I'm a dialogue junkie. The first thing I look for when I read a novel is quotation marks.
If I don't see any by page 2, I'm out of there. I like to be inside my characters in a scene and see, the way it looks
and smells to them. You learn this by constantly describing people and scenes
in your mind all day, wherever you go. When you meet someone with a
characteristic you can use, describe them in your journal. When you write
dialogue, you are the character, playing out the scene.
Most
people use clichés when they speak, according to their culture. I live in the South, and one of my favorites is, “He’s a hard dog to keep under the porch.”
“Back in the day” is used too much. I save it for people I don’t like. When
teenagers are relating a conversation, they often start with, “He goes…” and
then, “I go…” I like to give pet expressions to my characters. The sheriff’s
wife in my book, Maddie’s Choice, is a loud, buxom woman who ends a lot of
her sentences with “So to speak,” and has Maddie doing it sometimes.
Since I write women’s lit with romance, I create,
first, a female and a male main protagonist, and I’ll probably write in each
one’s point of view, which means I have to know the character intimately before
they speak—be in tune with the emotions governing their speech, as well as
their background and culture. How do they feel at that moment? Okay, here’s a
for instance from my romance, Maddie’s
Choice, set present day, at an Arkansas cattle ranch.
Maddie
Taylor is from New York, a successful writer of romances and has inherited half
of the ranch. She’s just driven in and
is greeted by a very unfriendly crowd of cowboys. Clearly she’s not welcome. We’ve
already met her in New York so we know how she’s looked forward to living on a
ranch, yearning for real friends. Disappointed almost to tears at their
attitude she loses her temper and explodes into a rant. Feisty Maddie has a
smart mouth. Her speech will reflect her background as a successful writer,
educated, with a large vocabulary at her command. She’s just been told Uncle Gid said she’s some
Bimbo who just wants to take the money and leave.
Fueled by anger, she planted her bright red
boots solidly, put her fists on her hips, and raged, “Whoever implied that is a
sexist, judgmental, bigoted ignoramus who doesn’t have a clue, and has no
business giving opinions on subjects about which he knows nothing. Where might
I find this paragon of Western wisdom so that I might enlighten him?”
“Right here, ma’am. You have somethin’ to
say to me?”
The deep voice came from right behind her,
full of challenge, loaded with sarcasm, and entirely too close. She turned and
looked into the eyes of Mister Sex, himself.
“I’m here to stay. Now, deal with it.”
“Well, hell.”
This is
Gideon, the other half-owner, who has decided not to like her, although she
excites him. He’s street-smart and his speech reflects his gender. When he’s at
a loss for words, he often says, “Well, hell.”
The
following are snippets from a conversation Gid has with Pete, the grizzled
senior citizen, foreman of the ranch for years and surrogate dad to young,
orphaned Gideon. By now we know that Gideon is a damaged war veteran with PTSD
and although yearning for love, is afraid to get close for fear he’ll hurt
someone. In this scene, Gid is sitting alone in the barn, depressed after
another argument with Maddie, nearly drunk from a bottle of wine. Pete enters.
“Gid, what are you doing here? I thought you
were with Maddie?”
Gideon gestured with the bottle. “Here, it’s
some wine I found I the kitchen.”
Pete accepted the offer and took a drink.
“Jesus,” he gasped, coughing, “what is this stuff?”
“Chardonnay. Maddie bought it for the party.
She says New Yorkers drink it.”
Pete grimaced. “It wouldn’t be my poison of
choice. Hell, I don’t like grapes on a bunch, why would I like ‘em in a bottle?
Guess it gets the job done, though.”
Gid got to the point. “I don’t know a damned
thing about women.”
“Women are different ‘n men,” Pete agreed
with a nod.
“Ain’t that the damned honest truth?”
Gideon
goes on to explain his latest dust-up with Maddie, his confusion, and despair.
Pete tells him his problem. “Hell, boy. You’re already half in love with
that woman.”
“I don’t believe in love. People don’t have
it in them to give. This man-woman thing is all about sex. There’s no such
thing as love. How would you know, anyway?” He raised the bottle to his lips
“You’ve been married to Bea for more’n fifty years. Do you love Bea?” It took a
lot of wine for him to find the nerve to ask that. A man his age shouldn’t be
ignorant of such things.
Pete thought a bit. “In the morning I wake
up, in this warm place that Bea and me made, with her curled up against me,
holdin’ on to me like I was the most important thing in her world. No matter
how my day goes, I know she’ll be there when I come home. The thought makes the
day worth living. That’s how I know.”
I could
have left the tags off all Pete’s speech because his words were so different
from Gideon, but they serve to pace the scene, so I left some on.
Don’t be
afraid of making your men human. There is a film I watch every time it is on TV
that does this to perfection. As Good As
It Gets, with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear. The men bare
their souls to each other in a heartfelt way that makes them no less men. The
realization that men speak differently when they are among their own was
pioneered by Paddy Chayefsky, a brilliant playwright of the 1950’s and his
breakthrough play Marty (1955). His style was termed “kitchen realism.”
In this
book Gideon’s army buddy shows up with the DEA when Maddie is kidnapped, right
before a gun battle with the local drug-smuggling motorcycle gang. Gideon’s
army friend is Australian. That needed a lot of research into Australian slang.
At the end of the last scene, after the gun battle, when Maddie’s life has been
saved by an Angus bull, he remarks, “If the bikey comes good, he’ll need a new
set of knackers. That bull made a mess of him.”
