What can dialogue do?

As I read through the books I selected for Novel Study, one question I kept asking is this: What is new in fiction these days? It’s the reason I focused only on books that have appeared in the last few years. So far, we’ve seen evidence of a tempering of the show-don’t-tell maxim (in my post on The Dutch House), a fresh new way to use omniscient narration (in my post on Matrix), and now, in I Kissed Shara Wheeler, some clever dialogue tricks. Let’s take a close look at how Casey McQuiston uses dialogue so you can apply the techniques to your own work.

Chapter two of the novel starts with a chunk of backstory telling us how Chloe ended up in the wonderfully named False Beach, Alabama. McQuiston wisely chooses to orient even this backstory around the mystery of the missing Shara Wheeler (already top-of-mind due to the new time stamp). Chloe remembers that the first thing she saw in False Beach was an enormous billboard featuring Shara as part of an advertisement for Willowgrove Christian Academy, the high school both girls attend. McQuiston livens up this backstory by grounding it in a specific scene—the moment Chloe’s family first drive into town—complete with a single dialogue exchange:

Notice how much work the space around the dialogue lines is doing. The lines themselves are quite ordinary—just a pretext for delivering details that bring both Chloe and her mothers into focus. We learn that this move from California to “the buttcrack of Alabama” is not a happy one for Chloe. (I spent a lot of time as a child with my grandparents in Decatur, Alabama, further up that buttcrack, and I can attest that I too would have been very unhappy living there as a teenager.) We can also guess that Chloe’s mother may have been happy to leave the town behind, and that her other mother—the one reading The Canterbury Tales on a road trip—may fit in there just about as well as Chloe will.

After a few more details about the town, McQuiston brings us back to the present timeline of the novel: “It’s just a town by some water where nothing interesting ever happens. And, in what Chloe has learned is the nature of small towns, when one thing does happen, everyone knows about it. Which means by Monday morning, all anyone wants to talk about is where Shara could have gone.” And here’s where McQuiston does something very interesting—they give us examples of the town talk, without identifying it as such:

The effect is almost like Chloe is parroting these lines back to us, putting mocking emphasis on certain words. It’s an Austen-esque technique, akin to the much-discussed free indirect discourse, in which dialogue is implied rather than quoted and filtered through a point-of-view character who gives it her own spin. (I touched on this technique in my discussion of Matrix.) By the end of this passage, we tilt more firmly to something we are beginning to identify as Chloe’s voice: “It’s a miracle nobody has put her [Shara’s] likeness on like, the side of a butter container yet.”

McQuiston then does start giving us direct quotations, though unattributed to specific speakers:

See how different these feel from the reported lines above, delivered straight this time, without Chloe’s mocking tone?

Now, get ready for the tour-de-force that comes next:

McQuiston transitions seamlessly from backstory to ‘front story,’ keeping Shara Wheeler as the focus but prioritizing Chloe’s voice and point of view, and then moves us into a live scene in the high school hallway so smoothly that we don’t even notice they’ve done it unless we stop to see how it works. McQuiston has also told us a great deal about Shara’s status in False Beach while making it seem as if they’ve shown it instead. And one more detail I want to call out: Notice how specific the detail about the Sonic shirt is and how much it reveals about Benjy’s socioeconomic status. McQuiston has thought carefully about what Benjy puts in his locker (not the expected textbooks) and makes the detail count.

I’ve got just a few more passages from this chapter I want to show you, all of them illustrating just how much you can do with dialogue. The first comes soon after Benjy’s line above. He and Chloe are standing at their lockers, and Benjy asks Chloe if she’s okay. Her response:

Here again, it’s the in-between space that delivers the goodies. McQuiston fits in a big wedge of character description that is anchored in specific details (those shiny pins) but also tells us a lot about how this character sees herself—as a creative nonconformist. Because the details are sandwiched in between two closely related dialogue lines we imagine being spoken back to back, the pace of the scene doesn’t flag.

As Chloe adds the missing eyeliner that provoked Benjy’s concern, Benjy delivers the reverse effect—a wedge of dialogue absolutely packed with information:

What can we glean from these sentences? Let’s see how much: Benjy is likely gay or bi, but he’s not yet out to his father; this group of friends is tight knit and has regular routines; and Chloe’s mom is respected enough for the group to actually want to watch a movie she suggested (a miracle!). Once again, McQuiston keeps the pace moving by pulling us back to the plot rather than having Chloe respond. Rory Heron is there to join Chloe in the next step of their plan, which is to confront Shara’s boyfriend, Parker Smith (who Chloe later describes as “victim of a tragic first-name last-name, last-name first-name situation”).

The last passage I want to show you is the awkward conversation between these three characters, each of them members of such different social groups that just being seen in conversation together threatens to “rip a hole in the Willowgrove space-time continuum.” Smith is reluctant to talk at first, but Chloe persists. Once again, it’s the white space between dialogue lines where the magic happens. I’m going to give you the passage first with just the dialogue lines so you can see what I mean:

Do you see how flat and ordinary that is, even though this is a dramatic revelation? Very little of the emotions at play come through—perhaps only Rory’s nervousness emerges in his hedging and pausing. Now take a look at the original:

Chloe’s point of view dominates the passage, absorbing the white space even between dialogue lines that aren’t her own. In the midst of Smith’s first line we get a strong dose of Chloe’s scorn not just for him but also for this whole town. Even though she notices the “heaviness around his eyes,” she doesn’t attribute it to the fact that his girlfriend is missing, but rather to some imagined late-night high jinks. Likewise, poor Rory’s nervousness is an opportunity for Chloe to malign his entire gender before depicting herself as the hero.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler showcases the versatility and power of dialogue as a narrative tool, demonstrating how it can simultaneously reveal character, advance plot, deepen themes—and make us laugh. McQuiston’s novels should be studied closely by any writer who wants to find new uses for dialogue in their own work.

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