As Much As Needs To Be Said
Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.
I taught dialogue in my creative writing class yesterday. One thing I’ve noticed over the years that I’ve always found interesting about dialogue is this: poets tend to be very good at writing it. And I had come up with a hypothesis about why that is, and I decided to test it on the poets in the room.
“Am I correct in my assessment that poets strive to present their ideas in as few words as possible?” I asked.
One poet nodded, but another one said, “Some people say that, but I don’t agree. I think you say as much as needs to be said.”
*DING*
This young poet is dead right. And put in succinctly. And, if you hadn’t noticed, said it in good dialogue. And I think she proved my hypothesis by rewording it so effectively. Good dialogue says as much as needs to be said. No more. No less.
Dialogue can be naturalistic, full of stammers and hesitations and odd dialect quirks. Dialogue can be formal and stylized, written in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. But dialogue is never “realistic.” If we just took a transcript of what people actually say in conversation, unedited, we’d generally end up with terrible dialogue. Why? In real life we repeat ourselves, misspeak, wander off on tangents, and in general say much more than needs to be said. And when we’re not saying more than needs to be said, we’re taciturn, relying on non-verbal cues to communicate (as one of my favorite comediennes puts it, “Trying to get him to ask me out with my powers of telekinesis”), and in general saying much less than needs to be said. Real-world conversations need to be edited down and/or fleshed out to make good dialogue.
So, rather than going for “realistic” dialogue, I think we should be striving for “believable” dialogue. That’s the dialogue that, even though no one would ever say it that way in the real world, readers totally buy as having come out of that character’s mouth. Step 1 there is to write the dialogue in a way that’s appropriate to the character (DUH!), but Step 2 is also something that poets tend to do instinctively: Read it out loud. Seriously. You may need to do the voice or the accent, but if you can’t say it, it’s not believable. If it flows trippingly off the tongue, as good poetry does, it’s probably going to convince a reader that it’s real.
And from there, it’s just a matter of including only the words that need to be said to move your story forward, to develop the character, or to deliver the punchline. Have the characters say as much as needs to be said, and you’ve got good dialogue.
I’m very impressed with my students sometimes.
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