Black Writers' Guild Workshop: "You Talkin' To Me? Strategies for Effective Dialogue"

On Saturday, May 4, 2019, I attended the Black Writers’ Guild meeting where Margaret Pagan presented a workshop titled “You Talkin’ to Me? Strategies for Effective Dialogue.” Ms. Pagan stated that dialogue is important for many reasons: 1) to learn about the setting and time period of a story, 2) to gain insight about the characters, and 3) to show tension and conflict.

To illuminate these points, she had members from the audience read specific parts of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston to show how masterful Zora was at using dialogue to conjure up images of her characters. The audience members had a blast reading their parts while the rest of us envisioned the setting and how the characters felt about each other.

Next, we broke out in groups of four to read various parts of a short story titled “The Jockey” by Carson McCullers. This story had a lot of twists and turns. However, what I thoroughly enjoyed was how the writer used dialogue to show the intimacy, dislike and love amongst the characters. There were also certain subtleties and undertones based on the description of the characters.

For instance, Sylvester made a comment about the jockey and right away, readers could get a sense of the type of guy the jockey was. See a snippet of the dialogue below.

Sylvester glanced across the room at the jockey and wet the corner of his mouth with his red, fleshy tongue. “An accident. A kid got hurt on the track. Broke a leg and a hip. He was a particular pal of Bitsy’s. An Irish kid. Not a bad rider, either.”

“That’s a pity,” said the rich man.

“Yeah. They were particular friends,” Sylvester said. “You would always find him up in Bitsy’s hotel room. They would be playing rummy or else lying on the floor reading the sports page together.”

Overall, this was a great exercise and a valuable reminder of the importance of dialogue in writing stories. Coupled with all the other writing elements (tension/conflict, character development, scene/setting), you can’t go wrong with this elixir.