How to Write Killer Prose (18)

Dialogue again

            Last time we looked at the nuts and bolts of dialogue, and how to use action and punctuation to ventilate 'he said, she said' sequences. This week I'd like to look at the choices we make when deciding what our characters actually say.

            Dialogue performs several vital functions in fiction. Establishing character, creating atmosphere, providing backstory, guiding and driving plot, etcetera. When we go to dialogue we move up a gear. I see people in bookshops thumbing through the pages of novels. When choosing passages to read they don't go for grey pages, or blocky paragraphs of exposition, they look for direct speech.

            Most readers don't want too much grey. They want plenty of white on the page. Conversation, argument, fury, banter, hilarity, erotic murmurs, passionate cries and whispers... It's life. Dialogue is narrative at its most personal, its most organic. It's also brutally exposing of the writer's ability. Do it well, and your work will fly. Do it badly, and it'll undo you like a shoelace.

            So how do you set about writing a dialogue passage? First and foremost, be clear about what you want to establish. Ideally, your reader should get to know your characters by a process of accretion. Each event, each conversation, should add another layer of understanding, and this process should be subtle enough that the reader is not aware that it's happening. They should find themselves, at a certain point, just 'getting' the character.

            This is in stark contrast to much contemporary TV and movie drama screenwriting, in which character is established by a series of thuddingly obvious events and dialogue sequences. This is not wholly the fault of screenwriters. Producers consistently underestimate audiences' intelligence, and insist that character-establishment and plot points are heavily semaphored. Any scene in which a male character is seen nursing a drink in an otherwise empty bar and then moodily shoving the empty whisky glass at the barman for a refill is an example of this. If a female character, bruised by life but still beautiful, then occupies the next seat, and the two embark on a series of wry, philosophical and weirdly vulnerable exchanges, we know we're in screenwriterland. The whole thing is just so... on the nose.

            Another weak feature of contemporary screenwriting is a tendency to stuff scripts with exposition, in which characters tell each, in a wholly unbelievable manner, facts which they already know, but which producers think we need to know too. Think of a million scenes in which the principal male character is called in to a superior's office, has his CV read to him, and is told that his brilliant career has been flawed by his bad attitude.