March 16, 2006
I'm reading Tami Hoag's "Prior Bad Acts" to review. It's the first time I've read anything by this bestseller, although I may have listened to a couple of her books-on-tape. Something caught my interest. She does this repeatedly, but here's an excerpt:

"I'm telling you the plain truth, Amber," Liska said without emotion. "I'm doing you a favor telling you. If you don't straighten up and at least pretend to be a good citizen, the parole board is not going to be all that anxious to kick you back out into the real world. That's how it is.

"You're pulling real time here. This isn't county jail, where they're happy to watch your ass walk out the door because they need the bed," Liska said. "Unlike a lot of other places, the State of Minnesota has plenty of prison cells to go around.

"Am I getting through to you here? I don't want to make things hard for you, Amber. I really don't. I don't even want to be here right now. I've got two kids of my own. I'd like to be spending time with them.

"I'm sure, as a mother, you can understand that. You remember what it was like. Your kids look up to you like you've got the key to the world. That love is like no other. That bond is stronger than anything."

Now, just so you know, this is a homicide cop talking to the incarcerated junkie whose two children, who were placed in a foster home, has been murdered, and the cop is trying to work her into giving her any clue as to who might be stalking the judge in the murder case.

But the reason I bring this up is this is a long stretch of dialogue, one person speaking, and Hoag breaks it up into four separate paragraphs. She does this a lot, although this is the most dramatic example I've come across.

Pros: It's generally accepted that in commercial fiction, you should keep your paragraphs short. Lots of white space. All those long blocks of content can put off readers. Don't agree? Fine, don't agree, but I think the point has some merit. So I'm fairly positive that Hoag is doing this intentionally to keep the blocks short, which gives readers some mental reprieve, but also keeps the pace snappy. Joe Konrath noted that if you look at bestsellers and count the paragraphs per page, there tends to be more of them. That seems to be rather mechanistic and obsessive of Joe, but he's probably right.

Con: One of the reasons this has been so noticable to me is that when I have a paragraph break in the middle of dialogue, I tend to interpret that as another person is speaking or narration is coming up. In thise case, the quotation marks indicates it's dialogue, so my brain is saying, "Okay, another speaker." But it's not another speaker, and this is flinging me out of the story a little bit, which is a bad thing.

Note that Hoag uses a character tag in the first two paragraphs, ie., Liska said. In the third paragraph she uses the name of the person who is being spoken to, Amber.

I'm not sure this is a recommended approach, although Hoag has been enormously successful. In this case my approach would have been to have Amber try to interrupt and Liska to talk over. I think that creates urgency, heightens tension, and frankly, that's how people talk in the real world, often on top of each other. Here's an example if I were to rewrite the above, with apologies to Ms. Hoag:

"I'm telling you the plain truth, Amber," Liska said without emotion. "I'm doing you a favor telling you. If you don't straighten up and at least pretend to be a good citizen, the parole board is not going to be all that anxious to kick you back out into the real world. That's how it--"

"Mind your own business, bi--"

"You're pulling real time here. This isn't county jail, where they're happy to watch your ass walk out the door because they need the bed," Liska said. "Unlike a lot of other places, the State of Minnesota has plenty of prison cells to go aro--"

"They can have mine, it's all theirs. I didn't do nothing. And I'm gonna sue--"

"Am I getting through to you here? I don't want to make things hard for you, Amber. I really don't. I don't even want to be here right now. I've got two kids of my own. I'd like to be spending time with them."


So you've got options. Hoag's are interesting.

Best,
Mark Terry