Cases of Dialogue

My next Zoom masterclass, Showing and Telling on 20 October, is devoted to scenecraft and narration, and dialogue will be one of the topics under discussion.

Once upon a time I read a guide to writing novels by a leading light at a well-known creative writing establishment, and it included a whole chapter on dialogue, and every single example of dialogue in that chapter was taken from a Hollywood film. 

But a film is not a novel! 

Great dialogue in films has much to teach us about embodying stories and characters in speech, but I often find myself questioning the emphasis given to screenwriting practices in the world of prose fiction. Screenplay structures designed for two-hour movies can be crudely applied. Or we hear ‘It’s like a film’, or ‘It has filmic qualities’, or ‘Can’t wait for the film’ of some treasured book, which can be lovely, of course – especially if it’s a good adaptation! Sometimes it even seems that the movie version is the prize – what’s aspired to or grasped for, as if it has higher status – so it’s not surprising that movie conventions have come to set a standard.

But when a book is being written, the requirements of prose are what we should pay attention to. And though dialogue is often the most important part of any scene, as it quickly brings characters and settings to life, there is more than one approach to representing it in prose fiction and nonfiction. 

Direct speech

The most obvious way to render dialogue is direct speech. The words captured on the page are the words as a character speaks them. This is the lively dialogue we find in good screenwriting.

Many writers do direct speech in prose very well indeed, and it’s central to how they bring characters and worlds to life. Think of the wit and bite of Evelyn Waugh, or the surface exchanges betraying subtexts in the stories of Ernest Hemingway. 

Direct speech in Ernest Hemingway and Roddy Doyle (and unpublished manuscripts)

In Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ two characters circle round a very sensitive subject without being explicit about it, and that evasion says much about that very subject: not just what it means at the point in the relationship between these characters, but also what it means in terms of transgressing the law, and what it means as a matter of life and death.

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.’

‘And you really want to?’

‘I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.’

‘And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?’

‘I love you now. You know I love you.’

‘I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?’

‘I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.’

‘It’ can’t be spoken about, and what’s unsaid is all. What’s also shown is a rather controlling and withholding power dynamic: he makes self-serving statements that sound measured but feel contradictory (‘I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to’), and she, who is in a position of physical vulnerability because of ‘it’, asks questions that start to feel like begging, as if she’s put on the back foot. Classic gaslighting!

Good dialogue usually serves more than one purpose. It moves a story along, but too, for example, it also reveals something of character and setting. Roddy Doyle is very good at capturing what people say as a reflection of who people are and where they come from, as illustrated by this selection from The Snapper:

—Hey! Jackie roared at the lounge boy. —Get your body over here.

They laughed.

The lounge boy was sixteen and looked younger.

—Three vodkas an’ two Cokes an’ a gin an’ tonic, said Jackie. Got tha’?

—Yeah, said the lounge boy.

—An’ a package o’ crisps, said Yvonne.

—Ah yeah, said Sharon. —Two packs.

—Do yeh have anny nuts? Mary asked him.

—Jesus, Mary, yeh dirty bitch yeh!

They screamed.

—I didn’t mean it tha’ way, said Mary.

Here’s our filmic version of prose: crisp, quick, funny, witty word choices (‘anny nuts’), energetic. What you see is what you get, and what you get are flesh and blood characters, with their world opening up to you.

But not all direct speech is done with such immediacy. I’d dare to say direct speech brings up some of the most common causes of weakness in unpublished manuscripts. If it’s done well it’s fantastic, but just a couple of false notes can make it start to feel laboured, or stilted. Or sometimes it’s too naturalistic, with every um and ah relayed. 

I remember reading a manuscript in which a group of characters met in a bar and conversed in info dumps and ping-pong speech for sixteen pages without anything happening – though one character did go to the toilet twice. It was perhaps truthful to life, but as a very literal representation of speech it was boring, and it didn’t help the story move along. 

In addition to the spoken content, or what’s actually said, the presentation of dialogue matters too. Waugh’s and Hemingway’s characters speak within quotation marks, and this convention is probably the clearest and most easily comprehended. Doyle’s characters do it with dashes. Kent Haruf’s and Sally Rooney’s characters speak without either, which can have a subtle effect of blending speech with narration.

Indirect speech

In prose direct speech can also be replaced by indirect speech (sometimes called reported speech), which recounts (i.e., reports) what has been said but in the words of a narrator or as another character’s account. It can paraphrase, e.g., as a near verbatim third-person version of what someone said in first-person, but too it can compress and summarise whatever was spoken.

Given that to some degree it’s putting what’s been said into other words, indirect speech might seem secondary, perhaps the more muted step-sibling of the splashier and more attention-seeking direct speech. But I must insist that there’s nothing inferior about it. 

Dialogue in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Think, for example, of the scene at the end of Chapter One of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, where Colonel Aureliano Buendía recalls that warm March afternoon of his childhood in Macondo when he and his brother were taken to the fair, where their father, José Arcadio, was seeking out his old friend Melquíades:

The gypsy wrapped him in the frightful climate of his look before he turned into a puddle of pestilential and smoking pitch over which the echo of his reply still floated: ‘Melquíades is dead.’ Upset by the news, José Arcadio Buendía stood motionless, trying to rise above his affliction, until the group dispersed, called away by other artifices, and the puddle of the taciturn Armenian evaporated completely. Other gypsies confirmed later on that Melquíades had in fact succumbed to the fever on the beach at Singapore and that his body had been thrown into the deepest part of the Java Sea. 

We avoid here any info dumps (aka expository lumps). A lesser writer might have laboured in direct speech an explanatory account of the death of Melquíades as back story.

Instead we are simply given that potent line ‘Melquíades is dead’ in quotation marks, with the narrator deftly jumping forward in time to the later occasion when the demise of Melquíades would be described to their father, sharing with us in summary a couple of rich details but no more of that conversation. 

Márquez’s style accommodates digressions, but the storytelling doesn’t linger too long. The narrator points us forward:

The children had no interest in the news. They insisted that their father take them to see the overwhelming novelty of the sages of Memphis that was being advertised at the entrance of a tent that, according to what was said, had belonged to King Solomon. They insisted so much that José Arcadio Buendía paid the thirty reales and led them into the center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur: 

‘It’s the largest diamond in the world.’ 

‘No,’ the gypsy countered. ‘It’s ice.’

Those last two lines of direct speech place an emphasis on what’s most important in whatever verbal exchanges took place. There has been other dialogue, of course, but it’s described indirectly: we have all those insistences of the children (I mean, who wants to listen to whiny kids?!), as well as the transaction of paying the entrance fee, which that lesser writer might enforced upon us as a tedious exchange in direct speech. 

Another longish paragraph of seventeen lines concludes the chapter, its voice building momentum as it fuses description with indirect speech, though it also incorporates a couple of direct intrusions: ‘Five reales more to touch it’ and ‘It’s boiling’. 

I love the effect of these brief shifts into direct speech into narrative summary – each instance really spikes the energy, as does the final line of the chapter, where direct speech works as punctuation of all that’s gone before, delivering the grandiose statement that captures so much of what this magnificent novel is about:

‘This is the great invention of our time.’

Throughout this chapter it feels as if direct speech was rationed, with only the juiciest bits saved for direct transmission, and space given over to a rich storytelling voice. The use of summary and indirect speech in fact makes the selections of direct speech even more potent.

What’s said and not said in ‘The Child’ by Bobbie Louise Hawkins

My teacher Bobbie Louise Hawkins wrote an astonishing story called ‘The Child’, which was originally published in her collection Almost Everything and in 2023 was selected by George Saunders for his Story Club. You can listen to Bobbie reading it here; gosh, the miracle of audio recordings, and hearing that remarkable voice again here in the room with me. 

The opening paragraph:

After the child had been taken from the water. After someone had said it that the pool cover should be taken completely off to see whether he might have slipped through he was so small and the cover was removed and there he was in that strange element. There was a question of shock and something like discretion that could not let them use one of the long poles with nets on the end to reach into the water and manipulate the small body toward waiting hands at the poolside. That expedience was so possible. The poles were right there but. The owner jumped into the pool fully clothed and gathered the dead child to himself as if he hoped to save it back into life. As if it still might be that he would be in time. And the awkward moment was past. It had been dealt with humanly with an implication of hope and salvaging against the grief that was now all that could happen seeing the child’s blue tinted face.

Plenty was surely spoken in this opening scene of that story – someone asking to remove the pool cover, someone saying he was so small, all the other panicking responses and exclamations. But they are not registered directly, and instead we are left with this somewhat flattened narration with at times strange syntax, uttered by a narrator who feels as if they are trying to regain control at least of this account of what happened. 

And then in the middle of the next paragraph:

And still no one said it, that he was dead.

This story is all about what’s unsaid, what can’t be said. 

And when the small body was tidily on the bed in the ambulance and whisked away with tubes taped on the arms and injections still continuing and the ambulance attendant not looking at the mother, it would be so complicit what they knew together and no one would say now, not yet.

Later, we are told of ‘an earlier drama’ when the mother met the child’s father (‘He said that he wouldn’t marry her’), and then the narration of what happened after the baby was born slides into the diction of spoken words, though still as indirect speech, or perhaps this was in fact internal speech (‘She began to worry about the baby’s heart, poor baby. Oh, the poor baby’). Exterior and interior worlds are blurred.

And then we experience the aftermath of the child’s death, and life goes on, sort of, and anything that is said there again gets conveyed as indirect speech. 

Only in the last two paragraphs of the story do we finally get any direct speech, after the mother’s parents come to visit (see below). It’s hard to know exactly what to make of what the child’s mother means when she finally gets to speak in her own words, and why it is rendered directly, but it certainly lands with an unsettling effect.

‘Can you believe it?’ she laughs, leaving us with that lingering question, which, among other things, made me realise this is a horror story. What a terrible tale for anyone who’s lost someone too soon, and its power comes from the tone of its telling, a tone that would probably be diminished by various characters chipping in with direct speech.

What’s notable in One Hundred Years of Solitude and ‘The Child’ is how indirect speech and direct speech, description and action, inside and outside come together with narrative force. Dialogue is playing a part in both cases, but not just in the literal way of rendering words that were spoken. The poor baby. It’s not obvious, and it’s not on the nose. Something else is happening.

It’s a style I enjoy reading. A story is being told, and a storyteller takes a central part here, and there’s much to be said for that role of a confident narrator. Gimme some storytelling with my stories. 

And too: at other times gimme some direct speech for its vivid and sparkly power. 

(But no banter! No Marvel bro banter!)

Developing your own indirect speech

As a writing experiment, rewatch a favourite scene from a film, play or tv show, and then write it as indirect speech plus description. You can use direct speech too, but only selectively. 

You could refer to a screenplay or playscript if one is available.

Also try rewriting sequences of direct speech as indirect speech in writing of your own. Again, save up the juicy bits for direct speech, but otherwise let a narrator do the work.

And then lean into this practice a little more, perhaps. Don’t feel obliged to show rather than tell every scene with page after page of direct speech, though do think about those instances where you might use direct speech for best effect.

Another writing experiment: write a story or a scene that uses direct speech only at the beginning and the end to top and tail the account. 

Further resources

For what it’s worth, the writing manual with the best advice on crafting dialogue is Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway; it’s notable that guidance comes in one of her chapters on creating characters. Stephen King’s On Writing also has an excellent section on dialogue. Both books use examples from prose fiction. King has some salty words about one otherwise good storyteller’s tin ear for dialogue, and he gives us examples – when you’re a king you have no worries about naming and shaming.

And of course all I say for fiction can work for narrative nonfiction too.

My masterclass Showing and Telling, held on Zoom on 20 October, will give you plenty of tips on ways to make your direct speech vivid and engaging, alongside further sermonising about indirect speech, other aspects of scenecraft, and the power of narration. Consider this post a preview. 

And below is the end of that first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and here is a link to The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins – do seek her writing out. If you don’t know her work, she’s one of those writers awaiting your discovery.

An earlier version of this post was first published on Substack in September 2024.