Who Has Emotional Control? Using Dialogue to Define Relationships

When reading fiction I'm often struck by the pronounced difference between an author who understands how RELATIONSHIPS control and define dialogue, and an author who is less aware of this.

The skilled author, for instance, understands that people who know one another very well, such as lovers, conspirators, work colleagues, old married people, members of the same family or best friends, don't need to share facts that are held in common (these facts are called 'exposition'). What they do share is a manner of communicating that has been developed over time and contact through shared experiences or shared feeling.

It may be very fully, positively developed, with the exchange of feelings and intentions intuited on certain levels and with understanding complete, or it may be well developed but in a negative manner, a manner that typically has forced one person to adjust over time for the toxic characteristics of the other in order to have any meaningful communication at all. The latter relationship will rely less on shared intuition than on shared history and will involve varying amounts of guilt, antipathy, recriminations, and the like.

Whether the characters engaged in dialogue know one another well or not, the skilled author will also be conscious of and will make it clear to the reader which person holds emotional control in the relationship. By "EMOTIONAL CONTROL" we mean: who has the power? The leverage? Who has information the other one doesn't have? Who may be withholding something that the other one wants or needs? It's critical that the writer understands this component of control when crafting the relationship in order to provide dynamic movement to the scenes within a novel, the mechanical plot-generator of action v. reaction that we discussed in the previous blog post (The Trigger and the Heap).

In my opinion, the talent and skill of a particular writer can be measured by his or her ability to delineate the small relationships a primary character has with secondary ones. The fact that these relationships may occupy less "floor space" than the major relationships in no way excuses them from being less believable, and may in fact allow for insights just as breathtaking as those offered in the dialogues between key characters.

Consider how this is done in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. The title character in the novel is a strange, prickly, repressed, and not very likable middle-aged woman. And yet in this novel-in-stories she emerges as somehow admirable because of how fearlessly she "owns" who she is, and in the process of being Olive she emerges as remarkably funny and relatable.

Because so many of her interactions with people are characterized by few words, much must be conveyed in her laconic lines, especially when the interaction is emotionally intense or highly charged. I love a particular, concentrated section of dialogue between Olive and a fellow teacher at the junior high school in her small Maine town. We learn that when she was 44 Olive found herself "swept off her feet" by the 53 year old Jim Casey when he began giving her a ride to school every day. They have never kissed or been intimate; have never even touched, and yet an understanding -- a powerful mutual attraction -- has grown palpable between them. One day when the two of them are eating their lunches in Jim's office he says:

"If I asked you to leave with me, would you do it?
"Yes," she said.
He watched her as he ate the apple he always had for lunch, nothing else. "You would go home tonight and ask Henry?"
"Yes," she said. It was like planning a murder.
"Perhaps it's a good thing I haven't asked you."
"Yes."
(Strout)

Nothing more needs to be said at this point. Olive's feelings are crystal clear, and because of this, she holds emotional control. In a tricky way, however, she lets Jim know in this exchange that she is GIVING control to him. She lets Jim Casey know that she is willing, without a doubt, and now HE must decide if they will be bold together and follow their hearts, if they will abandon their jobs, families (he has a "shoe full of children") and homes for each other and run away to start new lives.

Instead, a few days later, her husband Henry breaks the news to Olive that Jim drove his car into a tree and is not expected to survive. He dies the next day.

"I don't believe it," she kept saying to Henry. "What happened?" (Strout)

But she knows what happened, and so do we, because of the dialogue Strout crafted between them. Jim wasn't as resolute as Olive. He wasn't brave. Instead of making a choice between staying with his wife, his children, and his job at the school or eloping with Olive, he chose death, which is no choice at all. It was simply his way of NOT MAKING the choice Olive offered to him. Olive is furious with Jim for disappointing her -- for turning out to be so ordinary in his indecisiveness. Not brave at all.

And all of this human drama is accomplished with a spartan economy of dialogue: the best kind.


Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. New York, Random House, 2008.
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Published on February 16, 2019 13:09 Tags: dialogue, elizabeth-strout, emotional-control, olive-kitteridge, relationships
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