On Writing -- And Listening To -- Dialog

Good dialog gets my blood pumping. It always has; its rhythm is infectious and it carries its own sort of momentum. This was a bit of an acquired taste, as when I was younger, I was all for flowery descriptions, which was possibly due to being a big Anne Rice fan when I was in high school.

I don't know when I exactly turned. I think seeing Pulp Fiction, and understanding the sheer exuberance of a fantastically scripted conversation, that helped. Reading popular British authors (check out some pages of Nick Hornby and you might find some that are just pure dialog, no description), that helped too. Perhaps taking a bunch of theater classes in college tipped me over the edge.

It's funny, because at some points, I wonder if I would have been a better screenwriter than would-be novelist. My early drafts are almost pure dialog because that's what comes best to me. In fact, Sierra Godfrey was telling me about feeling stuck on her work-in-progress and I offered a suggestion that gets me out of a rut: write only the dialog, screw the rest of it, you can fill it in later.

(The flip side to this is that writing action for me in a physical sense is terribly laborious.)

Perhaps the best thing about good dialog is that it can mean so many things, even when it's just printed words on a page as opposed to emoted in front of you on a screen or stage. Everything from the pauses to the emphasis all carry a weight with it. You can tell an entire story in dialog, but it's difficult to tell an entire story based on flowery description alone. This differs slightly from genres, of course, but unless you're going for something avante garde, that human communication needs to happen.

I'm reading David Milche's book on how he wrote and created Deadwood -- and if you haven't seen Deadwood, it's probably the most incredible TV show I've seen in...I don't even know. My wife introduced it to me after she took in the whole series when she had last summer off; we waited until the Blu-Ray came out last fall, so I held off for months while she went on and on about how amazing this show was. And I'd say within ten minutes or so, I totally got it. The level of acting, directing, writing, and cinematography are all worthy of the superlatives you hear about the show, particularly Ian McShane's Al Swearengen.

But back to Milche's book, he writes about the purpose of dialog. If you've seen Deadwood, you know that the dialog is this amalgamation of Shakespearean tempo, modern verbiage, and a whole shit-ton of swearing (a brilliant move on Milche's part, as the swearing was intentionally brutal and over the top to emphasize the chaotic society they were forming). This particular passage from Milche stuck with me:

Whatever appears to be, we redefine it with our voice, however puny and ineffectual it might seem. Language can accommodate illusion and make illusion real for the purposes of the moment.

Maybe that's why I love writing dialog more than anything else -- just for a moment, it makes everything I'm writing real, at least in my head. I can hear the characters, not just saying the words, but the way they ennunciate, pause, mull things over. And if I do my job successfully, that builds a little corner of the world I'm trying to create.

Now, when something happens and I have to move a character from point A to point B...well, that takes a little more effort.

And on that note, I'll leave you with the best clips from the best character from the best show ever.