The Art of Bad Conversation

Dialogue. It feels like the easiest thing in the world to write, doesn't it? Somebody says something, then somebody else answers. And then that person responds, and the first person responds to the response, and pretty soon you've got eight double-spaced pages and you're heading for the early bird special at Denny's with a big self-aggrandizing smile on your face.

And then, a few weeks later, you read what you wrote, and it's the boringest thing imaginable. What the hell?

Maybe you ought to go back to Denny's--not for the food, for some eavesdropping. If you listen to the way people actually talk, it doesn't work the way you think. People don't respond to each other in the expected way. Thoughts go unfinished. Someone starts arguing a point, and then abruptly gives up. Someone changes her mind, or changes the subject. Sometimes two people who appear to be talking to each other are actually holding two separate conversations with themselves, out loud.

Some of the best dialogue I've read can be found in James Welch's 1974 novel Winter In The Blood. There is a lot of talking in bars in this book, and nobody's ever quite listening to anyone else; multiple conversations are carried on at once, and when anybody says anything, it takes another line or two before anybody else notices. Here's a bit from late in the novel. The narrator has just been in a fight, and he comes home to find his grandmother's chair empty. Soon his mother and stepfather walk in the door:

     "She passed away," Teresa said, setting down the sack of groceries.
     "What did you do to your nose?" Lame Bull said.
     Teresa looked at him. "It was a merciful death."
     "Where is she now?" I said.
     "We took her to Harlem." Teresa began to put the canned goods in the cupboard.
     "Somebody busted me one," I said to Lame Bull. "How come? Why don't we bury her here, where the rest of them are?"
     "She was a fine woman," Lame Bull said.
     "Because they have to fix her up. They'll make her look nice. And Father Kittredge will want to say a few words over her."
     "But it would have been easier to bury her here," I said. "She didn't even go to church."
     "Can't you get it through your head that we are going to bury her here?" The voice was calm. "As for looking nice--it's the least we can do."
     "Standard procedure," Lame Bull said.
     "Will the priest come down to bury her?"
     Teresa turned. She had been putting the milk in the icebox. "I don't know, if he can get away."
     "Like he did when we stuck First Raise in the ground?"
     She looked away. "He's very busy. They're sending him to another parish...Idaho."
     "Look here, boy." Lame Bull pulled a bottle of wine from a paper sack.

First Raise is the narrator's father, and a whole raft of resentment and unhappiness--about his absence, and about Lame Bull's presence, and about Teresa's affiliation with the priest, whom the narrator considers a fake, is coiled up in those efficient lines.

If you keep reading another page, you get to the funniest line in the book, too. Lame Bull, trying to justify his purchase of the bottle of wine, offers the following testimonial: "I saw a guy drinking this once in Great Falls."

Dialogue!

Oh, my. Part of my approach to this novel I'm writing has been to avoid my strengths--dialogue and flashbacks--in order to try and dig myself a new groove. The protagonist is an unreliable narrator who rarely mentions his past and is completely alone in a forest for most of the book.

But today he made a phone call and whoa, it was like I'd been swinging five bats in the on-deck circle. I will probably have to erase half of it, somewhere down the line, but it was quite a pleasant tumble off the wagon.

Tomorrow, as penance, I'll have him fall into a hole.