Dear Reader,

Welcome to a burgeoning season of jackets, firepits, and turning leaves. Those comforts are on my mind as my brood starts school, two now in college, and I try to balance my awareness/ignorance of the constant contentions of 2020. It seems everywhere I turn, our nation has engaged in a shouting match. Aren’t we glad that dialogue in narrative only mimics reality and doesn’t reproduce it?

But if we think we might escape combative conversation through reading or watching a good story, we’re sorely mistaken. Good narrative dialogue rises from character conflict, as you will discover in “The Art of Dialogue.” Yet somehow, we are drawn like late-summer fireflies to “The Pitched Battle of Subtext” in story. We love a good skirmish, especially when the shouting stays under the covers.

I hope you’ll find time this long weekend to sit down and scribe a few lines. If you do, be sure to engage in Callie’s version of “Theft,” a skill we all can improve.

I pray you all remain well, and that your dreams of soup and sudden shivers are connected to the frosty breath of an autumn morning.

The Art of Dialogue

Character Conflict

by Kelli Sallman

When I speak about conflict in story, beginning writers default to fight scenes and the direct opposition between protagonist and antagonist. If I ask them to show me conflict through dialogue, I might get a shouting match or two people arguing about the right course of action. But in story, the most engaging conflict punches a hole right through plot-driven external goals and lands with a thud on the jawline of the characters’ internal motivation. The core of conflict comes out not through the climactic, scene-exploding battles but through the small skirmishes of will through dialogue.

Dialogue Pits Perspective against Perspective

Dialogue must, of course, move the plot forward; good dialogue does so by consistently pitting characters and their internal drives against one another. Competing drives are why it’s possible to have gripping stories with few action scenes. Even in a high-action thriller, what ultimately determines success or failure in the story is frame of mind, not finding the treasure or escaping the natural disaster. The arc of change we want to see in the characters of a story is a psychological change. We don’t care that Bobby changes from wimpy victim to buff weight lifter; we care what Bobby thinks about going from wimpy to buff and how it revises his perspective and his wisdom.

The perspectives revealed by dialogue—and, yes, also by how characters behave—shape the literary argument of the story in concert with or even in contrast to the overt plot. Each major character represents a competing viewpoint for the argument, and the story outcome tells the reader whose perspective the author wants us to identify with.

Theft, Dialogue, and Other Things My Undergrad Experience Taught Me

by Callie Johnson

I’m not a thief, at least not in the strict sense of the term. I’ve never hotwired a car, dine-and-dashed, or slipped out of Wal-Mart with an unpurchased pack of gum. But often, when I sit down to write, I find myself referencing a stack of the same well-worn college textbooks and class notes. It feels like cheating, somehow, to work from other people’s ideas, even though learning other people’s ideas was the point of my education.

Sometimes, writing dialogue feels the same way: When it’s straight from my head it’s boring. When it’s interesting, I feel like I’ve stolen it from someone else.

The Pitched Battle of Subtext

by Bobbie Jeffrey

Dramatic literature is not for wimps. Really. Many people complain about how difficult it is to settle into a favorite armchair next to a crackling fire, strong cup of joe in hand, to turn the pages of a script. To find its magic, you have to want the inner life of a play badly enough to overcome the distraction of ellipses, dashes, and stage directions. And the magic is in something the playwright doesn’t even endow with actual words.

Dialogue in both dramatic literature and fiction is obviously the words that pass between its characters; however, in a playscript, while the dialogue is of course written, it is spoken language meant to be heard. The printed text is not just what the characters say; it is what they do. Dialogue becomes the primary vehicle for dramatic action.

In the gold standard of directing texts, Francis Hodge wrote, “From the casual reader’s view, dialogue looks like it is only the printed text of the play, but it’s basic function is to contain the heart and soul, the essence of the play—the subtext or dramatic action” (22). A play is more than talk; its characters live and move and have their being. They are involved in activities, and those activities fulfill two functions. On one level, the activity is what a character physically does within the context of the given circumstances in a scene that provides a “fabric of normalcy” for the character (Hodge 26). On another level, the activity contains and conveys the subtext, which is always related to what the character really wants, but may not be obvious or observable.