Everybody’s Talking at Me, The Art of Dialogue, by Josh Stallings

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?

A: David Mamet said he always carries a pad and pen with him so when he overheard good dialogue he wrote it down. When I steal words from a chainsaw sculptor, it isn’t theft, it’s an homage. I try and always have a Moleskine notebook and a Fisher Bullet Space Pen with me to capture story ideas and snippets of dialogue that I either hear in my head or in the world around me.

In the early stages of writing a new character they tend to sound wooden. It takes me getting to know them well enough to dial in how they think and feel. Cisco in TRICKY was easy to start with because he was based on my son Dylan. I’ve listened to Dylan his whole life, his rhythm, word choice, and humor all came through. As I got deeper into the writing, Cisco’s life growing up in East LA added its own flavor to the dialogue.

Grandpa Hem in the same novel grew up in Deaf Smith Texas. My friend Amy loves a good turn of phrase. She was raised in Texas and she had a relative who used to say, “It’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock.” That became a touchstone to Hem’s dialogue. I made the mistake of googling Texas Slang. Every phrase I found came out corny. I’ve spent time in Texas so it is best to draw on what I’ve heard than to trust Google. A little regionalism goes a long way. Planting a line like rats fucking early on tunes the reader’s ear so that they will hear all that character's dialogue with the tone or accent. Little things help remind them. “Git.” instead of “Time for you to leave.” Lets you know it’s Hem talking.

I write until I know a character and then go back and revise early dialogue. I also have a file about every character and as I discover more about them I add to their bio description. I note if they are frivolous with their words or miserly. Do they want to sound better educated than they are because they feel insecure? Do they front with street slang to sound tough and cover fear? By building this file I can refer to it a hundred pages later when they reappear and I’ve forgotten what color their eyes were or that they spoke in broken Spanglish in chapter two.

I have been told by enough women to believe them that I write wonderful female characters. I’ve been asked how I do it. Simple. I have never written a woman character. I have written many characters that are women. Gender identity, affectional orientation, cultural, or racial backgrounds are not characters. They are monolithic generalizations and of very little value when writing a character’s dialogue. 

A good place to study dialogue is by reading plays. David Mamet’s American Buffalo is a master class in rhythm. Sam Shepard’s True West delivers complete fully rounded flawed characters using only dialogue. I love films, but a screenplay relies on knowing it is a visual medium. So much can be said with a close up on an actor, that the dialogue doesn’t need to carry the work. When reading a play I was taught to only read the dialogue. Stage directions of any kind are almost always written by the stage manager after the play has been mounted and might not reflect what the writer was thinking at all.

Find writers whose dialogue speaks to you. Reread their books and ask yourself “Why do I like this? How does it work?” Take it apart and look at the lines. Steal freely.     

 Here are a couple of books with dialogue I dig… 

Set in LA 1963 Gary Phillips’ One-Shot Harry subtly uses dialogue to remind the reader of the era and place without ever clubbing you over the head with it. He writes about Black characters that come from every educational level and social strata.

Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows covers characters from multiple levels of LA’s social classes. Actors, film makers, petty thieves, executives, cops, each with their own coded language. He captures but never mocks his characters. 

In Lou Berney’s Dark Ride he writes with love and respect about a stoner slacker thrown into a situation that calls forth his need to be a hero or as close to an approximation of a hero as he can pull off. It vibes a Hitchcockian everyman for our times. Written in first person even the descriptions read like dialogue. 

“I’m the kid in the back row, moving his lips and just pretending to sing. I’m the dude with a fake badge and a toy gun. The dumbest thing you can do, if you’re someone like me, is believe you can be more than you are.” — Dark Ride: A Thriller by Lou Berney  

I haven’t answered the last two parts of this question. How do I know good dialogue? It’s like the court’s take on pornography vs art, I know good dialogue when I read it. It’s one of those intuitive things that ultimately inform what becomes our individual voices. 

How much is too much or too little dialogue? Same answer as above. Tana French’s Murder Squad books all come down to these incredibly long dialogue driven interrogations. They read almost like transcriptions of an interview. It gives a level of authenticity that’s hard to achieve. I haven’t ever used that much dialogue, but I’m damn glad she does. Her books sing a brutal tune that I love to read. As a writer or a reader there are NO RULES… Okay, there is one rule, everything is possible if you can pull it off. I’m not Tana French, I love what she does but I’ll leave real time interrogations to her.

Last thought - I have been lucky enough to work with editors I trust to guide me when I stray too far off the map. And editors who push me when I stay too safely inside the known lines.

Orphan Thoughts and Great Openings, by Josh Stallings

Q: Have you had success taking an old, perhaps previously abandoned, manuscript and breathed in new life before selling it?

A: No… That is true, but maybe I can dig a little deeper. I was talking to my son Jared about his song writing. His current project is a band called Sprinkler Boiz. The process is working with a fellow musician who is creating instrumental tracks. Jared then creates lyrics and vocal tracks and they bounce back and forth until a song emerges. He said he scours his notebooks for orphan lines and thoughts, using them to build a song. It feels like his mind has built a wonderful pile of building blocks for him to play with. 

Back in my typewriter and pen days I saved every scrap of writing in an army surplus sailor’s chest that I dragged with me whenever we moved. Because of the basic disorganized nature of my brain, finding anything of value in ten-thousand scraps was daunting if not impossible. With the advent of computers I saved floppy discs of every draft, thinking I might go back and find gold. Problem was, I saved to obsolete formats.  

I ditched that real and virtual pile of orphan thoughts when we moved to the mountains. And I feel much lighter for it. I have come to see that my taste and world view is ever evolving. No matter how brilliant an idea was (and I doubt they were) I no longer live in that time. 

This isn't to say I don’t sometimes toy with an idea for a long time before it becomes a book. I worked on Tricky off and on for years before I became evolved enough as a person and skilled enough as a writer to turn those thoughts into a book. 

I have a book out on submission right now that I am writing a new opening chapter for. This has led me to think a lot about where a story should start. I cut trailers for a ton of 1980’s action films. They mostly start with a bang, and if they could they tossed into it the hero “saving a cat” so we knew they were good people even if they killed a mountain of nameless baddies. With books, the wisdom is you have less than twenty pages to hook a reader. But what will hook them is nebulous. 

Here is the opening paragraph from Lou Berney’s Dark Ride,

I’m lost, wandering, and somewhat stoned. This parking lot, when you’re in the middle of it, seems much vaster and more expansive than it does from the street. Or do I just seem much less consequential? That’s the question. One for the ages. It’s July, hot as balls. I stare up. The sky, pale and papery, looks like it’s about to burst into flame. How would you describe the sky to someone who has never seen a sky? You’d have to explain how it’s different every day. So many shades of blue, of gray. And we’re not even talking about sunrise or sunset. Plus the clouds! How would you describe clouds?

I’m hooked by the character's voice. I know from the book jacket that it’s a thriller, this character feels absolutely fresh in that context. He’s not a macho man or tough as nails woman, not a smart every-man, not even a petty criminal in over is head. Just a stoned dude who is content to be who he is, who is dragged into a moral dilemma and a dangerous world. 

Another fine opening is from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss,

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Now that sets a tone and tells me exactly the kind of writer Crumley is.

Emily St. John Mandel starts Station Eleven this way

No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Apocalyptic, and smart. Speaks of a huge event, but also locks me into the writer’s voice. 

Here is the opening line from my latest WP, 

The worst day of your life never begins on that day. It is the culmination of events. Some good. Some bad. Spend your life as a cop and you’ll recognize the connections between time, actions, and pain. A survivor’s pain is proportionate to how much they loved the victim. On July 21st 1984 Detective Hem Madsen sat in an unmarked police car unaware he was ten days away from the worst day of his life.

Will it make it to the final version of the book, or will it be a darling that needs killing? I guess I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Point is, where we start and how we write that opening sets the reader up for the rest of the book. It gives them an expectation we must fulfill. If it is done correctly it will pull in the readers that will enjoy the book, and might repel those who wouldn’t find it to their liking anyway. 

I personally am sucked in by character, and originality. What pulls you in?

Time to Be Inspired, by Josh Stallings

Q: Are there crime fiction books so good you hold on to them and re-read them? Name a few classics and inspirations.

A: I evolve year to year not only as a writer but also as a reader. That’s true for most of us. As a teenager I attached my identity to the bands I listened to, books I read, movies I dug. It was a way to connect with like minds. I wore tight pants, long scarves, platform shoes, a leather jacket. 6’4” and skinny, I must have looked a sight, but I was a walking billboard to attract my people. 

We listened to Bowie, Velvet Underground, Eno, Queen. We read Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Albee, we did scenes from Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. I read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, but doubt I told anyone. I loved Cotton Comes To Harlem and Superfly. As an adult I find Curtis Mayfield’s classic Superfly soundtrack holds up better than the film. 

At sixteen I moved to LA. I was alone a lot and Raymond Chandler kept me company. I slowly discovered what I personally loved to read. Hard Boiled Crime consumed me for a long time. Here are a few writers that gave me a good grounding in the field:

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye is my favorite, but you can’t go wrong reading anything he wrote.

Charles Willeford, the Hoke Moseley series is gritty brilliance. Miami Blues is worth more than a few reads.

James Crumley, is the poet laureate of brutally self effacing hard boiled crime. Dancing Bear remains my favorite, and has the best last paragraph of any book I’ve ever read. 

Andrew Vachss, the Burke series introduced me to the possibilities of what a crime family of choice could look like, that and Bullmastiffs. He wrote about the pain of childhood abuse and the need for avenging knights in tarnished armor. Flood is the first in the series and the place to start.

James Lee Burke has published twenty-three Dave Robicheaux books. The first, Neon Rain is amazing, as are all that follow. Dave and Clete Purcel are opposites in some ways, but maybe more, they are two sides of a tarnished and pitted coin. They give Burke a chance to examine morality from two perspectives. Dave who does hard violent things to set the world right, but suffers guilt and spiritual pain for having done them. Clete acts to protect those he loves and if he feels any guilt, he drowns it in whisky. 

If you dig your crime fiction Hard Boiled these five writers will give you a grounding in the sub-genre. They did for me.

My evolution as a reader is taking me farther away from crime fiction. Don’t get me wrong I still read a ton of crime books. Just finished the amazing Naomi Hirahara’s Evergreen. A brilliant, tough LA novel that we all need to read.

I recently read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. WOW! She is a bloody master of style and form. The three books are set in the same time and have many crossover characters, but each book feels stylistically entirely different. She has her characters drive the prose. I find writers working in speculative and sci-fi are freer from tropes and reader’s structural expectations; this is exciting as a reader and maybe impossible as a writer. All writing is a high-wire act, but Atwood walked over the Grand Canyon without a net or a wire. Moments in it took my breath away. 

A well written book will entertain. A brilliantly written one inspires.

Which books inspires you? Your list will be different from every other writer or reader’s.

What book am I waiting for today? 

Lou Berney’s A Dark Ride, out 9/19. Lou is one of my favorite authors, his work is full of thrills and chills and buckets of heart. He creates people you will not forget. Where ever he’s going in this new novel, I’m buckled up and ready to go. 

These Books Are Not For Burning by Josh Stallings

Q: The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

A: Easy, the books that matter are my signed editions. This year Thomas Pluck gifted me with signed first editions of most of James Crumley’s oeuvre. Tom knows how important Crumley is to me. The Moses McGuire trilogy is a love letter to Crumley’s tarnished drunken knights. Three books were missing, Dancing Bear, luckily my friend Steven Hertzog gave me a signed first edition years ago. That leaves only A Right Madness and The Wrong Case, (weirdly these are his first and last detective novels,) I will find them sooner or later.

So after I make sure Erika, our sons, and the four legged beasties are safe, I will run back in for the Crumleys and that’s it.

Charlie signed this to our son Jared after seeing his punk band play.

Ok that and the books Charlie Huston signed to me and my family. He has been a friend and supporter since I first stumbled onto the crime scene. That’s six Crumleys and seven Hustons. Nothing else.

Except for November Road, a brilliant book, and Lou Berney signed it with a wonderful note to Erika and I. 

Looking on my shelf Bad Boy Boogie screams, “Yo gonna let me fry?” How could I leave signed Thomas Pluck books behind? 

I have signed copies from my oldest best mate, fantasy writer Tad Williams. Young Americans is dedicated to him for good reason. We lived through so much, and more to go.

It’s been said that book are old friends. These are old friends written and signed by dear friends. Picking up Monday’s Lie, I remember Jamie Mason signing it at Bouchercon San Diego. I moderated a panel she was on. I had no idea we would remain good friends over the years. 

Every book here has memories attached of the book and the writer. When Erika couldn't make a conference, Catriona McPherson signed a copy of Scot Free to her.

The first time we met Terry Shames was at Noir Bar Los Angeles, she signed a copy of her first book to Erika. She remains one of my favorite writers and people. So yeah, her books are coming.  

What about Eric Beetner or Gary Phillips’ books? Johnny Shaw? Todd Robinson? Sara J. Henry? Hillary Davidson? All great writers and old friends. Yeah, their books are coming along. 

Stuart Neville added a drawing to his signature. As did Scott Phillips when he signed Ice Harvest. Got to keep those.

I have a copy of Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely” published in Russia and signed to me from actor Victor Wong. He was in a movie I wrote and edited that was shot in Russia. This book has personal value and the back where it explains english idioms to Russian readers is priceless.

And the books of Ian Ayris, my brother from another world. Ian signed April Skies to me  praising my memoir, “It helped me more than you will ever know.” I feel the same way about his work.  

Ok, tally up time. I count thirty six heavy books that must be saved. Maybe I can drag those out of a fire in one trip… maybe… until Erika chimes in, “What about the children's books we read to the boys?” I look at the covers and remember reading to Dylan and Jared. I read Where the Wild Things Are so many times I could read it with my eyes closed, and I did some nights. 

I just asked Jared if he remembers any particular books he was read. “Yeah, Where the Wild Things Are, Everyone Poops, and Goodnight Moon.” The children's books survived the move to the mountains and the downsizing of our life, they will not burn. Not even hypothetically.

Erika’s beautifully bound with original art work Folio editions? Yep. Those are simply too beautiful to let burn.

Books have been a part of my life since before I was me. They are attached to memories, they are gossamer threads that help me drift back. Winnie the Pooh is a very little me lying on my father playing with a Steiff bear and hearing the words rumble up deep and rich from his chest. 

Peter Pan is my mother reading to us from the very book she was read to as a child. It was faded and magical. My mother was Wendy and we were her wild children.

What books would I save? 

All of them, clearly. Wouldn’t you?