Say What You Mean..or Don't Mean

One of the many beauties of being a student in creative writing workshops is that I'm able to read over various pieces. Each writer has their own strengths, but I'm finding--more often than not--most of my colleagues don't quite know how to use dialog effectively.

To be fair, dialog can be intimidating. The reason why? It can't be as straight forward as any of the other elements. Say you have a point in the story where you want to show the relationship between two characters begin to shift and fragment. Unlike setting, you can't just come right out and say that. You have to be subtle.

Within dialog there is what is being spoken and what is not being spoken.

• What is being spoken- the actual words between the quotation marks or in narration.
• What is NOT being spoken-thoughts, feelings, relationship, characterization which stem from what is spoken.

Wait a minute! I thought people do express their thoughts by what is spoken! Yes, sometimes we do, but think of it this way: If you're in a literature class offering your perspective on some assigned reading, you are expressing "thoughts" and "your thoughts", but not really your thoughts. If asked about the insanity of the character in Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell Tale Heart", you can speak your thought of "Well, he's crazy", but you're not expressing that you gave such a short answer just so you can get your quick five points of participation for the day. That is a "thought" that is NOT being spoken. See the difference?

What is not being spoken is subtext (sub-"beneath" text-"the written words") . Ah, subtext. This is what makes most conversations worthwhile.

It's really difficult to explain subtext without an example, so here's a sample conversation I had with my mom a few months ago about reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (for the sake of convenience, I'm going to condense it to script format).

Me: "One of the books I've been assigned to read is Frankenstein."

Mom: "By Mary Shelley."

Me: "Yes."

Mom: "I've heard it's a good book. You know what kind of family Mary Shelley came from? Privileged. Beyond privileged!"

Me: "Oh, cool."

Mom: "And can you imagine what her parents said when they read the horror of something like Frankenstein?"

What is spoken in the above example is pretty obvious, (so obvious that I doubt it needs repeating), but can you see what is not being said? By my mom telling me about Mary Shelley's privileged upbringing, and the "horror" of her parents' reaction to a gruesome story as Frankenstein, she is saying something about our relationship. Being that I've been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and recently Mary Shelley, my fiction has come to reflect their elements (dark, horror, romantic--as in Literature, not those "cheapies" you buy at the grocery store) . Most of the time my mother passes when I offer for her to read my stories. Reason? It's too dark and depressing! I suppose it's not surprising that my parents live in a cyclical questioning state of "what went wrong with this privileged child for her to write so dark?", but those unanswered questions aside, there is subtext there! My mom's not coming out and saying how she's upset and questioning "what went wrong", but she is expressing that at the same time by using Shelley as a filter.

Perhaps that example was a little too "dense". Maybe there's and easier illustration. Well, you're in luck because there is! This example is one that I commonly use for my colleagues on their critiques. Say you want to write a dialog exchange between two characters--one character is distraught, and the other is concerned--what would you write? Most of the time, they go to the following:

Concerned character: "How are you?"

While that's not entirely an incorrect execution, there is no subtext. It comes off as stale and/or has the tone of an elementary school type situation where conversations were based on surface level things. That's a problem when it comes to books and short stories. You are alloted a certain amount of words--you've got to make them count! Had I not written that the character was concerned, the reader would have no idea of the actual situation. Instead I suggest the following:

"Are you okay?"

When you compare the two examples, their differences are subtle. What is spoken is more or less the same, but what is not spoken could not be more different. Both examples are asking the same question,--what is the condition of the distraught character?--but if you look at the second one, the reader can put together that something is not quite honky-dorey.

Another thing that subtext is doing there is establishing the degree of a relationship between the two characters. There's some closeness there--the kind of closeness where distraught character has been able to text concerned character at three in the morning to go out for ice cream and not fear any chipping away of their relationship. Yet, if you take a look at the first example, the characters relationship has a much greater distance--almost as if they were coworkers who occasionally chatted while waiting to clock back in (surface level conversation at its finest!).

There are many other things that dialog can accomplish, but if there is no subtext, your story is as good as shot. Most readers run their peepers across stories to see how this human being character experiences or sees the world, and as a writer, if you fail to show a reasonable reaction and/or depth to what your characters say, the story will inevitably fall flat.

To echo what I've been told by all my professors, something like this just takes practice. I've attempted dialog since I was in sixth grade, and it wasn't until the last year that this light bulb finally came on. Give it time. The good thing about growing up around a talkative culture is that you're exposed to many different ways of saying the same thing. Harness it, and use it for your benefit!