Also consider that big voice might not always occur in words. Look at the stories in which a vast art project serves to comment on or clarify the main character’s thoughts. In The Day of the Locust it’s the huge mural that Todd is painting in his apartment. Called The Burning of Los Angeles, the work in progress depicts all the novel’s characters involved in a classically inspired inferno of ridiculous architecture. Similarly, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss externalizes his obsessive thoughts by spending much of the film sculpting a room-filling replica of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. In the film version of my book Choke the past accumulates as yet another mural.
And yes, a small amount of big voice goes a long way. It works great for setting a scene. And it works great for underscoring a plot event. If you were my student I’d tell you to keep your big voice philosophizing to a minimum. Each time you shift to big voice you bump your reader out of the fictional dream, so too much commenting can slow the story’s momentum to a crawl. And it can annoy by being too clever or too preachy, dictating how the reader should react.
However, switching to big voice for short stretches will allow you to imply time passing. And it can also buffer between scenes in which lots of physical action takes place. And it allows you to briefly summarize preceding action and deliver a witty or wise meme about life. Textures: Attribution
By attribution I mean those little signposts inserted in dialogue that tell us who said what.
For example: “Don’t make me stop this car,” she said.
Or: He asked, “Who died and made you Ross Perot?”
Too often we see page-long cascades of unattributed speech. Characters exchange quips without a hint of gesture or action. Soon enough we’re confused and counting backward to establish who said what.
In silent pictures actors flailed and mugged to communicate, with only an occasional line of dialogue flashed on a card. The early talking pictures became the opposite. The crude microphones required everyone to cluster in static groups near them. No one dared to move. It was years before filmmakers could combine the huge physical vocabulary of the silent era with the smart, stagy dialogue of the early sound era.
Ideally, you should be combining gesture, action, and expression with your dialogue.
First, use attribution to avoid confusing your reader. Avoid making your reader feel foolish at all costs! You want to make your reader feel smart, smarter than the main character. That way the reader will sympathize and want to root for the character. Scarlett O’Hara is charming and smart and can convince men she’s beautiful. We have every reason to hate and resent her, but she’s too dumb to recognize that Rhett Butler is her soul mate. So we’re hooked. We feel superior and in our patronizing, condescending, voyeuristic way, we want her to smarten up. In a way, we “adopt” her.
So use attribution to avoid making your reader feel like a dummy who gets lost in long exchanges of dialogue. Better yet, I’d tell you to never use long exchanges of dialogue, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Second, use attribution to create a beat of…nothing. A bland, empty moment like the silence between notes in music. The theory is that readers don’t subvocalize “he said.” They visually leap over it, landing harder on the dialogue that follows. For example: “Nurse,” he said, “hurry and get me a fresh pancreas.”
Use attribution to control the delivery of dialogue, creating the sort of dramatic pause an actor would insert. Otherwise, the reader will race through a line without realizing how it ought to be weighted.
Third, use physical action as a form of attribution that also underscores or undermines what’s being said. For example: “Coffee?” With her back to the room, she poured the cups full and dropped cyanide in Ellen’s. “I think you’ll like this new French roast.”
Or: “Vampires?” Declan smirked, but his hand flew to his chest, to where he’d worn a crucifix as a child. “You’re talking nonsense.”
Create tension by pitting your character’s gestures against his or her words. Your characters have arms and legs and faces. Use them. Use attribution. Control the delivery of dialogue. Support it with actions, or negate it with actions. Above all, do not confuse your reader by leaving it unclear who’s saying what.
In closing, a reader sent me the results of a study done at the University of California, Los Angeles. People clip these things from Scientific American and send them to me all the time. But this one study focused on how people communicated in conversation. It found that some 83 percent of what people understood came via body language, tone of voice, and speaking volume. The actual words spoken accounted for only about 17 percent of the information passed between people.
That reminds me—my Italian editor, Eduardo, once took me to see Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper in Milan. You have to make a special appointment. You enter the everything-controlled room through an air lock, and get fifteen minutes to look before you’re ushered out. And in that quick visit I saw how the picture is really a catalog of gesture. The body language transcends Italian or English. Honestly, all the emoticons are there in one painting.
In short, dialogue is your weakest storytelling tool.
As Tom Spanbauer always taught us, “Language is not our first language.”
Tom Spanbauer
If you were my student, I’d make you create a list of all the quick wordless gestures you use every day. The thumbs-up. The thumb-and-index finger “okay” sign. Knocking your fist lightly on your forehead to “recall” something. Clutching your heart. The hitchhiker’s thumb, which implies “get lost.” The index finger held vertically against the lips for “hush up.” The hooked “come here” finger. I’d
