Writing visually
Part 3: dialogue as a plot-building device. Featuring Raymond Carver (or Gordon Lish), and Robert Bresson
Anaemic dialogues
Have you noticed how many decent authors suck at writing dialogues? Their dialogues don’t sound real, or are too literary or pretentious; or worse: they lack a clear purpose (beyond filling pages). So focused they are on other aspects of writing that they neglect this one. I don’t know why this happens but this neglect results in weaker characters and weaker plots. That poor dialogues affect characterisation is quite obvious, since everyone considers them part of that process; that they affect plot is less evident for the simple reason that most writers don’t think of dialogues as plot-building devices. Creating plot through dialogues is central to visual writing, as I hope to demonstrate below.
I have previously discussed characterisation, and how to come up with believable characters — it should surprise no one that this entails a lot of observation. I won’t repeat myself, go read the post if you are interested. If you rather not, the TLDR of using dialogues to create believable characters is that you need to pay attention to how people actually speak: listen attentively, note down what they say. And I don’t mean how people speak in films, or in the theatre, or in other books; I mean in the meatspace, when the dialogues aren’t processed by someone else’s aesthetic concerns. Your dialogues don’t need to be realist but I believe that you need to start from reality to then deterritorialise, otherwise you won’t know where you’re going and this lack of clarity will manifest itself as weakness in your writing.
To give you a filmic example (after all I’m discussing visual writing!) of someone using dialogues very consciously: Robert Bresson’s dialogues aren’t realistic — they lack all emotion (he thinks of his actors as “models” who deliver lines as coldly as possible); but nevertheless his dialogues work because Bresson has a very clear idea of how he wants them to perform, and how these dialogues will aid in the portrayal of his characters. Do people speak like Bresson’s characters in real life? No, they don’t. But they speak like this in a Bresson film and they do so for very clear reasons. But I’m convinced he only managed to arrive at his “models” and the way they speak through a lot of observation.