The Great Chain of Being in Contact

My friend Jane posted this on my Facebook wall: “Had a lovely imaginary conversation with you yesterday, which made me think it’s time for a real one.”

As fiction writers, we spend a great deal of time imagining conversations. It’s important that they seem real, but they must also effectively convey relevant information without interrupting the dream of the story.

Typically, fictional conversations happen as dialogue. Writers try to balance what the characters say with nonverbal cues and unshared thoughts. Although these three aspects of dialogue provide a lot of possibilities, it’s important to consider other ways that people interact, adapting elements of dialogue to various real-life contexts.

Face-to-Face: The reader get to observe characters talking, complete with facial expressions and gestures. What’s interesting is that readers find out how characters deal with immediate feedback from one another, whether through dialogue, thoughts, or a combination of both.

Presentational: One speaker addresses many audience members. If there’s time for questions, which in a very limited way resembles conversation, some jackass usually eats up the time by spouting nonsense in an attempt to outshine the speaker.

Telephonic: This is voice-to-voice conversation in which the interlocutors are not in the same place, so there’s usually a lack of nonverbal cues. (Video conferencing would be more like face-to-face.)

Virtual: A conversation based on text communication, it’s virtual in the sense that all of the information involved must be simulated, recreated, or assumed through words and formatting. It can happen synchronously (e.g., IM) or asynchronously (e.g., email, text).

Venty: Not to be confused with the large coffee at Starbucks (spelled with an “i”), this category is similar to the in-person presentational style mentioned above. This kind of online communication results in more talking than listening going on. We post our opinions in comments sections, product reviews, etc., but it seems that mostly we’re venting frustration through words. We can choose to read responses or not, i.e., encourage conversation or not.

Epistolary: A written correspondence by letter (a.k.a., snail mail). Since it’s so difficult to include the text you’re responding to as is automatically done with email, there’s a lag of time and content that makes letter-writing feel almost imaginary to me. But extremely intelligent people communicated important ideas this way throughout history, so what’s my problem?

Imaginary: Imagining a conversation can be a useful way to prepare for a discussion that is going to be difficult in some way. Or, in the case of Jane’s imaginary conversation with me, we know each other well, and although we wouldn’t presume to speak for each other, we can guess pretty accurately what the other might say and proceed with a conversation when time doesn’t allow us to connect in any of the aforementioned ways, knowing we’ll check in about it later.

Remembered: Memories may be vivid and fascinating, but they’re often not dependable. Even in so-called reality, the remembered version of a past event is a fiction. If our protagonist remembers a conversation, she may very well misquote herself as well as other characters’ lines (intentionally or not). A reader may assume a remembered conversation is a transcribed truth, when in the reality of the story its purpose may be to reveal something about the character who remembers it.

How do your characters communicate, and what are their intentions?

James Black is a founding member of Book Writing World. He earned a masters degree in comparative literature at the University of Missouri at Columbia. His work has been published in the anthology The New Queer Aesthetic on Television and in the journal Anon. He’s writing his first novel about the family of a closeted, gay soldier stationed in Iraq. Check out his blog, Quota, at http://j3quota.wordpress.com/. He contributes to the BWW weekly!