Tying up a loose end about dialogue

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

Brian said I need to provide concrete examples of our dialogue pet peeves. I almost included some from popular fiction originally, but I hate to point fingers and name names. So I will take the weasel’s way out and give you some examples from television. TV is easy to make fun of. And yes, I know I watch way too much of it.

So let’s get specific:

Chock fulla clichés: Turn on most any daytime soap and you will be bombarded with a wave of boring clichés. Admittedly, I haven’t watched any since high school, so to test my theory I turned one on yesterday since I had the day off. I was rewarded with this gem almost instantly:

“Your love is the only thing that’s kept me going these last few months. You have to love me. We were meant to be a couple. I can make you happy in ways you can’t even imagine. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done because I love you,” said a weirdo in a mask and strange half-and-half costume. I think it was a woman, but it’s hard to say.
“You drugged me with chloroform, stripped me naked, tied me to a chair, and threatened my life. You have a strange way of showing love,” said the kidnapped fellow, who, at least in this scene, was awake, fully clothed, and moving about freely.

I felt like I’d hit the jackpot: a two-in-one example! Not only is it full of cringe-worthy clichés, but it can also serve as an example of the…

Barbara Walters interview: OK, so technically it isn’t a Q&A session, but both of the two characters in the room know what the strange masked kidnapper did to the guy—why on earth would he list the offenses like that, except as a recap/information dump for viewers? Awkward!

This device more often crops up in sci fi or fantasy genres. The writer has made up certain rules for her fictitious world and must somehow convey these rules, so she make the characters question each other about them. But the characters would have no reason to discuss this any more than you and I might have the following conversation:

“How do you get to work every day?” you ask.
“I drive my car.”
“I see. And what is a car?”
“It’s this machine with an engine and wheels that transports you from one place to another,” I reply.
“How do you make it go?”
“I put a key into the ignition and turn it while pressing down on the gas pedal.”
“How does it know where to take you?” and so on.

So you get my point—if we had this conversation in real life, I would be wondering if you’d suffered extreme memory loss or were brought up in an impossibly cloistered Amish community, but this would not constitute a typical, casual conversation.

Terminally cute: I have two words for you: Gilmore Girls. I apologize to fans, and maybe I haven’t given this show a chance since I've only watched it once. I turned it on one night when I couldn’t find anything else, and the daughter spewed I think 5 cynically witty one-liners in the first 90 seconds. OK, so she is a smart and funny and cynical college student. I’ll go with it.

Then her mother opened her mouth and did the exact same thing. And so did the mother’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s boyfriend. And the daughter’s best friend. And the grandmother. Cute line overload! These characters all share the same brain! The illusion that these words were spoken by six distinct people with different voices and personalities was completely shattered. It was impossible to ignore the fact that these lines were written by the same person (or persons). You want your readers to hear and see your characters, not the person behind the curtain.

Arguing as a substitute for real drama: You see this a lot on cop shows. You have your major 'A' story line and your lesser B and C subplots, but then, somewhere around letter G or H, there’s a sub-sub-subplot that never amounts to anything: a scene where the supervisor yells at the protagonist about his unorthodox (albeit effective) investigative methods. My problem with this is, like I said, it never amounts to anything and in no way contributes to the story except to tack on some cheap conflict.

And the dialogue itself usually bugs me too. I’ve worked in a lot of places (never a police station, but still), and when a supervisor calls in an employee for an upbraiding, it doesn’t usually sound like a 150-decibel, profanity-laced tantrum. Usually the supervisor dreads these talks and has been up all night carefully crafting the exact way to phrase the complaint in order to avoid a lawsuit, and sometimes the employee goes postal, but usually both parties are kind of silently pissed but manage to keep up their professional decorum. They save their ranting and raving for after work hours in the safety of their homes. That may not make for good TV, but all the fists pounding on desks and empty threats and insults don’t give me an adrenaline rush, they just make me roll my eyes.

Too much profanity: Hmmm. We don’t have cable, so I will have to take an example from the movies for this one. As much as I enjoyed The Big Lebowski, I seem to recall that just about every line contained the F word. I remember Brian saying that if you added up all the times that word and its variants were uttered in the movie, it would amount to about 5 minutes’ worth of screen time. We speculated that the screenwriter had a 115-page script and wanted to get to that magic number 120, so he went back in and injected hundreds of four-letter words for the sake of padding. I just don’t know many adults who go around talking this way, so I never find it believable.

Naked dialogue: The next two cannot apply to TV since you pretty much always know who’s talking and what they’re doing at the same time and you can hear accents, so I will be bold and name literary names. I seem to recall Hemingway doing this an awful lot. One of the many reasons he is not a favorite of mine… I don't want to have to read a page two or three times to figure out who's saying which line.

Phonetic dialogue: I hated Mark Twain and James Fenimore Cooper when I was a teenager just because of their phonetic spellings in dialogue. I later decided that Twain was worth slogging through and forgiving. Not so Cooper.

This blog entry is like three times longer than the two general entries on dialogue put together, which illustrates a bonus writing tip: when you get specific, you will have lots of material and much more text.