One of the questions I’ve been asking in these Novel Study posts is this one: What is new in fiction these days? It’s the reason I’ve focused only on books that have appeared in the last few years. So far, I’ve seen evidence of a tempering of the show-don’t-tell maxim, a fresh new way to use omniscient narration, and now, in I Kissed Shara Wheeler, some clever dialogue tricks. Let’s take a close look at how Casey McQuiston uses dialogue so you can apply the techniques to your own work.

We analyzed the opening of the novel in our last post, so start there if you want to get the lay of the land. We’ll focus on chapter two in this post so as not to give too much of the plot away.

Chapter 2 starts with a chunk of backstory telling us how Chloe ended up in the wonderfully named False Beach, Alabama. Cleverly, McQuiston keeps even this backstory oriented around the mystery of the missing Shara Wheeler: Chloe remembers that the first thing she saw in False Beach was an enormous billboard featuring Shara as part of an advertisement for Willowgrove Christian Academy, the high school both girls attend.

Note, too, that McQuiston livens up this backstory by grounding it in a specific scene—the moment Chloe’s family first drive into town—complete with a single dialogue exchange:

“What kind of name is False Beach?” Chloe asked her mom for the five thousandth miserable time that day as they glided under Shara’s billboard. It was a question she’d been asking since her mom first told her the name of her hometown.

“It’s a beach but it’s not,” her mom answered, same as always, and her other mom flipped a page in The Canterbury Tales, and they kept driving out of the California sunset and into the buttcrack of Alabama.

Notice how much work the space around the dialogue lines is doing. The lines themselves are quite ordinary—just a pretext for delivering details that bring both Chloe and her mother (or one of her mothers) into focus. We learn that this move from California to “the buttcrack of Alabama” is not a happy one for Chloe. (I spent a lot of time as a child with my grandparents in Decatur, Alabama, further up that buttcrack, and I can attest that I, too, would have been very unhappy to be moved there permanently as a teenager.) We can also guess that Chloe’s mother may have been happy to leave the town behind, and that her other mother—the one reading The Canterbury Tales on a road trip—may fit in there just about as well as Chloe will.

After a few more details about the town, McQuiston brings us back to the present timeline of the novel: “It’s just a town by some water where nothing interesting ever happens. And, in what Chloe has learned is the nature of small towns, when one thing does happen, everyone knows about it. Which means by Monday morning, all anyone wants to talk about is where Shara could have gone.”

And here’s where she does something very interesting—she gives us examples of the town talk, without identifying it as such:

Shara Wheeler’s so pretty. Shara Wheeler’s so smart. Shara Wheeler has never been mean to anyone in her life. Shara Wheeler has the voice of an angel, actually, but she’s never auditioned for a spring musical because she doesn’t want to take the spotlight away from students who need it more.

The effect is almost like Chloe is parroting these lines back to us, putting mocking emphasis on certain words. It’s an Austen-esque technique, akin to the much-discussed free indirect discourse, in which dialogue is implied rather than quoted and filtered through a point-of-view character who gives it her own spin. (We touched on free indirect discourse in our pandemic tour through Austen’s Persuasion.) By the end of this passage, we tilt more firmly to something we are beginning to identify as Chloe’s voice: “It’s a miracle nobody has put her [Shara’s] likeness on like, the side of a butter container yet.”

McQuiston then does start giving us direct quotations, though unattributed to specific speakers:

Today:

“I heard nobody’s seen her since prom night.”

“I heard Smith broke up with her and she lost it.”

“I heard she ran away to build houses for the homeless.”

See how different these feel from the reported lines above, delivered straight this time, without Chloe’s mocking tone?

Now, get ready for the tour-de-force that comes next:

“I heard she’s secretly pregnant and her parents sent her away until she gives birth so nobody finds out.”

“That’s literally a plotline from Riverdale, idiot,” Benjy calls after a passing sophomore. He sighs and carefully lays his folded Sonic uniform polo for his after-school shift at the bottom of his locker.

Note how McQuiston has transitioned seamlessly from backstory to ‘front story’, keeping Shara Wheeler as the focus but prioritizing Chloe’s voice and point of view, and then moves us into a live scene in the high school hallway so smoothly that we don’t even notice she’s done it unless we stop to see how it works. She’s also told us a great deal about Shara’s status in False Beach while making it seem as if she’s showing it instead. And one more detail I want to call out: notice how specific the detail about the Sonic shirt is and how much it reveals about Benjy’s socioeconomic status.

I’ve got just a few more passages from this chapter I want to show you, all of them illustrating just how much you can do with dialogue. The first comes soon after Benjy’s line above. He and Chloe are standing at their lockers, and Benjy asks Chloe if she’s okay. Her response:

“Of course I’m good,” Chloe says, straightening her shiny silver collar pins. Georgia describes her interpretation of the uniform as “doing the most.” Chloe describes it as “please let me feel one sweet hit of individuality before it’s squeezed out of me by lunch.” It’s whatever. “Why wouldn’t I be good?”

Here again, it’s the in-between space that delivers the goodies. McQuiston fits in a big wedge of character description that is anchored in specific details (those shiny pins) but also tells us a lot about how this character sees herself—as a creative nonconformist. Because the details are sandwiched in between two closely related dialogue lines that we imagine being spoken back to back, the pace of the scene doesn’t flag.

As Chloe adds the missing eyeliner that provoked Benjy’s concern, Benjy delivers the reverse effect: a wedge of dialogue absolutely packed with information:

“Anyway,” Benjy says, picking their conversation back up. “I told Georgia that we have to do movie night at her place this week because Ash wants to watch that Labyrinth movie your mom mentioned, and if my dad walks in and sees David Bowie’s junk in white spandex, he is going to have some questions that I’m not interested in answering. So, we’re—” He breaks off. “Um. Why is Rory Heron coming over here?”

What can we glean from these sentences? Let’s see how much: Benjy is likely gay or bi; this group of friends (which includes Georgia and Ash, neither present) are close enough to have regular movie nights; Chloe’s mom is respected enough by this group of teenagers for them to actually want to watch a movie she suggested (a miracle!) and the mom clearly gave Benjy the relevant detail about the visibility of David Bowie’s junk, signaling that she’s fine with Benjy’s sexuality while his own father might not be. Note, too, that McQuiston once again keeps the pace moving by pulling us back to the plot rather than having Chloe respond. Rory Heron is there to join Chloe in the next step of their plan to find Shara, which is to confront her boyfriend, Parker Smith (who Chloe later describes as “victim of a tragic first-name last-name, last-name first-name situation”).

The last passage I want to show you takes us to the awkward conversation between these three, each of them members of such different social groups that just being seen in conversation together threatens to “rip a hole in the Willowgrove space-time continuum.” Smith is reluctant to talk at first, but Chloe persists. Once again, it’s the white space between dialogue lines where the magic happens. I’m going to give you the passage first with just the dialogue lines so you can see what I mean:

Smith: “Look, I had a long weekend. Can y’all just—”

Rory: “I kissed Shara.”

Smith: “What?”

Rory: “I mean, uh . . . she, uh—before she left, we, um—”

Chloe: “He kissed Shara. And so did I. I mean, she kissed me, if we’re being specific. But I kissed her back.”

Do you see how flat and ordinary that is, even though this is a dramatic revelation? Very little of the emotions at play come through—perhaps only Rory’s nervousness emerges in his hedging and pausing. Now take a look at the original:

“Look, I had a long weekend,” Smith says, turning to her. This time, she can see heaviness around his eyes. She wonders how he spent his Sunday—probably cow tipping with the boys or something. “Can y’all just—”

Rory blurts out, “I kissed Shara.”

Smith freezes. Rory freezes. Untipped cows on the edge of town freeze.

When Smith speaks again, his voice is low. “What?”

“I mean, uh,” Rory says. It’s almost funny, the way all his class-cutting, shoe-gazing edginess shrinks into nothing. Boys are so embarrassing. “She, uh—before she left, we, um—”

“He kissed Shara. And so did I,” Chloe says, stepping up like the Spartacus of people who have kissed Smith Parker’s girlfriend. “I mean, she kissed me, if we’re being specific. But I kissed her back.”

Chloe’s point of view dominates the passages, absorbing the white space even between dialogue lines that aren’t her own. In the midst of Smith’s first line we get a strong dose of Chloe’s scorn not just for him but also for this whole town. Likewise, poor Rory’s nervousness is an opportunity for Chloe to malign his entire gender before depicting herself as the hero.

McQuiston is delivering a master class in how to get the most out of dialogue, and her novels are worth studying for anyone who wants to find new uses for dialogue in their own work.

Takeaways:

• Use a snippet of dialogue to liven up a backstory recollection.

• Consider using reported speech to give the sense of a community’s reaction to an event. If it makes sense for your narration style, you can filter this speech through the point of view of your narrator.

• Use the white space around dialogue to reveal details about the character speaking. Bracketing those details between two dialogue lines keeps the pace lively.

• Use dialogue lines to sneakily hint at important facts about a character rather than revealing them directly.

• If you are using a limited, close narration style, you can allow your point-of-view character to take over the white space in another character’s dialogue paragraph with their own thoughts and reactions.