Flash Fiction / Dialogue / Blogging

Compressionism is a term I invented. It means "image-driven fiction." Image-driven fiction is a much more effective way of rendering a story than the more traditional exposition-driven fiction for the simple reason that a picture is worth a thousand words. "Water" is a perfect example of Compressionism: using words to paint a picture and then letting the picture illustrate the story. This allows the reader to join in the creative process by using his or her imagination to complete the story. It's more fun this way for everyone. So even though the things I'll be writing about deals with flash fiction the ideas also apply to any length or kind of effective fiction writing. Now lets talk about the aesthetics of dialogue.

Since a compressionist story is a mini photoplay, what the characters say--or don't say--will often carry the weight of the story. Within the confines of about 1,000 words, how can the compressionist practitioner give dialogue the best chance of carrying this weight successfully? I use the following parameters: tension, characterization, movement, understory and backstory. Let's deal with tension first.

Dialogue is not simply "talk." Talk can be random. It can be convoluted. It can be nonsensical. Pay attention to how people really talk. Talk is seldom efficient. People usually say more words than are necessary to get their point across. That's okay. That's the way most of us talk. Besides arguing with each other we also do a lot of agreeing. Don't let the characters in your story agree for too long. There's no tension in agreement. If for some reason you have two characters talking about the weather, if they disagree about the weather that creates tension. Tension in dialogue is essential. It doesn't have to be in your face disagreement. It can be a quiet, loving disagreement between a wife and husband. Or as in "Water" the tension is created by the hinting at the revealing of a mystery. Just get some tension in there. And get it in there efficiently. Don't waste words. Dialogue is efficient talk. If the talk isn't efficient it's sloppy dialogue.

Compressionist dialogue is characterization. Remember, compressionist writing is cinematic writing. Each compressionist story is a micro-movie on the page. You don't want to explain through exposition what kind of a person a character is. You want the reader to "discover" what kind of person a character is. And as in real life we judge people by what we see them do, including body language, and by what they say.

A compressionist story cannot sustain much narrative movement. The story's too short; but it is not a sketch. So it must have narrative movement. Something must be different by the end of the story. Many times a character will simply feel different about something and may express this in a line of dialogue. The change is slight and internal.

Understory is what the compressionist story is really about. Understory decides setting, tone, characterization, description and action. The surface story, the words on the page, is made up of the particular concrete. The understory is the universal abstract. The surface story is merely the metaphor for the understory. If you've noticed I don't use metaphors in my stories because the images (the water, the weather, the park, the boy, the young woman and the ducks in "Water")are the metaphors. Does this make sense? When you have two characters arguing about the weather they're really not arguing about the weather at all. What they're really arguing about is the understory; the trick is often--not always-the understory is "the thing left out." This makes the reader sense more than he or she understands; because images speak directly to the subconscious. Pretty cool, huh? The shorter a story is the deeper it must be. It must resonate.

Finally, we have backstory. Backstory is the history of the surface story. (It sometimes overlaps with understory.) How did your characters get to where they are right now? In "Water," because it's so short and I wanted to keep the story as tight as possible, all of the backstory is implied mainly through the woman's dialogue (setting, body language and weather play their part, too).

Well that's how I try to write my dialogue. I don't always succeed. If there's anything here you can use for your own dialogue be my guest and definitely use it. I don't expect agreement on everthing here. This is just to keep my own head on straight so that when it comes time for my characters to speak I don't go off the deep end and end up with a lot of crap.