Free Fiction Writer's Workshop by Josip Novakovich Page B

for the surprise.
    These are the ways I'm encouraging you to create your dialogue. Good dialogue, whether windy or compressed, snappy or rambling, generally follows these principles. Like the good curse, strong dialogue lends shape to characters, even as the characters shape the words themselves.
    ALL, BUT NOT EVERYTHING
    If I'm going to give you any principle to lean on at all, it should be this one: All, but not everything. What I mean here is that we should be able to hear all that a character is through his words, but we don't have to hear everything he says. You are not a recorder. You are not trying to capture every word spoken. I hope I proved to you in the first chapter that capturing every word spoken does not make a story in itself. The story resides in smaller units, in the words themselves, in the moments of silence, in the pace and pause of exchange. All, but not everything.
    Assume you have a character who is fond of exclamations such as "Golly gee" and "Gosh darn." Perhaps you are basing this character on a car dealer you know particularly well, and following my earlier advice, you have documented that this car dealer fellow uses the two words as often as forty times in a morning. That's all well and good, but you can't assume there's room for forty "Golly gees" in your story. Nor, more importantly, is there a need. These sorts of personal exclamations and catchphrases go a long way in a story. Remember rhythm. A well-timed "Gosh darn" goes a long way toward establishing who that character is. Unnecessarily sunny. Absurdly happy. Overly demonstrative. Genuinely nice. It could be any of these things, or all of them. Use catchphrases like this, time them well, but don't assume you are building a strong character because you lace your dialogue with personal exclamations. The same applies to idiomatic expressions. They tend to sound like blather when used too loosely.
    Dialogue is one part of character. It should be consistent, well chosen and purposefully paced. Add too many catchphrases and the well-rounded character starts to flatten out like a crepe at high altitude. The principle of All, but not everything asks for inclusion of all that makes a character shine as himself, but at the same time demands a measure of this sort of thoughtful exclusion.
    The same principle applies to cursing. The words "fuck" and "fucking" have got to be the most overused exclamations in the contemporary idiom. I hear them seventy times a day. On the golf course. On the basketball court. In the parking lot of the discount store. On the corner near the Centurion club, just as some guy is about to throw a bottle of malt liquor at the wheel of my car. When someone gets burned at the stove. When I nick myself shaving. On The Dennis Miller Show. When the Cubs lose. When the deficit rises. It seems to me that the only time I don't hear the word thrown around like a Handi Wipe at a convention of two-year-olds is when I'm at work, when I'm talking to my children or when I'm watching network television. I hope the first two will never change, but you never know what will happen with network television.
    EXERCISES
    1.I said diction rules. Let's prove it. Pick ten friends, preferably ten people from different parts of the country or the world. Ask them the same question, something easily answerable, but nothing that requires only a yes or no. Try for something open-ended enough that they will want to answer without asking more questions: Why should I have to know the nine planets? Aren't you sick of Michael Jordan? What would you do with a dead cat? Something they'll want to answer before they give you grief. Record the answers, with a tape recorder if you'd like. Now write the answers, word for word. Skip nothing. Read them back to yourself. Try to hear your friends' voices in the words, without imitating them. Pass the answers around and see if your friends can recognize each other. Chances are many of them will say, "Only Red would say