I’m working on the first draft of a new novel set in 1920 in my native southeastern Illinois. At that time, Prohibition created an opportunity for bootleggers which, of course, led to violence as most illegal operations tend to do. That’s only one part of the book I’m trying to write. The KKK was prominent in this place at that time, and the thing I find interesting is while their white supremacy was obviously abhorrent, they also took a stand against the bootleggers, thereby setting themselves up as the defenders of law and order. So much depends, then, on who’s looking at these Klansmen, and what they’re carrying with them when they’re considering how they should feel.

One of my narrators is the teenage son of one of the Klansmen. The boy has apprenticed himself to a local veterinarian, a Black man everyone calls Doc, and through him, the boy has learned that several farmers have had horses die from what Doc suspects is arsenic poisoning. All of these farmers are also bootleggers. One of them, Mr. Pool, goes missing. That’s the context for what I’m about to share with you.

Sometimes when I’m writing a first draft, I forsake narrative and turn my attention to dialogue. It’s as if for a while, I’m writing a play. Only the words said back and forth between two characters. No description, no narration, no dialogue attributions. Just the words I hear the characters saying. Today, I wrote this passage that begins with the boy’s statement and the father’s answer:

“I was with Doc at Mr. Gerald Bell’s today.”

“Is that so?”

“One of his Belgians died. Doc said he thinks someone poisoned it.”

“Doc’s always been a smart one when it comes to horses.”

“He seems pretty sure.”

“It’s a shame what’s happening to those men’s horses. A damned shame.”

“What happened to Mr. Pool?”

“If I knew that, don’t you think I’d say it?”

When I began, I had no idea the boy was going to be so direct with his father: “What happened to Mr. Pool?” And I had no idea the father would subtly evade a direct answer. I learned a bit about each character. The boy has more grit in him than I thought. His father is even more devious than I imagined. “If I knew that, don’t you think, I’d say it?” The father’s line places the burden of deciding whether he knows something about Mr. Pool’s disappearance onto the boy. What’s he to say? “I think you do know something,” or “Yes, I suppose you would.” It’s a no-win situation, discovered and dramatized because I made a decision to listen to what these two characters, given what they’re each carrying inside them, might say.

The next time you’re working on a piece of fiction, you might invite two characters to have a conversation—not a casual conversation, but one in which one character has something troubling to say and the other character has something to protect. How could the dialogue build to a point where the first character can’t keep in something he thinks he knows, something he doesn’t want to believe? How could the second character turn the question back on the first character thereby increasing the pressure and the stakes?