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.