“It’s not that I think dialogue is a bad thing,” he said, staring at the blinking cursor.
“It isn’t?”
“No, it isn’t,” he continued, though his voice had taken on a higher-pitched, self-justifying tone. If he had been an adolescent girl his hand would have been on his hip, his hip jutting out in that awkward position only an adolescent girl could find comfortable. “It’s not just filler. Dialogue can be used to actually advance the story. In fact, it should be.”
As I noted last week, I have a tendency to be dialogue-heavy. Worse, as a former high school classroom teacher, I not only overuse dialogue but often feel a need for more dialogue to explain the dialogue I’ve just used. I think it drove my first publisher – herself a former English teacher – a little crazy. “It’s the curse of our day jobs,” she told me.
See how it advances the narrative?
For some writers, even within the crime genre, dialogue is the principal tool for advancing story. One of my earliest crime writing influences is surely Robert B. Parker, author of the famed Spenser series of some forty novels. Spenser was a hero of sorts to me, limited in his dialogue generally to short, snappy sentences but somehow managing to solve crime nonetheless.
Parker, who famously wrote four pages a day, every day until literally dying at his computer nearly three years ago almost reversed what is often the standard mantra of writers: sparse dialogue with lots of action. Parker’s stories are so dialogue driven that the short bursts of action actually do come as a surprise. In the middle of a conversation someone is suddenly punched in the throat or a bullet flies.
And of course, Parker’s dialogue was witty (and always included the line “we’d be fools not to”), replete with literary references, and intelligent in a way we’d all like to speak on a regular basis, like the West Wing of crime novels (Sorkin-esque dialogue would require a whole other post simply to contain my fawning). I’ve heard critics decry Spenser’s literary and culinary prowess, as though it’s not possible for a hard-boiled detective to read classic literature and know how to cook. I find it charming.
But I get it – there’s more than one way to skin a cat and readers may well prefer a variety of narrative tools and structures to advance the story.
Which leads me back to the quagmire in which I found myself last week: how does Winston Patrick determine this newest piece of information I need him to have without relying on dialogue, and yet remain plausible?
In this particular scene, it may not be possible. And given the slowing impact it has had on my writing (though the novel has been progressing rather slowly of late anyway) it may be an indicator that perseverating on one reviewer’s point of view is, in fact, as unproductive as everyone tells me it is.
Next week: I hope to have the scene written. I’ll let you know how it works out.
