Excerpt from Chapter 5: Dialogue Mechanics

Mr. [Robert] Ludlum has other peculiarities. For example, he hates the “he said” locution and avoids it as much as possible. Characters in The Bourne Ultimatum seldom “say” anything. Instead, they cry, interject, interrupt, muse, state, counter, conclude, mumble, whisper (Mr. Ludlum is great on whispers), intone, roar, exclaim, fume, explode, mutter. There is one especially unforgettable tautology: “‘I repeat,’” repeated Alex.”

The book may sell in the billions, but it’s still junk.

--Newgate Callender, The New York Times Book Review

Imagine you’re at a play. It’s the middle of the first act; you’re getting really involved in the drama they’re acting out. Suddenly the playwright runs out on the stage and yells, “Do you see what’s happening here? Do you see how her coldness is behind his infidelity? Have you noticed the way his womanizing has undermined her confidence? Do you get it?”

You get it, of course, and you feel patronized. You’re an intelligent theatergoer, and what’s happening on the stage is clear enough. You don’t need the writer to explain it to you.

This is exactly what happens when you explain your dialogue to your readers. Consider the following:

“You can’t be serious,” she said in astonishment.

If you’re like most beginning novelists or short-story writers, you write sentences like these almost without thinking. What could be easier than simply to tell your readers how a character feels? If she is astonished, you just say so.

When your dialogue is well written, describing your characters’ emotions to your readers is just as patronizing as a playwright running onto the stage and explaining things to the audience. “You can’t be serious,” conveys astonishment—no explanation is needed. And when you explain dialogue that needs no explanation, you’re writing down to your readers, a sure-fire way to turn them off.

And if your dialogue isn’t well written—if it needs the explanation to convey the emotion—then the explanation really won’t help. Say you’d written:

“I find that difficult to accept,” she said in astonishment.

Here the explanation does let your readers know that your character is astonished. But you don’t want them to know the fact, you want them to feel the emotion. The only way to accomplish that is to have her say something your readers can imagine themselves saying when they’re astonished. “I find that difficult to accept” doesn’t quite do it.

If you tell your readers she is astonished when her dialogue doesn’t show astonishment, then you’ve created an uncomfortable tension between your dialogue and your explanation. Your dialogue says one thing; your explanation, something slightly different. Your readers will be aware, if only subconsciously, that something is wrong. And that awareness will undermine their involvement in the scene.

Think about it. There are as many different ways to be astonished (or angry or relieved or overjoyed) as there are people. The way we react under the influence of strong emotion is one of the things that makes us who we are. If you tell your readers your character is astonished, all they will know is that she’s astonished. But if you show them how she is astonished through her dialogue or through a “beat” (a bit of physical action), they’ll know a little more about her. (“She dropped the whisk, splattering meringue up the cupboard door. ‘You can’t be serious.’”) It’s showing and telling again, applied to dialogue.

“You can’t be serious” also has a formality and coldness about it—compared to, say, “You’ve got to be kidding,” or “You pulling my chain, dude?” A character likely to say, ‘You can’t be serious,” is also likely to be prim, proper, maybe a little uptight. And if all her dialogue conveys primness, then your readers will get to know her character without your ever having to use the word prim. Think of it this way: Every time you insert an explanation into dialogue, you’re cheating your readers out of a little bit of one of your characters. Do it often enough, and none of your characters ever comes to life on the page.

Also, while most of your explanations will probably involve your characters’ emotions, be on the lookout for those that explain the content of the dialogue:

Percy burst into the zookeeper’s office. Their callous mistreatment was killing the wombats and he wasn’t going to stand for it.

“Is something wrong, sir?” the zookeeper said.

“Don’t you realize you’re killing those poor innocent creatures, you heartless fascist?” Percy yelled.

If the dialogue already makes it clear, then you don’t have to repeat it.

Your readers will get it the first time.

Of course, dialogue explanations are rarely as obvious as that. More often they take the form of –ly adverbs, as in:

“I’m afraid it’s not going very well,” he said grimly.

“Keep scrubbing until you’re finished,” she said harshly.

“I don’t know, I can’t seem to work up the steam to do anything at all,” he said listlessly.

Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence on the writer’s part, perhaps it’s simple laziness, or perhaps it’s a misguided attempt to break up the monotony of using the unadorned said all the time (more about that in a minute), but all too many fiction writers tend to pepper their dialogue with –ly’s. Which is a good reason to cut virtually every one you write. Ly adverbs almost always catch the writer in the act of explaining dialogue—smuggling emotions into speaker attributions that belong in the dialogue itself. And if your dialogue doesn’t need the props, putting the props in will make it seem weak even when it isn’t.