• This Month's Silly Picture: Paula B. at a Book Signing
• Writing Dialogue, Part 2
• Attention: Crime Fiction Writers
• Capitalization, Part 3: Government Documents
• Writing Show News
• Trivia Question: Canadian Books into Academy Award-nominated/winning Films

Writing Dialogue, Part 2

Last time, we began a new series on writing dialogue and highlighted the advice of Chris Roerden, author of Don't Murder Your Mystery: 24 Fiction-Writing Techniques to Save Your Manuscript from Turning Up D.O.A.. Let's continue sampling Roerden's advice. She says:

Effective dialogue is purposeful-the means by which characters strive to realize their objectives, act on their strategies, and incite reactions from others.

Of course, in order to show purpose, you have to know what that purpose is. That means asking a question now so familiar it's become a cliché. Actors from David Garrick in the 18th century to Al Pacino today have asked "What's my [character's] motivation?"

Conflict in storytelling, as in life, arises when people's agendas come into conflict with each other. You want a raise; your boss wants to keep costs down. You're infatuated with a hottie who's infatuated with some other hottie. You want to jump out of airplanes; your partner is worried about losing you if your chute doesn't open.

So first, you have to know what your characters' agendas are. Next, you have to make them apparent to your readers. As Roerden says, "Only when readers are made aware of what each character wants can they anticipate the potential for conflict." It's that anticipation that keeps readers hooked. And what's one way to make your characters' agendas apparent to readers? Dialogue: what your characters say and what is said about them.

Let's look at some examples and see how characters' agendas are expressed through dialogue.

From White Sister by Stephen J. Cannell. A cop named Shane Scully has accidentally hit a homeless man named Jonathan Bodine with his car:

"You just another drives-too-fast-don't-give-a-shit-half-stepper," he growled at me, cradling his broken right wrist with his left hand, glaring with enough hatred to start a race riot.

 

I felt guilty and offered up an excuse: "I didn't see you." The defense rests.

"Jus' 'cause you a cop, don't mean you can go an' plow poor folks down."

"You were jaywalking. You're supposed to cross in the cross-walks. Section P-dash-one-oh-six of the motor vehicle code. Look it up." The last thing I needed was a frivolous lawsuit from this guy.

"You just an A-train hard-ass out here gorillin' and Godzillin'. But you ain't helpin' nobody. Hit my black ass and now I'm the damn problem?"

Bodine isn't just angry that he's been hit. He's angry at the world, white people, cops, and well-off people who drive too fast, make excuses for bad behavior, and blame the victim for their problems. His agenda is to get Scully to take responsibility for his actions.

Scully wants to assuage his guilt, abdicate responsibility, and avoid consequences. He simply wants to continue what he was doing and forget about the whole thing.

So the essence of the scene is:

• White cop hits black homeless man with car
• Homeless man gets angry and accuses cop of selfishness and apathy
• Cop tries to deflect the attack by blaming homeless man for the accident.

Cannell doesn't simply say:

I hit a homeless guy with my car. As soon as I got out to see if he was all right, he hit me with a barrage of invective. I felt guilty all right, but he had been jaywalking, and I wasn't about to get hit with a frivolous lawsuit.

Instead, he provides a few lines of spicy dialogue that not only demonstrate the different speech patterns and vocabularies of the characters, but also show incipient conflict between their agendas that could lead who-knows-where. Now we, the readers, are wondering where this conflict will lead. We're also developing sympathies and antipathies and beginning to care about these characters. Who will win and who will lose? What will happen to Scully's mission if he gets sidetracked looking after Bodine? Is Bodine just a minor character, or will he play an important role in the story? Will he live or will he die? What is the relationship between the cops and the homeless?

Here's a snippet from Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing by Judy Blume:

Henry was right. My mother was really surprised. Her mouth opened when I said, "Just look at what I won at Jimmy Fargo's birthday party." I held up my tiny green turtle. "I've already named him: Dribble! Isn't that a great name for a turtle?"

 

My mother made a face. "I don't like the way he smells," she said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. I put my nose right down close to him. I didn't smell anything but turtle. So Dribble smells like turtle, I thought. Well, he's supposed to. That's what he is!

"And I'm not going to take care of him either," my mother added.

"Of course you're not," I told her. "He's my turtle. And I'm the one who's going to take care of him."

"You're going to change his water and clean out his bowl and feed him and all of that?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "And even more, I'm going to see to it that he's happy!"

It's pretty obvious what the agendas are here. Peter, the child, is excited that he won something, and not just any something: a real live pet. He wants his mother to be as excited as he is. His mother experiences the turtle as a loathsome thing and unwanted responsibility. She wants it to go away. As in the Cannell example above, one person craves attention while the other simply wants to get on with business as usual.

But the exchange reveals more than that. Mother and child are waging a tacit battle. With the remark, "And even more, I'm going to see to it that he's happy," Peter is implying that his mother does not see to it that he's happy. The exchange over the turtle represents Peter's feeling of deprivation and his mother's seemingly cold-hearted response to his hunger for love. Blume has set up this conflict right at the beginning of the story in order to hook us and perhaps remind us of our own childhoods.

More on dialogue next time.

Criminal profiling is hot. From Poe's C. August Dupin in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" to Val McDermid's Tony Hill, crime fiction writers have, in recent years, glorified that psychological rock star who, by speculating on the perp's personality and background, gets the bad guy every time.

But, sociology writer Malcolm Gladwell now informs us in "Dangerous Minds: criminal profiling made easy" (The New Yorker, November 12, 2007) that profiling isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It seems that profiling doesn't exactly work. In fact, it's got a track record close to that of soothsaying.

Of course, as I read the article, I thought not of the police or the crime victims or the perps who have gotten off as a result of bad psychology. No. I thought about crime fiction writers. What will this exposé do to them? To "Waking the Dead," The Wire in the Blood, and other TV shows, movies, and books that feature profilers?

Maybe not all that much. For one thing, since when do TV and movie producers worry about realism? Story comes first; adherence to reality trails. For another, if you can believe the letters to the editor printed in the December 3, 2007 issue, Gladwell may not have got whole the story straight. One profiler states that "Profilers do much more than draw up vague pictures of a would-be perp." Another says, "Criminal profilers usually don't get involved in a case until other investigative avenues have been exhausted and, unlike the portrait provided in Malcolm Gladwell's piece, rarely suggest that they offer anything but educated guesses."

So who knows? Check out the article and let me know what you think. (Unfortunately the letters aren't available online.)

It's tempting to capitalize every word that relates to government, including the word "government," but sometimes it's correct to capitalize and sometimes not.

Here are some dos and don'ts:

Capitalize full formal names of documents and programs resulting from them. Usually you shouldn't capitalize incomplete names, but there are exceptions. So,

• Do capitalize "Constitution of the United States" (full name). Do capitalize "U.S. Constitution" (variant of full name). Even though "the Constitution" is an incomplete name, in this case you do capitalize the word "Constitution."

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• Capitalize "California Constitution" (full name). Do not capitalize "the state constitution" (incomplete name). Do not capitalize "the constitution" (incomplete name).

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• Capitalize "Fourteenth Amendment" (in this case, the words "to the U.S. Constitution" are understood; the phrase is considered the full name, and it's capitalized). Do not capitalize "the amendment" (abbreviated name). Do not capitalize "the Berinstein amendment" except for the proper name "Berinstein" (incomplete name).

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• Do capitalize "Monroe Doctrine," but do not capitalize "the doctrine."

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• Capitalizing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is optional.

Do not capitalize descriptive references to pending legislation:

• Say "The abortion bill goes to a vote on Friday," not "The Abortion Bill goes to a vote on Friday."

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• Say "Berinstein introduced a new writers' rights bill last May," not "Berinstein introduced a new Writers' Bill last May."

These rules come from The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Edition. Yeah, they're capricious. Makes you wonder who came up with them.

Upcoming shows:

January 6, 2008. First-Chapter Contest First Prize Winner Sarah Maurer tells us about the writing of her chapter.

January 13, 2008. "Dealing with Shyness," with journalist/author Karen Laven.

January 20, 2008. "Writing Marketing and Advertising Material," with Naomi Finkel, owner of Say It With Words.

January 27, 2008. "The Ten Story Types of Every Good Screenplay," with Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told.

Have a question or topic you'd like covered on the show or in the newsletter? Want to write for us or be a guest host? See mistakes in my writing? Let me know.

--Paula B.

Last month we asked:

In what play does this line appear: "If only I was born Italian. All the best Yankees are Italian."

The answer is Brighton Beach Memoirs, by Neil Simon.

This month's trivia question: Name two books by Canadian authors that have been made into films that have been nominated for or won Academy Awards.

Answer next month.

Remember: you don't have to have an iPod to listen to podcasts!

Writing Audio Plays, with Jack J. Ward

How to Get Interviews and Book Signings, with L. Diane Wolfe

A Conversation with Irish Horror Writer/Filmmaker Darryl Sloan, Featuring Mick Halpin

You've Finished Writing Your Book, Now What? with Dick Margulis