Curiously, I a
m now of a mind to return to the craft of writing. This section will discuss character and dialogue. The example I will use comes from Gardens of the Moon, Chapter Seven, the third section. The scene is with Lady Simtal and Councilman Turban Orr, and is set at her estate, in her bedroom.
I’ve chosen this scene for a number of reasons: firstly, it’s relatively short; secondly, it fuses character, character action, and dialogue in a way that is, I hope, both interesting and readily explicable.
Alas, because of length restrictions, I can’t include the excerpt here. You’ll need to find a copy of Gardens of the Moon; the section is about three pages, beginning with ‘The Lady Simtal paced…” If you don’t have a copy of the novel, you can try the local library. I can’t give specific page numbers because different editions have different pagination.
Many writers use dialogue for purposes of conveying plot elements, providing basic information and advancing the story. Often, among unmindful writers, this takes the form of Question and Answer, interspersed with exposition. I spent the last few minutes working up egregious examples only to find I can’t do any – I’ve lost the knack, if I ever had it in the first place. But I am sure you have noted examples of this kind of dialogue while reading books you later wish you’d never read. They come across as clunky, wooden, and sometimes ridiculously obvious – in other words, the dialogue doesn’t sound like ‘real’ conversation.
At the same time, there are instances where it is nevertheless necessary to convey plot elements through dialogue; the problems arise when that imperative overpowers other essential requirements: specifically, the need to convey a sense of the ‘real’ and the authentic; and of conveying character. These are people talking, after all, and each holds to his or her own needs, wants, fears, motivations and attitudes. Revealing these is achieved by the writer through describing action, thought, and dialogue. Granted, exposition supports all of this, but we’ll talk about exposition at another time.
But even then, the key to writing decent dialogue is, for me at least, found in working against all the currents of necessity. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s take the above-noted requirements one by one.
1. Conveying Plot Elements
A certain amount of information is necessary, to maintain a sense of cohesion. There’s a sliding scale here. At one end you have writers like, oh, I don’t know, James Michener, whose novels read like text-books vaguely dramatized and stylistically suggestive of a roomful of hired researchers collating their notes (which, if the rumours are accurate, is precisely what they were).
On the other end, Cormac McCarthy, whose most recent writing seems to have taken the paring down into a form feeling both obsessive and compulsive, with the result so bereft of internal emotion that even reading it makes me feel repressed (yes, I know, I’ll take a lot of hits for this, and hasten to point out that it’s my opinion, no more and no less. The Road was for me an anorexic novel, so starved down all I could see were the bones of its construction, glaring out at me as if to say I’m still fat, I’m still eating too much, got to lose more weight, got to…
Oddly enou
gh, I lean more towards McCarthy than Michener on that sliding scale. Even when I know that I need to give out information (dammit), I resist, push off in the opposite direction, fighting against the current of necessity. Which is probably why I lose readers early on in Gardens of the Moon. Not only do I not spoonfeed, I’ve taken a hammer to the spoon. It’s not just for reasons of personal taste, either.
These books are fat enough – I can’t even imagine how big they’d be if I did the info-dump thing – so there were practical reasons for staying terse. It’s also a matter of focus. Keep it tight and the big picture only shows up in the faintest hints, vague shapes sensed only peripherally. Until it’s time to look at ‘em.
The excerpt provides plot elements. The political consequences of the assassination that preceded this scene; a few details about other events (the arrival of Moon’s Spawn and the efforts to make contact with its inhabitants); and an indication that through these two characters schemes are at work that place other players at risk (ones we happen to like). But they are all subsumed, almost incidental to what’s driving the scene.
2. Conveying Character
Nobody converses from a position of unchecked openness. Ever. We are biologically designed to hide most of our inner world from the outer one. Sociobiologists might call it a survival imperative, slave to the necessity to ensure the continuity of our genes. Even without the genetic angle, being social creatures encourages us to hold back most of what we think and feel. We do this to get along. If we were truly open, oblivious to any notion of inside or outside, or barriers, we’d be ants.
At the same time, our biology maintains some essential holdovers we relegate to the ‘subconscious,’ to help us ‘read’ fellow humans. And that of course is all the nonverbal communication going on, which often belies our spoken words. As with any and all social creatures, we really only fight one war, and it is an information war, in which we are lone soldiers, where every alliance is shaky no matter how necessary. And we’ve been fighting it forever (who knows, maybe death is nothing but the collapse of those barriers, where we all flow into one single form of all-knowing. Called God, I suppose. An end to the war, a kingdom of peace. Nice thought).
So, we’re cagey, and that needs to play a role when presenting a character. Cagey is my byword on dialogue; and for those for whom I offer no internal point-of-view, cagey is the byword for character, too. Cagey cagey cagey.
You know the classic fantasy scene from AD&D where you walk into a tavern and ask somebody something and they actually tell you everything you need to know? Hate ‘em. No, hate’s too gentle a word. Despise. A perfect example of using dialogue to convey information – at the expense of character, realism, even imagination. Awful. Lazy. Insulting. Has this character no life beyond sitting there waiting to tell you all you need to know? No motivations? No secret likes, dislikes, fears, loves, weaknesses, hidden scars, sad memories?
Some beginning writers create these characters and then manipulate them solely to help guide along the hero(es). Might as well be automatons. I used to set up players in my role-playing games with just that scenario – tavern, some guy in the corner looking mysterious, and off the players would troop, sit down at his table, and start up a conversation. Or try to. This man has just had his false teeth stolen and not even a tyrant’s torturer could make him open his mouth, since he’s both vain and embarrassed, and you’d be, too, in his shoes. So, I made a point of confounding players’ expectations. This is what comes of being evil.
‘…in his shoes.’ That’s the key to all this. As writer it’s like this: you invented them, now you owe them. You owe them their space, their lives, their humanity. Maybe you won’t show much of all that, but it still needs to be there – or, of not there, then what needs acknowledging is that character’s right to that life, a right that must be respected. Writers who manipulate characters probably manipulate real people, too. I say ‘probably’ because, really, I haven’t a clue. Well, call it a suspicion. Comes down to respect, anyway, either way.
There’s an interplay of power going on between Simtal and Orr, and it switches back and forth multiple times, spelled out through non-verbal cues, silent interplay of actions, and spoken words (which mean one thing on the surface but something else under the surface). Simtal is actively engaged on all fronts and accordingly uses every trick. Find them. Her final gesture is overtly sexual (because sex is how she got all her wealth and power in the first place), and echoes to the scene’s pre-opening (the sex that has just occurred off-stage). Turban Orr is alternately unmindful of her efforts and cynically all-too-aware of them, and while arrogant it’s that arrogance that ultimately makes him vulnerable to Simtal’s manipulation.
So, there’s varying levels of self-awareness, gender-specific in some ways, with Simtal internalized (and it’s her bedroom, not his – imagine how different the scene would feel if it was his bedroom instead) with her ambitions, and Turban Orr externally directed with his (politics, etc). For him, the sex is a diversion also useful in terms of potential alliance; for her, sex is her only source of power. She wants him to arrange the murder of her ex-husband. He wants the power to indulge her wishes, with all the ease that he indulges his own (as he has just done).
The entire power play proceeds on distinct levels that still fizz on contact with each other: her non-verbal argument – which is all about who is in charge, post-coitally – which she almost loses (he ignores her to tie on his leggings) only to get back when she sprawls on the bed at the end – catching his eye one last time; and her interplay with him on subjects ranging from politics outside her interest (yet she uses the subject seeking to puncture his swagger, while he fends off her efforts almost haphazardly, which in turn leaves her on shaky ground, which then ups the venom of her words and makes more raw and obvious her nonverbal stuff) to the one subject obsessing her (her ex-husband).
The two are conjoined but their motivations are not. This is how you can get conflict from just two characters (never mind the only adage about three characters being the minimum). They want different things and most of what goes on between them is the economics of sex and power. Because those are what obsesses these two characters.
So, how does a writer go about making full use of all this? Here is an exercise I gave my workshop students a couple years back: two characters in a room at night, between them a dead body lying on the floor. Write two pages of dialogue with minimal exposition, under the following rules:
- They never mention the body.
- They never directly answer each other’s questions.
- No-one else arrives on the scene.
At the end of your two pages the reader should know who the dead person is, his/her relationship to the characters, and how the victim died. Let’s see some of your work in the days to come, and I’ll comment as best I can.
No-one likes being asked direct questions – that’s why courts have all those swearing-in rituals and perjury laws. We’re naturally evasive. We don’t like to get pinned down. We often lie and with good reason, too. The writer has to think about all these things when creating dialogue, so that everything a character says is squeezed out reluctantly, from that hidden reservoir of fears, desires, etc. People don’t really talk to each other; they talk past each other.
Conversely, a person can talk endlessly – this too is a defense mechanism. Who pays attention or makes the effort to find the gems amidst all the detritus? Kruppe is that kind of character; everything he says is misdirection, so in that sense he is giving voice to the very evasiveness I’m talking about here. And he does so entirely aware of what he’s up to, and it amuses him. I guess in those instances, Kruppe is me.
Every time you have someone ask a question, draw up short and consider how the character being addressed can evade answering directly. If required, have them answer but only in their heads (so we don’t see it) and then have them utter a statement based on that hidden, unspoken, unknown answer. Leapfrog the dialogue so that we know stones have been jumped over even though we can’t see them, and we know the importance of each stone by how high the person jumps.
Get into the habit of this and you’ll be amazed at how dialogue just sings along, and ‘sounds’ almost natural (but not so natural that we die of boredom – condense reality to keep it lively). Obviously, there will come moments in the story when things get raw, when all the subterfuge is torn away, but the dramatic impact of those instances is entirely dependent on all the times when it’s all stayed under the surface, molten, bubbling away – the longer you hold back on the explosion the more powerful it will be when it finally comes.
There’s a style of writing (Carveresque) where the explosion never comes; where it’s all just ratcheted up and up and up, and then suddenly the story’s done. Works best with short stories. In novels it just makes you want to scream at the last page. Or there is a style where the eruption is exclusively in the reader’s inner world (I did plenty of that in my series, say, with some scenes closing Deadhouse Gates, Memories of Ice and House of Chains, and, finally, The Crippled God – the characters stayed tightly bound, transferring the anguish to the reader, but each time, the scenes needed to be carefully worked towards, so that the collusion of circumstance and character serves to deliver a single crushing blow. Which is why I consider what I write to be tragedy).
Anyway. As you can see I didn’t do a line-by-line analysis here. You can do the work with what I’ve provided, if you’re so inclined. The process of deconstruction is one every beginning writer should work towards mastering, as a way of demystifying the process of writing, and of moving past the ‘I write from instinct’ rubbish I recall hearing from fellow students back in the writing programs I attended. Instinct only works until something goes wrong, at which point you don’t know how to figure out what happened, much less fix it. It’s not a magical process, this writing. It’s the brain working on every cylinder, full tilt, max RPMs, until you start bleeding out the ears.
What could be more fun than that?
Recent Steven Erikson Articles:
- Deconstructing Fiction (For Writers and Readers): Excerpt Deconstructed (8)
- Deconstructing Fiction (For Writers and Readers): Excerpt Deconstructed (7)
- Deconstructing Fiction (For Writers and Readers): Excerpt Deconstructed (6)
- Deconstructing Fiction (For Writers and Readers): Excerpt Deconstructed (5)
- Deconstructing Fiction (For Writers and Readers): Excerpt Deconstructed (4)
2’nding Toste
Also throwing out an attempt:
In a non-descript room two ancient beings fought over a prize. The first was Eri who is from fire, and the second was Reta who is from water.
“What’re you doing here?” asked Eri, as Reta condensed in front of him.
“I should ask the same of you,” Reta replied, “Can you not see my alter boiling away behind you?”
“You mean to tell me that’s not soup?!” Even as he uttered the words, Eri began to dry heave at the thought of swallowing water blessed in the name of Reta.
Inspecting the cauldron Reta responds, “So it is, how fortunate that the poison in this soup would never kill ones such as ourselves.” Slowly, she picked up the wooden ladle and spooned some of the broth into her mouth.
Bubbling over with excitement Reta exclaimed, “Tincture of flame, I should have guessed!”
“Woah, you’re not suggesting that I poisoned the fool!” Eri said backing into the nearest corner of the small room.
Reta smoothly walked over towards Eri “You know the rules. You are not supposed to interfere.”
Eri, passions enflamed flicks a finger out at Reta “Like you always play by the rules. Who are you to judge?”
Receding, lips pouting, Reta murmurs “Typical, Eri. You would get all fired up over nothing…”
Passions dimming Eri wonders aloud “We still have to decide who will take the sorry lout before morning. Otherwise one of the others may get wise and try to claim him for their own.”
As if an idea has struck him for the first time, Eri brightens up “I’ll take him, it’ll be less trouble for you in the long run Reta.”
“Absolutely not! Under no circumstances will I let you have him, just because he was your priest does not mean he wants to spend an eternity in your realm!” She then stamped her foot for emphasis, as if to say the conversation was over.
“What’s wrong with my realm?” Eri said, idea somewhat extinguished.
“Oh nothing, it is just FILLED WITH FIRE! Who wants to go there?!” Reta questioned, hoping to further extinguish Eri.
“Perhaps he was a chef,” retorted Eri, brightening noticeably.
“And why would that matter,” said Reta, who was slowly advancing on Eri.
“Think of how easy it would be to cook. Fire over here, over there, everywhere! He could enjoy this life’s passion in the next,” Eri said stepping towards Reta.
“You can not be serious,” Reta surging onward relentlessly, “He likes a little bit of fire, not a whole world of it!”
“It would be better than your realm,” responded Eri, with a slight twinkle in his eye. Watch her squirm!
“He loved to swim. I saw him doing it nearly every day. Apparently he got pretty hot cooking all the time,” Reta, responded languidly. She then walked to the center of the room, mouth dripping sensing the prize was almost hers.
Eri, abashed almost saw his chance at the prize gutter out. “What happens when he gets tired?” He then joined Reta in the middle of the room.
“I will make sure that never happens to your little priest,” calming words from a serene face.
With his interest in his priest burning out, Eri almost vanishes, then he re-appears in a rage “How is he going to cook and eat!?”
Reta, remaining calm attempted to placate her colleague, saying “Lots of people eat fish raw, and I have plenty of that.”
Eri, slightly diminished responds “He hates fish!”
“No he does not you fool, you just ate some of his fish soup,” she bubbled.
“I thought you said that was your altar,” he raged.
Reta screamed with rage boiling over, “It is not my altar!”
“Now who’s boiling?” Responded Eri, with pride beaming off his scarred face. “Can’t swim in boiling water, now can you, guess he’s mine after all.”
“I’m NOT BOILING, and even if I was it’s only because I am around you again. You have that effect on people!” Said Reta heatedly.
“And he’s one of mine, he would have the same effect on you, do you want to be like this forever?” Eri crackled with excitement knowing he had won.
Once again, thank you for giving us this insight into your mind, Steven. it’s like a free ten minute workshop and i value your experience and expertise highly.
I took a shot at your little writing exercise, and I’m mildly satisfied with what I came up with. The idea that you might actually comment (or even, beru fend, critique!) has me all in a flutter but i assumed that this would have been an in-class exercise and so here, unedited and uncensored, is my attempt.
Outside the second floor window a streetlight flickered, casting periodic shafts of light on the grim scene within.
“He never told me who the guy was,” came a voice during a period of darkness.
“You can’t be serious.”
Harry sneered, “Of course I’m serious, you dolt!”
He rummaged in his pockets for a lighter, flicked it and brought the flame to the cigarette waiting on the edge of his lips.
Trent watched from the edge of the couch, hands jiggling in his lap, “Got one for me?”
Harry regarded him from within a haze of smoke, his sneer deepening.
“A man could get killed that way,” he muttered, pulling another smoke from his shirt pocket and handing it over. Trent made a gesture and with a muttered, “Jesus Christ,” Harry handed over the lighter as well.
Harry walked over to the window, looked down upon the street.
“What’s it look like out there?” Trent asked, looking up from lighting his smoke.
Harry hesitated, watching a taxi roll slowly down the darkened street below, somewhere a dog barked, was answered from several directions, “Never heard a man make a sound like that, like some kinda dyin’ rodent or somethin’” he said under his breath.
“Yeah, well, pain’ll do that to a guy.”
Harry looked back over, saw, in a sputter of light from the streetlamp, the eyes of his colleague, deep set and bracketed in heavy lines. He took a drag on his cigarette. Needing a moment.
He went to the lone chair in the room – avoiding the large wet patches on the carpet – a wooden thing, rickety, with peeling blue paint. Stuck out his hand, and Trent placed the white lighter in it.
“You knew why though, right?”
Harry looked away again. Trent was being stupid. Apparently needing to pass the time in idle conversation about the man they’d just killed, the man he had tortured. Billy Boy had gotten in with the wrong crowd, and, in over his head, he’d made some mistakes. Fatal ones.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with just sitting here smoking,” Harry said, flicking ash onto the coffee table between them.
“Come on, Harry, you ain’t blind. You know how far up this goes, straight to the highest heights,” Trent said, a sly look in his eyes.
“You shut your fucking mouth, Trent. I don’t know nothing except that I’m walking outta the bank tomorrow with a briefcase full of cash. Then, I’m a fucking ghost, and nobody’s ever gonna see me again. You wanna get a bullet in the brain? Keep following this line of thought.” He rose from the chair and went to the window again. A lone figure walked down the sidewalk opposite.
“Quite the talent, that way you keep yourself from thinking. Must serve you well.”
“It’s the company I keep,” Harry snapped over his shoulder.
Trent was silent for a few moments.
“I don’t think you’re as well shot of this as you think you are, Harry,” he said in a low, dark, voice.
Harry whipped around, teeth clenching around the butt of his cigarette, “Who the fuck are you?” he grated, “Fucking upstart from the west coast! Marko saddles me with some sadistic fuck who then proceeds to threaten me? Threaten Harry Polorosa? You gotta a fucking death wish, kid?”
Trent stood up hot, finger stabbing, “You old bastard. These are facts! A senators son, Harry! A senator! They can send the fucking FBI, the CIA, ATF, fucking everybody!”
“Fuck Trent, fuck, stop talking, just stop, right now.”
“So you’re just as scared pissless as me. Huh, Harry Polorosa’s shit-scared, who’d’ve thought?”
The older man closed the distance so quickly as to be a red-faced blur. Hands closed on Trents collar and Harry lifted him into the air with a grunt.
Face to face, he whispered, “Listen you shit: twenty-five years I been takin’ out Marko’s trash. I’ve travelled the fucking globe tracking down his mistakes in judgement and puttin’ ’em outta their misery. Then he goes and fucks me in the ass like this? Well I’m through, I tell you! Through! Marko ain’t gonna let me go? I’ll fucking kill ‘im. The fucking government wants to find me? HA! No worries on that front, after twenty-five years of hits I got so many passports in so many countries with so many names that it’ll be years before they finish chasin’ all them wild geese down. By that time I’ll have a new face, a new name and a new history. And you think I’m gonna sit around here and get involved with your shit? Do you!?”
The man was choking, much more of this and he’d be spilling piss and shit down his dangling legs. Harry released him and with a gasp he slumped back onto the couch.
“You do what you think you gotta do. And you leave me outta it.”
More heaving gasps from Trent. Harry went back to the window.
Low laughter from the couch, harsh and strained. Harry stiffened.
“So that’s the way it is, hey? Marko’s not gonna be happy to hear about it, no not at all. Nobody walks away from Marko, Harry. Nobody and no-one. You ain’t special, old man. You may think you are, but your just a killer, same as every other killer all down through history. So you run, you run hard and fast, but we’re comin’ after you. And we’ll find you. Might be tommorow, might be the day after, might be twenty years from now when your drooling in a nursing home. Best watch your back-”
Trent abruptly stopped talking, as there was a muted whipping sound and his head snapped back, pulling his body into the cushioned embrace of the couch. Harry faced him now, and in his hand was a smoking gun, with silencer attached.
Harry was angry. He’d let Trents gloating get to him. Nerves were a jangling mess tonight. Now he’d have to hide out for the night, probably just roam the streets, and visit a bank early in the morning. Thank heaven the scheduled money transfer had already taken place. He would catch the first plane that was leaving the country.
He left the apartment, went to the fire escape and climbed down to the alley.
The clean up crew was coming, so they’d know he killed Trent. Things could be close.
He pulled out another cigarette, lit it and began walking down the street.
“You should’ve just smoked your fucking cigarette, Trent.”
I’m not a writer, Im a scientist, but this post made me want to try and write two pages of dialouge just to see if I could and what I would produce with such a brief. I look foward to reading other people’s responses, since the breif seems like a great teaching tool.
“Even when I know that I need to give out information (dammit), I resist, push off in the opposite direction, fighting against the current of necessity. Which is probably why I lose readers early on in Gardens of the Moon. Not only do I not spoonfeed, I’ve taken a hammer to the spoon.”
Hah! My first encounter with Gardens was an interesting one, we borrowed the first five books off a mate and my partner tried to read Gardens but kept falling asleep three pages in. And he couldn’t start re-reading from that point the next night because so much happend in that time that he got lost and had to start again. He gave up.
I only started reading it because I was desparate for something new to read. I figured if it was that awful I would go buy a new book the next day (I can’t fall asleep without reading for at least an hour first). Now I read very very fast. I can devour a book the size of Gardens in a few days, if it was written by Stephen King or Terry Goodkind, or in a week if by JV Jones, Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss etc. Very good books, like the Gap series by Stephen Donaldson or Perdido Street Station by China Meiville take longer, because I need to savor them, even re-reading for the 5th time. But my goodness this book!
To say that no information is given in the first hundred pages of Gardens is misleading, there is at once a massive surfeit and at the same time not enough. I almost tore my hair out. Who were these people? Where was this world set, where were my usual tropes that set me comfortably into my fantasy pardigm? Because the book starts out with Ganoes as a child and then you see him later as an adult there is this desire to push the book into the “young man grows up to be hero” story arc. The fact that we then suddenly jump to different characters far away shows you clearly that you’re looking at things all wrong but so much fantasy is paint by numbers these days that it can be hard to step outside the text and think about what you are really reading.
Happily I did. Around the time poor old Ganoes gets stabbed, I stopped, I thought. I went back and re-read the book from the beginning, discarding my pre-concieved notions. I also made a conscious effort to slow down my reading speed (like I do with text-books and research papers). This prose was as dense and complicated as a genetics research paper on x-linked lissencephaly.
It was rewarding. A week or so later I finished Gardens, then I started Deadhouse Gates. For almost two months I read nothing but Malazan books.
My partner wanted to start reading Gardens again. I had completely sold him on the idea of pushing through those first hundred pages and he had holiday coming up. I wouldn’t let him, instead I went out, bought Reapers Gale and re-read them all. I have never before been able to re-read a series straight after reading it. But this author who doesn’t like to give out information (and in one sense he is right, he and his characters are very tight fisted with details, particualry interesting plot ones) fills huge books with so much rich detail that a second re-read was not only rewarding but valuable. The second time through all these little hints and references that you didnt even notice suddenly make sense. You realise that such and such a detail actually refers to a character you don’t meet until the Bonehunters or that a certain tiny action in one book has caused massive issues for another place (or another time!). The history and the backstory of the world, plus all the extra realms/warrens/dreamscapes(???) is so detailed, and nothing can be considered unimportant.
I’d reckon I have re-read all the books (except Toll the Hounds) more than five times each. Every single time I find something new, some little detail.
And to bring my blather back to the original topic, all those conversations! In the Malazan world there is no such thing as an irrelevant conversation. Or character for that matter. In his above post Erikson suggests that every character has a story and that this story must be kept in mind when writing their dialouge. It must be this approach that means that he does not create two dimensional characters. He can paint a person in a few sentences and make them real for you as the reader but it is when they speak that they come alive properly. Their words tell you so much about who they are, and very often far more detail about the world and the plot that you will ever realise first time through.
If you havent done it, I urge a re-read. This time through pay special attension to the little people, who don’t appear often and don’t say much, they are as rich and complex as the major characters and sometimes they tell you the stuff you really want to know!