52. Provocations
For
me, nothing expresses the personality of a character
as forcefully - or as subtly - as dialogue.
I once heard a Mills & Boon author say that:
'dialogue oils the page'.
It's an unpleasant image but it's true. Dialogue breaks up the text
visually and it conveys information in a way that we are used to in
our everyday lives. (After all, if we insisted on speaking in the well-rounded
paragraphs of Victorian fiction, we would bore one another to tears!)
But I'm not talking about creating stories that are easy to read – although that is a laudable goal. My issue is that old chestnut: 'show not tell'.
If you can reproduce distinctive voices in your dialogue, you will be showing your readers what your characters are like instead of having to tell them. My examples come form the annals of the Surrealist movement.
Amongst surrealists there has always been a provocative tendency. Surrealists
enjoy being shocking or surprising. Another trait
is their attachment to game-playing.
In one classic surrealist game called Provocations, a subject is chosen – in this case Religion – and the players are each requested to say something unexpected and provoking about it. First up is Ninon de Lenclos:
A man must be very lacking in any moral sense if he needs religion
to make a gentleman of him.
Can you hear the urbane, disdainful tone, a sense of superiority
if not arrogance? But, at the same time, there is concern for morals,
an implied respect for the importance of 'being a gentleman'. Compare
this with Ambrose Bierce:
Priest: one who controls our spiritual affairs in order to improve his temporal affairs
Bierce has chosen a bogus dictionary entry as a structure. Perhaps the joke is more important than the message? Also, the humorous definition lends itself to pithy, memorable aphorism. I'm sure he wants us to remember what he said and quote it admiringly later on.
Lastly there's Bakunin:
Christianity is religion par excellence, because it completely exposes
and manifests the nature, the absolute essence, of all religious systems
– that it involves the impoverishment, subservience and abasement
of man for the benefit of divinity.
In this long single sentence, Bakunin speaks with a fierce conviction.
Unafraid of repetition, his sentence is broken up by jolting
grammar. He expresses his deeply-held belief in unashamedly provocative
prose. He is the reason why some pubs have signs on the wall that say:
No Politics or Religion
Lenclos, Bierce, Bakunin: three speakers, three personalities.
My advice, for what it's worth, is to use dialogue to let
your readers in on what your characters are like …
