OK. More dialogue today.<\/p>\n
Three little bits of housekeeping first.<\/p>\n
Number One<\/strong>. The Summer Festival was such a massive hit, we\u2019ve decided to bring that vibe into our JW membership package \u2013 lots of regular, live material, from a whole range of different, brilliant speakers. You can see our autumn line-up here. We\u2019ll be making big plans for next year as well. There\u2019s no extra cost for any of this \u2013 it\u2019s all free within your membership. Hooray.<\/p>\n Number Two<\/strong>. We\u2019ve always been keen to help people where we can and, to celebrate the end of the Summer Festival, we\u2019re going to give 10 under-represented writers free memberships for a year. More about how to enter at the end.<\/p>\n Number Three<\/strong>. We got into a fight with Jeff Bezos last week \u2013 and lost. Your email this week comes on a Friday. Next week, it might be either Thursday or Friday, and it will sizzle with good things.<\/p>\n Right. Nuff of that.<\/p>\n Dialogue.<\/p>\n I was going to offer up a couple more snippets with comments this week, but I picked one to start with, and that one ran away with me.<\/p>\n So just one snippet this week. Take a look at how contrary, how twisty this one three-hundred word chunk is. Look at how silence can operate in the same was as actual dialogue. How silence can push back at the reader, at the listener. And how the real thing being revealed by dialogue isn\u2019t so much the content of what\u2019s being talked about as the emotional reactions of the speakers to that content.<\/p>\n Here goes:<\/p>\n REBECCA \/ NO TITLE<\/strong><\/p>\n Ida has recently lost her hand and had a vicious go at her best friend as a result of which she has locked herself away in her room. She set her maid outside her door to stop people from entering but her lover, who is also a military General, has come to see her.<\/em><\/p>\n The door clicked shut and a momentary silence fell over the room. Why was he here?<\/p>\n “If you’ve come to lecture me then you are too late,” she said. “I’ve already had enough lectures for the day.”<\/p>\n It wasn’t true. She hadn’t had any. Agatha had come yesterday and given her an earful. She had told her ‘This is not how a young woman behaves\u2026’, and ‘You should know better than to be so vulgar in public\u2026’, that she had ‘\u2026been raised to be more tactful’. They were nothing new, but coming from the woman who was more of a surrogate grandmother made them sting just as much as if Agatha had taken Ida over her knee and smacked her.<\/p>\n “That is not the reason I came,” he said. “Though all I will say on the matter is while Vastian was clearly not thinking when he opened his mouth, your outburst was inappropriate.”<\/p>\n Her fingernails dug deeper into the wood of the chair.<\/p>\n “No, the reason I came is to tell you, in case you didn’t know, he’s gone.”<\/p>\n There was a tightening in her chest. She did know. Aidric did not need to elaborate. She had woken early that morning and gone to her balcony for air. From there she saw Vass leave on his horse, its saddle bags heavily laden.<\/p>\n “I know,” she said.<\/p>\n “He’ll be back.”<\/p>\n “I doubt it.”<\/p>\n Vass had only done what any sensible person would do if their friend had treated them in such a way.<\/p>\n “Of course he’ll come back. Friendships don’t end because of one argument.”<\/p>\n No, she guessed they didn’t. Still this felt more final, worse than an argument.<\/p>\n My comments<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n The reason I picked this is because it\u2019s a really nice example of how fluid and mobile and surprising even quite a short piece of dialogue-led text can be. It\u2019s also a good example of how silences can register as effectively as sentences.<\/p>\n Take the silences first.\u00a0<\/p>\n When Aidric enters the room, he says nothing. The question looms, \u201cWhy was he here?\u201d. That\u2019s a question for the character, of course, but it becomes one for the reader too. The silence is a little marker of the question\u2019s importance. It\u2019s like there\u2019s something too holy, too important, about the question for it simply to be asked out loud.<\/p>\n And, crucially, if you set up a question like that, you have to not answer it \u2013 or not answer it quickly.<\/p>\n So instead, the speaker turns her back on the question. Instead of saying, \u201cWhy are you here?\u201d, she starts telling him about lectures.<\/p>\n Then, the passage that follows turns its back on the character\u2019s own statements. (\u201cIt wasn\u2019t true. She hadn\u2019t had any.\u201d) Then proceeds to give a true statement of events.<\/p>\n So we start with a legitimate question about her lover\u2019s presence. Then the character bats that question away with what she says. Then the text bats what the character says away, and takes us off into a little surrogate grandmother moment. (That grandmother moment has one bad sentence, by the way. The sentence starting \u2018They were nothing new \u2026\u2019 is a bit of a mess grammatically. That happens weirdly often when a sentence gets over a certain length \u2013 this one is 34 words. The trick, of course, is editing with care and paying extra attention when a sentence starts to feel unwieldy.)<\/p>\n But, OK, we\u2019re now one hundred words into the snippet. The original question is still hanging, of course, but it\u2019s got more urgency and interest than if we hadn\u2019t \u2013 twice \u2013 turned away from it. Its charge has been increased, not reduced, by the delay.<\/p>\n That\u2019s nice.<\/p>\n But then the military man drags the question back into the room \u2013 but still backwards. (\u201cThat\u2019s not the reason I came. Though all I will say on the matter\u2026\u201d)<\/p>\n So now we \u2013 the character and the reader together \u2013 know the real reason is about to emerge.<\/p>\n Time for another silence. You need to approach these big moments slowly.<\/p>\n As it happens, I don\u2019t like the \u201cfingernails dug deeper\u201d bit. To me, those sentences feel like authorial shorthand, a type of clich\u00e9. (\u201cOh, shucks. I\u2019ve got a moment of unbearable tension coming up. How do I signify that quickly? Oh yes. Fingernails digging into something. That\u2019ll do. Bish bosh, OK, what next?\u201d)<\/p>\n All the same, I like the silence. We just need any little trench between Aidric\u2019s first comment (\u201cThat\u2019s not the reason I came\u201d) and the comment that follows. We just need a way to extend the reader\u2019s suffering.<\/p>\n Lovely. And even better \u2013 that comment, \u201cShe did know.\u201d This whole passage has played a kind of double game with us. The passage presents as though something of great significance is about to be revealed. Only \u2013 ta-daa! \u2013 it turns out that the protagonist is already well aware of it. And presumably was well able to guess what Aidric was about to tell her.<\/p>\n Now all this might seem like a damn stupid way to convey information, except that the passage isn\u2019t really there to convey information about the departed Vass at all.<\/p>\n I mean, yes, the reader needs to know that Vass has left. And it does the job, right at the end, by saying, \u201cshe saw Vass leave on his horse\u201d, nice and clear and simple.<\/p>\n But really, that piece of information is secondary to the question of how does Ida feel about it? And that question doesn\u2019t have a nice, simple, tidy answer. Ida is in a muddle and so is the text. She evades the question, she lies, she goes silent, she delivers information well after it was logically time to release it. And that\u2019s how Ida feels.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what dialogue does. It doesn\u2019t just tell readers how Ida feels, it shows them. And the twisty, resistant, contradictory untruthfulness of the dialogue is reflective of a complicated mess of feelings in Ida. There\u2019s no way you could tease those feelings out any other way.<\/p>\n Dialogue? I love it. It\u2019s probably my favourite-favourite thing to write and I have a lot of favourites. That\u2019s all from me.<\/p>\n I\u2019m going to saddle up my horse and ride away from this castle. I\u2019m pretty sure there\u2019s a ghost in the Great Hall and its battlements smell of raven poo. Giddy-up.<\/p>\n