Write Dialogue Like You're Fighting a Marlin
In honor of my Papa-besotted colleague Dave, here's a superb bit of writer's advice that Seattle's own Matthew Simmons gave last evening (as recorded on HTMLGIANT and found, along with a Biz Markie video clip, via Slog). Want to think about how to construct dialogue in your fiction? Think of a book that has no dialogue:
Okay, so today I’ll give you—you writerly types—a way to approach dialogue. And I’ll use a book that you may or may not have read, but very likely know, as a way to think about this approach to dialogue. And this book is a book where the two main characters never speak to one another. Where they can’t speak to each other because they don’t speak the same language. Where they can’t speak to each other because they aren’t even the same species. But this will work, anyway.
So, Hemingway wrote a book called The Old Man and the Sea. And in The Old Man and the Sea, an old man goes out to sea. And he fishes. And he hooks himself a big, big fish. And then, for quite a lot of the rest of the book, the man and the fish pull at one another. For pages and pages they pull at one another. He—the old man—pulls at the fish. And it—the fish in the sea—pulls at the old man. They pull and pull and they fight and fight.
This is dialogue. This is how to approach dialogue.
He explains further. From the limited and flawed experience I have in writing dialogue, his advice is both brilliant and correct. --Tom
P.S. Crushingly, we don't have a copy of Simmons's book, A Jello Horse, available, but I bought a copy recently elsewhere, and you can find one here.
sesli sohbet on March 21, 2010 at 02:33 AM
Hmm..very interesting got to check this out. Thank you
Edward Sisson on March 21, 2010 at 09:07 AM
At the linked full story ( http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/talk-talk/ ) Mr. Simmons gives the premise of the point he makes here, saying "When people communicate, they do so to reveal to the listener their wants and needs." But this omits the fact that people communicate also to send their ideas to the other person, and to trigger the other person to respond to those ideas; and they communicate to persuade, or manipulate, the other person into doing or not doing some action.
To me the fundamental question in reading a story is: are any of these characters worth paying attention to? Are their ideas interesting, or are their morals or their motives engaging? Dialog is an essential way in which characters show whether or not they are worth paying attention to.
But speakers tend to shape what they say based on their estimate of how capable the other person is in understanding what they say. Writers applying the Marlin-fishing analogy may cut-out from the dialog the most interesting and engaging elements of what the speaker would say, if the speaker believes that the other party to the conversation is more able to understand and respond to it, and if the speaker believes that the means of transmitting the communication provide a clear process for ensuring that the hearer accurately hears what the speaker says.
A very long and circuitous conversation may include many statements by one person that appear to express the feelings of that person, but in reality the speaker has very different feelings, and wants the hearer to think he has certain feelings, so as to maneuver the hearer into taking some action. Every man who falsely tells a woman he loves her, really to get her to offer sex, and every woman who tells a man she loves him, really to get him to marry her, is doing this.
The Marlin-fishing approach to dialog is most useful in conversations where both parties are open about what they really want, and they are in opposition to each other. But for other situations a more useful image might be the carrot dangled before a donkey, or a pheasant-hunter trying to guide a retriever-dog that is having trouble finding the downed bird, or some other image, that corresponds to the pre-existing relationship between the characters that exists as their conversation begins.
comatus on March 21, 2010 at 09:35 AM
Piscatorial criticism, older than the Bible.
In the North, men harpoon whales. Their sentences run longer.
Then, there is the special voice--from inside the whale.
Some would be fishers of men. Again, short sentences.
The hardest dialogue is that of Siren-fishers. It's the wax.