Great Dialogue Sells Books. Here's Why and How to Write It.

This little “short course” is aimed primarily at writers of fiction, but if you’re into creative non-fiction, such as that practiced by Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff and many more titles) and John McPhee, a genre dubbed by the critics as the “New Jounarlism,” this should be of interest to you too.

Forgive me for a few preliminaries here that may be ho-hum to some of you. But I want to start at the beginning before we sally forth into details and deep water.

Thousands of books fail every year because the writers have failed to create believable characters that the reader comes to care about-- for one reason or another. The characters don’t have to be “good people” per se for the reader to “care about” them. But they must, above all, be interesting and convincing. They can be serial killers, pederasts, hypocrites, pathological liars and many things worse. But as long as they sound and act plausibly, it’s off to the races. This is what Tennyson called “the willing suspension of disbelief,” which loosely translated into today’s English, means the reader says to him/her self, “Okay, I’m with you so far. Tell me more.”

These characters capture the reader’s attention and make the reader want to know what they are going to do next, or what is going to happen to them next, within the context of their interaction with the other characters in the book and the situation the book presents in its early chapters. (Every viable main character is involved in a conflict of some kind and the expansion of this conflict and its ultimate resolution is what we call “the plot.”)

But the truth is, readers don’t care a flying fig about the “plot,” or anthing else in the book (setting, prose style, moral, etc.), if you haven’t grabbed them at the outset with a character worthy of their interest.

So the over-riding question for the writer becomes: how do I make this guy or lady I have in mind “real” to the reader?

First and foremost, “telling” the reader about this person is not enough. In fact, the more you “tell” the reader (physical attributes, personal habits and history, how something makes him/her “feel”), the lamer and less life-like the character becomes. If a character doesn’t like anchovies on his/her pizzas, and this is important in advancing the story, don’t tell the reader this. Show it. Put the guy/gal in a situation in which his/her actions and statements dramatically reveal this fact. Like, maybe, this:

Sally flung the hot pizza on the table and it skidded into Rocko’s lap.

“Sorry, Rock. It was an accident.”

“Right.”

“Why are you looking at me that way, honey? Aw, don’t get mad! My hand slipped. I didn’t mean for it to get all over you.”

“How many damn times have I told you?”

“You don’t have to yell, you know. You’re always yelling at me! I can’t stand it anymore!”

“You’re totally worthless. I’m finished. Get the f—k outta my life!”

“Stop it! You’re getting my clothes dirty! Stop throwing that stinking stuff at me!”

“What? You don’t like anchovies either, eh?”

“I’m sorry, Rock. I forgot, I totally forgot!”

“Like hell you did!”

“Look, you’ve ruined my new outfit! I’m going to stink like those stinkin’ damn fish!”

“I’m outta here. When I get back, I want you and all your stupid crap cleaned out and gone, understand? Quit cryin’! It won’t do any good! I’m tellin’ you, get the hell out!”

“No, wait, Rock, honey! Don’t go!”

The above is not presented as an instance of excellence in dialogue, but only as an example of what any writer can do with a little work. Some writers have an ear for it and some have to study it. But the juice is obtained the same way. You have to listen to and groove on the speech patterns of the kind of people you’re writing about. Forget about grammar and correct English usage. People speak in fragments, yelps, snippets, squawks, mutters, hyperboles, understatements, and so on. The over-riding issue is: How would your character speak normally and in a given circumstance? Once you’ve got that down, things really start rolling. The book starts writing itself.



My favorite contemporary master of ten star dialogue is Elmore Leonard, the mystery writer. But to call him a mystery writer is an injustice because he rises so far above the genre. In my mind, he is our generation’s Mark Twain. He writes humorously about losers, low-lifes, criminals, hucksters, bail bondsmen. Not the respectable types. But he’s written over 30 novels, most of which have been on bestseller lists, and over a score of which have been made into hit movies. Remember “Get Shorty” starring John Travolta? Or “The 3:10 to Yuma,” which has been made and re-made already in his lifetime? It’s no accident. His characters are utterly compelling and believable, and reveal themselves through what they say. All of which is to say, they are interesting and we want to know what they’ll do next.

I watched a long video of an interview with Elmore Leonard not long ago during which he spoke frankly and humbly about how he learned his craft. Turns out the major influence on him was Hemingway, as sparse a “describer” as you can get (he abhorred adjectives and adverbs, refused to use them if at all possible), and he let his characters do the talking and plot development themselves.

I highly recommend Elmore Leonard’s books to writers for two reasons: they are a rip-roaring fun read and you can learn almost all you will ever need to know about writing great dialogue.

And great dialogue sells books.






Whatever the Source, Everybody Wants to Make a "Real" Book Out of It

This is something I just discovered on the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. Talk about "Signs of the Times!" All writers seem to want a "real" book!

The following is quoted verbatim from the Wall Street Journal under the "Fair Use" provision of U.S. copyright law:

By William M. Bulkeley

Some bloggers are beginning to save their words on paper after all — collected between hard covers in a bound volume to pass along to their children.

A service, Blog2Print, from New York custom-book maker SharedBook, prints blogs into books and says that demand has been been growing 50% every month, although from a small base.

“When we launched, people would say, ‘Who would want to print their blog?’” said Caroline Vanderlip, chief executive of SharedBook. But while demand was slow when the service was first introduced, she said after Google featured Blog2Print in a communication called “Blogger Buzz,” some 5,000 people clicked the link in 24 hours. It also works with other blog services such as TypePad and WordPress.

“It’s the modern equivalent of writing a journal in a black, bound book,” she said.

Melanie Jones, a young mother in Ocala, Fla., found the service when she searched “print my blog” online. She said that she has been blogging for four years, telling her friends and relatives around the country about family news and sharing pictures of her children.

After a while, though, “I wanted to have all those memories tangible in my hands and not out there in cyberspace,” she said.

Ms. Jones used the Blog2Print software to turn her blog into a 296-page book, which cost a little over $100, she said. “There’s a table of contents. The pages are numbered. It looks like a textbook.” One nice feature: “It includes comments people made like ‘Congratulations’ after a child was born.”

“It’s nice to see who we knew then, and what his grandparents said when he was born,” she added.

SharedBook said the average customer spends $50 on a 120-page book. Ms. Vanderlip predicts that based on current growth rates, more than 50,000 books will be created from blogs next year.





That All-Important First Sentence

Every writing guide worth its salt emphasizes the importance of grabbing would-be readers by the neck with a great opener. A writer has about 10 seconds of readers' time and attention to convince them to continue reading whatever it is you are serving up.

This critical first sentence is not always obtainable to the writer early in the writing process. Most of the time it becomes apparent and write-able only after the book is nearly finished or after the book has gone through several drafts. A writer has to discover his/her story as the story evolves and to reflect on the characters and situation a good while before a humdinger of a first sentence emerges.

Literary classics and books that have stood the test of time all have achieved this status in no small part because of their incredibly compelling opening lines. Here are a few opening salvos of timeless classics worth study and analysis:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . .--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Call me Ishmael. --Herman Melville, Moby Dick

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.--George Eliot, Middlemarch

What all these openers have in common is a single powerful affect on the reader, who thinks: "Huh? What? Why?" And to answer those questions, the reader does just what the sentences were crafted to accomplish. The reader continues to read.