should reinforce that. I also love the idea of creating a character through his or her dialogue, ie: specifically the language that he or she uses. I definitely feel like I've gotten to a place of extreme comfort within a project when I can look at a line of dialogue I've written and think, "Oh, [Ari] would never say that." You should know what your characters would and would not say, I think, if you're grounded in your work.  

Do you like writing it or dislike writing it?

I do like writing it, although when I have to write an emotionally charged scene my mass-market roots tend to show--I'm quick to fall into melodrama. A lot of voices trembling and faces white with anger. I always have to go back and pare those exchanges down once the scene is complete.  

Philip Roth wrote: "My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets / no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!" Do you think this is true? Do you think that writers think this is true?

I think this is true--that words are weapons but also gifts. Being as articulate as possible at all times has always been very important to me--it just about *kills* me if I can't come up with exactly the word that I'm looking for in a given situation. And yes, some stories are much more plot-driven than language-driven (many of my own), but I think all in all that writers are interested in communicating precisely via the written word. I am always urging my students to strive for specificity of language: it adds depth, complexity, humor, emotion, nuance--all the good stuff you're looking for no matter what genre one writes. 

Micol Ostow worked as an editor at several major New York City publishers before leaving two years ago to pursue her writing full-time. Her novel, EMILY GOLDBERG LEARNS TO SALSA, was named a NYPL Book for the Teen Age, and she has a busy year coming up: her "election chick-lit" novel, POPULAR VOTE, releases from Scholastic Point in September, and her new paperback series, a private school story story told in blog format and utilizing innovative web content, THE BRADFORD BLOGS, launches in spring '09. Oh--she's also got a hybrid graphic-novel project called I'M WITH THE TRIBE: A GUY, A GUITAR, AND A DATE WITH (NON-DENOMINATIONAL DESTINY) coming out from Flux/Llewellyn in summer '09. 

When she is not writing, Micol is pursuing her MFA in writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and teaching YA writing through Media Bistro, Miami Dade College, and anyone else who'll pay her to natter on. She lives in NYC with her Emmy-nominated (!) producer boyfriend, Noah Harlan, and the most adorable French Bulldog in the world. 

 Linda Urban was a bookseller and marketing director for many years before embarking on the writing journey. Her first middle grade novel, A Crooked Kind of Perfect, was named a Junior Library Guild selection. Her picture book MOUSE WAS MAD is set to be released in 2009.

http://www.lindaurbanbooks.com/

http://www.micolostow.com/

carriejones

“One of the primary ways we were given besides writing to express ourselves is talking,” Agent Edward Necarsulmer with McIntosh and Otis told me.

To write a book without dialogues he said, “Deprives people of one of the only ways we can interact with each other.”

To shy away from dialogue is to limit your own tools as a writer, and it also limits your reader’s world when she or he steps inside your book. It limits part of our risk in searching for truth in  our story.

I interviewed Andrew Karre, acquiring editor of Flux, a young-adult imprint of Llewellyn about dialogue. I also interviewed award-winning author, Rita Williams-Garcia. Here is what they said, with Rita going first:

Rita, you are one of the best writers of dialogue I've ever met. So, how do you do it? Do you hear it in your head when you write? Do you become the characters when you write? Do you act things out?

Dialogue comes from listening.  Hearing how it sounds and trying to replicate it without the ums, ers, gaps and that whole issue of nothingness that real talk tends to cover.  In my pre-school years, my mother played jazz records when it was just us two.    The horns, piano, scat kings and queens would talk and she'd talk back.  “Talk that talk.”  “That cat’s sayin’ something.”  “Catch the ‘trane goin’ to Frisco.”  I’d always tried to hear it.  What I gained was an ear for the rhythm, inflection, and energy between the two and three artists engaged in “sayin’ something.”   So first and foremost, dialogue is an ear thing.  I read my work aloud and start cutting.  I listen for my characters while I'm first imagining them, or sometimes they shoot out of the gate faster than I can find a pen.  They come as they are; say only what they can say and I follow it like I’m following a Miles or Ella  solo. Where does that come from?  Why did he/she say that?  What did she mean by that?  And then I delve into character.  The more I understand, the more the voice is shaped.  I give myself the freedom to withhold, which creates a better energy.  The other players or characters’ voices become apparent.  I play one off the other and hope they’re sayin’ something and not just yakking.

Are there certain decisions you make when you write dialogue? Any that you are proud of? Any that you regret?

Honestly, I listen and I write.  I start with the purpose of the scene, but stay open to whatever Akilah, Leticia, Gayle and Delphine have in mind.  The thing I’m most proud of is not resisting the force of character.  They know best, so I often play catch-up to get there with them.

As for decisions, the real work of writing dialogue gets done with the blade of El Zorro.  There is nothing like a good cutting to make your dialogue sing. My regrets are about concessions I make toward grammatical correctness during editing.  Rosemary (editor) is good about this stuff and always asks, “Preserve for voice?”  Correctness can read like the character has had an out-of-body experience with the scene.  I also ditch the speech tags during a reading.  They annoy me.

Do you think writers can learn to hear dialogue voices that aren't the same as their own voice? What I'm thinking about is how every once in awhile I'll pick up a book and every character no matter what their gender, socio-economic class, age, race or religion sound exactly the same. The poor white truck driver sounds just like the Haitian political science professor. How can writers avoid that trap?

Writers must hear dialogue voices that aren’t the same as their own.  We can eat and identify different varieties of cheeses and chocolates.  Even within a musical genre, we know Schubert from Wagner.  Aretha from Mary J. Blige. Why can’t we hear voices outside the familiar?  The trick is to delve into character.  If you can wholly imagine a person outside of yourself, you can hear the voice.  It’s about what you’re willing to invest in your characters, but also knowing what to withhold.  The filling up of mind with character is for your writing benefit.  I’m a firm believer in meditation.  I spend a lot of quiet time with my characters that will never make it onto the page.  But I research.  I try to know a day-in-the-life as well as events from their parents’ early lives.  These things never make it onto the page, but the characters resonate.  There’s subtext to the words because they run deep, even if we don’t exactly know where they come from.

Ani DiFranco wrote:

“Life is a B Movie: it's stupid and it's strange, it's a directionless story, the dialogue is lame, but in the 'he said she said' sometimes there's some poetry, if you turn your back long enough and let it happen naturally.”

I know you do a ton of research prior to writing, but is there ever a sense of turning your back and letting your characters speak during dialogue and then turning around, looking, and finding the poetry there?

You like Ani?  I went out with a sound engineer who gave me two Ani DiFranco CDs.  The guy is Black History but I’ve got my Righteous Babe CDs.

If you pay attention to the characters you imagine, they always speak their truth.  They remain true to their own nature, even when you don’t realize the cool thing they’ve said.  When you read your novel two years later, you’ll find streams of truth that while you didn’t consciously include, they’re present because you’ve stayed true to character.  I’m finding connections between Leticia, Trina and Dominique (JUMPED), long after I’ve turned in the copyedited version.  I’m learning now, just how true the dialogue is.  Truth has such a long and deep reach.  It extends beyond the writer.  You’ll think you’ve found the poetry of your own work but it isn’t for you to find.  You’ll get letters from students working on papers, citing your work to support their project because, “Aha! There it is,”  in your characters’ words.  During the imagining and writing you let the characters go and be who they are; you still have to shape, cut, direct.  You, writer, are never excused from that.

This is Andrew. He is dressed up for Halloween. Hopefully, he won't pull all my books because I've posted this picture, which was originally posted on the Flux blog.

When you read dialogue on the page do you hear it in your head?

I suppose I do if it’s good, but it’s not like an audio book running in my brain. It’s a tricky question; if we are speaking of first person narration, I like to “hear” a version of the narration that I’m reading. I like to find a relationship.

Is there something that writers make dialogue do that they shouldn't?

Well, they shouldn’t use dialogue to carry emotional weight that it simply can’t. It would be an enormous task for an author to make me believe that her character becomes more articulate and eloquent when she’s emotionally overwhelmed—that simply goes against what I know of human behavior. I think authors forget that people communicate nonverbally a lot more when they’re stressed and that they communicate rather badly. Very few people get chatty when the shit hits the fan—or if they do it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Alfred Hitchcock said, “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.” Do you think this is true? How does it relate to writing?

There’s a reason people call Hitchcock a genius.  That’s a much better way of saying what I just said. Authors have just as much control over the physical worlds of their books and the bodies of their characters as filmmakers. I think the admonition for any artist to take away from this quote is to control your creation fully.

http://www.timwynne-jones.com/pages/tenthings.html

http://www.fluxnow.com

http://www.ritawg.com/

Micol has offered to send a signed book for one of the commenters. Yes. FREE BOOK! To enter, all you have to do is comment on a post this week. I'll be posting a great interview with her and Linda Urban tomorrow.

Also, I'm giving away two of my books and a surprise gift that is cuddly. So, if you comment you are also entered into that drawing.

carriejones

Children’s book agent Edward Necarsumler and I had a discussion about dialogue last Friday.

Edward said, “You can often find out more about a character, a character’s situation and life in dialogue than multiple pages of telling.”

   			CLAIRE
               I can't believe you can't get me
               out of this...I mean it's so absurd
               I have to be here on a Saturday!
               It's not like I'm a defective or
               anything...

                       CLAIRE'S FATHER
               I'll make it up to you...Honey,
               ditching class to go shopping
               doesn't make you a defective.  Have
               a good day.

It's a perfect example of dialogue showing character and setting up backstory in a quick, meaningful way.

Don't talk to me, you are a defective and I am in pink.

But the problem, Edward said is how to create dialogue in a meaningful way for our stories rather than a stream-of-consciousness way.

 “Dialogue is very very hard to write especially for ages 10-12,” he said.

ACK! DIALOGUE?!? FOR 10-YEAR-O LDS !?!

For writers of children's books that isn't easy to hear. Of course, that doesn't mean we should give up. Dialogue is too important to lose.

According to author and teacher Marion Dane Bauer’s book What’s Your Story?: “Dialogue serves at least one of three important functions. In the best writing, it accomplishes all three at the same time.”

Those functions, according to Bauer, are:

1.      Giving the reader information.

2.      Revealing character

3.      Moving the story forward

 
“Dialogue is especially important in books for children because it’s also what can ground them in a story. Teenagers have their own language and their own terminology and their own way of exposing what it is to be a phony. Try calling a 14-year-old a square. They'll laugh at you. But 20 years ago when you were called a square it was an insult,” Necarsulmer said.

Who are you calling a square?

Part of joining the club of writing for teenagers, he said, is getting the dialogue. If not –nobody reads their book.

Bauer and Necarsulmer differ about one aspect of dialogue. Bauer writes, “Could you take it (the dialogue) out and leave the story unchanged? If you could, it probably doesn’t belong there.”

However, Necarsulmer believes, “Not every single conversation that occurs in a novel has to have direct meaning to exactly what’s going to happen on page 237, but at the same time you have to make choices.”

He doesn’t want a book full of nothing dialogue, however there are arguments to be made for the art and style of a piece and why or why not that conversation may belong.

“You can find out more about a family and its interactions with good dialogue than you can by saying, ‘My dad’s an asshole. My mom is neurotic… My sister is this…My brother is this…’” Necarsulmer said. “That’s detrimental to the book. We have less space and more to accomplish in children’s books and we have to propel the narrative arc. It can’t just be a sequence of events.  A lack of dialogue creates a sequence of events rather than a story.”

Kids deserve stories.

Angela Davis once said, “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at their roots.’” 

I think that’s true for dialogue. As writers we need to dig deep into our characters so that we can understand their worlds and what has shaped their words. This includes class, race, gender, religion, trauma, geographical location. It includes the brilliant details that make them zing. But to make those characters good characters, to make their words true, we have to go to the roots of who they are. It’s only then that we can make the right choices, the right dialogue for our characters and our stories.

Bauer says, “Dialogue is one of a fiction writer’s most important tools. Use it well and your stories will come to life.”

There’s a ton of papers and projects on the internet, which discuss the regionalization of dialect. Here are a few:

*Lay Language Paper on the NSP for the Acoustical Society of America
*The Do You Speak American? Project at PBS
*Linguistic Atlas Projects in the United States
*Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University
*International Dialects of English Archive at the University of Kansas
*The Pop vs. Soda Page

My favorite is the sound recording of a Maine dialect: http://web.ku.edu/idea/northamerica/usa/maine/maine1.mp3

Even though I live in Maine, I don’t sound anything like this, by the way. Also, it is a set piece where he is reading something in front of him. It’s interesting, though, to browse the site and just listen to the difference in voices, and try to see what you can discern about people’s character just by the quality of their voices.

Note: Edward is the children’s agent at McIntosh and Otis. Authors and illustrators he represents include Lynne Reid Banks, Nancy Garden, M.E. Kerr, Annette Curtis Klause, Sheila P. Moses, the Scott O’Dell Estate, Ed Young, Donald Sobol, and the estate of Fred Gipson and Madeline L’Engle. He also represents me.

 
And don’t forget, Micol has offered to send a signed book for one of the commenters. Yes. FREE BOOK! To enter, all you have to do is comment on a post this week.

Commenters are also entered into a contest to win my books, Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend and Love (and other uses for duct tape).

Book cited: Bauer, Marion Dane. What’s Your Story? A Young Person’s Guide to Writing Fiction. New York: Clarion Books, 1992.

carriejones

Here are some hints that Brown expounds upon in her chapter on dialogue. They are general, and assumptions /generalizations always worry me, but remember that it’s the exceptions that make our characters interesting:

1. The higher the class, the less emotion in speech and word choice.
2. The higher class guard what they say.
3. The higher class likes clauses.
4. The lower class talk with more emotion.
5. The lower class have shorter sentences or else their sentences are full of commas.
6. The middle class tend to be bland. They try not to offend.
7. The middle class are good at therapy talking, at describing emotional states and how people feel.

I wonder if you agree with those hints, or not?

This part interests me. It’s how our world, our occupations, our lifestyles are reflected in our word choice.

So, my truck driver dad is more likely to use phrases such as:

pedal to the metal,

hot and heavy,

batting the breeze,

and gear jamming.

My uncle who is a judge is more likely to say things such as:

perjured yourself,

chattels

appurtenant thereto

My best friend who is a middle-class mom and watches a lot of Doctor Phil is more likely to say:

 get in touch with your feelings,

down deep,

or maybe,

I’m sorry but…

 
According to screenwriter, Stephen J. Cannell, “One of the biggest mistakes that most novice writers make is to create characters that all sound exactly like they do. This makes for flat-footed, uninteresting dialogue.”

Again, Flux Editor Andrew Karre said, “Bad dialogue puts too high a premium on being “how teens really talk.””

I think that putting too high a premium on how classes talk can also be limiting if done with terror or out of stress. But the truth is, that in our worlds there are different classes interacting. If our novels or stories are meant to be slices or recreations or revisions of the world we have to be aware of class and personal background and how it affects dialogue.

Of course, as my agent Edward Necarsulmer says, there can be too much of a good thing.

 “I’ve also seen it go completely overboard in the other direction in a story where you have someone growing up in the trailer park and every other word is “ma this” or “ma that.” I know that there are other ways to explain our background and where we come from and how we interact with other characters and other worlds,” Necarsulmer said.

Basically, don’t try to hard to put it ALL In the dialogue. And make sure that if you are writing about a class that isn’t your own, that you write from a place of warmth and understanding, not a place of prejudice or ignorance.

 We owe it to our readers to have dialogue that enhances our characters and illuminates our characters’ backgrounds rather than being unbelievable or contrary to what we say the character is.

As writers for children we can’t ignore class diversity. We can’t ignore the fact that some people struggle for food, that some people struggle to keep their mortgage,  that some people heat their house with the oven opened wide because oil costs are so high. The process of empowerment comes through understanding and through exposure. If all our books are about the upper middle class and only have upper-middle-class characters (or only about the lower class, etc.) we are defining the world through our own solitary class interests. We deserve bigger worlds. Kids deserve bigger worlds. We must explore as we write. We must move beyond our own immediate circles.

There’s an old women’s rights/civil rights saying: We must lift as we climb.

 I think we must lift as we write. 

 To lift we must recognize and explore and go deep into our characters. We can’t be afraid of exploring class.

 The amazing thing about dialogue is that it’s a tool. It’s a tool we can use to make our stories better, not just to provide white-space, or to increase readability or to move the plot along. Dialogue can also lend depth and understanding to character nature. How cool is that?

Here’s an exercise. Write this scene: A popular cheerleader whose dad is a bank CEO and the lower-class, daughter of a Pentecostal preacher are both in the principal’s office because someone has written a bomb threat in the girl’s bathroom. Both girls were spotted going inside the bathroom and are about to be questioned. They are angry and upset. How do they sound? What words do they use? 

This week I’ll also post interviews with agent Edward Necarsulmer IV, of McIntosh and Otis; Flux Editor Andrew Karre, and authors Rita Williams-Garcia, Micol Ostow, and Linda Urban. They will all talk about dialogue.

Plus! Micol has offered to send a signed book for one of the commenters. Yes. FREE BOOK! To enter, all you have to do is comment on a post this week.

Brown, Rita Mae. Starting From Scratch. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

Cannell, Stephen J. http://www.writerswrite.com/screenwriting/exercises.htm

Andrew Karre can be found at: http://www.fluxnow.blogspot.com/

Edward Necarsulmer is the children's agent at McIntosh and Otis.

carriejones

This week I’m going to talk about dialogue. This first entry is going to be about class.

I grew up pretty poor. My parents were divorced. My dad was a truck driver who didn’t make it past fourth grade even though he is super smart. My mom, who is also super smart, never went to college, but she made sure I did.

So, I grew up poor, but I also grew up exposed to wealth. My uncle, a lawyer and a judge, had senators and governors over his house regularly. Every Thanksgiving I shared turkey with a cousin who went to Harvard law school and medical school. His dad helped create the measles vaccine. 

At one end of the table my truck-driver dad would be saying, “Then the motor? Just kaput.”

At the other end of the table, my sort-of-uncle would be saying, “The proliferation of HIV-positive women in Africa promises to be a problem of epidemic proportions. I’m really tremendously concerned.”

Two different speech worlds collided over turkey every year.

What does this have to do with dialogue, you’re probably wondering.

Listening to all those different voices in my family exposed me to a lot of different speech patterns and word choices. Listening to all those different voices made it hard for me to find certain dialogue in certain contemporary romances believable. It made me realize that class and background affect speech patterns and word choices. A lot.

In MFA classes and in blogs, I hear writers worrying a lot about how to sound like teens when they are not teens. They worry that when writing outside of their age they will fail

 It’s important, true, but what I don’t hear authors ever talk about is how to write outside of their socio-economic class.

 Yes, I said it: Socio-economic class.

 In the United States, we tend to pretend that there aren’t socio-economic classes. That there aren’t haves and have nots. Presidential candidate John Edwards talked about the two Americas a lot. People didn’t really listen or vote for him. Presidential candidate Barak Obama got into political hot water when he talked about the working class of Pennsylvania being “bitter” about the economy and “clinging” to religion and guns for stability. People called him ‘elite.’ Elite is considered a bad thing in politics. Then Hilary Clinton campaigned in the Pennsylvania primary and slugged back shots to prove she wasn’t elite. That she was regular.

I’m not endorsing any political candidate. What I find interesting is:

1. The attempt to pretend that presidential candidates are of the same socio-economic class as the voters
2. That the voters are all of one socio-economic class.
3. The animosity that’s created when it is revealed that there actually are classes in the American society.
4. How we try so hard as a culture to pretend that class differences don’t exist.

 So, once again, what does this have to do with dialogue?

Andrew Karre, the acquiring editor of the teen imprint, Flux, told me, “Good dialogue is unmistakable, but it’s hard to say why. I think it’s a combination of natural flow and true inventiveness. For instance, the dialogue in FEED (by M.T. Anderson) is a lot more interesting than the dialogue in a lot of books with contemporary, realistic teen settings—where the author was trying to “get it right” with reality. I think Anderson simply tried to make it beautiful. Bad dialogue puts too high a premium on being “how teens really talk.” I don’t think we read to hear how teens or anyone else really talks. We could simply go to the mall for that. I think we read to find a combination of inspiration and invention. When I read, I’m not asking myself, “does this sound like a teenager?” Rather, I ask, “Is the author making me believe this character talks like this?””

 
Part of what makes me believe a character is their language choice. And language choice has a lot to do with socio-economic class. As writers, it’s our responsibility to be cognizant of this.

In her book, Starting from Scratch, author Rita Mae Brown writes, “The difference between you and other people comes out in speech. Obviously, difference displays itself in the subject matter people talk about, but on a deeper, more subtle level, it displays itself on the way they frame their very ideas.”

 
To know our characters we must know how they talk. To know how they talk we must know their class just as well as we know all the details about them.

 
Hint: If all your characters speak the same way you speak it gets a little dull. No offense.

 
So, how do we do it? How do we show character class via dialogue?

Part of it is word choice.

Imagine Princess Elizabeth of the Made-Up Country of Usania. The paparazzi is following her as she strolls along the beach with her two-year-old toddler, Prince Poppyupants. They are asking very impertinent questions about the princess’ former lover, Mr. Happyhands.

PAPARAZZI GUY A: “Princess! Tell us about Happyhands. How happy were those hands? Huh?”

PAPARAZZI GUY B: “Princess, please illuminate us about your tawdry escapades and liaisons with one Jonah Happyhands.”

There’s a difference there, isn’t there?

The intent is the same, but the words are really REALLY different and they give us one of two notions:

1. Paparazzi Guy B is really poorly written by some incredibly wealthy writer who has no idea how the paparazzi talk.
2. Paparazzi Guy B is really, really wealthy and perhaps just posing as the paparazzi, or maybe he’s lost all his money, or maybe he’s trying to talk in the princess’ language or maybe he’s the prince incognito….We know he’s well educated. We know he understands the upper-class or is from the upper-class or is pretending to be.

Rita Mae Brown says, “Speech is a literary biopsy.”

A writer could explain to you that Paparazzi Guy B is wealthy by describing his amazing car, his better-than-your-average paparazzi’s camera, his expensive eyebrow threading treatments and hair replacement surgery. But instead, a writer could also do that, or reinforce that, with dialogue.

In my next post, I'll tell you a little more about Brown's class divisions and hints about how to illuminate character with dialogue.

This week I’ll also post interviews with agent Edward Necarsulmer IV, of McIntosh and Otis; Flux Editor Andrew Karre, and authors Rita Williams-Garcia, Micol Ostow, and Linda Urban. They will all talk about dialogue.

 Brown, Rita Mae. Starting From Scratch. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.