Sister Shorthand

I had lunch with my Evil Sister yesterday. She treated, so that makes her slightly less evil. And it was a very expensive lunch, too! Why is my sister Evil? Because our birthdays fall one month and four years apart, and she loves, and I mean LOVES, to emphasize which one of us is OLDER. It's a good think I ordered the expensive shrimp salad.

But as we sat, I noticed how much we talk in shorthand. Sometimes we don't have to finish our train of thought--the other one fills it in. When we talk about a certain relative--they can read this and wonder--we don't have to go through the whole back story, we can cut to the present-day issue.

We couldn't be more different. They don't make 'em any more left-wing liberal than me. She's pretty middle-of-the-road. I am the "flakey, artsy" one. She's a homemaker and really, REALLY good at the job--meant as the highest compliment. You could eat off her floors. Me, you could find the makings of a buffet on my floor, but you wouldn't want to eat it. Me, we have funeral services when the goldfish die. Her? Well, you don't want to know what happened to her beta fish.

And therein, having just been a contest judge not too long ago, is one of the fundamental errors of dialogue. For some writers, it is so natural. The flow, the history, the backstory, the way people who are close to one another KNOW these rich histories in both silly and sad detail, the unresolved crap, and funny stories, the way people simply are. And they have an ability to WRITE that way. So that you BELIEVE that people are actually having this conversation in exactly this way, as if you're just eavesdropping.

And some writers? Filled with tags and falseness. I have NEVER said to my sister, "Well, SIS . . . " I have never said to her, "Remember that time when we did this or that as a family in the summer of 1972, you would have been 6 then, and if you remember, that was the year you loved the Beatles, and . . . ." In families, there's a shorthand. Our role as writer is to write the dialogue in a way that is utterly natural . . . and yet doesn't leave the reader TOO far out in the Land of Confusion. It's a fine line, and I think it's either easy for you or it isn't.

I don't need to be told cops and undertakers have a morbid sense of humor. Just let the dialogue tell me that. I don't need to be told teachers sometimes bring home this sing-song kindergarten-teacher voice to their own families. Show it. Let the dialogue do its dance. Sisters are close? Show it.

True story . . . once I brought an old boyfriend home with me for a weekend. My sisters (I have two) hadn't seen each other--all in the same room--in a while, at least 8 or 9 months at that point. I had long since moved out, one was off in college, and so on. We were excited to see each other and conversation flew. About five minutes into it, he started laughing. I asked him why, and he said (remember, my sisters and I are New Yorkers), "I JUST realized you were speaking English."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"This whole time, you three were talking so fast, it didn't sound like English. I assumed you lapsed into Polish or Russian when you were all together."

THAT'S how fast we spoke, like some strange staccatto.

Capturing "THAT" precise way of family and friends . . . is the writer's task.

So tell me . . . do you notice clunky dialogue? Doyou speak shorthand with someone? And how does this all translate into your dialogue?