Free This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley Page B

have a little extra work to do with those characters who are communicating most directly with the reader. A first-person narrator, for instance, might not be aware of certain aspects of her personality or the effect her presence has on others. The writer wants her to be humble in this way and therefore brings in another character to say what the narrator cannot say (or maybe even know) about herself.
     
    “They all love you,” Leonard told me. “Everybody does. Markham said that the only way they’d let me come was if I brought you along.”
     
    The narrator could deny what Leonard has told her. Later on we will be able to tell if he was right or wrong.
    Making the dialogue pedestrian might seem counterproductive to the passionate writer. Here you are, telling us a story of profound feeling in which the main characters are going to experience deeply felt transitions, and I’m asking you for ordinary and prosaic dialogue.
    Absolutely.
    If you can get the reader to identify with the everydayness of the lives of these characters and
then
bring them—both reader and character—to these rapturous moments, you will have fulfilled the promise of fiction. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence. Dialogue is an essential tool to bring them there.
    Among the five points, there isn’t anything all that challenging. I’m sure the new writer will have no difficulty getting a secondary character to interact with the first-person narrator, giving us much-needed information. It’s not that hard to put plot points into someone’s mouth.. . .
    The problem is getting three or more of our five rules working at the same time. The problem is making sure that when Leonard is telling us something about the first-person narrator, he’s also telling us something about himself
and
advancing the plot.
     
    “They all love you, not me,” Leonard said. “Markham didn’t care that I stole that money for him. He told me I could get lost if I didn’t bring you with me. You’re the only one him and his crowd want to see.”
     
    Inside this dialogue there is jealousy, hints of self-deprecation, the fact that Leonard is a criminal,
and
the impact that the narrator has on others.
    The information in this example might be too blunt. But I’m sure you see what I mean. Dialogue in your novel is not just characters talking. It is sophisticated fiction.
    There are many different ways to get people to speak in novels. They can have conversations, write and read letters, and leave messages on answering machines; someone can tell one person something that someone else has said; one character can overhear someone else’s conversation. People shout, whisper, lie, seem to be saying one thing when they’re saying something else.
    Dialogue is an endless pleasure, but you have to get it right.
    Do not attempt to use slang or dialect unless you are 100 percent sure of the usage. If you get it wrong, it will taint the entire book. In relation to this admonition, remember that “less is more” when you’re dealing with accents, dialect, and colloquial speech.
    “Yeah, I seen ’im.”
    If you’re sure about this articulation, then use it, but consider completing the idea through explanation rather than dialect.
     
    “Yeah, I seen ’im,” Bobby Figueroa said. Then he told me that Susan’s brother was on the lookout for Johnny Katz.
     
    As they say in boxing, “Protect yourself at all times.” If you aren’t sure about the way someone will say something, then find another way to get at the same idea.
    One final note about dialogue: a novel is not a play. Don’t house your entire story in conversations. Don’t try to contain the whole plot in dialogue. As with metaphor, overuse of dialogue can bewilder and distance your reader from the experience of the novel.
    a solitary exercise
    In your meticulous rewrite, one problem you will be looking for is flatness in the prose.
     
    I went to the store