Manual For Fiction Writers by Block, Lawrence (classic books to read .TXT) 📗

The second thing you must learn is when to break it.

A chief reason for breaking Rule 1 is in order to make it clear to the reader who's saying what to whom. I recently read a novel (American Made, by Shylah Boyd, if you care) in which all dialogue, including sections which went on for several pages at a clip, was allowed to stand utterly alone. There was never a single indication as to who was speaking?and this was true too of scenes in which half a dozen people were shooting lines back and forth. That's damned confusing, and in this case readability would have been greatly increased by chucking in he said and she said where necessary for clarification.

Some exchanges don't need much of this. If one person is asking questions and the other is answering them, the reader will understand the question-and-answer format and follow it effortlessly for pages on end. When he said and she said are indicated, there's no rule as to how often they should be sprinkled in. This depends upon the length of individual speeches, the general rhythm of the dialogue, and other factors impossible to reduce to a formula, not the least of which is the author's presumably individual style.

When else do you depart from the rule? Well, you might want to slow the pace deliberately and convey to the reader a sense of the scene and the interplay of the speakers; this may be as important as the actual information that passes between them in their conversation. Consider:

Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

Oh? Jarvis lowered his eyes, set his coffee cup down. What did he want?

What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

Jarvis searched the other man's face. Then his eyes went to the clock on the far wall. That's crazy, he said.

Is it?

You know it is.

Maybe, Lawson said levelly. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

This passage clearly does not read as quickly as it would with the conversation standing alone. On the other hand, the extra material may help us visualize the two speakers, especially Jarvis, and may give us more of a feeling of the unspoken interplay between them.

Sometimes you'll want to use the saids as punctuation marks, popping them in to establish the rhythm, sometimes giving a string of them all to one character for emphasis:

Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

Oh? Jarvis said. What did he want?

What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

That's crazy, Jarvis said.

Is it?

You know it is, Jarvis said.

Maybe. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

Said, said, said. Dean Koontz told me once that he makes it an absolute rule never to use any verb but said in dialogue. I suppose you'll stay out of trouble this way, but I do feel that any number of alternate verbs have their uses from time to time. They can be good accent points in dialogue, and the less frequently you employ them the more effective they will be. And they serve a definite purpose when you've got a line which can be read any of several ways and you feel it's important the reader gets it the way you meant it.

Words like state and aver and affirm and declare, words that newspaper reporters use frequently so that their stories will read like newspaper stories, have little or no place in fiction. But words like drawl and murmur and whisper indicate how a line is spoken. Prose fiction, after all, differs from drama in that one is not assisted by actors on stage or film. It is the writer's job to shout or whisper. I won't give an example of this?I'm sure you get the point?but you might find it an instructive exercise to knock out a few versions of your own of the imperishable conversation between Lawson and Jarvis. (While I've shown Jarvis as nervous in earlier examples, the dialogue itself is neutral, and, by giving the conversation's superstructure the right coloring, Lawson might emerge as timid while Jarvis could be bold, dominant, untouched, or whatever.)

In first-person narration, dialogue can never stand completely alone because the persona of the narrator exists to filter everything to the reader. The narrator's presence is a constant in first-person work, and if that particular voice drops out entirely in an extended dialogue sequence, the result is sort of jarring.

In first-person dialogue, the narrator may limit himself to he said and I said. Or he may report what he sees as well as what he hears. Or, additionally, he may toss in thoughts and observations for one purpose or another, as for example:

I let him sit there for a minute or two. Then I said, Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

Oh? He started to take a cigarette from my pack, then remembered that he'd given up the habit. What did he want?

I took the cigarette he'd rejected, thumbed my lighter and took a hit. What had Bollinger wanted? Hell, what did anyone want, I wondered. Why did anyone bother? Why did people get out of bed in the morning?

But Jarvis didn't want to hear my Philosophy 101 lecture. So I looked at him through the smoke and said, What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna-.

I'll tell you, I'm getting a little upset about Myrna myself.

This last example, you'll note, adds substantially to