Make Dialogue Do Something

A line of dialogue is something one person does to another, and whatever it sounds like, you can ask of it whether the two people stand differently afterward. Plenty of dialogue records instead of acting. Characters greet each other, summarize their week, and answer each question in the order it is asked, and the page sounds like speech and gives the reader nothing to track. Readers probably take dialogue less as sound than as evidence of intention.

Early in the first act of The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon is holding a cigarette case that Jack left behind after a dinner. Inside is an inscription: “From little Cecily with her fondest love.” Jack has said he knows no one of that name, so now he says she is his aunt. Algernon asks why an aunt calls herself little Cecily and calls her nephew her uncle. Jack answers, “Some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall.” The scene conveys one fact, that Jack leads a double life, and that is the least of what happens in it. Algernon wants a confession and is holding the case as leverage; Jack wants his property and wants not to be examined. Then the contest becomes a trade. “Well, produce my cigarette case first,” says Jack. Algernon hands it over: “Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable.”

Lines with no attempt in them tend to be interchangeable between speakers, and two characters could swap them without anything changing. Some of the best talk in literature does no visible work, though, and an audit of every line for ambition can sand the texture off a page. If you find a scene by letting two people talk, the audit belongs to revision.

Practice. Work through one page of your own dialogue, about twenty lines, in thirty minutes. In the margin beside each line, write a transitive verb and its target: deflects her, bargains for the case, tests whether he’ll lie. Inert verbs such as says, tells, or explains don’t count. Mark any line you cannot find a verb for, and any run of three lines carrying the same one. Then revise the marked page, cutting the lines you could not verb or giving them an attempt, until at least two lines are cut or changed.