Guest Post: TJ Kahn Reveals the Unheard of in Fantasy

Have you ever read dialogue like this?

     "We'll need the Spear of Glorgon to kill the Pit-Fiend Czhnarboth."

     "Yes, we will. Do you know where the Spear of Glorgon may be found?"

     "Sadly, it was lost centuries ago in the Empire of Cardel."

     "Then finding it will be the ultimate test of our powers."

     "True, and surely the gods of light will favor us."

One of the most common reasons dialogue gets boring is that it turns into a type of conversational ping-pong. Speakers volley lines of speech back and forth at each other. Each serve is neatly and appropriately returned. You’ve probably played a game or two of ping-pong like that yourself.

Think about the first time you ever picked up a paddle (in my mind, you’re in your uncle’s shag-carpeted basement.) You’re immensely proud of yourself for just getting it back and forth over the net. But it is also, effectively, a kind of stalemate””the ball goes back and forth, but nothing changes. And, after a while, it’s boring.

But a professional game of ping-pong, when you watch talented, competitive players? Not boring at all. After talking to ping-pong players and reading about the game, I think I know one reason why.

More than once I’ve come across the phrase “ping-pong is a game of spin.” If volleying the ball back and forth is the beginner level, then spin is at the heart of competitive ping-pong. It alters the movement of the ball so that the predictable becomes unpredictable. It’s what makes play volatile, explosive, unexpected””interesting.

Spin has the same effect in dialogue. It’s basically what it sounds like: a turn, a twist, a deviation.

The problem with ping-pong dialogue is that it’s so predictable: everyone stays on topic, everyone responds to the questions they’re asked, everyone provides accurate information. Dialogue with spin, in contrast, goes in unexpected directions. Since one of the reasons readers read is because they want to know the answer to a question, dialogue with spin draws readers into a story by raising (and partially answering) new questions.

How do you generate spin? A few ways, actually. Let me offer you three.

Give your characters an agenda.

When each character in a conversation has an agenda, it means that they have a goal””and, since you’re a talented writer and you have conflict bred in your bones, you know that these characters have different goals. Those goals help produce spin as each character attempts to steer the conversation toward their desired end. If, for example, you are working on dialogue between an exhausted detective and an amorous witness, you might have a great deal of fun as their competing agendas inflect their conversation in different ways.

Allow for subtext.

While subtext often naturally arises from giving characters an agenda, the two are not interchangeable.

Subtext is the text around and behind and between the words””the text that never makes it into text. When a character says exactly what they want, you’re dealing with on-the-nose dialogue, which is the clinical condition of having zero subtext. Subtext is about hidden meanings, unverbalized desires, buried insults.

To extend the example above, let’s imagine that our amorous witness is married and can’t directly proposition the detective. The spoken conversation might be exclusively about the crime, while the subtext might be the unspoken thrust-and-parry of an attempted seduction.

Employ “No” Dialogue.

I find this technique to be a great deal of fun. It’s exactly what it sounds like””one character wants something, and the other refuses to give it to them. The fun comes in finding ways to make the refusals””and there should be a number of them””indirect and distinct, without the character repeating themself. Often, this becomes part of both the competing agenda and the subtext; the three work together beautifully. In our example, perhaps the amorous witness is also the police chief’s romantic partner, and the detective’s refusals must be firm but indirect enough not to humiliate and enrage the witness.

Bonus technique: Third-ball Attack

To wrap-up our ping-pong analogy, I’d like to offer you one more idea: the third-ball attack. In ping-pong, this refers to a strategy that goes like this: Player A serves the ball (ball #1), Player B returns it (ball #2), and Player A attacks (ball #3).

Think of this as both a heuristic””a rule-of-thumb diagnostic””and as a technique. If you’re writing dialogue, and you can tell it’s starting to drag, look at the first three lines. If the first three lines are ping-pong dialogue, the likelihood is that the rest of the conversation is, too.

You can break it up by turning that third line into an attack: give the dialogue stakes no later than the third line. One character makes a difficult request, issues an ultimatum, attempts a threat, initiates a seduction””whatever it is, it has to commit them to a risky course of action so that, succeed or fail, there are consequences.

Final Considerations

Is the sky the limit with spin? Not exactly. There’s a point of diminishing returns, even a point where it becomes counterproductive. Too much spin produces conversations that are hard to follow (whether because of non sequiturs, or because they break genre conventions, or because they become illogical or incomprehensible). These all threaten to alienate the reader. More spin is not necessarily better.

The important things to remember? Ping-pong bad. Spin good. If nothing’s happening, third-ball attack. And remember, just like real people, fictional characters are rarely as good at communicating as they think they are.

What kind of dialogue bores you to sleep? What are your go-to strategies for pepping it up? Who writes your favorite dialogue? Share some examples and tell us why!

Want to improve your dialogue even more? In January 2023, Gregory will be teaching the Odyssey Online class, Angled Dialogue: Crafting Authentic-Sounding Dialogue to Convey Information, Escalate Conflict, and Advance Character-Driven Stories.

Odyssey Online classes combine deep focus, directed study, intensive practice, and detailed feedback to help students learn how to best use the tools and techniques covered to make major improvements in their fiction.

Apply by November 21 at odysseyworkshop.org!

BIO

Gregory Ashe is a bestselling author and longtime Midwesterner. He has lived in Chicago, Bloomington (IN), and Saint Louis, his current home. He primarily writes contemporary mysteries, with forays into romance, fantasy, and horror. Predominantly, his stories feature LGBTQ protagonists. When not reading and writing, he is an educator. He is a graduate of the Odyssey workshop and has returned to teach there. For more information, visit his website: www.gregoryashe.com.

Hard science fiction tells stories based on the hardest of hard sciences, particularly on the engineering and technological application of these sciences. If a story doesn’t have space ships, terraforming, anti-grav, robots, or semi-accurate descriptions of planetary orbits and atmospheres, it cannot join the elite ranks of hard SF.

Any story which dips overly much into issues of society, culture, or what it means to be human, is often tagged as soft science fiction. Even cyberpunk, a high-tech genre, is usually considered soft, because of its thematic commentary on the fallen state of mankind.

The implication is that hard SF is somehow “better”, just as the hard sciences are “better”. Physics is a hard science. Psychology is not. Psychology is assumed to be flimsy, weak, inaccurate, and easy. “Soft.” Therefore, SF that deals with it is equally easy.

This division seems a little unfair, because to me the “soft” sciences are arguably far more complex than hard sciences. Physics and chemistry picked up the low-hanging fruit of empirical discovery, those aspects of our universe that could easily be discovered by looking through a microscope, telescope, or mass spectrometer. But understanding the interplay of synaptic pathways? That takes advanced tools like fMRIs and scanning electron microscopes, which have only recently been invented.

All Freud and Jung had in 1900 was instinct and anecdote. So their research consisted of conjecture. Conjecture which has been built upon and advanced greatly since their time.

Access to technology is now blurring the line between soft and hard sciences. Soft SF concepts that used to require a certain amount of hand-waving can now be written about with a foundation in actual research.

It should follow that the line between soft and hard SF should also blur. And in many ways, this process has already occurred.

I remember reading my father’s shelf of classic authors, like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke (but also soft science-fictionist Bradbury). My young mind didn’t care that all the characters were cardboard cutouts, barely-human actors there only to convey the ideas. Because for me, the ideas were most important.

But mere ideas, as cool as they are, flicker over the surface of our minds, the frontal lobe of the neocortex. They fail to reach into the occluded recesses of emotion and subconscious. They fail to spark our deeper neurological wiring.

Some golden era stories did dabble in psychology, but they did so at a clinical distance. For example, the classic novel Foundation depicted a science called “psychohistory” ““ only at arm’s length. Psychohistory dispassionately crunched numbers to predict how people in masses move inevitably towards some end. But these stories weren’t really about the people themselves.

As I grew up, and as SF grew up, readers began to demand real characters. They wanted to see how the technology affected human beings. There was a realization that without people, science was meaningless, and the outer space we sought to explore would simply be an empty, darkened void.

Mainstream fiction has always focused on an exploration of humanity. The golden age of SF set itself apart as a genre by instead exploring ideas about the future. Since then, it has come back around to become a reflection of ourselves via an exploration of the future. The future has become ancillary to the purpose of SF.

A story that doesn’t mean something beyond the idea is not likely to be published. It’s not enough anymore to fire off dopamine in a reader’s neocortex. A story that doesn’t also evoke some emotion or spark some unknown “thing” in the hidden depths of our hearts is unlikely to be noticed.

Psychology and neuroscience has grown up, too. But we’ve never needed it to. Psychology is often discounted as “squishy,” but that’s because the mind itself is squishy. Many of Carl Jung’s insights 100 years ago still apply today. Modern science is simply discovering how the underlying cells and chemicals work to create the behaviors and mental dynamics he and his contemporaries observed.

And we’re discovering more parts of the mind than even Jung’s two-part consciousness vs. unconsciousness model suggested. An engineer or astrophysicist might prefer the simple, predictable mechanics of a one-brain, one-mind model, (hard science!), but to accept that would be in denial of the facts.

Many may be tempted to laugh at the hand-wavy woo of Jung’s “collective unconscious.” But is it really so silly now that we’re learning about how culture spreads and how about “memes” may be thought of as living creatures that reside in our minds and self-replicate to everyone who comes into contact with them?

Getting a bit meta here (because a mind exploring the mind is intrinsically meta), science fiction has always unconsciously acknowledged psychological principles. By way of example, dreams are a common fictional vehicle to represent thematic elements of a character’s past. This is classic Jungian psychology, and as authors and artists, we know the power of symbolic metaphor firsthand.

Yet how often do we address these ideas head-on, with self-awareness, making the reader aware of the processes of her own brain as she’s reading? Wouldn’t such stories act fully in the spirit of science fiction, which has always asked the reader to ponder her place in the universe, to ponder her own relationship to the ideas of the story?

It’s time to consciously embrace the mind sciences in science fiction. It’s our responsibility, because as a society, we will soon begin to feel the impact in our own lives. Science fiction needs to step up and fill its predictive role, both warning us and giving us hope. Warning us of the dangers of advancement, while simultaneously inspiring future engineers in how to apply the discoveries we’re making right now.

Because what could be more disruptive (both constructively and destructively) than a comprehensive understanding of the human mind? I’m not just talking about obvious technologies, like neural implants, but also developments in how we practice the art of existing in fully understood self-awareness. How might we structure society to account for a better understanding of what nature has already given us?

Moreover, in past-SF, we’ve treated the obvious tech (like neural implants) like toaster oven technology (nifty conveniences) ignoring the probable fact that these technologies will change us at our innermost core. Just as social media has transformed how we relate to one another, “upgrading” ourselves will transform what it means to be human.

And though these scenarios are difficult to imagine (because how else can we relate to our fiction except through our current understanding of humanity?), it’s our responsibility to close our eyes and imagine it. We need to grapple with these disruptions via fiction before the changes come.

Here are just a few questions we ought to explore:

• As we discover more neurotypes and cease to pathologize them, how will society change?
• What if we could all see a live map (fMRI-style) of our minds on our smartphones?
• Forget flying cars ““ how would the world be different if we could end the cycle of abuse, both in homes and in our public institutions? And how can we end those cycles of abuse? (Yes, this is science fiction!)
• How can we explore newly discovered aspects of the human brain by telling stories of alien beings that take those aspects to extremes?
• As we gain a better understanding of psycho-social manipulation, can we develop technologies (in the form of memes perhaps) that counter it?

Discoveries now tell us that the digestive tract literally is a mind of its own, and that the nerves throughout our bodies may play a much larger role in memory and thinking processes than previously thought. My words in this post may have triggered neurons in your left elbow. This point alone is worth a hundred science fiction stories.

And if that’s not hard SF, I’m not sure what really is.

Bio: Luna Lindsey lives in Bellevue, WA. Her first story (about a hippopotamus) crawled out of her head at age 4. After running out of things to say about hippopotami, she switched to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also became an accidental expert on mind control, autism, computers, and faeries. Her stories have appeared in The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Penumbra eMag, and Crossed Genres. She tweets like a bird @lunalindsey, intermittently blogs at www.lunalindsey.com, and publishes entire novels and nonfiction tomes at http://amazon.com/author/lunalindsey. Her novel, Emerald City Dreamer, is about faeries in Seattle and the women who hunt them.
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