With regard to Tarantino, I think one of the points about his dialogue that 'feels' natural is the extraneous, everyday, non-plot-related topics of casual conversation, that help make his characters seem like real people just doing a job ('Let's go to work' as a strapline for Reservoir Dogs had it).
The squabbling about tips, babbling about Madonna lyrics, rather than just poring over blueprints of safes and security guard changeover times. The musing as to burger and fries naming and eating practices in Europe.
Real people probably wouldn't have those conversations in that way, but the fact that they happen at all felt quite radical. Though I'm sure, as the film scholar he is, Tarantino was drawing on earlier examples of such fleshing out of characters through dialogue that deliberately tells us almost nothing about them in the context of the plot, but I have no idea which directors.
I must also confess to being fairly unfamiliar with his post-Pulp Fiction stuff (i.e. nearly all of it - shame on me), as I found PF itself a bit of a messy letdown after all the hype, and the stage play tightness of Reservoir Dogs.
Oh yeah for sure. I just think that these sort of undereducated blue collar or criminal kinds of characters are made to speak in a way that is much more highly intelligent and perceptive than they would likely be if they weren't at the end of Tarantino's pen. He takes the the topics of conversation that these kinds of characters may have with one another, and injects them with flare, making them far more entertaining than they'd be in real life.
Bravo! You’ve covered all the major schools of dialogue in a neat little guide. As a writer who’s often been complimented on my dialogue, I’d like to share one insight: you have to let your characters talk to each other first, and then trim the fluff. If you truly know them and believe in them, writing dialogue becomes easy. Sometimes I just let them speak in my head, jotting down every pause and half-sentence, and only afterward do I shape it into something more artistic. It’s really that simple.
I'll have to come back to this, but I had to stop and say that I really like what I've seen so far. I have a collection of essays across substack that I share at the end of my NF contents page. I'm going to add this!
Good essay Timothy. I read Hemingway's 'A Farewell To Arms' recently, and was internally criticizing the dialogue the entire time. He's known for his dialogue, which confused me as I read because it's so flat and laconic in that book. But I s'pose I was making the same mistake you're highlighting in your piece. I was expecting realism. His protagonists are men who rarely utter more than 5 words at a time, and I found it a little annoying. Though I surely would have been more annoyed if it was windy.
Thanks, yeah, I liked Hemingway a lot more when I was younger, but having grown up and widened my knowledge of what literature can be, I like him a lot less now. He was a revolutionary, certainly, but I agree wholeheartedly with it being flat and laconic. I'd rather read the flare of Philip Roth than Hemingway, I think. But he certainly has his place.
With regard to Tarantino, I think one of the points about his dialogue that 'feels' natural is the extraneous, everyday, non-plot-related topics of casual conversation, that help make his characters seem like real people just doing a job ('Let's go to work' as a strapline for Reservoir Dogs had it).
The squabbling about tips, babbling about Madonna lyrics, rather than just poring over blueprints of safes and security guard changeover times. The musing as to burger and fries naming and eating practices in Europe.
Real people probably wouldn't have those conversations in that way, but the fact that they happen at all felt quite radical. Though I'm sure, as the film scholar he is, Tarantino was drawing on earlier examples of such fleshing out of characters through dialogue that deliberately tells us almost nothing about them in the context of the plot, but I have no idea which directors.
I must also confess to being fairly unfamiliar with his post-Pulp Fiction stuff (i.e. nearly all of it - shame on me), as I found PF itself a bit of a messy letdown after all the hype, and the stage play tightness of Reservoir Dogs.
Oh yeah for sure. I just think that these sort of undereducated blue collar or criminal kinds of characters are made to speak in a way that is much more highly intelligent and perceptive than they would likely be if they weren't at the end of Tarantino's pen. He takes the the topics of conversation that these kinds of characters may have with one another, and injects them with flare, making them far more entertaining than they'd be in real life.
Bravo! You’ve covered all the major schools of dialogue in a neat little guide. As a writer who’s often been complimented on my dialogue, I’d like to share one insight: you have to let your characters talk to each other first, and then trim the fluff. If you truly know them and believe in them, writing dialogue becomes easy. Sometimes I just let them speak in my head, jotting down every pause and half-sentence, and only afterward do I shape it into something more artistic. It’s really that simple.
I'll have to come back to this, but I had to stop and say that I really like what I've seen so far. I have a collection of essays across substack that I share at the end of my NF contents page. I'm going to add this!
Good essay Timothy. I read Hemingway's 'A Farewell To Arms' recently, and was internally criticizing the dialogue the entire time. He's known for his dialogue, which confused me as I read because it's so flat and laconic in that book. But I s'pose I was making the same mistake you're highlighting in your piece. I was expecting realism. His protagonists are men who rarely utter more than 5 words at a time, and I found it a little annoying. Though I surely would have been more annoyed if it was windy.
Thanks, yeah, I liked Hemingway a lot more when I was younger, but having grown up and widened my knowledge of what literature can be, I like him a lot less now. He was a revolutionary, certainly, but I agree wholeheartedly with it being flat and laconic. I'd rather read the flare of Philip Roth than Hemingway, I think. But he certainly has his place.