Ah, the epiphany.

Like a brick flung from the heavens that strikes you on your skull. The resultant head-wound sparks a dizzying array of revelation: “Rhino meat is delicious! I should quit my job and become a human sailboat! My brother is a robot!” Each epiphany, a resounding holy shit moment.

I had a small epiphany, and it’s maybe so foolish an epiphany that I was the only doucheballoon that failed to recognize it.

I had an epiphany about dialogue.

Maybe I had it because all week I’ve been thinking about dialogue, as evidenced by Monday’s post on that very subject. Maybe I had it because I pulled something when I was shoveling the snow and dislodged some hunk of steak-fat that lay dormant in my arteries and that gobbet of gristle shot its way like a bullet to my brain and instead of killing me, it spoke to me of secret truths. Hell, maybe it did kill me. Maybe this is my Eternal Reward — a single epiphany, and one last blog post. Sad, really. I was hoping for virgins or unicorns. Or virginal unicorns.

I’ll stop dicking around.

I’ll get to the epiphany.

The epiphany is this:

All too often, we speak of dialogue and action as two separate entities. That’s how I learned it when I studied writing under the Sufi Mystics — er, I mean, English professors. Dialogue, then action, then dialogue, then action. Electrons and protons, whirling about.

I don’t believe they’re different at all.

Dialogue is action.

And by thinking of it that way, I feel like it opens up a new way to look at dialogue.

Is that stupid? Am I reiterating something everybody already knows?

Let me clarify the notion. See if I can’t make sense out of this for myself and, ideally, you. (Though let’s be frank: I don’t care about you people. I don’t even know you. It’s not me who responds to you in comments or on Twitter. That guy’s just some vagrant I hired to come in here and answer fan mail. He has his own special keyboard, because his fingers smell like meth and french fry grease. See, anytime you think you’re talking to me, you’re actually talking to Johnny Possum. I don’t know if that’s his real name. That’s just what I call him, and I pay him enough money to answer to it.)

So, if we take every scene of dialogue, whether we’re talking in a novel or a screenplay or comic script or whatever, and we assume that it is action, I think it allows us to reframe it in an interesting way. We can reposition the dialogue as doing something, not merely conveying information. That’s by and large how we see dialogue now: two people are talking, and they are communicating something. That “something” might be plot information, character information, a scheme, a story, whatever.

By framing it as action, we do not remove the conveyance of information. Nothing is taken away. But, for me, something is added: a layer of motion and motive.

I’ll tackle each of those.

Motion

When my wife gets home from work, she tells me about her day, and I tell her about mine. When this occurs, we don’t stand in the middle of the kitchen, nose-to-nose, transferring data like a pair of cable-linked androids. (This is when I get a Google rush of people searching for “android porn.” You watch.)

I get dinner ready. She moves from kitchen to living room, hangs up her jacket and plays with the dogs. We’re both active. We’re both in motion. Dialogue rarely happens when two people are fixed in physical space. That’s not to say it’s completely bizarre — two people laying in bed, a group of people sitting around a table, a couple fighting during a car ride. But even in those scenes, something else is usually going on. The wife in bed is trying to read. The people sitting around the table are drinking, and the guy in the far seat is scanning the crowd for some chick who might actually touch his penis. The couple in the car ride are driving, fucking around with maps, messing with the GPS, playing with the radio.

Action, motion, doing.

Okay, so, what does this give us?

One, it gives us the chance to liven up our dialogue. From an ornamental standpoint, action provides interest.

Two, it allows us to tell a smaller story during the dialogue. Something is happening. Talking is doing. Action creates tension. Tension creates conflict, and conflict is fucking awesome. A guy trying to fix a car as he’s talking with his friend gives you a vector for fresh tension. The conversation starts out fine, but the guy’s having trouble, he’s got motor oil in his eye, the car still won’t turn over, and so the tension ratchets higher and higher, and the conversation can start straying into suddenly dangerous waters.

Three (and this is related to the above point), the action affects the dialogue and stops it from being a straight-up info-dump. If I’m talking to my wife in the kitchen and I’m cooking something in the hot skillet (rhino meat), and I’m about to share with her something either really exciting or really awful and then — Ssss! — I burn my goddamn hand, suddenly I’m talking about that. I’m yelling about how our kitchen is too small and I hate this fucking place and Sweet Betty Boom-Boom this searing hot rhino meat is like napalm it burns it burns it burns. Interrupting the conversation that way increases tension (as noted), and it also changes the dialogue and informs it.

Plus, at its very core, talking is doing something. “Speak” is a verb. It’s an action verb. Think of it as a dynamic thing, not a static thing. Occurrence. Happening. Motion.

Rhino meat.

(Huh?)

Motive

Action in a story is a double-layered thing, most times. Someone is doing something — running, kicking, cooking, killing (layer one). And that someone is doing that something for a reason — to escape the police, to dispatch a foe, to feed his family, to sate a sociopathic urge to eat hot fresh rhino meat (layer two). There might even be a third layer in there, a deeper one extrapolated out — the man wants to escape the police because he’s been incarcerated before and he goddamn won’t go back to prison, for instance.

Looking at dialogue as action, as something happening, we can see the same thing. Once more, it’s not just about a conveyance of information but rather an action meant to achieve a result.

Dialogue always has a motive.

In real life, this may not be true. When the wife and I share the day’s happenings, I don’t know that there’s any overarching motive beyond the conversation itself — it is its own motive. I want to share the day’s events, and so I share the day’s events.

Fiction ain’t real life.

Same rules do not apply.

In fiction, actions performed without purpose are dull like a Nerf machete.

In real life, people just talk. In fiction, people talk with a result in mind — even if it’s an unconscious one. Figure that out. Frame out your dialogue scenes as characters acting in order to achieve a goal. What is the motive? When I try to pick a lock, it’s an active thing. It’s a thing I do with purpose; I pick the lock because inside that closet is a thermal cooler full of verboten rhino meat. When I talk to the cops about it later, that too is a thing I do with purpose. I converse with the goal of not getting caught or framing someone else or fucking with authority because I’m just a total dick that way.

Dialogue is action.

And action has motive.

People don’t just do things to do them.

And thus, people don’t just say things to say them.

Often in fiction you’ll see the question: why does the character do that?

You should similarly be asking: why does the character say that?

So, every scene of dialogue, for every participant, define the motive. Maybe the character is fully aware of the motive and is in total manipulator mode, or maybe the character is acting on a motive she hasn’t fully realized or identified.

By injecting the conversation with purpose, you will:

…get to the heart of the matter more quickly

…put stakes on the table (mmm rhino meat steaks)

…make the conversation more interesting.

Is This Dumb?

Is this an epiphany that others have already had? Am I the guy who’s just figuring out how to use his VCR when we’ve all moved onto Blu-Ray players? Maybe. Then again, maybe there’s one or two among you that will find this useful. By thinking of dialogue as a thing not separate from action but itself a part of the action, it’s helping me conceive of dialogue as an organic part of the whole. Further, it helps me think of it in dynamic, active ways rather than a passive (and thus, bland) communication device.

Motion and motive.

Something happens. And that something happens for a reason.

In dialogue, people talk. That’s the action.

And they speak with purpose. That’s the desired result.