NaNoWriMo: Dialogue
by Saranna DeWylde
“First you didn’t want her to love a demon, and now you don’t want her to love a man. Which is it, Seraphim? You can’t relive your choices through your granddaughter no matter how much you’d like to.”
“I’m not trying to relive my choices. I wouldn’t change any of them.”
“Even your deal with me?” Hades asked softly.
“Even that. I wouldn’t have had Aurora without you and I am thankful for every second of her life that I got to share. I guess we did that right.”
“We certainly did.” Hades sighed. “Look, Sera, I know I don’t have the best track record. Persephone dropped me like a bad habit almost right after we were married. I’d like to think I’ve changed in a couple centuries. I really do love you and I’m asking you to marry me.”
“What, right now?” Seraphim gasped with surprise.
“That’s not the answer that I’m looking for, Seraphim Stregaria. I didn’t want to have to remind you of your promise, but I will do it if I have to.”
“Isn’t that what cost you Persephone?”“No, it was her unnaturally-attached mother.”
“You know what I mean.” Seraphim eyed him meaningfully.
“Fine. I release you from your vow.”
“Thank you,” Seraphim picked up a catalog and browsed the shoes. That would be the vice that damned her, not the Devil riding.
“And?” Hades asked, clearly waiting for something.
“And what?”
“I released you. Now you’re supposed to capitulate and agree to marry me.”
“Not if you only released me because you expected something in return.” Seraphim said calmly.
“Well of course I expected something in return. I’m the Devil.”
“A fact that you keep reminding me of. It’s kind of like getting bad service at a restaurant and the customer keeps saying, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ Yes. I know who you are and I don’t care.”
He considered for a moment. “Fine. Now you can say you got the better of me. I don’t care either. Put the ring on.” Hades shoved it at her.
~From How to Lose a Demon in 10 Days, Kensington Brava 2012
Writing dialogue is like having a multiple personality disorder, only you’re in charge of when the switch happens. My daughter was watching me work on my work in progress a few days ago and mocked me horribly because I kept making faces at the monitor like a kid at the zoo taunting the baboons. When my heroine smiled, I smiled. When my hero scowled and looked “thunderous,” I did too. When he said something that cracked her heart like a bad tooth, I may have sniffed a little bit. My facial expressions ran the gamut and I was sitting here by myself, clickety-clacking away. I even raised my brow and pursed my lips like Scarlett O’ Hara to something the hero said.
Supposedly, this dialogue comes from my own brain, so I shouldn’t be startled by anything I put to paper. But I am. Why? Because I’m not in my own head. I jump back and forth between my characters in every scene. I feel every indrawn breath, every pause, every slam-dancing butterfly in their bellies and every brick that junk punches them. Even my villains. They are all individuals with their own motivations, their own experiences and feelings. They aren’t me, and yet, they are.
My voice comes through in everything my characters say, even though they are distinctly their own creatures. There are only so many story lines, so many plot devices. What makes a book spectacular is the soul of the book: the voice. For me as a reader, that’s what makes a book unique and wonderful.
Dialogue is a great place to share information with your reader and other characters without doing the ever reviled “info dump.” It’s also a place for us to see the sparks between the characters, to see what fuels their relationships. You can learn most of what you need to know about a character through dialogue and their reactions to other characters’ dialogue. Dialogue should flow; it should be something you can read out loud without getting your tongue all twisted up.
In my own work, where the love and redemption are the heart of the piece, the dialogue is like the veins. It carries things from place to place, emotions, thoughts, and even action. Banter is my particular weakness.
I’ve been told both that I have a talent for dialogue and others have said the banter has to stop sometime. My question is why. Why does it have to stop? Because real people aren’t like that? Yes, they are. I’ve been married to my own Prince Charming for eleven years and he still gives me a run for my money. Our conversations are like watching a tennis ball being smacked back and forth, only without the lame grunts.
Unless it’s only grunts, but then that’s something else entirely. *wink*
Saranna DeWylde is a published author of short horror, erotica and romance. To learn more about her, please visit her website www.sarannadewylde.com
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For years I had been meaning to read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, and for years a friend of mine had been raving about how amazing it was and how I absolutely had to read it. I would keep saying, “Yeah, I’m getting to it!” and would then forget all about it until she mentioned it again.
