Do you strain to find little bits of action to enliven your dialogue that rise above “he ran a hand through his hair,” “she raked her fork through her potatoes,” or my favorite riveting action, “he leaned in”? This scene from Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, suggests we may not be giving ourselves enough to work with.
The set-up: Joe Cavalier has escaped Nazi-invaded Prague and landed in New York City, where he hopes to create superhero comic books with his cousin. At an artsy party in a mansion belonging to the family of young Rosa Saks, he hurts his finger in an oddly heroic way. Rosa invites him upstairs to see her paintings.
The question tosses Joe into a quandary. Chabon then provides subtext that infuses the scene to come [portions excised for brevity]:
From the time of his arrival in New York City, he had never permitted himself to speak to a woman for pleasure…he had not come here to flirt with girls…he could justify his own liberty only to the degree that he employed it to earn the freedom of the family he had left behind.
Sounds like a no, right? But then Joe experiences an irritant that drives him into the very sort of scene he’s been trying to avoid: he overhears a German accent. Enraged, Joe says, “I would love to see your work.”
In excerpts from this long “getting to know you” dialogue between Joe and Rosa, which begins on p. 246, watch for two dialogue techniques that effectively bring to life this dialogue: misdirection and modulation.
Misdirection unfolds as if a deck of questions and a deck of answers have been shuffled together incorrectly. Because questions are not paired with their answers, the reader has to pay closer attention to understand what’s going on.
Modulation uses setting and narrative commentary to extend the scene’s complexity. Each spoken line invites the artful layering of meaningful detail or memory.
Yet Chabon isn’t all about craft here; he’s also using the nature of the dialogue to evoke the artistic process itself. Here are some examples.
“Speaking” is not limited to the characters
Watch as the room speaks to Joe of Rosa’s character.
In addition to her tiny, girlish white iron bed, a small dresser, and a nightstand, she had crowded in an easel, a photo enlarger, two bookcases, a drawing table, and a thousand and one items piled atop one another, strewn about, and jammed together with remarkable industry and abandon.
“This is your studio?” Joe said.
A smaller blush this time, at the tips of her ears.
“Also my bedroom,” she said. “But I wasn’t going to ask you to come up to that.”
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
The characters bring the setting to life as the setting brings them to life
We are told to use all of the senses; here Chabon offers good reasons to use them. Rosa goes over to the phonograph and switches it on.
The scratches on the disk popped and crackled like a burning log. Then the air was filled with a festive wheeze of violins.
“Schubert,” said Joe, rocking on his heels. “The Trout.”
“The Trout’s my favorite,” Rosa said.
“Me too.”
“Look out.”
Something hit him in the face, something soft and alive. Joe brushed at his mouth and came away with a small black moth. It had electric-blue transverse bands on its belly. He shuddered.
Rosa said, “Moths.”
“Moths more than one?”
The moths offer a great example of modulation. That Joe encounters something “soft and alive” in this room is also lovely. Later, one of Joe’s comic book superheroes will be Luna Moth.
Misdirection sets up multiple layers of communication
Rosa points out that there are moths all over the bed, the walls, and the house, and the house before that as well. “That’s where the murder happened,” she drops in, then says, “What’s the matter with your finger?”
This opens the misdirected dialogue. It will be 2-1/2 more pages until Joe thinks to ask about the murder.
Instead, he tells her his finger is sore. She asks to look at it, delivering one of my all-time favorite lines of dialogue: “I was almost a nurse once.”
She examines the hand, telling him she had trained in Spain to be a war nurse. We learn she works at Life magazine. On the next page, she says she can fix his finger, warning that it will hurt “horribly, but only for a second.”
“All right.”
She looked at him, steadily, and licked her lips, and he had just noticed that the pale brown irises of her eyes were flecked with green and gold when abruptly she twisted his hand one way and his finger the other, and, crazing his arm to the elbow with instantaneous veins of lightning and fire, set the joint back into place.
“Wow.”
“Hurt?”
He shook his head, but there were tears rolling down his cheeks.
All elements are eventually interwoven
When Joe gets around to asking about the murder, Rosa asks for a cigarette. The modulation (moths, war nurse) and misdirection (the murder) converge with the scene goal of looking at her artwork.
He lit one for her. She continued to kneel in front of him, and there was something about it that aroused him. It made him feel like a wounded soldier, making time in a field hospital with his pretty American nurse.
“He was a lepidopterist, Moses,” she said.
“A—?”
“He studied moths.”
“Oh.”
“He knocked her out with ether and killed her with a pin. Or at least that’s what my father says. He’s probably lying. I made a dreambook about it.”
“A pin,” he said. “Ouch.” He waggled his finger. “It’s good, I think. You fixed it.”
Setting reflects a moment of indelible change
Joe let the dreambook comment drop, but a few paragraphs later, he asks what a dreambook is.
She set the burning cigarette down on a phonograph record that lay on the floor beside her and went to her desk. “Would you like to see one?”
Joe bent over and picked up the cigarette, holding it upright between the very tips of his fingers as though it were a stick of burning dynamite. It had melted a small divot into the second movement of Mendelssohn’s Octet.
Turns out she can’t find the dreambook about the murder, but she shows him another one, and its collage of images, described in detail, inspire and embolden him.
He sat on the bed and finished reading, and then she asked him what he did. Joe permitted himself, for the first time in a year, to consider himself, under the pressure of her interest in him and what he did, an artist.
Sitting on Rosa’s moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat.
Misdirected action creates a scene arc
Earlier in the scene, after Rosa fixed his finger, Joe thought, “This was unquestionably to moment to kiss her.” He considers himself a coward for not following through on the impulse. Now, three pages later, Rosa throws her arms around his neck and he falls backward on the bed. “The sateen coverlet brushed against his cheek like a moth’s wing.”
“Hey!” said Joe. Then she settled her mouth on his and left it there, lips parted, whispering an unintelligible dreambook sentence.
Not all dialogue should be misdirected. It would drive your readers mad. Yet here, it demonstrates the creative way Rosa joins concepts and images in her mind. It shows the way that Joe and Rosa are struggling to connect.
Not all dialogue should be modulated. Sometimes the urgency of a situation calls for a rapid-fire exchange. Here, it creates a slow, contextual build so that when Joe admits aloud for the first time in a year that he is an artist, we understand the way in which Rosa exerted a powerful influence on him.
Suffice to say: if your dialogue is about only what the spoken words are saying, it could probably do a whole lot more. Chabon shows us that great dialogue can convey information, deepen inner conflict, move the plot forward, and build characterization—all at the same time.
What could you add to a dialogue passage in your WIP that could deepen its impact? Could you add subtext? Amp up the setting? Would misdirection or modulation work? Why or why not?
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About Kathryn Craft
Kathryn Craft is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her work as a freelance developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com follows a nineteen-year career as a dance critic. Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, she leads writing workshops and retreats, and is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers. Learn more on Kathryn's website.
Have you seen the new TV show, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?” It’s set in NYC in the 1950’s. It’s written, acted and shot in 1950’s style.
The dialogue is stage dialogue, emulating Neil Simon, and uses yet another technique: talking at cross-purposes. Two characters speaking to each other are having two different conversations. There is tension as we wait for the two to finally hear each other.
The way I’d put everything you’re talking about today, is simple: dialogue is lifelike when there’s more than one thing happening.
(He said, tilting back his coffee cup to swallow the brew’s sludgy bottom.)
No I haven’t seen it, although the title recently came up on my FB feed—I depend on my pop culture guru friends to clue me in on what’s worth watching! I’ll have to check it out.
People talking at each other without listening—hmm. Sounds pretty realistic!
i love dialogue like that!!! ’cause conversation doesn’t happen batted back and forth like a tennis ball!
Putting these pieces together, leaving space for action and connection to previous themes, is one of the great pleasures of writing.
Everything goes in somewhere when the right characters talk. There is a flow to the results that seem inevitable once it’s right – and I find almost impossible to do spontaneously. When the rewriting is complete, the dialogue has a choreographed, inevitable quality.
The more characters in a scene, the harder it is to do, but the better it feels when it clicks.
Alicia: good for you for diligently editing your dialogue! I found it interesting that in his book STORY, Robert McKee says that even when writing screenplays he layers in dialogue after he knows what the action will be—because once we’ve “taken down” what our characters have said, it can be difficult to take the words back out of their mouths.
Lots of editing while writing, and then the final test: the Mac robot voice reads it to me.
If dialogue survives that, it has something going for it.
I watching carefully for ANY spots where my brain has a hitch or notices something – even if I can tell myself it’s nothing, it gets rewritten. You HAVE to be picky. I hope to do ‘as read by author’ one of these days, and I think ahead for that.
Lately I listen a lot more – sometimes even after finishing a beat or a couple of paragraphs, occasionally for an individual phrase or sentence. Even though the robot mangles some things, it is so much better than trusting my brain’s processing of text.
I loved this, Kathryn, thank you! I always endeavor to make my dialogue do more than talk. It’s fascinating to see your explanation of what a writer can do to make the words spoken between characters more than just a conversation. For every dialogue scene I write, I’m always thinking “what can I do with what they say to translate it to who they are, and particularly who they are to each other?” I make it a point to do a lot of what you discussed here, but now I have a better understanding of why it works.
That’s great, Karen. I also love that this scene with the moths, which is showing us the accumulative nature of the creative process just after Joe’s heroic act at the party (he saves Salvador Dali from asphyxiation by springing him from an underwater diving suit), is a precursor to the creation of the Luna Moth super-hero. Following your gut can only take you so far—you have to take a huge step back and see the entirety of your story to pull that off!
Thank you for naming the techniques I’ve been noticing and admiring in good writing, Kathryn. In particular, I’m thinking of the misdirection in Tell the Wolves I’m Home. In addition to adding texture and realism to the interactions, it was superb at adding micro-tension.
And so true about the need to use misdirection with care! I’ve read books where its continuous use came off as manipulative and coy.
Hi Jan, I love Tell the Wolves I’m Home. Not granting an immediately relevant answer can serve to hook the reader. We can zone out as easily during predictable dialogue on the page as we do in real life—until you drop something like a murder in, lol, and race past it. Then the reader will sit up and watch for its re-introduction!.
great piece, Kathryn! your bit about the room “speaking” to Joe made me think of a line I wrote the other day, “New wallpaper wrapped the room in a welcoming embrace.” (setting is 1913 when wallpaper was the rage!)
Modern readers will still relate, as we all love homes that offer a welcome hug. Plus, according to a March article in the Washington post, wallpaper is making a comeback! Thanks for the example, Robin.
I always learn so much from these posts, Kathryn. Again, I’m late in responding, but loved this one especially–and while I am editing–misdirection and modulation give me more to consider.
You’re never too late to visit WU! More tools for the toolbox—that’s always my goal. Thanks for reading, Beth!
Fantastic analysis! Very enlightening. Thanks!
Thanks for reading, Krista! Glad it helped.