Dialogue as Repartee

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

A little of it--more than a page or two--goes a long way, but a bit of it is engaging--dialogue as repartee. Dean Koontz is especially good, when he’s good, at such bantering conversation between characters, as this passage, from his novel Odd Hours, in which the protagonist, Odd Thomas, is conversing with a woman named Annamaria, whom he’s seen in a prophetic dream, indicates:

“Are you originally from around here?” I asked softly.

“No.”

“Where are you from?”

“Far away.”

“Faraway, Oklahoma?” I asked. “Faraway, Alabama? Maybe Faraway, Maine?”

Farther away than all of those. You would not believe me if I named the place.”

“I would believe you,” I assured her.

“I’ve believed everything you’ve said, though I don’t know why, and though I don’t understand moist of it.”

“Why would you believe me so readily?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know.”

“I do?”

“Yes. You know.”

“Give me a hint. Why do I believe you so readily?”

“Why does anyone believe anything?” she asked.

“Is this a philosophical question--or just a riddle?”“Empirical evidence is one reason.”

“You mean like--I believe in gravity because if I throw a stone in the air, it falls back to the ground?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean.”

“You haven’t been exactly generous with empirical evidence,” I reminded her. “I don’t even know where you’re from. Or your name.”

“You know my name.”

“Only your first name. What’s your last?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Everybody has a last name.”

“I’ve never had one.”

To maintain a sense of the passage of time, Koontz occasionally intersperses descriptions of changes in the environment which may or may not be of further significance to the story’s later action. In this exchange of dialogue between Odd and Annamarie, he describes the cold night air, the arrival of a thick fog, and the characters’ foggy breaths, tying their exhalations to the mystery of Annamarie:

The night was cold; our breath smoked from us. She had such a mystical quality. I might have been persuaded that we had exhaled the entire vast ocean of fog that now drowned all things, that she had come down from Olympus with the power to breathe away the world and, out of the resultant mist, remake it to her liking.

Then, Koontz resumes the dialogue between his protagonist and the mystery woman, Annamarie:

I said, “You had to have a last name to go to school.”

“I’ve never gone to school.”

“You’re home-schooled?”

She did not reply.

“Without a last name, how do you get welfare?”

“I’m not on the welfare rolls.”

“But you said you don’t work.”

“That’s right.”

“What--do people just give you money when you need it?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. That would be even less stressful than the tire life or shoe sales.”

“I’ve never asked anyone for anything--until I asked you if you would die for me.”

Another way that Koontz makes his dialogue interesting is to suggest that there is a mystery, apparent to one character, but not another, concerning the events at hand. By implying that everyday incidents have a deeper, as-yet-hidden significance, he writes livelier dialogue than he might otherwise and, at the same time, maintains the suspense that keeps the reader turning the pages of his novel. Here is an example of the technique at work, in another, earlier conversation between Odd and Annamarie.

“You knew my name?” I asked.

“As you know mine.”

“But I don’t.”

“I’m Annamarie,” she said. “One word. It would have come to you.”

Confused, I said, “We’ve spoken before, but I’m sure we never exchanged names.”

She only smiled and shook her head.

A white flare arced across the dismal sky: a gull fleeing to land as afternoon faded.

Annamarie pulled back the long sleeves of her sweater, revealing her graceful hands. In the right she held a translucent green stone the size of a fat grape.

“Is that a jewel?” I asked.

“Sea glass. A fragment of a bottle that washed around the world and back, until it has no sharp edges. I found it on the beach.” She turned it between her slender fingers. “What do you think it means?”

“Does it have to mean anything?”

“The tide washed it as smooth as a baby’s skin, and as the water winked away, the glass seemed to open like a green eye.”

Koontz has said that he writes one page a novel and revises it again and again, until he’s satisfied that it is the best he can write and that it accomplishes its purpose both in itself and in the bigger scheme of things. Then, he writes the next page and repeats the process. In doing so, he confides, he pays attention even to the cadence of his words, trying to get his sentences to scan roughly according to the rhythm of iambic pentameter in order that the measure will carry his reader forward.

It’s obvious that he pays a good amount of attention to keeping his dialogue interesting, crisp, pithy, and compelling, using humor, bantering, and mystery. For Koontz, it is not a matter of merely making a scene or a passage of dialogue serviceable to the overall plot that it helps to advance. Instead, like a director concerned with mise en scene, as carefully planning every shot as if he’s storyboarded it, he determines the best possible way to write each scene and each exchange of conversation between characters who are interesting (and usually, in some way, eccentric) and sympathetic in their own way. Dialogue as repartee is one of the secrets of his craft and a reason, no doubt, that his books routinely find the number one spot on reputable lists of bestsellers.

On a not -quite-directly-related, but significant, note, Koontz also sustains readers’ interest by occasionally beginning a chapter with a cryptic paragraph that sounds as if it’s coming from a narrator gone mad. Usually, these paragraphs begin in media res when they are part of the story’s ongoing action or they provide background information that is needed to understand what is presently happening.

The opening paragraph of Chapter Twenty of Odd Hours is an example:

A dove descending through candescent air, a brush bursting into fire and from the fire a voice, stars shifting from their timeless constellations to form new and meaningful patterns in the heavens. . .

The next paragraph explains the significance of these images:

Those were some of the signs upon which the prophets historically had based their predictions and their actions. I received instead two stopped clocks.

The last line of the previous paragraph, concerning the “two stopped clocks” is, of course, likewise intended to motivate readers to persist in reading the novel.

This strategy would become annoying if it were employed too often, and, for the same reason, if it is to be used, the paragraphs that set forth such odd descriptions (and the follow-on paragraphs which explain their significance) should be kept relatively short, as Koontz does.
Here is a second example, which opens Chapter Twenty-Four of the same work; unlike the previous example, this one continues through several short paragraphs, probably for the sake of emphasis, before coming to the point that “the weather was something more than mere weather”:

A universal solvent poured through the world, dissolving the works of man and nature.

Shapes like buildings loomed in vague detail. Geometric fence rows separated nothing from nothing, and their rigid geometry melted into mist at both ends.

Portions of trees floated in and out of sight, like driftwood on a white flood. Gray grass spilled down slopes that slid away as though they were hills of ashes too insubstantial to maintain their contours.

The dog and I ran for a while, changed direction several times, and then we walked out of nil and into naught, through vapor into vapor.

At some point I became aware that the weather was something more than mere weather. The stillness and the fog and the chill were not solely the consequences of meteorological systems. I began to suspect and soon felt certain that the condition of Magic Beach on this night was a symbolic statement of things to come.

Makes me want to read further!