THE ICE PICK

Dialogue: a Socratic Dialogue on the Art of Writing Dialogue in Fiction, by Lewis Turco. (Elements of Fiction Writing Series) Cincinnati, Writer’s Digest, 1989. ISBN 0-89879-349-1. $12.95.

This is a different sort of book, and it takes some getting used to, because the whole thing is written in dialogue form. This often makes it too cutesy for its own good, if not downright annoying.

But if you are having difficulties with dialogue, this book gives lots of examples, where some other h-t-w dialogue books may offer you mostly lists of baffling rules.

The index is so-so, given that often the information you want is scattered around in half a dozen different places. (E.g. format and punctuation is broken into six parts. So if you’re constantly looking stuff up, you’ll need to make notes in the index, inside the covers, on the flyleaves, or on little pieces of paper hanging out of the book in all directions.)

That said, the advice here is excellent. The book is primarily aimed at beginners, but there is plenty of meat here for everyone, including tricks for using dialogue to speed up as well as slow down a scene, for showing what a non-viewpoint character is thinking, and for expressing dialect by word choice. I was especially impressed by Turco’s clear explanations of definitions. You know, an editor asks you if your piece is objective, character-oriented, first-person, single-angle viewpoint; and you go, "Huh?" Before reading this I wouldn’t have known a subjective dialogue if it bit me on the foot. They’re things we use all the time, but the terminology is a foreign language to most of us.

"Dialogue," says Turco, "ought always to be doing more than one thing.... While it is going on it ought to be advancing the plot, or characterizing, or setting the scene, foreshadowing, or whatever, at the same time that it is operating as a medium for the exchange of information." And that is something we all ought to take to heart.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Mar. 1998. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, June 1999.}