About Arguing for Arguments

Post 358:

            No matter how good a person is at dialogue, they should be better. Think about all the practice life hands out. It’s constant and has been: phone calls, the guy at the drive thru, people at work, the dates that go bad, the dates that go good, on and on back to when you were spitting out stunted syllables to your parents.

            I’ve got two basic rules when writing dialogue. First, have something in the air. Give the situation where two or more people are talking a background, a subject, a canvas. The subject can be heavy or light, ever-present or on the edges. Just make sure there’s something. If a guy sits on a bench next to another guy and they have nothing to talk about, it’s not going to be that interesting. Pretty much like life. However, if they have a guy that just got hit by a bus or a rabid cat that just attacked an old lady, there’s something in the air. I want to hear that conversation. Hell, I want to have that conversation.

            It’s something to start from and come back to. If the two strangers start talking about the old lady, they can talk about the volume of her screams, the reluctance or the bravery of the passersby—this puts us into all sorts of realms—the nature of fear, the necessity of community, how old people shouldn’t be around cats.

            So there’s that.

            Rule Two is a bit more nuanced—not really. Arguing is best. Pretty much all the time, conflict drives a story, and conflict drives dialogue. The most effective way to write is to have people arguing in a way that serves to facilitate the ultimate and underlying conflict of the entire narrative. Let me get one thing out of the way; this doesn’t mean a writer has to have his characters screaming at each other. No, there’s a million ways to argue or “not quite agree,” and they all need to be in your toolkit.

            It’s like life. There’s ways of getting what you want, and sometimes, the best way is to make an argument. It doesn’t have to be silly or ridiculous or underhanded—it can be, but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re writing a politician, perhaps he argues in sweet tones that almost sound like agreement. Maybe a truck driver is a straight-up sort of character—his argument consists of arm-flexing and spitting.

            Generalizations.

            So two rules.

            I’m reading The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. It’s pretty pampered stuff, but the guy knew how to write some words. I like his dialogue. It’s like Downton Abbey conflict. There’s three nancies talking about wainscoting, and all of a sudden I’m hooked. They’ve got a backdrop and they’re working off of it. Their conflict is nuanced yet defined. See rules one and two. And see you after.

            Cheers knuckleheads.