Fiction Writer's Workshop Read Online Free Page B

them to be as precise as possible, but don't explain your curiosity, even after you get an answer. Fend them off. Confound them by not giving in. List their responses. Record the answers, yes, but take note of their reactions. What questions do they follow with? How do they word them? Are they threatened? Thrilled? Puzzled to the point where they throw up their hands? What do they think you're getting at? What are they worried about?
    5. Using a long, overheard dialogue, such as the one from exercise two, remove all punctuation and lowercase all the letters. Just make the exchanges clear by skipping a line after each one. Hand the pages to two friends to read aloud. Tell them nothing about the circumstance or physical context of the conversation. As they read, follow along reading your own copy of the dialogue. Keep a pen handy. Mark their pauses. Underline the points where the readers get fouled up, where one sentence gets pushed into the next. Now punctuate the dialogue using the rhythms of their reading as your guide. Forget sentence structure. Don't fret the fragments. Just think rhythm.
    W riting dialogue is so much about the energy and direction of the story at hand that many of the things a writer does are intuitive. A turn here. An exclamation. A silence. I'll often hear experienced writers say they've developed an "ear" for dialogue. The implication is that dialogue exists in the world and writers merely record, with good writers—those with the "ear" for it—recording a little more clearly. The truth is, it's not solely about recording, or listening, but about shaping.
    When I speak of the energy and direction of a story, I am referring to its tone and emotion (energy) and tension (direction). Writers craft, or shape, patterns of energy and direction in dialogue. In many ways these become the signatures of their dialogue, the things that make the voices of their characters recognizable and sustainable. Writers may have an ear for dialogue, but what they work with is a voice, shaped and charged by the needs of story. What your character says is directed by the needs of the story.
    Classifying dialogue by techniques can be troublesome. Writers don't work that way. Most writers I know despise the very act of naming the things they do. It makes them too self-conscious to think of the patterns they create as they create them. I'm going to do some of that here, but only for the purposes of comparison. You should be looking for the occasional pause, the turn, the reversal, the silence that defines each of these moments. Naming the patterns is unimportant; reading to uncover them is a worthy task.
    Thus you must be willing to take dialogue apart to look at what makes it tick. As you read, be willing to isolate moments within a dialogue. Highlight them in your book. Dog-ear the pages. Tear out a page and tape it to the wall above your computer. The idea is to take the dialogue on its own terms, to isolate the specific techniques the writer uses, before returning to the story as a whole to examine the dialogue's function in the larger context.
    Begin by looking for the general tension of the dialogue. Some beginning writers confuse tension with conflict, assuming it comes and goes depending on whether characters agree or disagree. Tension is more like the energy between charged particles. It's always there, even when two people agree. Think of two cars traveling a reasonable distance apart from one another along an interstate at sixty-five miles an hour. Safe distance. Same direction. Same speed. No tension, right? Wrong. We all know it only takes one little bump in the road, one touch of the brakes, a doe in the headlights for everything to be completely and suddenly redefined. So you might start by looking for those three qualities when gauging the tension of your dialogue: direction, speed and distance (or separation).
    TENSION IN DIALOGUE
    How do I apply all this talk of direction, speed and distance to a dialogue?
    Set