Dialogue, and those pesky pronoms relatifs!
Dialogue
is my favorite part of fiction.
I love to
write it, and I love to read it. I love it when (my) characters talk. It
accomplishes the “show, don't tell” rule – which we writers must obey – nicely.
It also moves the story along and is a good time for conflict to arise. It can
be serious, funny, embarrassing, comforting, sincere, deceptive, despairing,
upbeat, or – pretty much anything.
My
novel MAKE THAT DEUX is written in the “first person” point of
view, and the main character, Jenny Miles, even talks to herself (not out
loud, normalement) – she often uses “internal dialogue” to reflect
about life, the French, men, etc. During her year in France, she talks to her
boyfriend back in the States on the telephone only a few times, since it’s very
expensive. But he also “speaks” to her regularly through handwritten letters
mailed across the Atlantic.
Meanwhile, Jenny talks to her roommates and other
friends – usually in English – while doing her best at school and elsewhere to
learn to speak fluent French. She's been studying the language for years, and
she can understand it most of the time - la plupart du temps. Which
is fortunate, since all of her college classes are taught en français,
complete with “blue book” written exams and the occasional oral exam thrown in.
Fast forward to the present, and my love of
dialogue. Récemment, my French (conversation) class, taught by
Madame Marie-Hélène, has been reviewing relative pronouns. You know: those
necessary words that we don't think about, but that we use all the time (and
that make our dialogue flow more easily): who, that, which, what, whose,
whoever, whom, whomever, of which, whichever, where and when.
Most of which are necessary in dialogue.
Voici des pronoms relatifs en français, which I’ve been trying to use often enough to say
without thinking: qui (who, which, that), que (whom, which, that, what), dont (whose, of whom, of which), and où (where, when). For some reason, dont is my favorite; it seems simple, but it's really not, and it doesn’t sound anything like “don’t.”
Some other relative pronouns are used just with
certain verbs, and are somewhat trickier (I’ll let you guess the translations):
auquel, auquelle, auxquels, and auxquelles. Yet
others are used only in certain cases: avec qui, en qui, chez qui,
près de qui, à côté de qui; ce que, ce qui; sur/sans/dans/chez lequel (or
laquelle); and, of course, simply à laquelle.
The point is: An author must know the rules
before breaking them... no matter what language!
Twitter @MakeThatJulie
MAKE THAT DEUX (click to go to Amazon)
