The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

Thus the essential force of dialogue or written speech may be a handicap or an assistance. If a character's words jar upon a reader, they will do so strongly, if they are natural and in keeping with the whole conception of the person, they will do much to give him the breath of life. It follows that the writer of fiction should give due attention to the transcription of speech, the more so because superficially the task is easy.

Perhaps the first consideration is the mere mechanical distribution of dialogue. In real life only the after-dinner speaker talks at inordinate length. Conversation, except that of the bore, is essentially fragmentary. Not only is each person's part fragmentary, but the whole conversation is usually somewhat brief. People caught in a more or less rapid sequence of events have no time to talk at length, and a story is a more or less rapid sequence of events. The writer must counterfeit a like phase of life with his story, and to do so he must mingle the mechanical elements of the story in a texture pleasing because varied. The mechanical elements of a story are its narrative, its description, and its dialogue or speech of the characters; these must blend and intermingle, varying the appeal to a reader and simulating the pattern of life. An unfailing sign of the amateur, at least of the amateur with no innate sense of fictional values, is a story made up of hard and angular blocks of narration, description, and dialogue. The skilled writer—if the particular story permits, a proviso always to be understood—will intermingle speech with action and description with both. Dialogue should no more be written pages at a time than should description, and if a great deal of speech must be transcribed en bloc, it should be broken up to some extent by descriptive touches and even by narration more detailed than that part of the story naturally calls for.

The next consideration is to make the people of a story talk naturally. The necessity has affiliations with the necessity that the speech of any person be made characteristic, for dialogue is an efficient aid in the portrayal of character. The writer must make each person talk like a human being, even if not like some particular human being. Good, nervous dialogue will be full of elisions, mere exclamations, unfinished sentences, gaps that a reader will bridge readily for himself. He will be skilled in the business, for that is the kind of talk addressed to him every day. In more sedate and leisurely ages, if we may judge from the tales then written, people could frame a sentence on the lips, but it is a lost art now. To be "literary" in transcribing speech is to invoke almost certain failure. "Literary" dialogue usually is ruinous. A reader's interest may survive stilted and affected narrative or descriptive writing, for most readers have read so much of such writing that it is almost expected, but stilted and affected dialogue will kill interest once and for all. In narrative there is something behind the word for the reader, even in description there is a faint something, but in dialogue there is nothing at all. The word is the word; if it fails, the failure is total.

Yet it will not do to be quite literal in transcribing speech. If the speech of real life is broken and fragmentary, it is also impossibly wordy and purposeless. The lawyer who has spent weary hours in reading transcripts of testimony knows the fact to his cost. The writer of fiction has not space to set down with minute accuracy just what his people probably would have said during the progress of the story; he must counterfeit the auditory impression of real speech by eliding and leaving sentences unfinished; but this mechanically broken and abrupt speech must have the purpose and direction which is wanting in real speech. The characters must not only talk naturally; they must say certain definite things and convey definite and necessary information, directly or by implication. There is little need to emphasize here the necessity that the writer have some fictional purpose in making a character say something, except to warn against transcribing speech solely for the sake of its suppositious intrinsic wit or vivacity, for each story will assert its own claims over the talk of the characters.

The question of dialect has been debated often and at length, both for and against. There are many fine stories in dialect in whole or in part, but their merit does not result from the employment of dialect, though the dialect may be a necessary part of some of them. In the larger sense, the question is merely one of naturalness. The pronunciation of no man is in exact accord with the ideal standard of the dictionary; all have mannerisms of speech and accent. In some sections such mannerisms are so common and marked as to form a dialect, almost a patois, and, if a story involves a character from such a district, fidelity to fact requires the writer to write dialect when the person is speaking. Dialect in a story must be intelligible to one unfamiliar with it, which requires the writer to iron out its greatest divergences from the normal in an endeavor to retain its piquancy while avoiding its obscurity. The question is not one of technique, but one of material. The only insistence of technique as to dialect is that it must be intelligible.

Unquestionably there is prejudice against the story told wholly in strongly marked dialect by a narrating character, both on the part of editors and readers. The type had a vogue some years ago, but its commercial and artistic defect is that it tends to be unintelligible.

Dialect is a useful aid in characterization, as is any slighter mannerism of speech. The matter will be taken up in discussing the portrayal of character. Here I am concerned only with the more general aspects of the management of dialogue.

As stated, the first necessity in writing dialogue is to place the word where it would be spoken in life, during the action, not in isolated masses of speech. The second necessity is to write naturally, and yet to invest the hasty and elided speech of the characters with purpose in the fiction. Dialogue must be not only natural and easy; it also must be significant, significant in relation to life—which is the matter of naturalness re-stated—significant in relation to the characters, and significant in relation to the story. That is to say, the justly written bit of dialogue will be natural, will illustrate character, and will inform a reader, directly or by implication, of something he must know if he is to catch the full savor of the story. These are the most general conditions to be borne in mind in writing dialogue. It remains to discuss the necessity that a writer consider the matter of situation while transcribing speech. The necessity requires discussion. Not only is it stringent, but it is politely ignored by too many books on technique.

The abstract statement is that the same person will talk differently according to his situation at the moment. Jones is Jones, of course, but the Jones who discusses preparedness with Smith is a different Jones from him who telephones to summon the doctor for his dying child, and his speech in each case will not be the same. My lady will not berate her maid for a fault as she will reprove her lover, and the head bookkeeper talking to a subordinate and to the boss would impress a listener as two different persons. The man and his speech are influenced by the event. The writer of fiction, being under constant necessity to counterfeit life, must keep the speech of his characters in accord with the situation as well as with the general looseness of actual talk.

It may be said that this necessity to write dialogue with an eye to the situation of the persons is merely a more narrow phase of the general necessity to be natural. That is true. The writer will never go astray who lives his story in imagination and sets down the speech of the characters as it would have been phrased in actuality. The only trouble is to determine just how the persons would have spoken, and it is a trouble because it requires more than a vivid imagination. Imagination will embody the course of events for a writer, will touch in the setting with glowing color, but imagination alone will not supply the words spoken. To find them, the writer must employ his intellectual faculties as well as his imaginative powers, and precisely for the same reason that the characters must employ their intellectual faculties in speaking. One who writes a story lives vicariously, lives another's life for the time being, and where that other would be forced to think, as in speaking, the writer must think likewise. Where the other would be forced only to observe, as in witnessing events or observing setting, the writer can rely solely on his imaginative powers.