We have an idea of our characters and set the scene for them; now, they speak and know them through the subtext. Here are some other clues on how to write the dialogue before we go to practice:
Write the scene’s subtext, so the reader understands what the characters are really saying.
Create the proper dialogue for that particular scene (is it staged in a church, a park, or a prison?).
Express your character’s inner thoughts, but don’t overuse this trick. Everything, from how the character speaks to how strong its mimic is, is vital to deliver a message, a subtext.
Well, now let’s take some dialogues from some stories. The first one is an extract from The city, a short story I published some time ago. We are in a newspaper’s office, under the ground and two characters are confronting themselves. On one side is a curious journalist, a woman who wants to uncover the truth behind some mysterious killings. In contrast, on the other side, an old journalist reacts unusually.
She finally arrived in the basement and found Benito seated as always under his large lamp, his dirty hair over his face.
<<Hi, Benito!>>
The former tax attorney raised his eyes, nodded subtly to Anita and returned to his paper, moving his head like a big, old turtle.
Anita cleared her throat to attract attention, at the same time adjusting her jacket. Anita never noticed how cold that basement was.
<< I’m so sorry, Benito, I need only some information. It happened to you to find an ad… how to say it? Peculiar?>>
This time the eyes of the old tax attorney lit up with a strange, unusual light. He answered without raising his face.
<<No, not at all. Nothing strange.>>
He said, pursing the thin wrinkle at the side of his mouth. It was similar to a smile, for whom had a chance to learn how to read his emotions.
<<But…still…all right, don’t worry. I will check tomorrow, have a good night.>>
Murmured Anita, going up the stairs again without receiving any answer. She couldn’t guess how many volumes are written about hate, how many cathedrals build over the repressed resentment.
Dialogue, by Daniele Frau
Benito first is like a silent, harmless old turtle, but the reader can see a change in a couple of lines. When the right chord is played, his expressions change, he produces a sort of smile, a dark wrinkle. Anita is sure about herself, but suddenly she starts doubting her intuitions. We can understand it from how she speaks; her thoughts aren’t straight, and she doesn’t want to say something out loud. She can sense something isn’t right, but she doesn’t have proof. In the last scene, her intuitions will prove correct.
The extract I showed you is from a short story, and it’s crucial here to be precise; we need to be fast, we cannot indulge too much. Think about the scene you’re writing. Keep in mind the settings, the subtext and who your characters are, then give some life to it with mimics, sounds, and colors.
Your character is there, surrounded only by enemies; they’re ready to destroy him physically or metaphorically (sometimes both). Sometimes the hero will survive; some other times, it’s his defeat that makes him great. Think about the end of 300, with the Spartans ready to die for their freedom, 300 against thousands of soldiers.
Their glorious death makes them heroes, as well as Sir William Wallace, in braveheart (if you didn’t watch the movie, please do so). I remember that when I was reading The shadow of the wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, I was in a sort of panic, thinking about what would happen to the characters.
He mastered character creation so well that you feel what the characters feel and you won’t let anyone leave the scene. I read that book many times, in English, Italian and Spanish, and I thought I was reading it for the first time.
So, this last D is the one that lets you think about the worst. Your character is on one side of the battleground, and the opponent is laughing at him and ready to finish him; there isn’t no chance. A miracle? Maybe, but has to be a believable one.
Devastation.
If an angel comes from the sky and saves him, that’s when you say, “oh, come on, really?”. How comes it was never a single scene with an angel and now this creature arrives just in time? Why it didn’t come before, then? Why waiting the last scene to intervene if it was such a great and powerful creature?
Now, you have the four Ds in your hands, you know how to make the distance between the character and the primary desire, you know how to make it impossible and even beat your character so severely that everyone will think it’s the end (and a bad one).
Not all stories have to conclude with a good ending, so play it well; sometimes, it’s a good ending when your character dies as a real hero; other times, it’s a good ending when he triumphs in the last scene.
Not just that, use the 4 Ds when you’re writing the single scenes. Ask yourself:
What is the objective of the character in this scene, the main desire?
How to make this objective difficult?
How to make this desire impossible?
The desire seems gone, out of reach, but then… is it, really?
Let’s take Forrest Gump. He’s in love with Jenny Curran, from schooldays until the movie’s end. At the end of the film, there’s a perfect example of the 4 Ds; Forrest is rich and bored in his big mansion and hopes of seeing Jenny again. Sometimes he’s sure she’s coming, walking through his garden, but then it’s just an illusion, a ghost, a mirage. One day, he’s gardening when he sees Jenny coming again toward him. He thinks she’s again a ghost, but this time she’s real and she came for him.
He loves Jenny so much that he only wants to see her again.
He is in pain and he starts being delusional.
We see jenny again walking through his garden, but we think it’s just a vision. He’s irremediably crazy.
We were wrong, she’s there, coming back for him, finally reunited with Forrest and he’s finally happy.
All of these actions happened in no more than 2 minutes, but it’s one of the movie’s best scenes because of its pathos.
We finished with the 4 Ds! We’ll focus more on desires and objectives next time. Ready? Keep reading!
We had to deal with two Ds before, one for desire and one for distance. The desire lets us know the character’s wishes and what lies underneath. A desire is something bigger than a simple “oh, I wish to arrive on time.” For instance, the small Neil wants to go to the Moon; he’s always watching that piece of rock fluctuating in the sky and promises himself to do it. He needs to enter a prestigious university to study hard; his wishes are many, but his desire is something else. Ultimately, he will succeed in being Neil Armstrong and having his feet walking on the Moon itself. As we saw, many things happened, but he was driven by a long-shot desire.
Denial, the third D.
Now, the Moon is far, far away from us and it seems impossible to reach, so we don’t only add small steps but some (as my wife would say) pepper to it. Yes, as when you’re cooking, and you decide that following the recipe, your meal would end up bland, so you choose to add some spices. As a good chef, you must understand how to modify the old-fashioned recipes of writing stories to make one unique and immortal for your readers. Neil wants to go to university, but he loses his father the day before. He’s stopped by a dilemma: stay and help mom and the other brothers and sisters, or leave and have a chance to go to the Moon one day? Well, it’s beginning to be an exciting story, right?
Now, welcome to the third D, which stands for denial. We decided that Neil wanted to go to the Moon and we spiced up and planted small traps along his path, so now we need to take another step in this direction. He won’t go to the Moon, or at least that’s what your reader would have to believe and you need to let them.
I remember the first time I read about the Milgram experiment, which took place in 1960. It’s a famous experiment where ordinary people were paid to inflict pain on others, to the extent that they would kill the unlucky ones. Only a very believable staff would let people think that, at Yale University, people would ever be allowed to inflict pain on other human beings and maybe even kill them for an experiment. But that’s precisely what happened. I mean, not killing people, but cheating them, letting them think that was possible. And that’s precisely what we need to do with our readers. They need to believe that Neil lost his father, so he won’t be an engineer and go to the Moon (come on, really? The Moon?). Later he should have to decide if he has to stay with his young wife, who is pregnant now, or go to explore the universe. The readers have to think he won’t, that Neil is the kind of man who decides to stay with her no matter what, especially at that moment.
This D is the final decision, the most decisive, where Neil has to prove himself worthy of us reading his 230 pages story. He won’t go to the Moon but wait for a second. He’s already there. I went a moment to the toilet and bam! He’s there, closing his eyes for the countdown! So he did it in the end, that son of a preacher! What happened right there? Something like his wife coming to him, telling him that she will survive alone, but not thinking that she took this life dream from him. Their son needs to have a happy father, while a frustrated man would be worst than a dead one.
This was the third D. Next will come the last one of these beautiful fatty letters, D for Devastation. Keep always reading!
First comes the study of your characters. They start existing, walking, speaking, lighting a cigarette, or chewing a pack of gum. You started talking to them and now they answer you back, so you’re ready to write their story. You must have a plot already in your head, but without a good study of your character, your story will result in something flat.
So now you need to adjust the idea you have with the characters you created. Let’s imagine you wrote a book about Alan, a drug addict that wants his family back but doesn’t want to stop using drugs. He must have a mum, dad, brothers, or sisters, right? His family, what they look like, what they want from him? Why he’s so obsessed with their love and cannot leave them behind? Maybe he’s using drugs because of them, because of something that happened?
Create a chain of events.
Many questions can come when you think about your characters’ purposes and desires. However, if it was a simple desire- response, we would probably be speaking about Pavlov and his experiments with poor dogs. In a story, we’re talking about a chain; the longer this chain is between the characters and their desire- objective, the better for the reader.
Let’s take Mr. Bean as an example. The scene starts and we know he needs to accomplish an effortless task: buying a pair of shoes or washing his hands, it doesn’t matter. We start exclaiming something like “oh, come on, don’t do that” or “watch out”, but deep inside, we want him to fail. Not at the end, no. We want him to buy is pair of shoes or wash his hands. We’re not cruel. But we really want to be entertained, and without him passing through every ring of the chain of events before reaching his final goal, we won’t. As simple as that.
So, that’s Distance. Create a character obsessed with reaching a lake, put him in between a mountain with a bear hunting him, and make him allergic to bees. The Desire will push over his limits; his background will make the reader glued to the book, avid to read more of the adventures. The distance will ultimately make the story what it is: a long chain of events.
You probably listened to a song called Freed from desire. The idea is obviously not that new, as desire seems to enslave us. We need to know how to control that desire and, as writers, how to fully understand it. We have mentioned before 4 Ds, let’s start with the first one, desire.
In Stanislavsky’s philosophy, desire is a super objective; obstacles and conflicts are vital for a story to develop. What you must ask yourself now is: how can I create impediments to my characters if I don’t know them yet and how could I think of knowing someone if not starting from his personal goals?
Desire, definition.
So, let’s try to find your characters’ desires. First, associate it with an action verb since this is what a story is about: action. An example to avoid is to imagine a desire like this:
“A man wants to be a better person.”
Maybe our character Alan told us he wanted to be a better man when we interviewed him; this isn’t a desire we can use in a story if we want it to develop. His desire has to be specific and better if it is double, as in:
“Alan wants his family to trust his choices.”
The character would think in this way:
“I lied to my family all my life. It’s time for me to stop using drugs and let them trust me again.”
In short, it’s an action plan followed by the primary goal of the character. Creating a double and specific desire, we could later decide to “attack” our character from two sides.
Alan wants to be trusted by his family, but his nature is against it. So, trying to adjust his life, he’s probably going to replicate the same pattern repeatedly. When finally, Alan seems to have found a balance, it’s maybe too late and his family doesn’t want to speak to him anymore. How would he react to this change of events? Now that Alan is alone in the world, would he return to his bad habits, or would he change completely no matter what? What does it mean to trust him now that he is alone from his family’s point of view? How would his family react to his changes?
The more specific the desire, the less “egocentric” it would be from the reader’s perspective. A story based on “He did this, then he did that” is quite boring, to say the least. What makes a nice story is a desire that goes in two ways; Alan depends on his family as much as they rely on him. This creates several possibilities for the writer, for you and me, to discover new plots. Remember that the desire has to follow your character’s attributes. Imagine if Alan thought about his desire in this way:
“I lied to my family all my life. It’s time for me to find a way to cover the fact that I use drugs, so they will trust me again.”
See how twisted the story is now? Alan doesn’t want to be a better person but just a better liar.
Now ask yourself: what would happen if my character failed to achieve his goal? What are the consequences for him and for the rest of the characters involved? It’s better if the reader always knows what it’s at stake and what the risks are for the main character. Without risks, there’s no reader, as simple as that.
Sometimes a character can have a desire on the surface, manifest to everyone, plus another one that only the reader knows or think to know. It’s you, the writer that has to work with these two levels, making the reader curious about how it is going to end. The desire has to be clear if you want the readers to be really engaged, asking themselves, “how is it going to end for him? Is Alan going to lie successfully to his family, or he’s going to be discovered? Will they trust him again? In any case, achieving or not the primary goal has to leave a closure for the reader, an answer to all the questions raised.
So, this was the first D, next time, we’ll inspect our second D, for Distance.
We imagined our characters, maybe watching a colleague closely for years or just having a glimpse of an old woman on the way back home in the metro. Whatever the case, we have the first idea of our characters and a vague idea of the plot. Now, we decided to tide up our characters (or nicely invite them to a tea party), and we started questioning them. We saw how comfortable it is to ask easy questions and how uncomfortable it makes us ask some more profound, strictly personal questions.
It’s totally fine. But it’s still not enough. With your characters, you need to ask questions about their past, their dark secrets, and their manias. Think about how challenging it is for you to ask any question to a complete stranger, even where to find the closest pharmacy. And now consider how challenging is to answer a question since it’s still you speaking through your character.
“With a maximum top speed of 105 mph (169 km/h), a curb weight of 1993 lbs (904 kgs), the TR3 has a naturally-aspirated Inline 4 cylinder engine, Petrol motor. This engine produces a maximum power of 101 PS (100 bhp – 74 kW) at 5000 rpm and a maximum torque of 159.0 Nm (117 lb.ft) at 5000 rpm. The power is transmitted to the road by the rear wheel drive (RWD) with a 4-speed Manual gearbox. On the topic of chassis details responsible for road holding, handling behavior and ride comfort, the TR3 has Coil springs. Front suspension and Semi-elliptic leaf springs. De Dion axle. Rear suspension. The TR3 braking system includes the front and rear for stopping power. The TR3 model is a Cabrio car manufactured by Triumph, sold new from 1955. I’m going to sell my apartment to buy it.”
If you are ignorant of car matters, you’d most probably find this description ultimately futile. You have a lot of information, but you didn’t give anything useful to the general reader; no emotions mean no way for the reader to follow you into your story. Also, when that person added he would sell his apartment to buy it at the end of the description, you probably thought he was insane. Let’s imagine another person describing to you the same car in this way:
“Yesterday, an old man approached me at the market and asked me if I had ever watched La dolce vita by Federico Fellini. I’d never seen him before and found that question really odd. At any rate, I wouldn’t lose anything answering back, so I did. I told him that I’m a cinema connoisseur and mostly into old Italian movies. So he told me that he had the original car from the movie, the excellent Triumph TR3. That’s a magical, convertible, fashionable car as no one does anymore. When you accelerate, you feel the engine almost speaking to you, a roar full of stories and secrets. That’s more than a car. It’s an obsession now. I’m going to sell my apartment to buy it.”
Now, even if you’ve never heard of the car before, you probably start visualizing yourself seated in the front seat of this cult car, the engine speaking to you. You know this person is a cinema connoisseur and all the information you acquired is helpful in understanding the ultimate decision. It’s still a crazy conclusion to make, selling an apartment to buy a car, but now you know why. There’s a reason behind it.
Well, what we’ll do next time is to analyze the 4 Ds that will shape your characters and, therefore, your story:
We realize how easy it is to start writing a story, having the right tools. But what is the content of your story? It comes from your everyday life, inspired by something you witnessed once, or some social problem? You need to ask yourself where the inspiration comes from to realize which tone is better to use.
Your roots
Roots, image by Daniele Frau.
These are your roots, the base from which you will build your story and the way you find inspiration afterward. Let’s talk about the inspiration for a moment. We’ve grown with the idea that we need a specific sparkle to write, a magic moment. Without that, we imagine the writers sitting in their rooms, desperate, in front of their typewriters. It’s not exactly like that.
Yes, you can have some blank moments, periods where you have nothing to say. Well, that’s the best moment for you; take this as a vacation, write ideas, and make your life full of experience, so then you’ll start writing again. Inspiration is a myth, solid and difficult to erase from people’s imagination, but still a myth. When I don’t have anything to say on a certain topic, I switch to another one. I start writing about mathematics, science, and economics. I write about topics far from my usual niche, and an idea naturally pops out.
For instance, a few days ago, I wrote an essay about international investments and wham! Something strikes my mind, an original idea about a real estate man that lives in the streets. The main secret here is the first rule every writer always has to keep in mind:
Write, write, write.
If you don’t write, you won’t be able to clearly understand your limits, your common errors and as we said, you’ll feel increasingly tired of writing. See it like you were going to the gym. The more you go to do sport, the more you want to, because you feel your body is responding immediately. It’s precisely the same when you start writing, then you want to write more and more.
Solid roots
So, you have an idea of a real estate agent living in the streets. Now you need to understand which tone you will use to describe the situation. It will be something like Jean Claude Izzo in Les soleil des mourants, or you would try a political angle? Do you want to write in a sarcastic-dark humor tone, as Jonas Jonasson? After you realize that everything will be easy, your pen will scribble so fast on the paper, faster than your thoughts.
Then, it’s time to write your characters. But this is a story for another time.
See you, people! As always, send me messages or comments here below and I’ll be glad to answer all of your questions.
Do you want to read some of my stories? Check them out!
In my previous article, I spoke about the most challenging part of writing a story. In the beginning, the beginning. So, how to go over this first scary step?
Snowflake
Yes, the snowflake method was one of the most helpful methods I’ve ever tried as a beginner. You have a story in mind and that story is nothing more than some vivid sensations and a bunch of perfect phrases you noted. But that’s not enough, clearly.
What happens next?
Most of the time, what happens next is you staring at a blank page. It seems you have everything in hand to start, but the key doesn’t turn and the engine is stuck. You check the gasoline (ideas) and discover the tank is full. So, what’s the problem? Let’s open the hood of the car, shall we? Hm, that’s the problem, you’re missing all the cables that connect the engine to the car. That’s why it wasn’t doing anything when you turned the key.
Let’s find the cables
The cables are easy to find. We just need to put them in the right place. Let’s leave the car similitude for a moment. For example, the best place to start is to write down in 15 words what is your story about. Suddenly, you realise you didn’t think it through. Your story is somewhere in your head, but it isn’t clear. Not having a straightforward plot in mind from the beginning is why you cannot move from your parking spot (oh, I’m back to the car simile).
Play with words
Play with words
We all know how difficult it is to write an entire story in 15 words. Too many things are missing! Plus, you have to write it in a way that sounds interesting to a reader and seems even more complex. I can tell you two of my favourite exercises to improve your 15-words writing:
read as many movie descriptions as you can and try to describe movies that you know by heart
try to write epitaphs about people you knew or famous people
“Forrest Gump, American film, released in 1994, that chronicled 30 years (from the 1950s through the early 1980s) of the life of a intellectually disabled man (played by Tom Hanks) in an unlikely fable that earned critical praise, large audiences, and six Academy Awards, including best picture.”
How you can make it in 15 words?
The chronicle of 30 years of the life of an intellectually disabled man (1950s- 1980s).
Yes, there are a lot of things missing. This is precisely my point. Now you need to add. Divide this 15-words-description into 4 parts (beginning, development, middle, finale).
Forrest is an intellectually disabled child who discovers he can do some extraordinary things.
Forrest goes to war, understands he loves one girl and loses his best friend, Bubba.
The girl he loves continues to escape from him. Forrest is lucky and gets a millionaire.
The girl he loves returns, they have a child together and then she dies.
I know what you’re thinking: “where is the bench, that famous beautiful bench?”
Nowhere, now, but the exercise isn’t finished here. We need to make each part of the story divided into 4 phrases, 15 phrases long. In this way, we can start speaking about him sitting on a bench and speaking to a stranger, his disabilities and his single mum believing in him, and his crush on Jenny. Step by step, your story starts to be interesting.
What’s next?
Start doing some exercises, put some ideas together and write your famous first 15 words. Your story will start growing on an excellent base.
What is the most challenging part of a story to write?
The beginning in the beginning
When you first start writing, the easiest part is the beginning, or at least it’s what you think. Words flow so quickly that you feel you have a gift, and maybe you actually have. The issue is, when you let someone (not your mom and dad) read it, most of the time, they do THAT face.
Which face?
You know what face I’m speaking about, the lost look. Why is that? You start wondering if the story has a sense at all, and then you start questioning everything, even the editor trying to help you. The only solution is to take a step back and re-read everything, following the advice of the experts.
Beginners
So, I answered the first question, I think. The most challenging part of a story to write is the beginning when you are a beginner. The first line is so difficult to write that it takes 25% of my time, even nowadays. That line presents your book to the reader, and nothing will change that. The reader will understand your style and what the story is about just by reading that first line.
Now, I went to a book presentation a few days ago. Friendly atmosphere, cool people. Then, I bought a book copy and sat waiting for the discussion to start. I arrived there without preconceptions, open to discovering a lovely book and a new author.
Then, I opened the first page
The book was well-edited; no problem with that. I focused on the first line. Horrible, simply horrible. I closed my eyes, breathed and I tried again. Nope, still horrific. A nightmare for anyone who had ever written something, that first line told me, “run from this place”. Still, I tried my best not to run. I thought, “maybe I’m wrong; let’s give her another chance”.
And I did
The most useless hour I ever spent, believe me. The writer and the other two presenters started speaking about how skilled the author is. Also, they couldn’t avoid talking about how magic was the love story (apparently, if there’s no love story, there’s no book, they said) and other incredibly dull things.
What did I discover?
I discovered that you need to read many good books, but even more bad first lines, too. First, a bad first line wants to tell you something clever but doesn’t show you anything. Something like “George was walking in a garden full of roses, the smell of the paradise and the colour of passion”. After a while, you will understand how important the first line is. Phew.
If you’re still asking yourself what is the most challenging part of a story to write, here’s the answer, then. This doesn’t mean it’s always the most difficult part. In the example of the bad start, the author forgot to mention something important, questions. Questions are something you cannot forget when you’re writing anything. Questions bring answers, and answers get other questions.
This situation reminds me of the insightful (and very popular) experiment made at Standford University in 1971 and the book that followed, written by Phillip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect.
How nice people turn out not to be so nice anymore?
There are many reasons, many factors that sum up to create a so-called monsters. What we know is that no one is born evil. The same idea we have of evilness changed with time. The outstanding progress of medicine and the knowledge of our brain give us new keys to understand the phenomenon.
A trigger
We know for sure something that “triggers” us and made us prone to be evil. To put it in plain words, to be de-identified is a big motivator. Even the nicest person on Earth, set in a situation of having immense power and no control, can turn into a monster. Oh, it doesn’t mean everyone will react in the same way, but most people will (or let other people turn evil without doing anything to prevent it).
Go back to the future
Coming back to our story, Go back to the future: changing the name of the “newcomers” into aliens the society can turn the eyes away from the problem. The Chief of the State, a pure idiot with no skills whatsoever, become a real monster. The middle-class start shooting at the “coming aliens” just for fun.
Who’s helping the aliens?
Well, whoever they might be, they can go to hell. Or to prison, to be more precise. No, this isn’t pure fantasy. The right-wing hasn’t always been like this in Italy. But the new right-wing likes to speak to the bellies of the population. Don’t you believe me? Imagine if somebody would arrest me for saving people in the open sea. As estimates from the UN attested, 25 people die every day in front of Sicilian coasts. So, this blood is in our hands.
And what are we doing to prevent it?
Nothing, really. Like real monsters do. And this isn’t just my story.
Daniele Frau 