Gloria & Audrey Harchar

Note: My approach to discussing dialog, is to write dialog by ‘conversing’ with my imaginary friend, Piper. (I know, I’m strange, and tend to have imaginary friends with me. Good thing I’m a writer, huh?) However, I’ll start the whole article by giving you a glimpse of Sooner or Later by Vickie McDonough:

“How old are you?”
Mason pushed against a supply crate with his foot and shifted to a better position. “I’m twenty-six. How about you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Twenty-one? Mason blinked against the darkness. He’d thought for sure she wasn’t a day over seventeen.
“Have you—I mean—you’re not—married, are you?” Rebekah stiffened in his arms.

Piper leans forward to prop her arms on my desk from her seat opposite me. “Ooh, that Vickie McDonough writes so well. So? Why did you stop there?”

I glance at Piper, who scowls as she taps her foot. This makes me smile because I know that was mean of me to stop right in the middle of a scene like that. But I act nonchalant. “Because I wanted to ask if you noticed that Vickie didn’t have to use tag lines?”

“Ah, what’s a tag line?” Piper asks sheepishly.

“A tag line is a couple of words or a phrase that tells you who is speaking. The simplest and least obtrusive tag lines are ‘he said’ and ’she said,’ or minor variations like ’she replied’ or ‘he asked,’ as in this conversation between us,” I reply. “Let me give you another example off the top of my head.”

“Hello,” he said, “my name’s Horace. What’s yours?” he asked.
“Hi,” she replied, turning in her chair to look at him. “I’m Gail Adams.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Horace said. “I’ve been wondering who you were for an hour.”

Piper grimaces and shakes her head at me. “Kinda blah. Can’t you put some zing into it?”

“Sure,” I respond. “But it’s best to keep things simple. Using adjectives, adverbs and fancy verbs to describe tone of voice or show what’s going on just gets in the way of the action and characterization. This is what can happen—”

“Hello,” he croaked nervously. “My name is Horace. What’s yours?” he asked with as much aplomb as he could muster.
“Hi,” she squeaked uncertainly, turning in her chair to look at him. “I’m Gail Adams,” she said blushingly.
“Pleased to meet you,” Horace declared. “I’ve been wondering who you were for an hour,” he offered with a quaver in his voice.

“Ugh, that was awful, Gloria.” Piper grabs her throat and pretends to gag. “Can’t we go back to Vickie’s story?”

Piper had an attention span the size of a flea. “Not until I at least make my point. Now, what was wrong with that passage?”

“The dialog was amateurish—sounding stilted and forced. Why is that, I wonder?”

“It’s called author intrusion. The wish of an author is to create the illusion of reality, to make the reader forget he or she is reading a story rather than living it. Therefore, an author tries to hide herself to make the story seem as natural as possible. Adjectives and other sorts of descriptions tend to remind the reader that somebody’s controlling his or her interest.”

“But can’t that scene be livened up another way,” Piper asks, “and still keep the action and characterization going?”

“Absolutely. You can even start in medias res.”

“OK, showoff, what are you blathering about now?” The bunched brows are back.

“Hey, once in a while I can use writers’ jargon. After all, I am an author.”

“You are? Could’ve fooled me,” she retorts with a flattening of her lips.

“I’m doing this as illustration.”

“Uh-huh.” Arms crossed, she gives me a narrow-eyed appraisal.

I return Piper’s look with a frown of my own. Really. “I mean, can’t you give me a little credit?”

“Sorry,” she replies although her smirk tells me she is anything but.

“Do you want me to tell you what in medias res means, or not?”

“If you must.” Piper sighs and slumps against the back of her chair.

“It means ‘in the middle of things.’ And that’s where you’re supposed to start a narrative so as to get the action going and the reader involved as quickly as possible.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re about as quick as a sloth. Starting in the middle of a scene? I mean, would anyone know what was happening?”

“You be the judge. Here’s another version of the same scene, but starting in the middle of it. Just listen to this . . .”

“Gail Adams,” she replied. “And yours?”
“Horace. I’ve been watching you for about an hour, and I finally couldn’t help approaching you. Forgive me.” Hands trembling, he set his coffee cup on the table before he dropped it and made an even bigger fool of himself. She was beautiful.

“Much better, Gloria!” Piper beamed at me. “See? I knew you were an author, and a rather decent one, at that.”
“Thank you,” I reply, abashed.

You can have your character want anything as long as it’s strongly motivated. More importantly, you can make your reader believe almost any goal you set up as long as you justify it with motivation.

When I think of this, I think of the movie, Romancing the Stone. Remember when the main characters were running from the bad guys and they are surrounded by rough-looking men in the village they wend up in? Michael Douglas says, “Write us out of this one, Joan Wilder.” The leader suddenly freezes and with a wide-eyed expression says,”You’re Joan Wilder? The American author, Joan Wilder?” Come to find out he is a fan of hers and all the guys have read her books. The script writers made that scene completely believable, which gave the townsmen proper motivation to go through all the trouble to help them escape the bad guys.

When you consider a goal, make sure you think up the why, or motivation, and make it very strong:

1. Is the goal important to the character?
2. Is the motivation urgent?
3. Is the goal within the realm of possibility?
4. Does the character have skills and flaws to make this story unique?
5. Can you use this characters goal, motivation and conflict to help the reader understand the character?

In the movie Ever After, Danielle, (who is played by Drew Barrymore), has the goal of wanting to save her farm, which includes all the servants. When her stepmother sells off one of the servants to pay for her debt, Danielle dresses as a court lady to pay for his release with money the prince tossed her for “borrowing” her beloved deceased father’s horse.

Her motivations are:

1. The servants have become her loved ones, i.e., they took the place of her parents. How could servants become so dear to her? Because the servants were kind to her and gave her love and acceptance after her father died. Her mother died at childbirth. She was very much loved by her father when she was a child. When her beloved father died suddenly of a heart attack, she lost his love and was subjected to the cruelty of her stepmother and stepsister.
2. She wants to hold the farm together. Why? Because that’s all she has left of her father. The farm represents better days, days when she was loved and accepted by the world.

Make sure when you set up your goals and motivations that you don’t make it coincidental.

When someone tells you that your story isn’t believable, it isn’t because you sent the characters to a planet in another galaxy. It isn’t because your character survived a two thousand yard plunge to earth. It’s because your GMC wasn’t logical. Your GMC wasn’t appropriate to your characters. What the reader is telling you is, “I didn’t believe these people would find themselves in this situation or make these decisions.”

Example — you will have a hard time convincing readers that an accountant could do emergency surgery in the jungle with matches, a flashlight and a Swiss Army knife. A fireman is better, someone who trained as a paramedic, who walked away from an internship, now you have slipped that character into the realm of possibility. Give him a downed plane’s emergency kit, and you are well on your way to fixing the problem.

Or, if you want to stick with the accountant, have the victim be his 8 year old daughter. They just survived a plane crash and they are the only two alive. His daughter is choking and needs an airway. Give him a Swiss Army knife and a half-full ink pen. Since she is going to die for sure if he doesn’t do anything, I think he would be motivated to try to create an air passage for her. Don’t you?

Sometimes books start off with coincidences, like a chance meet. This is okay as long as you have the characters react to results of the meet within their GMC’s that you have set up for them. In Ever After, The prince does happen to ride through Danielle’s farm in an attempt to escape his father’s men, (he’s rebelling against an arranged marriage) — which is the heroine and hero’s first meet. But it’s how they react to that coincidence — that is, they keep within their character that makes this coincidence all right. Danielle always has her goals in mind. She doesn’t use the money to buy food or improve their lot. She uses the money to rescue a servant, which supports her main goal of preserving the farm, keeping the place intact with all of the original servants.