I tend to believe that, as a general rule, my feelings of incompetence with regard to the field of creative writing are spawned from an irrational fear of dialogue. One minute I'm breezing through exposition and character development, only to find myself at that place in a story that separates the boys from the men-- that moment when the characters that I have so lovingly crafted must stand up and speak for themselves. While I have no children, I can only imagine that this must be a small taste of what it is like to be a parent. For years you coddle your child, reading him carefully chosen books and playing Mozart non-stop in hopes of increasing the future capabilities of his sizable noggin. You give him everything he needs to be an intelligent, thoughtful human being, hoping that as he grows older, he will exemplify your better qualities, not the ones with which you have unintentionally endowed him. The dialogue that my characters inevitably spout suggests that perhaps I've been piping in the wrong tunes.
Hollow, waxen, contrived. In essence, I can't imagine anyone actually speaking the way that I construct dialogue. Francine Prose cites a common piece of advice given to young writers as a means of improving dialogue, gently reminding us that our characters should not use dialogue as a means of exposition. While this isn't my problem, I don't feel relieved. Not unlike one who knows that he is ill, but has yet to receive the diagnosis, I simply want to know what I am doing wrong! One more negative test result only intensifies my frustration.
The golden nugget of this chapter appears so quickly after its introduction that you might be in danger of overlooking it completely. Before Prose begins to quote from some of her favorite reading material, she mentions an intriguing (though morally questionable) activity that she once assigned to a class. Her students' task was to "eavesdrop on strangers and transcribe the results." Sketchy? Yes, but this girl is not necessarily above sleaze. Like Prose herself, I decided to spy on perfectly innocent strangers in a nearby Starbucks.
This admittedly Nervous Nellie is pleased to report that her covert operation proceeded without complication. After several minutes of frantic typing, I quickly saved the document, tucked my laptop under my arm and scurried out the front door. Once I was safely nestled in my apartment, I re-opened the clandestine document. To my surprise, a brief reading told me all that I needed to know. In addition to exemplifying Prose's point that human speech, and thus written dialogue, is not and should not be one-dimensional, this adventurous exercise showed me several of the crucial aspects of good dialogue that I had routinely missed.
First, spoken language has a certain cadence. If my previous attempts at dialogue sounded stiff, it was probably because I didn't stop to think about how the words would sound if someone were to read them aloud. I won't say that all speakers are poets, but everyone has a certain rhythm or pattern to their speech. Of course that pattern is subject to change, but the fact remains that it must be present in some form or another.
Additionally, spoken language is not complete. It makes references to things that it may never clarify, seeing as the listener is presumably more familiar with the subject than the eavesdropper. This speaks to Prose's earlier warning concerning the presence of exposition within dialogue, but I want to point out that it can also pertain to more than content. All of my lovingly formed complete sentences made for very poor dialogue because of their structure. Most of us don't worry about run-on sentences or sentence fragments while we are speaking. Why should my characters be preoccupied with it?
I'm sure that I have taxed your patience enough with this post, but I'll mention one more thing. Vocabulary. Obviously, it varies with a character's background, education, and audience. With a few exceptions, people generally use common words to express their meanings. While an omniscient narrator might be endowed with a broad and detailed lexicon, ordinary people tend to speak to the point. I didn't recognize many words from the GRE study guide in my subjects' speech. Conversely, I recorded more than my share of profanity. Though I may be reticent to jot down four letter words, the average person thinks nothing of uttering them.
