Dialogue Read Free Page B

getting firewood I felt a little scared."
    "You did?"
    "Yup," David said. "But I have a little plan that might be fun and it might help. Are you interested?"
    "Yeah!" Nikki said with enthusiasm. "What?"
    "You can't tell anybody," David said.
    "Okay," Nikki promised.
    David outlined his plan as they continued home. "What do you say?" he asked once he had finished.
    "I think it's cool," Nikki said.
    "Remember, it's a secret," David said.
    "Cross my heart."
    In the narrative paragraph that follows this scene, David goes into the house and makes a phone call, and we learn that he's experienced some distress about two of his patients who had previously died. Here things slow down as the author begins feeding us necessary information in narrative. The narrative slows the story back down after the scene of dialogue. What makes dialogue move more quickly than narrative? It's the quick back-and-forth of the character's words to one another, like a tennis ball being batted back and forth across the court.
    It's obvious which part of the above excerpt moves more quickly. Of course, there are times when you want a scene to move more slowly, so I'm not saying that it's always best to use dialogue. But when you need to speed up a scene, this is its purpose. This is what it will do for you.
    adds bits of setting/background
    Do you ever find it difficult to get the setting and background into your story in an interesting way? Here dialogue comes to the rescue once again.
    As writers, we have a tendency to want to use narrative to set up every scene for the reader before the action starts, which is unnecessary. Once the action in a scene is rolling along, you can use dialogue to throw in what you need us to know at that moment about the setting and story background. In Joyce Carol Oates' novel We Were the Mulvaneys, Patrick, the viewpoint character in this scene, and his sister, Marianne, haven't seen each other for a few years. He has just asked her how she did in college and she's told him she had to take a couple of incompletes. Listen to how Marianne describes the town she now lives in, Kilburn, and later how the author slips in a few details of the current setting, Patrick's room.
    "Well—" Marianne squirmed, pulling at her spiky hair. "Things sort of came up. Suddenly."
    "What kind of things?"
    "An emergency at the Co-op, just after Thanksgiving. Aviva who was assistant store manager got sick—"
    "Store? What store?"
    "Oh Patrick, I must have told you—didn't I? In Kilburn, in town, we have a Green Isle outlet. We sell preserves, fresh preserves, fresh produce in the summer, baked goods—my zucchini-walnut bread is one of the favorites. I — "
    "And you work in the store? How many hours a week?"
    Marianne dipped her head, avoiding Patrick's interrogative gaze. "We don't think in terms of hours—exactly," she said. She was sitting on Patrick's sofa (not an item from home, part of the dull spare slightly shabby furnishings of the apartment) while Patrick sat facing her, in a rather overbearing position, on his desk chair, his right ankle balanced on his left knee in a posture both relaxed and aggressive.
    Thinking Pinch-style I have a right to ask, who else will ask if I don't?
    "What terms do you think in, then?"
    "The Green Isle Co-op isn't—a formally run organization, like a business. It's more like a—well, a family. People helping each other out. From each what he or she can give; to each, as he or she requires."
    Here we get a sense of who the town is as a character as well as some physical details. Setting and background can actually be made interesting when incorporated into a dialogue scene. The reader experiences the setting through the viewpoint character's observations, and depending on the character, this could prove very interesting indeed. As long as there's tension, of course.
    communicates the theme
    In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King writes: "When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and