Jul 14 2008
A Good Beat Saves the Song
Kestrel hints at her insecurities while beating on a practice dummy. Hoyt talks politics while conducting tests on the stones he conducts magic with. Tuyet sips tea and works on her reports until her friend’s angst kicks in, then offers a shoulder to cry on. Karasu lets a small wooden ball run up and down his hands as he jokes with his friends, occasionally laughing because having his hair preened by his crow tickles.
All dialogue and nothing else makes a story into a festival of talking heads. Many readers and players, particularly the action-oriented ones, don’t do well with that kind of conversation. For one thing, it makes it easy to lose the image of the characters; they could be doing just about anything, dancing or fighting or doing dishes or just floating in a sea of color. For another, lack of detail drains a scene of its uniqueness, turning into something we’ve all seen before.
The answer is beats. Known also as dialogue tags, these little phrases are inserted into dialogue to try to ground it in the world around it. They can be as simple as this: “Don’t you see?” She tossed a strand of hair over her shoulder. “The difference is obvious.” Or for the more ambitious, a conversation can run something like this.
“So what do you do in here?” Nina stepped closer.
“Experiment, mostly.” Hoyt didn’t bother looking up from his current project, chiseling away at the chunk of blue stone in front of him. “Watch the floor there, it’s a bit scorched.”
Nina looked down at the floor and stepped around the blackened bit. “…do I want to know?”
“A spell blew up on me.” Hoyt lifted up the stone to look at it more closely, then started hammering at it again.
She knelt down closer to it and looked more closely. “And what sort of spell was this?”
Hoyt yelped as the chisel slipped and hit his finger. Nina looked up at him; this time he looked back at her, laughing wryly. “One to protect me from spell backfire.”
See what I mean? If that had been just the dialogue, would you have gotten near as good an image from it?
The most common beat is the speaker’s action, whether direct or in response to something else. Some formats are stronger than others; while “Yada yada yada,” he said, verbing his noun is popular, it isn’t quite as strong as “Yada yada yada.” He verbed his noun.
Beats can also be used to grant a little extra description. Want to call attention to your protagonist’s blue eyes? Have someone look at them. (Just don’t have them spend the next paragraph gushing over how blue they are. There are quite a few reasons.) Need to point out that the strange girl is wearing a necklace? Have her play with it. Looking for a way to show someone’s mood changing over the course of a conversation? Use lots and lots of body language.
Other, more immediate things can be gotten across with the beat. Take a look at the conversation above: in the second paragraph, I get across that Hoyt’s more concerned with his work than his guest by not having him look up, and give the reader an idea what this work is, then reinforce this image in the fourth. The fifth illustrates Nina’s curiosity; she could have just stepped past it and kept talking. And then there’s the last paragraph. Hoyt’s clearly slightly embarrassed by Nina’s question, or at least distracted; though he hasn’t had this kind of problem with multitasking for the entire conversation, his chisel goes straight to his finger rather than his project. I also get to demonstrate his way of handling such situations; he laughs at himself as he explains what happened to the floor.
Beats are like spices; inserting them can add flavor to any sort of scene. I’ve seen people who were bored out of their wits by the thought of standard conversation scenes enjoying themselves a lot more once we broke out the body language and let them see what was going on. So if your dialogue bores even you, or stretches on for pages, give it some good beats and set it straight.
