Transcript
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Welcome to lesson two of Writing with Hobbits. In this lesson we’re going to be talking about dialogue. And if you have already seen Writing Through the Wardrobe, this is going to be some review. But it’s always helpful. These are principles that are really important to go over and over again and see how different authors use the same principles in different ways.
So this is to me is one of the most central principles of dialogue writing. Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. What do I mean by that? What did Jesus mean by it? Well, simply that what we speak out of what’s going on inside us, right? Our utterances, our dialogue is an outward expression of what’s going on inside. Most of us aren’t very good at articulating directly what’s inside of us, right? Maybe it’s because we don’t know what’s going on inside of us or we want to conceal what’s going on inside of us or we want to manipulate other people. But whatever it is that I say, I’m saying because of what’s going on inside, right? And whatever I react to, I react to it differently depending on what’s going on inside me. So one way to think of it is the same stimulus. If you have three people in the room who speak in reaction to the same event, well, what are they going to say? They’re not going to — it’s not the stimulus, it’s not the event that tells them what to say, right? Their response to it is shaped by what’s going on in their hearts. So if somebody achieves some triumph, right? Well am I jealous of that? Am I glad for that person? Am I threatened by the fact that they succeeded? Well my reaction to that is going to be, you know, not determined by what happened. It’s going to be determined by what’s going on in me. Also by the way, if let’s say, let’s say I’m jealous of somebody else’s achievement and what’s in my heart is jealousy. Well, not everybody, not every jealous heart speaks the same way, right? And so these are all things that you need to think about from your character. You need to understand what’s going on inside them so that you know what they’re going to say, how they’re going to react. What are their, one thing I often talk to writers about is understanding exactly how your character doesn’t tell the truth. We all have different tricks for not telling the truth. And again, I don’t even mean when you’re intentionally lying. I’m just saying, you know, maybe I don’t even understand that jealousy is what is motivating me when I respond to somebody else’s success or something. So it’s one thing to understand what motivates this person, what’s in their heart, what do they long for. Then it’s another thing to say, how do they then, what is that desire that’s in their heart, how does it play itself out in the way they talk? Well, this, when I speak of the desires of your heart determining what you speak, that sounds a little lofty. I want to look at this passage in chapter two called “Roast Mutton” in which the trolls get in an argument. to think about a much simpler, I mean trolls are very simple people, right? They don’t have very complicated desires. They’re hungry, they get mad, but they don’t have a very rich inner life as far as we know. At least the ones in chapter two of Roast Mutton, it’s pretty straightforward stuff, the desires of their hearts. And so I want to look at exactly how they do and how they talk. So as I said, if you know what characters want you know what they’re going to say. Our trolls want to eat. They’re hungry, right? But also, don’t forget, characters’ wants change over the course of a conversation. Now, we’re going to talk about this at some length when we get to Bilbo’s conversation with Smog late in the, you know, around lesson 12 or something like that. So, we’re not going to spend a a lot of time on this idea today, but remember the whole point of a conversation, or at least an important point in a conversation, is that as it goes along people change their minds and they change what they want.
Sometimes that’s why you’re talking to somebody is to change their mind or to give them another way of seeing something and when they do see something new or when you see something new, your desires change and the way you talk changes.
So you go into a confrontation, you know, loaded for bear and you’re going to, you want to, you know, you want to fight and you talk one way and then if the other person is conciliatory or somehow points out something that you didn’t already know that changes the way you feel, well now you talk a different way, don’t you? These are the dynamics that you’re very aware of in real life even if you don’t think specifically about them. You need to be thinking about those things whenever you are writing dialogue because as things change, and again, that’s what conversation is about, is what it’s for, is to give people information, change their minds, change their hearts. As those changes happen, the conversation changes, doesn’t it? So that’s a, again, so much of storytelling is just applying what you know about real life and applying it to the way people act in your stories.
Human beings are very attuned to changes in these kind of dynamics. And by the way, your reader is very attuned to them and so you better be attuned to them as a writer. And you need to ride those changes. Well as I said, we’re going to talk about that in more detail in chapter 12, those ideas of the changing dynamics. But we have some changing dynamics in a much simpler way in the conversation with the trolls in chapter 2. So if you remember, these trolls for some reason have just regular old English names, William, Bert, and Tom. When William catches Bilbo, here’s the conversation that happens. “Blimey, Bert, look what I’ve caught,” said William. “What is it?” said the others coming up. “Let me if I knows. What are you?” addressing Bilbo. “Bilbo Baggins, a burr, a hobbit,” said poor Bilbo, shaking all over and wondering how to make owl noises before they throttled him. Remember, he was going to make owl noises to attract his friends if you needed them. “A burrahobbit,” said they, a bit startled. “Trolls are slow on the uptake and mighty suspicious about anything new to them.” “What’s a burrahobbit got to do with my pockets anyways?” said William. “And can you cook ’em?” said Tom. Alright, so a couple of things I want to point out about this little exchange. One is character, I’m sorry, dialogue always reveals character. Often because of what the person says, a person is trying to reveal their character in some cases. I’m trying to project some particular image and hopefully I convince you that I am what I want you to think I am. That’s an important part of the way we talk to one another, right? And the fact that you speak to your friends one way and to a teacher another way and to a parent another way, that’s sort of you projecting an image that you want them to see, right? And that’s a dialogue issue. But also, dialogue, in dialogue, people accidentally reveal who they are, okay? And so we’ve got these trolls who talk about a burrah hobbit in part because they’re dumb, right? They don’t understand. They also heard it wrong and that’s kind of a matter of hearing, not a matter of being dumb. But it’s interesting the way Tolkien paid attention to what kind of people these trolls are and that shaped their voice, doesn’t it? In this funny misunderstanding of when he says a burr, a hobbit, and of course as you know he started to say he was a burglar and then he said he was a hobbit.
And their stupidity helps get him out of trouble, right? They don’t think to say, “Wait a minute, are you a,” you know, they don’t know he’s saying he’s a burglar. And so their stupidity shapes this, especially, I think it’s really funny when he says, “What are you?” Directly addressing him. I just think that’s funny. It’s especially funny on the next page when he says, “Are there any more of your sort sneaking around here?” You know, as if he would actually answer that question. But anyway, I love the way these, the limitations of these, the sort of mental limitations of these trolls affects the way they talk, right.
The other thing I wanted to point out, and this is again, I’m stating the obvious here, but when I say that the desires of a character shape what they say, the trolls are people of very simple desires and so the question, “And can you cook them?” becomes the obvious thing for Tom to say, right? It is his desire that leads to that line of dialogue, right? Because he cares about food, because he’s hungry, he asks the question, “Can you cook them?” Now, at the same time, look what happens next. You can try, said Bert, picking up a skewer. He wouldn’t make above a mouthful. So Bert picks up a skewer, says you can try. And then look at William. He wouldn’t make above a mouthful, said William, who had already had a fine supper, not when he was skinned and boned. So we have two people, two trolls saying, let’s eat this person. And we have a third troll saying, he doesn’t look very edible to me. What’s the difference here? A big part of the difference is two of them are hungry and one of them isn’t. Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. What you want determines what you say. And I know this is an obvious example, right? There’s nothing subtle about this and you don’t have any trouble noticing this on your own but I’m pointing it out anyway just as sort of a simplified example of what happens in all dialogue. What people want determines what they say. And so if you’re hungry, you say, “Can you cook him?” You can try. And if you’re not hungry, you say, “He’s not above a mouthful and I’m the one who caught him and I should be able to say whatever it is.” Okay, now the other thing I want to point out is that it’s really important when you’re writing dialogue to make sure you don’t let your characters turn into disembodied voices. You have got to always be thinking. It’s so tempting when you start writing dialogue to think dialogue is just spoken words. Dialogue is being spoken out of mouths of people who have bodies and they’re doing things with those bodies. And so always when you’re writing dialogue, make sure you’re paying attention to the physical facts of the people who are saying those words. And so you can try, said Bert, picking up a skewer. We’re not letting Bert become a disembodied voice. He’s a troll who has a skewer in his hand. I’m not saying with every utterance you’ve gotten to show the person. I’m just saying make sure you don’t let your people become disembodied voices. I’m trying to think what happened. The other thing I want to point out, I’ve backed up a slide, because just as when I say that dialogue isn’t just words, the words outside the quotation marks are just as important as the words inside the quotation marks. In large part because it’s the words outside the quotation marks that control the pace. So I wanted to return to this screen because I want you to see how much space there is between the utterances here. Bilbo Baggins a hobbit said poor Bilbo shaking all over and wondering how to make owl noises before they throttled him. How long did it take to read that? Maybe two seconds to read those two lines? Think about how that affects the way you feel this dialogue. says something and then there’s two seconds. Even if you’re reading straight and you don’t, you didn’t try to pause, right? But there’s two seconds before anybody says anything. A burrahobbit said day, a bit startled. Trolls are slow in the uptake and mighty suspicious about anything new to them. So that’s what, three seconds? What’s a burrahobbit got to do with my pocket, said William. Alright, so in this moment where the trolls, because they’re kind of dumb, are slow on the uptake, they don’t know what to say next, we have lots of words outside the quotation marks. And everything slows down because of those words outside the quotation marks. And then for a few lines, things are just kind of normal. A few words outside the quotation marks just feels like normal dialogue. And then here, things really speed up, don’t they? So we’ve got our trolls. When this conversation starts, they’re slow on the uptake. There’s lots of space between the utterances because they don’t know what to say and they’re confused. But then as their dialogue proceeds toward a fist fight, things speed up really quickly, right? And people are a little more clear on what it is they want to say next and they’re reacting to one another instead of thinking. And so, “Look, I won’t have it,” said William. “I caught him anyway.” “You’re a fat fool,” William said Bert, “as I’ve said afore this evening and you’re allowed, and I won’t take that from you,” Bill Huggins says Bert and puts his fist in William’s eye. All right. See how quickly this starts to move and it’s strictly a matter of how many words are outside the quotation marks. Here we’ve just got said William, here we’ve got said Bert, and then we’ve got nothing. Just now that we know it’s William and Bert and we don’t need those verbs of attribution anymore, things move really fast. The next thing you know, we have some back and forth without any words between the utterances and next thing you know, Bert puts his fist in William’s eye. And this is how you control the pace of dialogue. And I don’t know that–who knows the extent to which Tolkien was doing this intentionally. I think he probably was doing it pretty intentionally. But as you think about how the rhythms of a conversation happen, and I think what we saw here is actually a pretty common way of pacing a conversation.
It starts out kind of slow, people are kind of feeling their way through it, you know, how are we going to be talking to one another here?
Maybe they’re confused, maybe they’re feeling each other out, you know, there’s different reasons that a conversation starts out slow, put lots of words outside the quotation marks at that point in your dialogue. And then as they kind of warm up and maybe they sort of get hot, really compress those words outside the quotation marks so it’s just boom, boom, boom, back and forth until something happens. And this is so important, this truth that Dialogue is something that people do to each other. Dialogue is not just words. In dialogue, social dynamics change. People who were friendly become unfriendly. People who were unfriendly become friendly. People get their feelings hurt. There are all these things that happen. Inner landscapes shift because of dialogue. But also, and so really have, you really need to have a handle on that. The fact that people’s inner lives are changing and that if I say to you, you know, what was it that, what’s his name, that Bert said, “You’re a lout and I won’t take that from you.” Okay, these are people whose social dynamics are changing very rapidly, right? At the beginning of this they were just kind of partners in crime or whatever and now they’re insulting one another. And this is what I mean when I say dialogue is something, this is one thing I mean when I say dialogue is something that people do to each other, right?
The only reason you say you’re a lout is that is the verbal equivalent of hitting them over the head, you know? That’s a verbal assault, so to speak. And so that’s one thing I mean when I say dialogue is something that people do to each other. But the other thing that What I mean by that is that words lead to actions. And so when you’re writing dialogue, I want you to think about a couple of things. How is this dialogue connected to physical action? So on the one hand, you have, I already mentioned this, you want to make sure your readers can see that this is not just a disembodied voice so that when Bert says, “You can try,” he He picks up his skewer, right? You can try to cook the hobbit. He picks up his skewer and so he becomes not just a voice but a person with a skewer, right? So that threatening, that threat, a verbal threat of you can try to cook the hobbit is answered or corresponds to a physical threat. And so that’s one thing I mean when I say dialogue is intimately connected with other more physical action, but also think about how often verbal exchanges have a physical outcome.
All right? So if two people, if a parent and a child are having some sort of conflict that they then work through, there’s a hug at the end, often. Or maybe they fail to work through it and somebody stomps out of the room, right? But there’s a physical fact that is intimately connected with that dialogue and you really need to be thinking through what are the physical ramifications of these words, right?
And so another way to think about it you might find helpful, maybe think of the words, the dialogue, as a bridge between the inner life and the outward life.
And so we’ve said out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks and what’s going on inside me always finds a way out. And sometimes it’s direct, right? I’m angry and so I just slam a coffee cup down on the table or whatever. That’s a direct thing. But a lot of times the dialogue is a bridge from what’s going on inside me, now it finds its way out and then it finds a physical expression in some sort of, I mean, especially in interpersonal things, right?
And that might be a hug or a handshake or a punch in the nose or whatever it turns out to be. And so that’s what we have with these trolls, right? We go from words to deeds. And that’s, you know, on the one hand, that happens in at least two different ways. One is, you know, when Bert says you can try to cook a hobbit and then he pulls out his stick, skewer, those two, you know, the skewer is sort of a physical manifestation of what he said with his words.
In the case of the fist fight at the end here, that the words manifest or the words create the physical conflict. So anyway, as I said, dialogue is intimately connected with other more physical action. So on the one hand, the dialogue itself is an action and then the dialogue plays itself out in physical action. And that might be a hug, it might be a fist fight. Alright, okay I think that gets us to the end of our dialogue, our first of two or three lessons about dialogue. And we’re going to in the next lesson talk about what I’m calling travel writing.