Tue 6 Nov 2007

Storytelling, part 2: Dialogue

Show, don't tell! Advice that is repeated frequently throughout the worlds of author blogs, writing advisers and reviewers. Yet, periods of discussion, real interaction between characters, stories are dull. Today, then, some thoughts about the role and advantages of dialogue in stories.

It is terribly important for a writer — whether in written or live medium, visual or audio — to convey more than just the appearance and actions of the main characters. They would like us to sympathise with the heroes, root against the villains, look forward to the return of the characters in slightly secondary roles. In real life, we experience each other through multiple senses. Not just sight and clinical analysis. Sounds, touch, unconscious behavioural observations (usually we can see a difference between the girl who is interested in a guy and the one who is trapped listening to him, even if we can't necessarily say why it's different).

In stories, we don't have the full sensual experience. We cannot pick and choose what to observe. We are told what the author of the written word chooses to tell us at that moment. We are shown only what is in the frame of the camera lens, at a pace determined by the director. We see only what is in the painting before us, not what else the artist used as their inspiration for the picture. Consequently, it is up to the storytellers (writer, director, actors, illustrators) to judge what is the necessary information needed for us to pick up the essence of the characters.

More is left unsaid than shown. Sometimes we get the feeling that not enough is covered, sometimes we are sick of being told about a particular character's background in "casual conversation" with other characters. Books, plays, films are of limited length and our imagination is quite good at filling in the rest, so the trick is to give the imagination enough to work with.

For me, good character interaction is often supported by good dialogue. I don't know which comes first. Good dialogue can sometimes mean very little talking at all, but the words are significant. Here, though, I want to highlight a few modern examples of what I think are good verbal exchanges that succeed because of their length, rather than because of their brevity.

Aaron Sorkin and Josh Whedon. In the television industry, both are acknowledged as excellent writers in different ways. Sorkin, particularly in The West Wing (which he wrote up until the fifth season), and Whedon, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, used well crafted verbal exchanges to bring out their characters' features. They were idealised characters; we didn't know anybody quite like Toby Ziegler, Josh Lyman, Willow Rosenberg, Anthony Giles, or Malcolm Reynolds, but we knew people with some of those traits and could believe in the person on the screen.

Sorkin's West Wing conversations tend towards complex sentence structures and impossibly well-crafted sentences are arguments, delivered in often harried or frustrated fashion as the characters raced around saving western democracy. Nobody speaks like that off the cuff, but this is compressed information delivery. In real life, we filter out the "umms" and "aahs", the pauses and false attempts at sentence construction. In television land, we can accept not being exposed to them.

Whedon's Buffy characters, particularly the ones like Willow and Giles in the early season episodes, tended towards a more self-mocking and share-the-fun style of conversation. The sometimes awkward delivery (not awkwardly delivered, but the character speech patterns) and trailing out into silences at the end of conversations reminded us of similar sorts of people we all know. We took the bits that look familiar — strong thoughts, polite delivery, quiet listening — and filled in the parts of the characters we didn't necessarily know about yet.

Both these television series used compressed, overly perfect delivery to make up for the fact that there wasn't a lot of time to tell the story and we were hostage to the director's pace.

Books, on the other hand, have the alternate problem: we can read as fast or as slow as we like. We can vary the pace, according to our mood. However, we have a much more limited view into the current moment. Trying to conduct a verbal exchange between multiple characters often leads to confusion. Particularly rapid-fire exchanges. Either we get sick of reading "John said", "Jane said", "Phyllis said", or we lose track of who's speaking and end up mentally assigning the different sides of the argument to the wrong people. Pulling off lively conversation in a group situation, even when the group is only two people, is something I admire in writers.

Science Fiction author and blogger-extraordinaire John Scalzi seems to do this well, amongst authors I've read a bit lately. Scalzi's storytelling abilities are pretty good. I've highlighted some of his work on this blog previously. On the odd occasion, though, he really hits it out of the park with dialogue (not always, but sometimes). In Old Man's War, there's a scene in the middle of chapter four, after all the old people have moved into their new bodies and are about to start training. A group, including the hero, John Perry, are sitting around in the cafeteria discussing their experiences and generally catching each other up on their recent lives. There's some dramatic irony present here: for the most part, we, the reader, already know a lot of this, at least from Perry's view. That just means we can focus on the conversation and mentally "listen" to the speech, picking up some feelings for John Perry, Susan, Maggie and Harry that lead into a fun chapter learning about those characters (in chapter six). When I first read Old Man's War, and even re-reading it later, those parts of the book struck me as fairly Whedon-esque dialogue in a good way. Almost inane banter, but it told us a lot without having to work at it.

At that start of Scalzi's The Last Colony, we have a few scenes between John Perry (again) and his assistance, Savitri Guntupalli. Savitri is possibly my favourite of all Scalzi's characters. She manages to be both competent and very human at appropriate moments throughout The Last Colony. In my head, though, she is one of the characters that I can really visualise. I can hear her accent as she delivers her one-line jabs at Perry (I have no idea what he sounds like in my head). The initial interaction between those two characters told us what Savitri was like and set her up for the rest of the novel.

(For those rushing out to now buy everything Scalzi's ever written, I've highlighted my two favourite examples. Not all of his dialogue is great, but his books are worth reading. They're fun.)

My final case-study of dialogue done effectively, for me, is in Greg Bear's Eon. I've written before that this is possibly my favourite book of all time. For a number of reasons, but the characters being excellently developed in the early parts of the story is part of it. Two characters in the book — the main hero, Patricia Vasquez, and a minor character, Coporal Pavel Minsky, of Russia — are both people who spend a lot of time in their head. Vasquez is a theoretical physics working on multi-dimensional topology issues and trying to work out how to interact with the real world and people in it. Minsky is a cynical communist trying to achieve his dream of getting into space without being just a tool of his government and, preferably, without destroying Earth.

Greg Bear manages to write both of these characters in a way that we don't always realise they are providing us with their own background. It's written from a third-party perspective, but it's an omniscient viewpoint. We are told what the characters are thinking, feeling, intending. Without being really told. We experience it along with the character in most cases. This is difficult to describe (for me), but if if you read a book where the author tries to put you inside the head of more than one of the characters, it's not always done well. Somebody ends up almost doing a Maltese Falcon style of monologue: "It's a cold night. I'm hungry. My shoes are too tight. I decided to have a sandwich and take a load off." I never think that way. It looks very transparent when a written character tries to. In Eon, a talented author manages to avoid the problem with two very introspective characters.

For those who know the book, or are intending to read it at some point, I will also highlight the series of exchanges between Pavel Minsky and Gary Lanier when they are negotiating in the middle of the book as another good example of dialogue contrasting the perspectives of the two men, whilst reinforcing that they are both intelligent and humane. I'll also mention that Bear undoes a lot of my goodwill towards his abilities at omniscient style with the character of Olmy, which I don't think is written particularly well and who does something think in retrospective monologue. Nobody's perfect.

As a parting thought for this part, I would like to raise this point: why are quotes so often used in newspaper articles? For topics that we don't know particularly well (exclude, say, national politics, where the speaker's name lends credence to what they are saying), does it really matter if we know that Dr. Bob said "I think this is a critical breakthrough in artificial kneecaps", as compared to a more passive statement that "doctors believe..." Partly, it's usually a nicer style to stay active, rather than passive in short pieces. Also, I have a hunch that it emotionally causes us to connect with the story. The journalist, our proxy on the scene, has brought somebody to life that is connected with the project. The short segment of dialogue adds a touch of real person to what otherwise might be just a recitation of facts.

Dialogue works like that. It evokes a reaction within our brain that is different to passive description, no matter how evocative. It can backfire horribly (bad dialogue destroys!) or keep a long scene alive. Think about that the next time you wade through an overly long descriptive section about the bad guy's one arm and patched eye. He could have told us himself, but not in so many words. If only we could have heard him speak!

Topics: entertainment/storytelling