What a passage of talk must do, and how to test it
The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition) — Chapter 3. Part I: The Scene and Its Materials.
In brief. Dialogue that sounds like real talk is not thereby working. A passage of speech earns its place when each speaker wants something from the other, wants it now, and uses words to get it, so that what lies between them (a fact, a standing, a permission) is different at the end. Most of that work happens in what is not said: readers assume that speakers are cooperating, and when a character answers the wrong question, says too little or too much, or agrees in the shape of a refusal, the reader works out what was meant. The tools are six domains in which an exchange can change something, a list of twelve ways of opening a gap between what is said and what is meant, and ten diagnostic questions. Use them on an exchange that is fluent and inert, or on a cast whose members all sound like the author.
What you can do after this chapter
- State what each speaker wants from the other before the exchange ends, in one sentence per speaker.
- Name the currency of status in an exchange and say whether any of it changed hands.
- Rewrite an on-the-nose line four ways, and choose between them as a decision about character.
- Strip the tags from an exchange and tell, from the speech alone, who is talking.
- Keep the plain, unguarded line in reserve for the place in the book that needs it.
Key terms
Dialogue exchange; turn, conversation and exchange; phatic communion; the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; flouting and conversational implicature; adjacency pair, conditional relevance and preference organisation; repair; face, footing and the participation framework; heteroglossia; the relational domain and the silence domain; text and subtext; attribution, the action beat and the contradicting action beat; the gap-closing move. Each is defined at first use and collected in the consolidated glossary.
Contents
The first files set out what an exchange is and why talk on the page differs from talk in a room; the middle files show the machinery; the last are for use at the desk.
- The Problem
A transcript, a fluent draft, and the chapter’s claim - Definitions
The exchange, its scale, conversation against exchange, adjacent terms - How It Works
Implicature, the machinery of turns, face and footing, the contest of social languages, and the dates of the conventions - The Taxonomy
Five domains of purpose, and a proposed sixth: silence - The Mechanism
Multiplicity in four turns, the two channels, twelve subtext mechanisms, and the gap-closing move - Diagnostic Tests
Ten questions on one page, and how to read their failures together - Failure Patterns
Five recurrent failures, each with a published work that commits it and succeeds - Worked Analyses
Wuthering Heights, The Remains of the Day, The Road, Succession, and the household revision case - Checklist and Exercises
The revision checklist and five exercises for your own draft - Coda
What the subtext ideal is, and what it is not
A writer already in revision can start at the diagnostic tests and use the checklist as the working page.
The full treatment
The Reference layer holds the complete chapter, The Dialogue Exchange: the theory at length, each domain’s carriers in tabular form, the twelve subtext mechanisms with exemplars, twelve failure patterns, close readings of Pride and Prejudice, the Grand Inquisitor, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Blindness, The Portrait of a Lady and “Hills Like White Elephants”, dialogue in the short story, the series, screen and translation, seminar questions and an assessment rubric, and the sources.
See also: The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), for the value-shift test and the relational domain this chapter adopts; Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2), for the decision that is made binding by being said aloud; The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4), for denotation and connotation, the descriptive counterpart of text and subtext.