Let Dialogue Drive Your Story

Anyone who writes mystery and suspense would agree pacing is paramount, pages turning faster and faster as your protagonist (and the reader) race against time to stop the killer, solve the crime, or save the world.

Some writers are particularly gifted at writing action scenes, visualizing every angle, kick, stab, or grab. But physical action isn’t the only forward motion in your plot, and all too often writers forget that every scene is about movement.

As a writer, I’d argue the most overlooked source of momentum is dialogue. How, when, and where your characters talk determines the velocity of your story.

Dialogue is action.

Actors know this. Visualize one of your favorite movies, thriller or not, a scene in which two characters are talking. They could be driving in a car, running away from a bear, or sitting in a booth at a diner. Walking, driving, eating, sitting on a couch, or trying on a suit. As long as two characters exchange words, things are in motion. In a mystery, one character often wants something, while the other character doesn’t want them to have it, and that something is information. Where is the treasure buried, who killed the lawyer, why did you poison my goldfish?

Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” Desire creates tension, and tension is latent energy. The minute dialogue is exchanged that tension is released and your story moves forward. And when tension is released your reader will react as we all do—viscerally—and let out that breath they were holding, or laugh, cry, or lean forward and turn the pages as fast as you can.

Dialogue is character, too.

One of Elmore Leonard’s “Rules for Writers” is to “avoid detailed character descriptions.” This allows readers to visualize each character in their own way, good advice for anyone looking to avoid speed bumps in their pacing, but prose as spare as Leonard’s only works if you can tell characters apart based on how they talk. Across every one of Leonard’s forty-eight novels, his dialogue is a DNA-infused soundtrack of his one-of-a-kind characters.

You might have visualized Chili Palmer from Get Shorty differently than I did, and maybe neither of us imagined he would ever be played by John Travolta in the movie adaptation, but from the moment Chili first opens his mouth to the end of that perfect novel, every word from his mouth carries the swagger of a character destined to come out on top.

Distinct dialogue is critical when two characters stand side by side through most of the story. Holmes and Watson, Spenser and Hawke, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Lydia Chin and Bill Smith, Batman and Robin. Close your eyes and I’ll bet you can hear every one of their voices, probably more easily than you remember who had blond hair or a mustache.

My own novels revolve around mysteries investigated by a San Francisco-based private eye named Cape Weathers and his partner, Sally Mei, who was trained as an assassin by the Hong Kong Triads since the age of five. Needless to say, their backgrounds, cultural references, and moral codes are worlds apart, as is the manner in which they talk, not to mention when they talk. Many of their shared scenes are driven by dialogue—impossible choices debated in rapid-fire exchanges that keep the plot moving at top speed. Having a character who is far more stoic than a colleague who thinks out loud and verbalizes every stray thought can bring humor or tension into a situation, and that pulls the reader closer to the personalities on the page.

The late Gregory McDonald, author of the Fletch novels, was arguably better at this than anyone. Some of his best chapters are carried by nonstop unattributed dialogue—with no voice tags like “she said” or “Fletch said”—and they work beautifully because McDonald was so good at voices that there was never a question who was talking to whom. Pick up the original Fletch or any in the series. Fletch’s Fortune, Fletch’s Moxie, and Carioca Fletch are particularly fun when it comes to the fast-talking felons that I.M. Fletcher encounters in his investigations.

Crime fiction has a long legacy of leveraging the power of voice. In the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, most private eye novels are still written in first person. The intimacy of that perspective creates a sense of urgency as the stakes get bigger, and that voice inside your head is just another form of dialogue; in this case, the narrator and protagonist telling you a tragic tale. Even mysteries and thrillers written in third person are often crafted from a close-in perspective, with each chapter written from a different character’s point of view, the syntax of the prose reflecting their attitude and inner monologue.

For a range of authors who make talking as riveting as a car chase, pick up novels by Donald Westlake, Ross MacDonald, Ross Thomas, John D. MacDonald, Loren Estleman, and Thomas Perry if you want to see how the noir tradition got modernized by masters. For dialogue that propels characters off the page like a trampoline, check out Robert Crais, Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Lee Goldberg, or D.P. Lyle. For books with dialogue in which the syntax amplifies a sense of time and place, read Cara Black, Martin Cruz Smith, Rhys Bowen, Naomi Hirahara, S.J. Rozan, James Lee Burke, Joe R. Lansdale, or Jacqueline Winspear. And that’s just to start, the to-be-read stack is as tall as the Empire State Building. The stories we share are the stories told to us by the characters we love, in their own words.

Which is why dialogue is the driver of any great story, and why those of us who love mysteries feel so connected to our favorite characters. We hear their voices in our heads.

About Hanging the Devil by Tim Maleeny: