The Pleasures of Dialogue

Q: Share your tips for writing believable dialogue. What separates good dialogue from poor, and how do you strike a balance between too much and too little in a scene/book?

 

-from Susan

 

I love to hear my characters talking. In a way, I’m eavesdropping on them because I don’t always know exactly what they’re going to say when they (I, I guess) open their mouths! Good dialogue has to sound real even though it isn’t. Why not? Because we salt our conversations with words and phrases that give us a couple of seconds to think about what we want to say, or to soften our meanings, or to present ourselves favorably. To our ears, that works. On the page, not so much. 

 

For me, dialogue has to serve a purpose. It moves the plot, reveals a character, creates or dissipates tension, may even carry a very small bit of background. 

 

How long is too long? The same amount that makes your eyes glaze at a party, that reduces you to “uh huh”s as you look for an escape. Some of us read our entire manuscripts out loud to catch long-winded treatises, or listen to the texts with audio apps that read for us. I just put down a much-praised noir novel because the private eye narrator not only used every cliché ever written for the genre, but carried on with the longest self-important monologues I’ve ever tried to endure. At a party, the character would be the person everyone else tries desperately to evade! Sadly, I don’t think the author was trying to paint him as such.

 

MURDER AND THE MISSING DOG, my newest mystery, launched formally last week, so I decided to include an excerpt in which dialogue does everything I wanted it to.

 

‘Bonjour, Madame. Viens ici vite!’ the widow called, beckoning with her free arm and hurrying over to the garden gate. Ariel thought, not for the first time, that Madame must have cut discreet eyeholes in the hat brim because, otherwise, how could she see everyone and everything that passed her? 

‘Bonjour, ma chérie,’ Katherine called back. ‘Shoot,’ she said in a low voice to Ariel, ‘I’m not supposed to use endearments when speaking to the women in the neighborhood. My American habit of assuming friendships that haven’t been cemented by decades of connections leads me into danger all the time.’ 

Madame Pomfort’s downturned mouth said she had heard and disapproved of Katherine’s familiarity as much as ever, but Ariel wondered why she was distressed. The woman unlatched the gate and stepped through. ‘This was bound to happen once those Bellegardes took over our village for their benefit. I warned everyone, did I not, that vagrants and rude people and voleurs would descend on us?’ 

‘What’s happened?’ Ariel looked around but saw no streams of threatening, swaggering strangers, much less curious strangers begging to spend money in Reigny. 

‘Well, it is you who should be the most concerned, Katherine, since it is happening at your’ – here Madame paused to sniff, her long nose adding emphasis – ‘shop. I saw it with my own eyes not ten minutes ago.’ 

‘Saw what? I’m on my way there now. Surely no one has broken into it?’ Katherine’s face registered fear. ‘A small negative cash flow is one thing, but the loss of so many exciting finds would be a catastrophe.’ Katherine’s hand went to her mouth. ‘I blame myself for not asking Michael to fix the back window that doesn’t close properly.’ 

Madame Pomfort would not be distracted from her most severe warning. ‘A vagrant, a homeless person just sleeping in your doorway. What does he think – that we shall all feed him, give him our own money, let him sleep in our houses? We will be run out of our homes, next thing.’ Her mouth turned down into a dramatic frown to register all kinds of nasty possibilities. ‘We will not be safe in our beds at this rate.’ She clutched one gloved hand to her heart, waved her hoe around and her voice trembled. 

Ariel frowned. A vagrant wasn’t a good thing overall, but Madame Pomfort had a habit, fed by an overactive imagination and old biases, of seeing the fall of civilization in anything that disturbed the routine of the village over which she reigned by dint of willpower. The gardener had taken off her apron, settled her long-handled hoe at her side and was clearly not going to miss any action from this invasion. 

As the defenders of Reigny’s safety rounded the bend and the whitewashed old house that now housed the little shop on the ground floor came into view, Ariel saw there was, indeed, someone curled up in the recessed doorway. But the beret, slightly askew on a head of gray hair, and the long shapeless coat were familiar. 

‘Could it be Madame Toussaint from Noyers?’ Ariel asked. The poor woman had probably arrived before dawn and was exhausted by what must have been a long walk. 

Katherine made a clucking noise and hurried forward. For Madame Pomfort’s benefit, she said, ‘She brings me little things to buy. She’s harmless, but she’s quite old.’ 

Ariel stepped closer. ‘I’ll wake her gently. No need to hold that over her.’ Madame Pomfort had advanced slowly to about six feet away and the hoe was poised as if to strike the small bundle of a woman.