Put More Drama in Your Writing—Using Dialogue to Define Character and Set the Mood

By Chris Mathews

One important way to put more drama in your writing is to understand the language of drama, dialogue.  Fiction and non-fiction can be written without dialogue; drama cannot. We know the story of a play through what the characters say and do on stage.
    

In prose, the writer has the advantage of being able to describe the characters’ motivations, but this can also be a pitfall. Description can deaden writing when it usurps action or tells the reader too much. Dialogue has the advantage of actively engaging the auditor. There are no intermediaries with dialogue. In fact, the reader is the audience in any quality writing, actively supplying the missing pieces of the story. Stories in which the reader is told what happens but not allowed to experience the story first-hand can easily become literary dry-gulches. 

I based my one-act Gargoyles (published by Baker’s Plays in 2005) on an actual event, a high-school Halloween play banned by a school board in a small mountain town. A preacher in the town provided the major push to ban the play Bats in the Belfry, decrying Halloween as “a pagan ritual.” The actual play was a comedy, in my opinion about as innocuous as Bewitched, but deemed “satanic” because it contained a warlock. 

To tell this story, I decided to create characters that could comment on the play-within-the- play (which I renamed Raising Spirits) and lighten up this controversy. I chose gargoyles as my dual narrators because of their traditional role as guardians-of-the-Church. As I wrote I realized the gargoyles were becoming a kind of medieval Siskel and Ebert, speaking in Latin-sounding phrases. Through their banter, I was able to both create a gothic atmosphere and comic repartee. In the opening scene, the gargoyles define themselves, setting themselves up as observers of humankind.

Here is the opening dialogue of the play:

As the lights come up, two gargoyles are perched on a platform flanking a large, gothic door.  Ornate medieval music is playing.

FIRST GARGOYLE.   Stone silence…

SECOND GARGOYLE.    …Mocks mankind’s folly.

FIRST GARGOYLE.    Demons dwell in eaves…

SECOND GARGOYLE.     …Caught in granite guffaws

FIRST GARGOYLE.     We outlast your short time

SECOND GARGOYLE.    Withstand your orangutan rantings…

FIRST GARGOYLE.    …Your humanegomania.

SECOND GARGOYLE.   Your acid haze

FIRST GARGOYLE.    Corrodes our veins

SECOND GARGOYLE.    So permit us

FIRST GARGOYLE.    From our lofty perches

SECOND GARGOYLE.    To comment

FIRST GARGOYLE.      To criticize

SECOND GARGOYLE.    To cajole

FIRST GARGOYLE.    To view from afar

SECOND GARGOYLE.    To scrutinize with a looking-glass

FIRST GARGOYLE.    To provide comic relief

SECOND GARGOYLE.    Though these humans provide their own quite well.

FIRST GARGOYLE.   We will be their funhouse mirror.      

SECOND GARGOYLE.   –Grotesques.

FIRST GARGOYLE.    It takes a grotesque to know a grotesque.

 If your characters know what they want  and listen to each other(unless you want them to ignore each other), dialogue often writes itself.   In the next writing, I will look at how conflict works in dialogue.

Werewolves, Cinnamon Bun Pirates, and Other Ghosts of My Writing Past

By Amanda Simays

My parents are moving out of the house they’ve lived in for twenty years. Which of my belongings do I discard, and which do I make them lug to their new house and store for me until God knows when? My attempts to weed out parts of my childhood bedroom over Christmas taught me a lot about my priorities. Stuffed animals, summer camp t-shirts, graduation paraphernalia? Toss without a backward glance. But my packrat tendencies kicked in when it came to really valuable stuff like old American Girl magazines, my collection of 1967 World Book encyclopedias…and anything I’ve written.

I hang onto almost all of my writing, whether it’s in a notebook or a computer file. Partly because it represents a lot of hard work, but mostly because (to use a cliché), I’m scared to throw out the baby with the bathwater. What if, buried deep in the piles of writing rubbish, there’s a character, a line of dialogue, or even a phrase I might want to use someday?

During the creation of a 150-page novel I wrote when I was about fourteen, I also ended up with an 80-page rival document of deleted scenes. Most of the writing there I can’t see using in the future at all. There is, for instance, a long, digressive subplot about a pirate who’s so obsessed with eating cinnamon buns that even his name, Nubni Mannic, is “cinnamon bun” spelled backwards…and incorrectly. But the description of a character who has “greasy hair the color of a banana bruise?" Hmmm…worth hanging onto…just in case.

Even earlier in my past, my brother approached me with a request to write him a werewolf story, and his instructions were to “make it as scary as possible.” So I did, and it was very scary. You can tell how scary this story is right from the subtle opening:

Hi! My name is Billy. I’d like to tell you something. It all began four years ago when I was eight. One day I was packing for my camping trip with my mom and dad in the mountains. My family just got a new van and station wagon.

We were done packing and we were ready to hit the road. On our way we saw some blood on the road and some dead peoples heads. We saw some signs that said “DANGER."

The story just goes downhill from there, degenerating into a thousand-word gore fest. My brother and I read the story out loud to our dad, expecting him to shiver with fright and proclaim it a masterpiece of suspense. Instead, he was completely disgusted and gave me strict instructions to delete that story and never show anybody.

But I didn’t, and years later, I’m glad I kept it. At the very least, hanging onto very bad writing gives me reassurance of how far I’ve come in the course of my writing life…or lets me have a good laugh at myself.

7-38-55

By Amanda Simays

If a Snapple iced tea cap tells me that average humans eat eight spiders in their sleep, I can roll my eyes and move on. But it’s harder to dismiss a statistic that I’ve had drilled into me during three separate job-related trainings, through speakers, handouts, quizzes, and public speaking videos.

I’m talking about the 7-38-55 rule, the one that states that 7% of communication is the actual words we use, 38% of communication is the tone we use, and 55% of communication is our body language. And I just couldn’t believe it.

I’ve lived through enough misconstrued text messages and emails to attest to the fact that tone and body language play a vital role in communication. But accounting for 38 and 55%? Really?

My hang-up over this statistic connects to my writing. I sprinkle details about tone and body language into my dialogue, but for large chunks I rely solely on the quoted words to deliver my message. If this 7-38-55 statistic were true, it had some scary implications. Theoretically, the dialogue I wrote often communicated only 7% of what I meant.

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous that seemed. Did the 7-38-55 rule mean that writers should spend 93% of dialogue text space describing tone and body language? Or did it just mean that with every single statement a character spoke, I needed to illustrate the tone and the body language so the reader could understand what I meant?

According to the way my trainings presented the 7-38-55 theory, readers would only get 7% of what I intended if I wrote:

“I am so fed up with your attitude!” Jane said.

Add some body language for almost two-thirds of the gist (62%):

“I am so fed up with your attitude!” Jane said, stomping her feet.

Then all I would need to do is throw in a helpful adverb to acknowledge the tone, and then the readers get 100% of the message:

“I am so fed up with your attitude!” Jane said angrily, stomping her feet.

Ohhhh….now they get the point.

The 7-38-55 rule bugged me enough to do some research, and I found several websites exposing the “7-38-55 myth”…a frequently misquoted statistic. The 7-38-55 rule originated with an experiment conducted by psychology professor Albert Mehrabian, and the numerical conclusion only relates when you’re forming a like-dislike attitude of the speaker, not whether you understand the message. Bottom line: no official scientific study ever claimed that the words you use comprise only 7% of the information you communicate.

I like to partially blame residual effects of being brainwashed by that statistic for times when I don’t trust the words on the page to stand on their own, overusing adverbs, obtrusive speaker attributions, or clichéd body language. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth buried in the 7-38-55 rule—the fact that I can’t rely completely on the quoted words to portray meaning. I still have to remember to visualize how my characters act, what faces they make, how their voices sound, and what they think about while they speak.

Finding the balance isn’t easy, and it’s something I’m working on. But I’m relieved to know that I can count on the words I use in dialogue for more than 7% of the legwork.

Keeping Our Illusion Honest

By Bonnie Stanard

I’ve just put down a novel of 368 pages after reading to page 179. I was interested in the story, so why did I call it quits? In a nutshell, I couldn’t take another erudite word from a 12 year-old. Dictum was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Kathleen Grissom’s The Kitchen House is historical fiction, my favorite genre, and has been praised by such as Robert Morgan. The first half of the book spans the time from 1791 to 1797, though the novel continues through 1810. The story develops around Lavinia, a seven year-old white girl who is orphaned when both her parents die on the ship taking them to America. The captain carries her to his plantation where, as an indentured servant, she lives with the slaves. Tension develops as Lavinia sees the negros as her family, though she is expected to behave as a white.

Lavinia, in telling the story, says things like:

I brought Sukey for a visit, for she elicited a vivid response.
…those excursions ceased as an increasing lethargy overtook him.
With the security of the past two years, I had become more sure of myself…Yet an underlying anxiety always stayed.

All of this from one page in the book. A few slips here or there can be overlooked, but the tone becomes that of an educated adult with 21st Century sensibilities, which, in my case, created a fault that shattered the fantasy.

Finally, Lavinia says “I often heard her state how she felt obliged to help the less fortunate, and there was no doubt that my welfare was included under that dictum.” What 12 year-old living in the 1790s would say this?

Grissom took on a double challenge when she chose not only an 18th century narrator but a child as well. Obviously the reader doesn’t want a tale told in simplistic language. The key is to sound simplistic without actually being simplistic. It’s in the tone, that ephemeral quality that doesn’t lend itself to a simple reduction.

As Shaun so capably reminded us in a previous blog, our characters can do unbelievable things only as long as we respect a consistent “reality,” which may be a far cry from what is really real; i.e., we can get away with any absurdity in our alternative reality, but if we violate the rules of our creation, we risk losing the reader.

In like fashion, the characters we create need to speak the language of the alternative reality we give them. Their words in many ways define them and can either reinforce or undermine their validity. Especially in historical fiction, contemporary language and sentiment can transport the reader out of the story.