This takes morphing an object—the curtains, the dress, the shroud of mind-warping poison—in a postmodern or meta-fictional direction, but if you can get away with it, do so.
In my own lesser way, the liposuction fat in Fight Club becomes soap to be sold for money to finance the movement. Then it becomes nitroglycerin to be used by the characters to topple buildings.
So, my student, today’s lesson is to recycle your objects. Introduce them, then hide them. Rediscover them, then hide them. Each time you bring them back, make them carry greater importance and emotion. Recycle them. In the end, resolve them beautifully. Tension: Avoiding Tennis-Match Dialogue
If you were my student I’d tell you to be clever on someone else’s dime. You’re not Noel Coward. Cleverness is a brand of hiding. It will never make your reader cry. It seldom makes readers genuinely belly laugh and never breaks anyone’s heart.
So avoid tennis-match dialogue. That’s where one character says something, and another responds with the perfect quip. Think of situation comedy dialogue. Snappy comebacks. Perfect rejoinders. Setup and spike. Instant gratification.
Tension is created and instantly resolved. So it never accumulates. The energy remains flat. For example: Wendy snuck a glance at him. “Do you have herpes?”
Brandon looked away. Gradually, his gaze came back to hers. “Yes. I do.”
Question answered. Conflict settled. Energy returns to a big, boring zero.
Instead, if you were my student I’d tell you to never resolve an issue until you introduce a bigger one.
For example: Wendy snuck a glance at him. “Do you have herpes?”
Brandon looked away. Gradually, his gaze came back to meet hers. “I bought those place cards you wanted.”
Or, “Wendy, honey, you know I’d never hurt you.”
Or, “Geez! If you could just hear yourself!”
Or, “That Megan Whitney is a liar.”
To which Wendy replies, “Who’s Megan Whitney?”
To which Brandon responds, “I bought those place cards you wanted.”
Always keep in mind our tendency to avoid conflict (we’re writers) and to cheat and use dialogue to further plot (a cardinal sin). So to do the first and avoid the second, use evasive dialogue or miscommunications to always increase the tension. Avoid volleys of dialogue that resolve tension too quickly.
Again, it’s not just me telling you this. Sitting on the floor in a quiet corner of an auditorium at Portland State University, Ursula Le Guin once gave me some advice. We were both speaking at an event for the Ooligan small press program. I’d told a story about taking a woman—an interviewer from Italian Vogue—to an amusement park. First I’d brought the reporter a huge bunch of Mylar balloons. Once inside the park she let them loose and they drifted away. An explosion boomed. The park’s rides slowly ground to a halt, leaving screaming kids trapped high in the air. It was chaos as sparks rained down and firefighters brought ladders to rescue the stranded.
The Mylar balloons had wrapped themselves around the main transmission line that delivered power to the area. High above us, the Mylar sputtered and melted, dripping flaming gunk. The park employees were cursing because they were out of work for the day, and all the concession food was spoiling. No one knew we’d brought the balloons. The reporter and I had slunk out, undiscovered. That was it. The story just fizzled on that vague note.
After I left the stage Ursula sought me out. We’d never met, but she wanted to help me brainstorm a better ending. Doing so she told me, “Never resolve a threat until you raise a larger one.”
Ursula K. Le GuinTension: Do Not Use Dialogue to Further the Plot
Think of those low-budget television movies where the lieutenant rushes into the war room and says, “The Martians have breached our force field and begun destroying New York with a heat ray!”
Feel cheated? I know I do. Even if the lieutenant’s uniform is scorched from a deadly heat ray and his face is a charred mask of exposed bone, and he screams his announcement and falls dead…I first want to see some scale models of Manhattan being bashed and torched.
If a plot point is worth including, it’s worth depicting in a scene. Don’t deliver it in dialogue. You’re not Shakespeare limited to the stage at the Globe Theatre and the endurance of the groundlings’ legs. You have the budget and the time.
Even in an otherwise good movie like Chinatown, where the discovery process is patiently and meticulously allowed to demonstrate how water is being stolen for Los Angeles, the biggest plot reveal is done through dialogue. Evelyn Mulwray’s daughter is a child of incest. Yes, it would be tons creepier if we used a discovery process to unpack that reveal—first speculating about the child’s father, then tracking down a birth certificate, hearing rumors from former servants, exploring why Evelyn has no mother—ask yourself, which would be more dramatic? The history of water distribution in Southern California? Or the emotionally engaging discovery of father/daughter sex and the threat of grandfather/granddaughter molestation?
It sounds harsh, but I forbid you from furthering your plot with dialogue. To do so is cheap and lazy.
Years ago Tom began a workshop session by describing a public reading he’d done days before. He’d been asked to read with a very young writer, practically a teenager, who was in the process of writing a novel called After Nirvana. The novel depicted adolescent hustlers soliciting sex in order to buy drugs. Tom talked in awe about how the writer, Lee Williams, unpacked a sex scene in a pornographic bookstore. Tom said he was amazed, wondering, Is he really going to go there? Is this guy actually
