Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I was young, with a penchant for obsession. I studied musical performance and conducting, and ran with a cadre of like-minded scholars. I was a science-fiction/fantasy geek, and so were they. It was fated, then, that when the first Star Wars movie came out, we would band together for trips to The City. Week after week we would ride down Geary, invade The Coronet theater, outmaneuver all comers, and claim the eight seats at first-row-center. There, practically vibrating with anticipation, we would wait, hands poised, ready for the downbeat. Together, we would conduct the entire score (long ago committed to memory), cueing the chords of the Death Star leitmotif, pulling in horns and strings as we swept up to light-speed. It was grand. It was intoxicating.

Until Harrison Ford tried to get his mouth around the line, “Marching into the Detention Center is not my idea of fun.”

A lighthearted line, to be sure, but one that brought sniggers George Lucas did not expect. I mean, Harrison practically had to spit out his teeth to deliver that line. How did it ever make it through the table-read? What was that writer thinking?

Now, having cut my own writing chops, I know exactly what that writer was thinking.  He wasn’t.

It’s a common error. I’ve written my own share of them: lines that sound perfectly good in my head but that completely fall down when a human tries to say them out loud. There are several reasons why this sort of clunky dialogue appears.

Naming Names

One ubiquitous error is to introduce proper names into dialogue. Think about this for a moment: how many times in daily chit-chat do you actually say the name of the person with whom you’re conversing? I’d wager it’s damned-near-never. And yet, it pops up all the time in dialogue. Take an example, from “Intaglio.” Rea and Nikki are talking; they’ve exchanged a couple of lines each, when Rea says:

“That happens, too, Nikki.”

Why the name? There haven’t been a bunch of others in the conversation, so there’s no confusion about whom she is addressing. Absent some cultural habit, it’s unnecessary and unrealistic. In an earlier section, I also put a proper name in the conversation, but this time with purpose. Here, Rea is talking to one of the soldiers; she asks his name and he refuses to provide it, but Rea sees his name stitched on his breast pocket.

“Gavin will be disappointed to hear that, Engineer Emerson,” she said…

There, she states his name with purpose, to let him know she knows his name. In this example is natural and understandable.

Puttin’ on the Ritz

But dialogue can get clunky for other reasons. Sometimes I’m going for a stylized syntax or “feel” to the spoken words, to evoke either another place or time. Here is an example from “Destrier’s Will“:

“You have carried me through many battles, my friend, and this one, today is the day for which you were born.”

I know what I was going for there; I wanted it to be high-falutin’ and all noble-like. What I got was a tortured, twisted syntax that probably sent my readers back to the front of the line to give the line another go. Even with a style, the words have to make sense when spoken. Throughout the Fallen Cloud books, characters that spoke in Cheyenne never used contractions; they don’t exist in that language, so they always said “I will” for “I’ll” and “do not” for “don’t.” By removing all contractions, the dialogue sounded more formal, but it still needs to sound natural.

Comfortably Numb

Lastly, there are just times when I’m asleep at the switch. A final example, from “Sum of the Angles,” shows how even modern dialogue can go off the rails when I don’t pay attention.

“Well, the way I figure it, you’ll get what you’ve been wanting and I’ll get what I’ve been wanting.”

This is a terrible line of dialogue; it’s passive and it just goes plonk every third word or so. It doesn’t sound like an adolescent kid, no matter how precocious he might be. “Hey. You get what you want, and I get what I want,” is cleaner, more immediate, more natural, and just plain easier to say.

Over the years, I’ve learned to spot these “lines that go clunk in the night” more easily, but the single, simplest, and most effective way to train yourself is this: read them out loud, yourself. That’s right. Out loud. Each and every line. Hell, do it with the entire story, in fact, because if you can’t say it easily, someone won’t read it easily. But this is especially true of dialogue because no matter how lyrical or stylized you want your prose to be, the words that come out of a character’s mouth must read like the spoken word, not like the written word.

All right. Off you go.

Next time: “As you know, Bob…”