How Dialogue is Like Bowling, Part II

In my first go-round, I made an analogy between fictional dialogue and bowling--the idea being that a bowler wants to put the ball in the pocket, just off center (if you hit the center pin straight-on you get a split) and that dialouge is like that, too. What makes dialogue interesting (or at least one of the things that make it interesting) is the way characters talk past each other. They respond to only part of what the other character says, or to what the character said a number of lines ago. It's like that old Saturday Night Live skit, Mister Slow-Reaction Man. I want to amplify that idea now by talking a little about summarized dialogue and the ways that moving back and forth between summarized and actual dialogue can make a scene of dialogue more dynamic. I'm always reminding my students to vary their cadences, that too much repetition is numbing. They'll give me a sentence with three great images, but what they don't understand is that those images are competing with each other and are therefore lessening the effect of the sentence: too much meat in the can and you get Spam. The same is true with dialogue. I'll often read a scene of better-than-competent dialogue, but it goes on and on for pages, with nothing breaking it up, no pauses, no description, nothing. You can do that for only so long before the whole becomes much less than the sum of its parts. What makes the alternating of summarized dialogue with actual dialogue compelling is the way that it plays with vantage point. In so doing, it keeps the reader alert, on her toes, which is how writers always want readers to be.

Take the beginning of Ethan Canin's early short story "The Year of Getting to Know Us." The story starts like this:

I told my father not to worry, that love is what matters, and that in the end, when he's loosed from his body, he should know he did all right by me, his son.

And he said, "Don't talk about things you know nothing about."

It's a memorable opening (I know it's memorable: I'm quoting it by heart), and it's worth noting that part of what makes it memorable is the contrast between actual dialogue and dialogue that comes filtered through summary. What makes the "Don't talk about things you know nothing about" more authoritative and zingy (and, also, funnier) is the abruptness of the transition from summarized speech to actual speech, the moving from greater distance to less distance. And it's this constant moving back and forth from greater to less distance that helps make a scene of fiction feel dynamic. It's also important to remember that it's possible through summarized dialogue to have a character say something (to use vocabulary, that is) that they wouldn't conceivably use in actual dialogue. Imagine, for instance, that Canin had reversed things and done the opening of the story in actual dialogue followed by summarized dialogue. It would read like this:

"Dad, don't worry, love is what matters, and in the end, when you're loosed from your body, you will know you have done all right by me, your son."

And he told me not to talk about things I know nothing about.

Well, that's just laughably bad, not least because the actual dialogue doesn't sound like a person--or, at the very least, doesn't sound like the character who's narrating Canin's story.

Comments

[tuck]

Not that you seem to be hurting for blog fodder, but could you also talk about the process leading up to a paperback release? Did you have the opportunity to help with the new cover, get new blurbs, make any changes in the book you didn't get to the first time, etc, etc?

[Gwen Dawson]

Great post. In connection with this post and the one above about whether writing can be taught, do you have any books you'd recommend about understanding fiction? I'm not a writer, but I'm an avid reader and reviewer. I'm always looking for new insights. Before reading this post, I never really thought about summarized vs. actual dialog. Thanks for the insight.