A year or two ago, a novel by Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train, was all the rage. It seemed to me that it was mentioned every time I turned on the radio, and people, including some of my friends, were reading it. It was touted as providing an exceptionally good example of the “unreliable narrator” in fiction.

Being a novelist, this, of course, interested me. But I didn’t rush out to buy it because, like so many fiction writers, I needed to wait till the price came down.

And then I heard the book was being made into a movie, so sometime later when my husband and I were perusing free movies we could download on the computer, I leapt with excitement when I saw The Girl on the Train on the list. I insisted we watch it.

“It’s a mystery,” I told him. “It’s based on a highly acclaimed novel. You’ll like it.”

Well, we watched that movie. And I think maybe it did involve an unreliable narrator – or at least an unreliable character—but it didn’t seem to be the story I’d heard about. It was a very strange movie, so it was hard to tell since I hadn’t read the book, but now I was more interested than ever as to whether this was the same story (it wasn’t) and, if not, what the other Girl on the Train was actually about.

And so, you guessed it, I broke down and paid full price for the book.

Was it intriguing? Yes. Was it well written? Basically, yes. Was it a good mystery? Yes. Was it creative? Definitely. Kudos to author Paula Hawkins.

But, in my opinion, it had a problem:

During longer dialogue passages, I often mistook who was speaking because both of the speakers sounded the same.

Granted, these were English women of the same general age who lived in the same area, so it makes sense that their choice of words and syntax would be quite similar, but in a work of fiction, the writer needs to make each character’s speech distinctive enough that readers can easily know who is speaking in a lengthy dialogue passage without needing continual dialogue tags to remind them.

Is one character vivacious and the other quite reticent? This should be evident in their conversation. Does one character have a favorite expression that frequently peppers zir speech? If so, use it. Does one character tend to be direct when asking or answering questions while the other hems and haws around, asking only hesitantly and giving only reluctant, evasive answers? This, too, should be evident in the dialogue.

These are devices you can use to help guide the reader through lengthy dialogue without constantly interrupting it to tell the reader who is speaking.

But what if the dialogue is short and clipped, consisting mainly of one- or two-word questions, answers, and comments? That, I admit, presents a challenge. Unless, of course, you’re novelist John Sandford, who can easily peg police investigator Virgil Flowers with the single expression, “Huh.”

Isn’t it amazing how often the best answer to a problem is a simple one?

Huh.

© 2017 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.

Photo: Knock, Knock! © 2017 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.