On The Wing

Editor’s note: Marc Nash knows things. Troubling things and puzzling things. Things he likes to share with other writers. Cutting Dialogue is an intriguing arguments for someone who has much to say. On The Wing welcomes Marc’s voice to our pages.

Cutting Dialogue

By Marc Nash

Be it my novel or peer review site postings, a constant question has been asked of me: “why is there next to no dialogue in your prose?” Talking is one of the main things we do as humans. Conversing. Communicating. It helps a reader get a handle of your characters. It would make your book easier for the reader to get to grips with…

Firstly I want to say that I can do dialogue. Before writing prose fiction, I wrote stage plays for 15 years. Nothing but an unceasing diet of dialogue required for a writer. But I have to say it’s my experience of writing dialogue for that realm that partly informs my decisions to keep dialogue down to a minimum in my novels.

Firstly talking isn’t the only thing that defines us as humans. We also think thoughts. We may silently curse somebody for fear of offense, but still the thought is expressed in our mind. We formulate our thoughts and reactions to things without necessarily always feeling a need to articulate them in sound. We think things through, we try and interpret likely consequences of certain of our actions; think of a pursuit of a particular love mate, how much silent thought we pour into that endeavour. Playing over and over each tiny incident for a sign of likely success. These are just as human as the urge to talk. They are forms of self-expression, albeit held within. After all, the mind constructs thoughts with the same tools as we speak with: words.

So I do  not see dialogue as the key indicator of our humanity. Where it ought to rate greater literary significance is in establishing relationship. Most of what I offered above takes place in isolation, us being left alone with our thoughts.

As a side point, reading is also a two-way communication that usually takes place in isolation, relying on the imagination; the definitions become blurred by Proust’s description of reading as “that fruitful miracle of a conversation that takes place in solitude”. A conversation with one of the people involved being absent? Go figure! It relies on both the imagination of the writer’s words and the receptive imagination of the reader to take those words and build the story in his/her mind.

But back to two people in a room talking. You can get to know so much about them and their relationship, by what they say right?

If you’re watching those two people on stage or up on screen, then yes. There it’s all about the portrayal of their relationship. You’re assisted by their facial expressions, their body language, gestures, inflection of voice, how close they stand to one another. You have none of these automatically embedded in lines of dialogue within prose. You could describe them, where the interlocutors’ eyes are looking, what they’re doing with their hands while listening, the rising cadence at the end of a resonant word or the like, but you would double, treble, quadruple the length of the exchange on the page. The prose would grind to a halt. You could do it more sparingly, the blinking of an eye here, the barely perceptible blush there, but then I always want to know what’s going on in this sentence, that is so different from those lines without any such elaboration? Even people sat in place at a table talking, rarely keep still throughout the duration of their conversation. They drink their coffee, they twiddle the spoon, they stack the sugar cubes in the bowl, they trace an outline in the salt spilled on the table. They may even tune out and look at other people in the cafe. Just go people watch and see this happening.

Dialogue in plays seethe in subtext. Since you have the craft and skill of the actor to bring them out. I defer to the master of stage writing, Harold Pinter. It’s what is not said that is absolutely key there. Of course, skillful prose writing can weave in subtext too, but the more dialogue you have, the longer the verbal exchanges are, you either run the risk of over-egging your subtext and repeating it so often so that there’s nothing ‘sub-’ about it anymore; or the subtly laid subtext gets diluted by lots of lines which have no ‘added value’. I think this latter is a large part of my gripe with dialogue. Many lines of dialogue add nothing (other than imparting their information) eg “Johnny said he’d be here by 5pm”. The context in which the dialogue takes place would clearly tell us that Johnny was in fact not here and it was past 5pm, or that the two speakers were waiting for Johnny before conducting the key business or that they had a cut-off deadline of 5pm to conclude their business. The dialogue line itself really adds very little.

So I believe less is always more with dialogue in prose. Aside from relationship, which you can also render by describing the relationship in space between two characters, distant/intimate/invasive/recoiling etc, you can paint a character by sparing use of their language. The idiom with which they express themselves, how they see the world around them, or what they deem important enough to put into words. Straight away you’d have an idea of their intelligence and level of education. A four/five line exchange of dialogue can do the work of pages if it is honed enough.

I despair on peer review reading sites, when I get swathes of dialogue to plough through. I always wonder why the author doesn’t write it as a play instead. So often it’s about the author trying to convey plot information in the misguided belief that this mode is more interesting and more readable than doing it as backstory. It isn’t. And inevitably the characters end up speaking like no human being would, as they are forced to spout plotlines.

I don’t eschew dialogue entirely. In one novel it makes an appearance right at the end, when it has two functions; firstly the main character who has been addressing the reader directly (and conversationally in tone if not in speech marks) just like Proust’s homily, now is shown exactly whom else has been listening to her story within the novel; and secondly, without giving it away, that very fact puts into question everything she has related up to this point, because of who she is dialoguing with. Up until this point the reader has been addressed directly and seemingly within one set of parameters, and then all of a sudden, through the introduction of a third party as it were who contributes their pov, the reader now is forced to question any assumptions and conclusions he/she may have arrived at up to this point. Here the limited dialogue is subversive.

A second novel has quite a lot of dialogue, but again it is off kilter. Partly it is dialogue typed out on computers in chat rooms and forums, a very different language from that spoken. Indeed it was a great surprise to me as I wrote, to discover that the narrator’s voice which had been in dialect, could not persist once I reached the point at which he started communicating online with his love pursuit. Because he was typing, I was faced with the fact that no-one actually writes/types in dialect in real-life communications. When the two characters do finally talk to each other in the final section of the book, again it is a subversive act; the man who has been pursuing her behind the relative anonymity of an online identity, reveals in a phone call a very different personality and purpose. His actual voice, heard for the first time, is one full of only previously hinted at menace and manipulation. Here dialogue tramples down the distance and fantasy built up over the rest of the novel. And yet it is still not face to face.

A final example sees a father at the door of his son’s bedroom as he lays silent siege to his room to get him either to come out or at least open up and talk to him. No words are exchanged as the father calculates strategies that reveal both his and the son’s character and the relationship as he perceives it. The end of the novella, having had just one line actually spoken at the end of its each of its two chapters, reveals exactly why no words are exchanged in the real time course of the novel and all the regrets the father has of not actually airing his thoughts to his son.

So I write extensively ABOUT dialogue and communication (or the paucity of it), without writing much in the way of dialogue itself. Language is a notoriously slippery entity for doling out precise meaning. Think about how many misunderstandings you have with people in an average week, based on what they say to you, or write or type in e-mails. Phones are the worst for this as again, you can’t judge reactions. That is what playwriting fostered in me. A determination to probe and get inside the nature of how we communicate, by addressing language in particular.  That to me is about getting inside the nature of being human.