Dialog gushers

When my characters have something to say, they have no problem saying it. Usually far more frequently and louder than is necessary. Unlike when I am writing narrative, as described yesterday, when I write dialog, it usually comes in a gush.

When a dialog gusher happens, the experience can be very satisfying. It's not uncommon for a gusher to be worth four or five pages, and I've seen the text flow at a very rapid rate. Five pages in fifteen or twenty minutes is not out of the question.

Of course it's usually dialog without context. In my mind, I may have a general sense of where the dialog will fit in the story, but in terms of setting and chronology, very often I find that I don't know where or when the words are being spoken. I may know that "Skin's conversation with Celia about the dinner takes place on the second day, sometime after Skin talks to Ed Riggins," for example. But where the conversation takes place, and what's going on while they talk is unknown. Dialog gushers take place in a white space, often free of attribution.

There are some striking benefits to that. For one thing, by skipping attribution, the burden is on the cadence and patterns of speech to indicate who's talking. I will often go in later and pepper attribution here and there, but when I do it's in service of the flow or pace of the scene itself. In my mind it should be evident who's speaking because of how they are speaking, their word choice and vocal style. Dialog is a key way of building character, I find, so how I present someone's speech outside of context can be critical in bringing them to life.

Later, I fill in the white space, establish place and time, bring in the sights and smells and sounds which surround the conversation. Sometimes place is a factor in the conversation. Sounds and people can interrupt, events can intrude. Other times setting is simply background texture.

The downside to the gusher is that sometimes in the energy of the moment, characters say things that I don't want them to say. It may be that they know something they can't know yet -- that can happen when I am not real clear when in the chronology a dialog gusher fits. "Skin can't talk about the kind of gun used in the first murder, because they don't have ballistics back yet." Other times characters go running off on tangents that either don't advance the narrative, or take it in a direction that I don't want to go.

Even that last can be a blessing in disguise. A character, in my dialog frenzy, can become the venue through which I explore new ideas. These ideas may have been percolating unconsciously and needed a weak moment to break through my internal editor. The spill of a dialog gusher is usually fast enough that I don't have time to pre-edit. Once the words are out, I can evaluate them and decide if I like what came out. If not, well, that's what scissors are for.