Back to Basics: Dialogue enriches your memoir—but how can you reconstruct old conversations accurately?

 

Dialogue, well written, can accomplish important goals for your memoir. It can:

• acquaint readers with key characters’ personalities, values, perspectives, emotions, and attitudes
• add pizzazz—or grief or terror
• present information readers need to know including backstory (significant events from the past)
• let readers feel they’re experiencing your story (important)
• keep up your story’s momentum
• entice people to keep reading.

 

But crafting dialogue can be problematic.

How can you accurately reconstruct conversations

from years ago

if you don’t have them on tape or videotape?

 

If you call your story a memoir, you claim to have written a factual story (not fiction), and you’re promising readers you’re telling them the truth. Readers want to trust you. They need to trust you. If they can’t rely on your dialogue, how can they believe the rest of your story?

 

Here’s good news: You can’t always succeed in penning decades-old conversations with complete accuracy.

 

And that’s okay. Take comfort from Cecil Murphey’s words:

 

“Most readers are smart enough to figure out

that dialogue isn’t word-for-word accuracy;

however, they assume the author strives

to be as close to truth as possible.”

 

So, reconstruct past conversations with integrity. Avoid distortions. Create dialogue that represents your characters, situations, and events truthfully.

 

In writing rough drafts of my two memoirs, I contacted people involved so I could correctly write dialogue. I suggest you do the same.

 

And when I published my second memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir, I included this disclaimer:

 

This is a work of creative nonfiction. Because these events happened nearly half a century ago, some people’s memories might not match mine, but memory is a wobbly thing—for both writer and readers. Based on journal entries, letters I wrote . . . , verifiable historical incidents, and accounts supplied by many people, I believe I’ve written accurately about places, dates, events, individuals, and situations. I recreated dialogue to portray the original conversation in tone and content. For security reasons, I changed some names, as noted.

 

Now let’s take a look at well-written, effective dialogue. In the following excerpt, Pick and his wife Cameron are attending a fancy dinner party in New York. Pick, the narrator, writes about one guest, Felicity, who glared at him as he visited with the hostess, Rita:

 

My southern drawl seemed to unnerve her. . . . Finally, in a vaguely British accent she asked, “I gather you’re not from around here?”

 

“No, ma’am,” I said. “How could you tell?”

 

. . . . “Then where are you from exactly?”

           

“Charlotte, most recently,” I said.

           

“Charlotte?” Her nose squinched, as if I had answered Kazakhstan. . . .

           

“I don’t see how anyone could possibly stand living down there with those people.”

 

“Those people? You mean my kinfolks?”

 

“Surely your relatives are not . . .” She smirked at Rita. “Oh, you know . . . .”

 

I felt my pulse quicken. “Actually, I don’t.”

 

“Well”—she quaffed her wine— “I’m certainly not going to explain.”

 

“Have you ever been down South?” I asked.

 

“Once. I did a commercial shot down there somewhere—” . . . “Raleigh. That was it. Dreadful place . . . I would never live down there.”

 

Our hostess [Rita] smiled diplomatically and asked, “Why not? I hear it’s lovely.”

 

Felicity looked at me. “I couldn’t take all the racists down there.”

 

. . . “How about some duck roast?” Rita chirped, trying to pull the conversation out of the nosedive it had taken. . . .

           

. . . “Besides,” [Felicity] continued, “southerners sound so . . . ignorant. . . .  I could barely bring myself to vote for Jimmy Carter because of that accent of his.”

 

“Well, ma’am”—the chill in my voice could have frozen hummingbirds in mid-flight— “where I come from we call that bigotry.”

 

Suddenly, all conversation ceased at the table. All eyes . . . focused on me. . . .

 

“Please pass the bread, Pick” said Cameron, her face flushing.

 

“Hold on, Cam,” I said.

 

“Pass the bread, Pick!”

 

Rita scrambled for the bread basket, desperate to do something, anything. . . . (from The Bridge by Doug Marlette)

 

Through that dialogue, you witnessed the dynamics between these four people. You sensed the tension. You discerned Felicity’s personality. What did you learn about Pick? About his wife, Cameron? About the hostess, Rita? Just think—Marlette accomplished all of that through a few lines of dialogue!

 

Next week we will continue with dialogue, but for now, study the above conversation and experiment with similar techniques to develop your main characters, their settings, and interpersonal dynamics.

 

Good dialogue is essential to your memoir.

 

If you doubt that, ponder Joan Didion’s words:

 

“I don’t have a very clear idea of who the characters are

until they start talking.”

 

Have fun writing your memoir!

 

More tips on using dialogue in your memoir

Today we’ll look at more tips for using dialogue in your memoir—because crafting it correctly is so important. (If you missed Thursday’s post, click on Are you using dialogue the right way in your memoir?) 

Place quotation marks around the words people speak. (Put your silent thoughts—inner dialogue—in italics, not quotation marks.)

Use simple dialogue tags (he said, she asked) rather than bigger words like he bellowed or she whined or he scolded or she demanded. Using fancy tags instead of simple ones will distract readers—they’ll draw attention to the tags rather than the spoken words. Keep the focus on dialogue rather than tags. (For more on this topic, including examples, read this fun post, A Critical DON’T for Writing Dialogue, by Joe Bunting.) 

Delete adverbs and adjectives with your dialogue tags, such as he said arrogantly or she said bitterly.

In general, if the dialogue is only one sentence long, place the tag at the end of it.

Victoria Costello offers this advice: “If you insert a tag between two or more sentences, the tag always goes after the first sentence” (The Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Memoir). For example, compare these two:

“There are many ways of breaking a heart. Stories were full of hearts broken by love,” said Pearl S. Buck, “but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.”

This is the better way: “There are many ways of breaking a heart,” said Pearl S. Buck. “Stories were full of hearts broken by love, but what really broke a heart was taking away its dream—whatever that dream might be.”

Each time a different person speaks, start a new paragraph.

If two people are in a long conversation, not every line of dialogue needs a tag—as long as readers know which character is speaking. To help readers keep track, occasionally include the speaker’s action. For example, the following has no tag but the reader knows who spoke:

“I must go.” Anne stood, threw her scarf around her neck, and turned toward the door.

Here’s another look at crafting dialogue without a tag, based on an example from Joe Bunting’s post. He encourages writers to: “…show…emotion with an action. Like this: ‘I hate you,’ she exclaimed she said, hurling her French book at him. The corner struck him just under his eye. A bright red mark began to rise on his skin.”

Notice two things: (a) Joe changed “she exclaimed” to “she said,” which is good, but (b) Joe could have deleted “she said” altogether. Then the dialogue would look like this:

“‘I hate you.’ She hurled her French book at him….”

I like that better. Do you?

Look over your manuscripts, 

study the way you’ve crafted dialogue, 

and make revisions. 

Your readers will thank you.