The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes - Jack M. Bickham [23]
Leave the lectures for the classroom or the Moose Lodge. Write fiction!
16. DON'T LET THEM BE WINDBAGS
IN THE LAST CHAPTER WE WARNED about letting characters for the sake of piling information into the story. But that's not the only way writers sometimes mess up their dialogue. Sometimes, without realizing it, they let their characters talk on and on, boringly, becoming windbags.
A windbag, in old-fashioned slang, is a person who talks and talks and talks... and talks some more... and never lets anybody get a word in edgewise.
Windbags in real life are colossal bores.
In fiction they're even worse.
That's important to remember, because so much of modem fiction is composed of dialogue—characters talking. You can't afford to portray windbag characters all the time, because if you do, your characters will be boring, your dialogue will look more like rampant soliloquies than real people talk, and your story will go right down the tubes.
So you have to write modem dialogue. That means that the only time you can let a story character talk like a windbag is when you intend to portray him as a windbag. The great majority of your characters have to be more terse and logical than we often are in real life, if the dialogue on the page is to appear realistic.
Which is to say: good, realistic story dialogue often has little actual resemblance to the way we really talk every day. It just looks that way.
How do you avoid the dread windbag syndrome?
You must not:
• Fill pages with endless, rambling talk.
• Try to substitute speeches for dialogue.
• Allow characters to beat every subject to death.
• Let one character totally ignore what the other is saying.
• Fill your story with talk where nobody wants anything.
• Be literary or classic.
• Produce pages of dull, overlong paragraphs of speechifying.
But what, you may ask, can you do to prevent this sort of thing?
In the first place, recognize that a story conversation should almost always follow the rules of stimulus and response as explained in Chapter Eleven.
Second, whenever possible, set up your dialogue scenes so that they play out "one-on-one," getting rid of other characters (who might interrupt and make the conversation more complicated). Setting up one-on-one dialogues makes life simpler all around. If Joe and Bill are to talk in your story, and you also have Sam and Fred standing around, figure a way to have Sam called to the telephone; Fred decides to go to lunch; now you have a one on one between Joe and Bill, and it's easier.
Remember, too, that most of the time your dialogue will become sleek, swift and contemporary if you will just provide your viewpoint character with a conversational goal. A viewpoint with a goal—information to be sought, or an opinion to be sold—will tend to keep things moving in a straight line even when the other character is being obstreperous. The strongly goal-motivated talker will not allow pages to fill with rambling talk. He will stick to the point, or keep dragging the conversation back to it. And he won't allow long speeches from anybody; he'll keep insisting on a return to the issues at hand.
Having a conversational goal helps you avoid the impulse to drag dialogue out endlessly, beating the subject to death, too. If the characters stick to the point—and one of them must insist on doing so—then the conversation not only can't wander too far away; it can't extend past the point of decision on the point at issue.
In this regard, it's vital to make sure both characters are listening. If Character A wants to talk about who stole the money, but Character B simply won't pay any attention, and keeps mumbling about his golf score last weekend, all is lost... nothing will make sense or progress. You need to make your dialogue participants listen, then respond directly.
If you fill your story with people who don't want anything, of course, all is lost anyway because there can be no focus, and