REALITY SOUNDBITES A DIALOGUE ABOUT DIALOGUE
by Keith Morrison
©2010 Keith Morrison

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An earlier version of this column appeared in TSAT #46

   As some of you might remember, a while back a discussion got started in various online forums concerning the realism (or lack thereof) of dialogue in certain stories. One example that was brought up was Bill Hart and his assorted TG-heavy tales. Now, right off the bat I have to make one thing clear: I think Hart is a very good writer when it comes to plotting, humor, style and the basic mechanics. The only real problem I have with him is his dialogue: His characters just don’t speak like real people. They’re too verbose, too… well, to be honest, it’s hard to describe. However, a brilliant flash of insight just occurred to me.
   As I’m typing this on an aircraft somewhere over northern Ontario, the in-flight movie is Pride and Prejudice… and that’s what Hart’s characters sound like: People from Victorian and Edwardian literature. People from a Regency tale who have just woken up in a world of magic and random gender changes. People whose dialogue is veddy propah indeed—and very much unlike how real human beings converse with each other. There’s nothing wrong with what they say; rather, the problem is how they say it.

   “Good morning, Miss Parker,” smiled J. Jonah Jameson as he chewed on the short end of his cigar. “I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever see you around the Bugle again.”
   “It’s been a slow week for picture taking, Mr. Jameson,” replied Pamela. “Interesting subjects have been few and far between. One can’t be off and about taking pictures of jailbirds like the Vulture all of the time.”
   “How very true, Miss Parker. However, since you are here, should I assume you have a picture or two you think I might like to buy from you?” Jonah tried not to look overeager or too excited or anything else that might make the girl raise her asking price. Somehow, this mere snip of a girl always had fabulous pictures, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “I hope you aren’t wasting my valuable time, Miss Parker.”
   Pamela smiled at Jonah. “Have I ever wasted your time, Mr. Jameson?” He didn’t need to answer the question. Pamela opened the manila envelope she was carrying. After taking out two of the pictures Fawn had taken as she’d returned from the Baxter Building, she laid them out on the publisher’s desk. “What do you think of these two shots, Mr. Jameson? They’re quite interesting. Don’t you think?”

(from What If: Whence Came a Spider, part 4)

   Now, this isn’t to say that nobody ever talks like that. I’ve been known to adopt that sort of speech pattern myself, on occasion. The problem in Hart-written stories is that everyone speaks like that all the time! It’s if all the characters aren’t really conversing, but reciting their pre-scripted dialogue. That simply isn’t realistic, and after a while it starts to irritate the hell out of me. Now, if I were reading some Regency-period historical fiction, Regency-period speech patterns would be fine. If this style of speech was restricted to a character who’s speaking another language (and thus being translated for the reader), no problem either. If it was one character talking this way because he’s a snooty blueblood, or is trying to impress others with his loquaciousness, no problemo. But when the author serves up this sort of artificial, heavily stylized language for contemporary English-speaking North Americans (or Australians, or Britons, or whoever) in everyday conversation? When things get that bad, it just gets under my skin. Perhaps there is a place where people go around speaking like that these days… but I’ve traveled fairly extensively, and I’ve yet to see it (in assorted languages, even!). Hell, even in back in the Regency period, everyone didn’t talk that way all the bleeding time!
   Hart’s mistake is especially notable in this particular case because one of the characters has been around for a few decades, and his manner of speaking is solidly established. Different writers bring their own personal touches to the character’s voice, of course. But no matter what different versions there are in the accepted canon, the character Hart wrote simply does not sound like J. Jonah Jameson, publisher of the Daily Bugle, constant thorn in Spider-Man’s public image, demanding boss. Jameson is a loud, aggressive newspaper guy with rolled-up sleeves, a loosened tie, and the stump of a cigar clenched between his teeth as he bullies and bellows his way through the day; the character Hart wrote his dialogue for is a genteel fop sitting properly in a large chair, with nary a hair out of place or button undone, regardless of what the narrator describes him as wearing.
   Compare the excerpt above to some of the dialogue from the movies. J.K. Simmon’s portrayal of old JJ, and the dialogue the writers gave him, has been pretty much universally lauded as being right on the money for perfectly capturing the character.

J. Jonah Jameson: No jobs! Freelance! Best thing in the world for a kid your age. You bring me some more pictures of that newspaper-selling clown, maybe I’ll take ’em off your hands. But I never said you have a job. Meat. I’ll send you a nice box of Christmas meat. It’s the best I can do—get out of here.

J. Jonah Jameson: Hoffman, run down to the patent office, copyright the name “Green Goblin”. I want a quarter every time someone says it.

J. Jonah Jameson: Come here. Parker, what do you know about high society?
Peter Parker: Oh… well, I…
J. Jonah Jameson: Don’t answer that. My society photographer got hit in the head by a polo ball. You’re all I got. Big party tonight for an American hero, my son the astronaut.
Peter Parker: Mr. Jameson, can you pay me in advance?
J. Jonah Jameson: [laughs hysterically for a few seconds] You serious? What, pay you for just standing there? The planetarium, 8:00. There’s the door.

Peter Parker:

Mr. Jameson, please, isn’t there any of these shots you can use? I really need the money.

J. Jonah Jameson: Awww. Miss Brant?
Miss Brant: Yeah?
J. Jonah Jameson: Get me a violin.

J. Jonah Jameson:

Flowers? How much? If you spend any more on this thing, you can pick the daisies off my grave! Get plastic!

   Both examples (the section from Hart’s story, the snippets from the two Spider-man films) show us Jameson being a skinflint… but the two portrayals are worlds apart in what they tell you about the character. In the latter, Jameson isn’t worried about appearing a cheapskate; rather, he proclaims it. He’s in your face with it. Right up front, you know that if a character gets any more money out of Jameson than he was originally willing to pay, it’s a huge triumph. You know it without the author needing to disgorge an blatant infodump about how Jameson is tight with money.
   That characteristic just doesn’t come through in Hart’s dialogue at all. Yes, he’s trying to save money, but Hart’s Jameson is doing it by playing a friendly game of poker rather than daring you to try and take it from him. And the only way you know that he’s playing that game is because the author explicitly, specifically told you. Without that interjection into the character’s mind, you wouldn’t know his action is an attempt to keep the price down.
   Don’t agree?

   “How very true, Miss Parker. However, since you are here, should I assume you have a picture or two you think I might like to buy from you?” Jonah had quietly admired her fantastic work but had not expressed it openly; good photographers were hard to come by and as good as she was, he couldn’t afford to be seen showing favouritism over his other free-lancers and risk losing them. “I hope you aren’t wasting my valuable time, Miss Parker.”

   Completely different motivation, but not one change in dialogue. That might be a clue that there’s a problem with the dialogue being integrated into the prime reason for its existence: Conveying information to the reader.
   Dialogue in fictional form is a tool to move information from creator to the audience, either directly, through the message being conveyed by the actual words, or indirectly, through the manner in which that message is expressed. Sometimes the latter is the more important thing. A classic example is the person on the verge of a breakdown after some trauma, who is babbling on about something totally irrelevant. The information isn’t the specific words that are being used, but that the person is babbling because they’re on the verge of a breakdown. You could switch out the character’s specific words for anything (because, after all, it is irrelevant) and it wouldn’t make a change in the thing that’s really important: This character is babbling because they’re losing it. The ‘how’ is more important than the ‘what’.
   On the other hand, the information content of the dialogue can be zero, with the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ both totally useless. Unfortunately, the example I picked out of Hart’s story comes close to that. The dialogue that is shown isn’t important at all to the reader; the two sentences in the middle which tell the motivation are, because those two sentences are where the author explicitly states it. In fact, you could pull that pair of sentences completely out of that paragraph, and it wouldn’t make much difference in the story at all. Don’t believe me?
   Here’s the same excerpt where I’ve done just that:

   “Good morning, Miss Parker,” smiled J. Jonah Jameson as he chewed on the short end of his cigar. “I was beginning to wonder if we’d ever see you around the Bugle again.”
   “It’s been a slow week for picture taking, Mr. Jameson,” replied Pamela. “Interesting subjects have been few and far between. One can’t be off and about taking pictures of jailbirds like the Vulture all of the time.”
   Jonah tried not to look overeager or too excited or anything else that might make the girl raise her asking price. Somehow, this mere snip of a girl always had fabulous pictures, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
   Pamela smiled at Jonah. She opened the manila envelope she was carrying. After taking out two of the pictures Fawn had taken as she’d returned from the Baxter Building, she laid them out on the publisher’s desk. “What do you think of these two shots, Mr. Jameson? They’re quite interesting. Don’t you think?”

   Story moves along pretty much the same, doesn’t it? The missing sentences don’t actually provide anything new or useful that we, the readers, need to know—or, more critically, care about.
   Compare this with the apparently inane dialogue between Jules and Vincent when you first meet them in Pulp Fiction. What they call ‘a Quarter Pounder with cheese’ in Paris is totally irrelevant to the rest of the movie. However, the information passed on to the viewer isn’t about what they’re talking about but, rather, the people having the conversation: These are two men who are, if not friends, at least comfortable enough with each other to have that sort of inane conversation. More importantly, as you quickly learn, these are two hitmen who can have that sort of conversation while on their way to whack somebody. No brooding, introspective killers, these two. It’s important for the audience to know this to understand their characters. Information has been passed.
   Thus, the irony: Dialogue that’s directly related to the subject of the story can be utterly pointless, while dialogue that seems utterly pointless at first glance can be critical to the story.
   Some might argue that it’s unfair to compare visual with written fiction, because visual usually depends on dialogue more to express character and motivation, while written fiction can ‘cheat’ in a sense by getting inside a character’s head. I’d argue that more writers should take the cue from visual to escape the telling without showing trap that Close Third Person, the most common point of view these days, leads them into. In the excerpts from the two Spider-man films, you don’t need anything like an explicit window inside Jameson’s head at all, because the dialogue itself provides all the data you need.
   That said, for that approach to work you need the right dialogue. This, in turn, means you need to take care of what the characters are saying, to give them each an individual voice. Individual mannerisms, verbal tics, vocabulary. If you don’t, the data flowing from author to reader is corrupted. You’re making the reader work to try and figure out who is saying what, instead of simply recognizing (once they are far enough into the story) who’s speaking and thus being able to pay attention to what is being said and how it’s being said. Granted, this is easier in fiction with a soundtrack, because the actor can convey information with tone and accent, but it’s still possible in written fiction.
   Analogy time: Imagine a radio drama where all the actors spoke through a voice distorter, so they all sounded the same and they all expressed the same emotion at the same time and so on. It would be impossible to follow unless you were paying ridiculously close attention to everything so that you could figure out who was saying what to whom. It wouldn’t be enjoyable; it would be work.
   So, basically, the point is that if you want to get information out to the reader, dialogue is a perfectly acceptable way to do it, but—and this is a big ‘but’!—you have to remember that effective dialogue is more than just putting words down on the page.
   One last example from the first Spider-man movie: It’s the scene where the Green Goblin blasts open the window of Jameson’s office and demands to see Peter Parker, just a few seconds after Parker has left that office. Jameson immediately says he doesn’t know anyone with that name.
   The one little bit of dialogue, very brief and over in mere seconds, told you something about J. Jonah Jameson: He’s not easily intimidated, and he won’t throw someone else in harm’s way just to save his own skin, even someone that he apparently doesn’t think a whole lot of.
   Not bad for a single sentence, huh?


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