by Youngbear Roth

Created on: May 04, 2010   Last Updated: November 09, 2010

Volumes have been unnecessarily written on the art of dialogue.  Simplicity is best.  If you want to write great dialogue, listen to the maddening crowd.  Our ability to communicate self-awareness couched in words of hopes and dreams, suffering and challenges, to speak with one another about our daily lives, is uniquely human.  When two people touch each other using words, they discover a dialogue.  Often, what makes our dialogue fascinating is that we ask questions no other species can ask.  'Well written dialogue is probing and begs a reply':

"We make love, and you claim in the heat of passion to love me, but what's that?  I'm a White conquest, that's all.  I wonder sometimes, afterwards, do you know me?  Do I hold an attraction for you beneath my flesh?"

Sitting in a coffee shop, I overheard the woman in the next booth ask those questions of her gentleman friend.  I sat riveted to my spot, praying the waitress would not speak requesting my order until I'd heard the gentleman's reply.  I knew there wasn't a way to honestly answer his date's questions without revealing something intimate about himself; about the way he conducts his relationships.  I had to know if he lived in fear of human commitment, or was he a sincere individual?  Perhaps, his words would reveal him as selfish.  Would his feelings echo any of my own?  Like most people, I wondered how much alike we were.  How different?  I knew that his reply, if genuine, if spoken from the heart, must be a revealing one.  I found myself wishing to empathize and identify with my kind.  'Interesting dialogue reveals character':

"That you venture to query is evil."  Below the table, he took one of her hands in his.  "I love your evil.  Of course, you're a White conquest, but a brown-skinned woman would be passive and never dare ask.  They like to feel they have no choice in the matter, and we senors, we like it that way."

As I suspected, he's a chauvinist cad!  Wait, he's breathing the deep breath, winding up for the big pitch, the 'con de la con'.  Oh, sweetheart, watch yourself.  This man can't be trusted:

"Except that I was born different, not a senor, but a poet.  I was born to step outside my culture, to transcend it, so that I'm very much a Mexican-American and still something more.  To be a poet is to give it up in front of the world, for your audience, it's 'machismo'

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