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Illusions of Dialogue
I came from a family of storytellers, I mean, gifted storytellers. They could pick you up and lift you into a tale like none other I have ever known. I apprenticed under them, and it made me the writer I am. I have been telling stories all my life and writing for most of my life, and at first, the storytelling didn’t translate to the written word.
If I wrote the story as I heard it, it always fell flat. There was no way to transfer the experience of telling a story to writing one. The teller has more tools.
Words don’t make the story. My grandfather had an eighth-grade education. He had a very basic vocabulary. But man, listening to him tell a story was an experience I cannot describe.
Well, I’m going to try.
It was not the words he used at all; it was the way he spoke. He used inflection like a master working a clay pot. He had a grip on the dramatics. He knew when to sip.
Have you ever been listening to a story being told by a truly gifted storyteller, and they stop to take a sip of their drink? There is magic in that moment. The entire room freezes. No one speaks. No one breathes. The sounds of the room drop down to nothing. The TV in the background turns itself down, and everyone waits.
The thing I learned from my uncles, grandfather, and mother is that it is not the words, the sound effects, or even the tone of voice. It is in the pause. The pause holds all the power of the tale. Conversation is this way as well. Magical moments wait within the breath between words. The rhythm of the speaking tells the story in a way nothing else ever could.
Think about great orators. The breaths they take and the way they pause are the magic of the speech.
You don’t believe me. You are looking at me like you don’t believe me. Okay, let’s look at any piece of dialogue. I’m a writer. I happen to have some on hand. Hold on while I get it.
Okay, I’m back. Did you notice that the period at the end of that last paragraph did not accurately convey the passage of time? Remember that. We are getting to that.
Now, in order to make my point, I’m going to show it to you bare bones and suck the illusion right out of the piece. Yes, my friend, there are illusions in every great piece of dialogue. That is actually why we are here. Just wait.
“I know, you make cheese. You’re a spy. Named Smear. Who makes cheese. Smear, the cheese maker. I would wager a guess that you’re the most dangerous cheese maker this country has ever known,” Rayph said.
“I’ll get better,” Smear said. Both laughed.
“I have to go. Got a thing to do. Thanks for the tea and what-have-you.”
This is the dialogue of a scene I have written. All the conversation is there. Every word of it. I have not changed a letter, not one piece of the conversation.
So, this is what we know now. Smear makes cheese. He is also a spy. He is dangerous and the country knows it. Rayph is leaving, and he has thanked Smear for the tea. We know that. It is right there. But the illusion of talking has been sucked out of it.
No one talks like this. This is totally unbelievable. Sadly, this is what I read a lot of the time. You can’t feel the cadence. You can’t feel the rhythm of the conversation. That is a major problem in writing because we are given crude tools to work with. We have a comma. That tiny piece of punctuation is supposed to imply a pause in the conversation. Well, it doesn’t. What would you say if I told you there is a long pause between the two phrases “thanks for the tea” and “what-have-you”? There is a pretty long pause there. Rayph also takes a breath for effect between the phrase “I know you make cheese” and the phrase “You’re a spy named Smear.” A pretty important pause lives right there. This conversation, like every one you have had, is riddled with pauses for effect and little breaths that give the dialogue meaning and make it worth listening to or reading.
In order to write real and convincing dialogue, we need to feel those pauses. They need to be there, but a simple comma or period will not do. It is too crude a tool. Go back up and read that piece of dialogue again. Feel how stilted it is and how clunky. Now, this is how it actually reads. This is the illusion I wove in it to give it breaths and dramatic pauses:
Rayph nodded. “I know, you make cheese,” Rayph said. “You’re a spy. Named Smear. Who makes cheese. Smear, the cheese maker. I would wager a guess that you’re the most dangerous cheese maker this country has ever known.”
“I’ll get better,” Smear said. Both laughed.
“I have to go. Got a thing to do,” Rayph said. He stood and drained his mug. “Thanks for the tea and,” he motioned to the cheese, “what-have-you.”
No comma in the world is going to change the first version into the second. But if we weave a little magic with tag placement, then we give the illusion of a pause. Look at the first line.
“I know, you make cheese,” Rayph said. “You’re a spy. Named Smear.”
Placing “Rayph said” in the middle of the speech makes the reader pause to read that tag. The thing about tags is they are almost invisible. If you are reading a well-written piece, you don’t even notice them. They blow right by you. When you read that sentence, you don’t even think of the tag. But you have to pause in the conversation long enough to read it. That one beat, the amount of time it takes to read that two-word tag, gives the reader just enough of a breath to make it look like the speaker stopped talking for a moment, thought about what he would say, and said it.
One tag did that. It was not punctuation. It was not a really long period or comma that created the rhythm of the speech. It was a tag.
Let’s keep looking. I want to take a minute and look at the last part of the dialogue. Let’s start here:
“I have to go. Got a thing to do,” Rayph said. He stood and drained his mug. “Thanks for the tea and,” he motioned to the cheese, “what-have-you.”
I needed a longer pause between “Got a thing to do” and “Thanks for the tea.” So, I broke free of the conversation and, just for a breath, described an action. In the time it takes to read that tiny bit of description, the speaker has taken a long pause. I do the same thing between “Thanks for the tea and,” and the line “what-have-you.” In that breath, he has looked at the cheese and has been unwilling to call it cheese at all. He instead calls it what-have-you.
But when I throw in that line of Rayph motioning to the cheese, it gives the idea that he had no idea what to call it. Was it cheese or some other disgusting thing that he ate? Without a pause right there, a break in the rhythm of the conversation, we don’t understand at all.
Great dialogue, like a well-told story or a perfectly orated speech, is filled with pauses for dramatic effect. We can’t use those pauses when we write a conversation, but by using brief spots of description or a well-placed tag, we can create illusions of that same effect as if we were standing in the room hearing Rayph and Smear talk about tea and what-have-you.
Pauses
There’s a book written by a master. His name is Dalton Trumbo. The book is called Johnny Got His Gun. It’s about an American kid who signs up to join WWI. A bomb lands on him. It takes out his arms and legs. Takes out his face, he can’t talk, he can’t see, he can’t smell. But he’s still alive. The government decides to do tests on him. He can’t even hear. He’s not even sure if he’s dead or not. The government decides to keep him alive and do experiments on him.
There’s a scene where a nurse comes in. She feels really bad for him, and she pulls up his shirt and on his chest with her finger she spells out the words Merry Christmas. The sun through the window touches his body enough and warms him up enough that he can tell when daylight has come and when night is passing. So for the first time, he is able to track the passing of days. And it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him in his life.
Of course he has imagined conversations with his father. He has dreams. And he’s having conversations with himself. So after a few years go by, he starts nodding in a certain pattern. The doctors can’t figure out why and they have a general look at him. And they figure out that it is morse code for SOS, Kill Me. They won’t do it, though. They decide not to do it.
The nurse comes in, and at one point in the movie she comes in and she strokes his penis until he orgasms, and it’s the first pleasurable sensation he’s had in more time than he can imagine. He doesn’t even know how to describe what’s happening to him.
Johnny Got His Gun made a huge impact on me. Partially because of my own mental health and the DID, and how I was sometimes trapped and unable to control my body and see the world I was walking through, and sometimes just because of suicidal fascination. Either way, it had a huge impact on me.
They made a movie. Donald Sutherland plays a Jesus-like character that talks to everybody during Basic training. In the patient’s delusions, reality is starting to warp itself, and his father becomes a carnival barker talking about him as one of the freaks.
I found the book, I’d like to say because I was so literary at the time. In fact, I was just a teenager who had no idea what was going on. But I actually found the book because of a Metallica video. Metallica, the heavy metal band, one of the members of the band’s father was in Vietnam, so war is a very big issue with the band. A lot of their early music deals with the subject. Anyway, after they read the book, they wrote a song called “One.” For decades it was my favorite song. I bring it up in this particular section of the lecture for two reasons.
During the video, they separate out images of what he’s thinking and what he’s experiencing, taken from clips of the movie. This is just like those pauses, because they show the band playing in between the clips. So this is just like those pauses. If they were to show the clips all together at the same time with the music put over them, they would have nowhere near the same impact. The impact would be so much smaller. But when they break up the clips like that, it’s like they’re pausing the clips and letting you think about what you’ve just seen. The band actually playing and performing the song becomes the pauses in the conversation like the dialogue we just read.
The other reason I wanted to talk about this Metallica song is that there is a certain part of the song where the entire band plays, pauses, plays again, pauses, in a staccato way that kind of symbolically shows both the beating of a drum, like they’re going into battle, and a pounding heart. But it all depends on the pauses in between.
Now this is a really hard song, and it’s a really aggressive topic to be dealt with but I’m gonna show the video anyway. In the end you’ll notice that they pull the curtains, they fired the nurse who’s become obsessed with him. They decide their experiments with him are done and they’re just going to keep him alive in a room with nothing. And in the book and in the movie, it symbolizes the fact that survivors of war, it never goes away. What they’ve seen and what they’ve done, it just never goes away.
It’s brilliant. It’s a brilliant book. Trumbo is actually one of the most amazing writers America has ever produced. And everything he wrote had a reason, had a meaning to it. There’s an edition of Johnny Got His Gun where he writes the foreword, and it takes place during the Vietnam War and he describes a scene where someone is reading the newspaper over breakfast hearing about the casualties in the war, and reading the numbers and how the numbers just don’t make sense.
Trumbo starts to take those same numbers and break them up into a different kind of understanding, saying things like, you’re eating your breakfast but you don’t realize that the number you just read, that you just dismissed, if they were to carve the heart out of every dead soldier you just read about and weigh them, then he tells you how many tons those hearts would weigh.
It’s an extremely powerful foreword to the book. Everything he wrote, he had a reason. Dalton Trumbo was brilliant. And I never imagined I’d be standing in front of people talking about him to be honest, and I never imagined I would be playing this video in a college class. But here we are. So we’re gonna play the video now.
If you don’t break up the clips from the movie with images of the band singing, you don’t have the kind of anticipation and impact that you would have. Pauses in the clips for other things creates the true power of the drama. Also during the instrumental section of the song itself there’s a beat of five, sometimes six, accented with a pause. Doubles as a rapid beating heart. In both of these ways, with the video “One,” pauses become extremely important, just like they are in dialogue.
You’re gonna find that in other aspects of your writing, pauses become very important as well. You can’t have a book that is just a series of battle scenes, just a series of sex scenes, you need pauses in between.
There’s an important aspect to writing that we haven’t covered yet, and I’m hoping we have time to get to. And that is pacing. You don’t want action, action, action, all the way through the story. You want times when the pace of the story slows down to let the reader catch up, catch their breath, and brace for the next run. That’s the entire thing pacing is about. And again, it’s all about pausing. A lot of people spend a lot of time talking about what you should have in your book and what you should do in your book. Not that many people spend time talking about how to stop and slow everything down.
Another thing they’re gonna tell you, another thing I’ve heard over and over again, is there’s an aggressive war against passive voice. I’m here to tell you that passive voice is not something you want to play with. It’s not something you want to use a lot. You should do your best to fight weak verbs that have you using more words than necessary and the same verbs to describe multiple different things. It was, had been, at this point you all know that passive voice is the enemy. But let’s for a second really look at why. Let’s look at why passive voice is the enemy of good writing.
Passive voice turns down the intensity of all the action, makes it less vibrant, less vivid. It makes everything less intense. So what if you write a heart-pounding, mind-crushing action scene and it goes on for like ten pages? You’re good with your pacing, so the reader is reading as fast as they possibly can. They’re completely carried away, and by the end of the action scene they are panting. I’ve seen it. It happens. I’ve done it. Read action scenes that actually take your breath away. So what if you write one of those? You need to slow everything down, let your reader catch their bearings and deal with what they just saw. They need to be given a chance to sink into a softer intensity before you bring them back into a hardcore read again.
So what if, in that small amount of time where you want to slow everything down and let the reader catch their breath, what if you use passive voice right there? Five pages where the reader is putting themselves back together again, and it’s all written in passive voice. The intensity of the read will drop through the floor. The reader will be able to catch their breath. Those five pages will ease all of the anxious energy that you’ve built and at the end you can start with the powerful, vivid verbs again and be building your next big intense scene.
You don’t wanna do more than five pages of it. But if you do, the reader won’t notice. They won’t be able to tell you why that small piece of the book calmed them down, because it’s hidden in the writing. But again, it’s just like a little pause. You’re pausing the intensity this time. And if you pick it up again, nobody’s gonna notice. And it’ll accomplish the feat that you’re trying to perform in giving everybody a break.
Pausing is just as important as running. Resting to let your body recover after an intense workout, or an intense week of workouts, is just as important as the workout itself. It’s the same thing with the reader who’s reading a really good book.
Reading Assignment
Reading Assignment for next class: “Collision” and “Mrs. Galvin” chapters from Teardrop Road.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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