A shimmering green gown & an unreliable smile

This week is a good and beautiful week, one of the best weeks ever.

And why? Because it is Week #3 of our Write with Jericho course. (Which is free and exclusive to Premium members.)

And just because we love ALL of you not just our lovely Premium Members, you can catch the replay of lesson one of the course for free. Enjoy the mighty Becca Day on adding BOOM to your scenes.

This week is all about dialogue and subtext and internal reflection, which are all things that are vast fun to play with and also vastly effective on the page.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten one of my scenes to death, so no more of that. Instead, I’ve picked up another scene from the same book. As before, I’ve chosen this at random – literally just moving my cursor at random through the text until it plopped onto some meaningful dialogue.

So: let’s review this little scene thinking about subtext. And internal monologue. And what the spoken words tells us about the two characters involved.

The scene is set in Fiona’s father’s study-cum-lair. Her dad is a former criminal, but charismatic and warm towards his family. Fiona’s in a bad head-place. She’s just been physically assaulted in her own home and has returned to her parents’ place for a sense of security. This is now late in the evening.

Bold text is from the scene. My comments in italics. I’ve shortened the text here and there, just for brevity.

Dad is talking about the security issues that his clubs have faced recently. Nothing out of the ordinary. The occasional idiot with a knife. The odd binge-drinker who gets violent.

That is: the scene opens neutrally. Whatever her dad is talking about has no relevance to the story.

I don’t premeditate the thought, just blurt out, ‘I know. I sometimes think I should get myself a gun. You never know what might happen.’

That’s all I say. A stupid thought that wouldn’t have lasted out the minute. But Dad’s on to it straight away.

‘What do you mean, love? You want to become an armed officer, is that it? Are detectives even allowed to carry guns?’

Now, there’s quite a lot of code going on here. The surface text is clear. Fiona says, “Should I get a gun?” Her dad takes that thought and remodels it as, “Oh, you want to become an armed officer?” (In Britain, police officers don’t routinely carry firearms.)

But there’s also subtext.

Fiona knows damn well that her father was (or is?) a criminal who may well have used illegal firearms in the past. So is her ‘blurted’ thought really just the expression of a woman in shock? Or is it a trial balloon sent up to see what her father might offer her?

And then the dad: he’s no shrinking violet when he comes to violence, but he (deliberately?) turns aside from Fiona’s obvious meaning to explore a legal / official way in which she might get access to a weapon.

I backtrack straight away. No, I don’t want to join some armed response unit. No, I can’t see the South Wales force thinking that DC Griffiths would be the right person to wave the heavy weaponry. No, it’s probably a stupid idea.

Notice here that there’s some implied dialogue which is just summarised, rather than written out in full. Rotating between direct speech and indirect speech is a way to keep the rhythm of your scene nicely varied. It’s also just quicker: Fiona’s backtracking would probably have taken up more page space than this quick summary.

Note that the dialogue has reversed already. First, she says, “I want a gun” and then she says, “No I don’t.” Fiona may be in shock, but she is very smart, very strategic. What is going on here?

‘You mean have a gun at home? A licensed thing? But you know, these days, you can get a shotgun or whatever for going out hunting. Air rifles, that sort of thing. But they won’t let people carry handguns. Not off a shooting range. And quite right too. The number of crazy people there are. If I could ban the whole damn lot of them, I would.’

But her dad isn’t dropping the idea, even though she just told him to. But he’s shifted it from, ‘Oh, you want a gun at work?’ to ‘Oh, you want one at home?’

The gun idea has become a little more personal, a little less official.

And this former gangster is saying he’d ban all handguns – really? Or is this cautious man, who has a police officer daughter, just playing things extremely safe in the event that someone was recording his words?

‘Yes, me too. I’m not really saying anything. Just, like you say, there are some idiots out there.’

Fiona is now steady with the ‘Oh, no, I don’t really want a gun’ message. But she did put the idea out there. And she did blurt the thought to perhaps the only person she knows who might be able to lay his hands on an illegal handgun. So how real is her denial?

‘You worried about something, Fi girl? If you are, you need to say. Maybe the police isn’t the right job for you. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re fabulous. CID bloody lucky to have you, never mind what I might have said. But you mustn’t take risks you shouldn’t, you know.’

Her dad has now crept from ‘armed officer’ to ‘licensed shooting range’ to ‘are you in trouble?’ He often uses a kind of burble of white noise – happy, positive chat – to disguise his strategies, and he does so here. But he’s saying: (A) don’t take risks, and (B) are you worried about something? That’s like any dad to any daughter … except that she’s a police officer and he’s a (former?) gangster.

He pauses, the shadows of our old arguments crossing our lamplit present.

His suspicion of anything to do with the police. His fear. My determination to pursue the career of my choice. Two obstinate people, digging in.

And to be fair to Dad – and I didn’t perhaps understand this as well as I should have done – he was worried about me too. He’s always been protective of me, doubly or trebly so during my illness and afterwards.  … even when my life was all put back together again, he felt that a career in the police force was absolutely the wrong one for me. Too much danger. Too much stress. Risks physical and mental. …

Anyway. The present pause compresses that whole debate into a few seconds of silence. It’s Dad’s way of saying that I can always quit the police, come home, take a job with him. My silence is my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Pa, but no way.’ Our argument unfolds in a few beats of nothing at all.

This is quite a lot of internal reflection that makes sense of the current pause. And this is a lot of revelation: more information than we’ve ever had on the father / daughter relationship during her troubled teenage years. Because the reader STILL doesn’t know what Fiona’s illness is, this scrap of text will be carefully scrutinised for any clues. And it emphasises her dad’s protective nature. And she just asked and then un-asked for a gun. What does a protective and criminally inclined dad do with that request/not-a-request?

Then it finishes. Finishes with a truce.

‘You look after yourself, love. If you need anything, you just say.’

‘I will, Dad. Thanks.’

This is a bland ending. Except that the subtext is still here. After all, the gun question hasn’t really been resolved. And Fiona could have chosen to respond to the ‘Are you worried?’ question, but she didn’t. If she had said – credibly – ‘no, I’m not worried’, then maybe the whole gun question could have been genuinely laid to rest. If she had said, ‘yes, I am worried’, then it would have looked like she was asking her criminal father for the use of a weapon.

But – both parties just evade the question. Lay it to rest with platitudes.

It’s bedtime. I feel oceanically tired. Tonight, I know it already, I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.

And – we’re done. ‘I’m going to sleep well. I’m home.’: that suggests some emotional issue has been settled … but we’ve just had a bit of dialogue that raised an issue – then denied it – then evaded it. What’s been settled?

Well, at this stage, the reader doesn’t know. But before too long, Fiona’s dad sends a workman round to her house to fix some cupboards that barely needed fixing. The workman chatted as he worked. In the course of that chatter, he mentions an unlicensed shooting range and gives Fiona directions on how to find it.

Fiona does indeed drive to the firing range at night and finds a gun laid out on a bale of straw. With bullets. She fires off a hundred or so rounds, trying to get the feel of the weapon. Then an unnamed man arrives, gives her some basic instruction in how to shoot. She leaves the range with the gun and ammo.

And by the end of this firing range scene, we finally know how to interpret that father-daughter gun conversation.

Fiona came to her gangster-dad and said ‘I want a gun.’

But gangster-dad can’t say to his police-officer daughter that, sure, he can find handguns no problem, so he evades the question.

Fiona, being a police officer, has to deny her own request, so she does – repeatedly.

The gangster-dad tests out various neutral options, none of which get an, ‘Oh yes, that’s what I meant’ from his daughter, so he asks her if she has fears for her safety.

She can’t say yes, because that would be like affirming that she wants a gun, so she evades. But she hasn’t said, ‘no, I’m not worried’, so gangster-dad comes away with three messages: (A) his daughter is afraid, (B) she wants a gun, (C) she wants an illegal, deniable weapon, because if she didn’t, they wouldn’t have had to go through that whole rigmarole.

And because gangster-dad loves his daughter and is very good at what he does, before too long a handgun is put into Fiona’s possession … but via a route that can’t possibly connect back to her the man who put it there.

REFLECTIONS

If you scan the italics and the bold above, you’ll see there’s way more of the former. And the beautiful lesson there is that subtext is much richer and more encoded than the text itself. To unravel the subtext, we need to spend more time and words than was present in the text itself.

And how enriching this all is!

A beautiful and unexpected plot strand is surfaced by this little bit of dialogue. (And of course, this illegal weapon ends up being used in the book’s climactic shootout.)

And our understanding of both characters are transformed by this little scene. Not necessarily during the scene itself – but once the handgun is produced, and we reconsider the dialogue that prompted its production, we realise that both these two characters are very strategic, very risk-averse – and vastly effective. Fiona asked for a handgun and her dad supplied one. And the two of them secured this outcome without ever saying anything that the Chief Constable him- or herself could take issue with. This is the first time in the series we see quite how subtle and potent Fiona’s dad is. It’s also the first time that we see quite how risk-averse he still is, even with his criminal past (probably) behind him. The whole incident adds a darkness, intrigue and depth to both characters … still without either of them having said anything so remarkable.

That’s the beauty of subtext and the beauty of dialogue. I love everything about writing, but if I could only go on a date with one aspect of it, I’d take Dialogue out to dinner, in her shimmering green gown and unreliable smile.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Once again, Feedback Friday comes straight from the Write With Jericho Course this week. Laura has asked you to:

Share 300 words from your scene, making sure to incorporate subtext and internal dialogue. You’ll get extra points the richer and yummier your subtext is. Once you’re ready, post yours here.

***

That’s it from me. I shall wear a smoking jacket in royal blue and bring with me a deck of marked cards and a two-headed coin.

Til soon.

Harry