By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

Miller looked up from the pistol he was cleaning and nodded to the chair on the opposite side of the table. “Just shoo the chickens away and have a seat,” he said. Pistol parts lay strewn on a greasy towel.

I’d known him for years, and sometimes it was hard to tell if he was angry. “Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“Nah, I just wanted to talk to you about something.” In his baritone drawl, “nah” and “I” rhymed.

I nudged the weird looking brown bird with the back of my hand and she landed on her feet on the floor. Careful to insult neither man nor bird, I sat without checking for bird shit. I crossed my legs and waited for him to say his piece.

“This blog thing,” he said. “They never talk about dialogue. What do you think about that?”

I shrugged. “I think ‘never’ overstates it.”

“Rarely, then.” He pulled a rag through the barrel tube and looked through it with one eye, like a first mate searching for shore. He scowled and stuffed the rag through again. “I just think it’s an important component of writing.”

“Of course it is,” I said.

“Let’s talk about it, then.”

“What, here?”

“You got someplace better to be?”

“Chicken shit and gun oil. How could I possibly want better?”

Finally, a laugh. “I’ve got some Maker’s Mark on the shelf over there.”

Maker’s Mark puts a happy edge on everything. “So talk,” I said. The chicken squawked as I stood and brushed it with my foot. “You want one?”

“The Pope’s still Catholic, right?” He finally saw the gleam he’d been looking for, I guess, because he placed the barrel tube on the towel and emptied his hands of tools. “I think a lot of writers get dialogue wrong.”

“Get it wrong?” I challenged. “You mean there’s a right way and a wrong way? I don’t remember seeing a rule book.” I found two glasses in the cabinet and put them to work. I’m very generous with other people’s booze.

“Take dialogue tags, for example: he said, he asked, he interjected, he postulated. Hell, in the last paragraph, you challenged. Why won’t a simple ‘said’ do it all the time?”

I handed him his drink and again dislodged the chicken from my chair. “I suppose it could,” I said. “Elmore Leonard made that one of his ten rules, right? I just happen to think that ‘challenged’ better clarified the purpose of my words up there. ‘Said’ would have been fine, but ‘challenged’ was better.”

“I disagree.”

“Good for you. It’s one of those—”

“Let’s talk about interruptions. You used an em dash right there. If you’d used ellipses . . .”

“It would have conveyed the wrong context. To me, ellipses indicate that my words just trailed off. But the em dash—”

“Is a hard abrupt interruption. Yeah, okay, I can see that. I still don’t agree about the tags, though.”

“They sure come in handy, though.”

“In what way?”

“Well, after long strings of dialogue, it’s easy for the reader to lose track of who’s talking.”

He weighed that. “You could always reestablish ownership of the speech by inserting a little action. For example, if you wrote—”

“ ‘He weighed that,’” I said. “Yeah, I did. Try to keep up.”

He took a long pull on his bourbon. “What do you think about exclamation points?”

“Hate ’em,” I said. “I used to overuse them like crazy. Now, if I use an exclamation point, it’s to communicate some loud friggin’ shouting.”

“You just said ‘friggin’.”

“Yeah, well, this is a family-friendly blog.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not talking about profanity,” he said. “I’m talking about the dialect stuff. Why not write frigging, complete with the ing?”

“I don’t have answer for you on that,” I confessed. (Yes, confessed. Get over it. In this context, it implies more than merely said.) “A little dialect goes a long way, though. After a while, I think it annoys the reader.”

“As annoying as a long blog post?” he asked.

“Even more, I think.” Point taken. I stood. “Can I take my drink with me?”

Miller laughed again. “I don’t think I can assemble the gun fast enough to stop you. But don’t you think you should ask them what they think?”

Them? Ah, the readers. The man might sound like Foghorn Leghorn, but he’s got a good head on his shoulders.

So, what do y’all think? What are tricks, triumphs and annoyances of writing or reading dialogue?

Yeah, I hear you in the back. “Trite little blog posts, har, har har.”

Seriously, let’s talk . . .

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Coming up on our Kill Zone Guest Sundays, watch for blogs from Sandra Brown, Steve Berry, Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Tim Maleeny, Oline Cogdill, Alexandra Sokoloff, James Scott Bell, and more.