Dialogue

Where narrative is the roadway of a story, dialogue is the stream-fed pool where we stop to drink. For new writers, the fatal words their friends will always say is "Your dialogue is great - you're really good at it." This leads the unfortunate writer to neglect the story and plunge into long, self-indulgent runs of dialogue, to which their embarrassed friends respond: "[Oh no, do I have to read more of this stuff, but] your dialogue is really great."
Dialogue, delicately used, is a close-up of character. Here's Vronsky watching Anna Karenina, the first time he sees her, from that old sensationalist Tolstoy's book of doomed passion:

Madame Karenina, however, did not wait for her brother, but catching sight of him she stepped out with her light, resolute step. And as soon as her brother had reached her, with a gesture that struck Vronsky by its decision and its grace, she flung her left arm around his neck, drew him rapidly to her, and kissed him warmly. Vronsky gazed, never taking his eyes from her, and smiled, he could not have said why. But recollecting that his mother was waiting for him, he went back again into the carriage.
"She’s very sweet, isn’t she?" said the countess of Madame Karenina. "Her husband put her with me, and I was delighted to have her. We’ve been talking all the way. And so you, I hear ... vous filez le parfait amour. Tant mieux, mon cher, tant mieux."
"I don’t know what you are referring to, maman," he answered coldly. "Come, maman, let us go."
Madame Karenina entered the carriage again to say good-bye to the countess.
"Well, countess, you have met your son, and I my brother," she said. "And all my gossip is exhausted. I should have nothing more to tell you."

We see Anna through Vronsky's eyes - warm, impulsive, and, of course, resolute. Then we have his mother mischief-making - and Anna letting him know that she knows full well, and making a little intimacy with him against his mother.
And look at how Ernest Hemingway uses dialogue to describe love at first sight:

They were all eating out of the platter, not speaking, as is the Spanish custom. It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chick peas in the red wine sauce. It was well cooked, the rabbit meat flaked off the bones, and the sauce was delicious. Robert Jordan drank another cup of wine while he ate. The girl watched him all through the meal. Every one else was watching his food and eating. Robert Jordan wiped up the last of the sauce in front of him with a piece of bread, piled the rabbit bones to one side, wiped the spot where they had been for sauce, then wiped his fork clean with the bread, wiped his knife and put it away and ate the bread. He leaned over and dipped his cup full of wine and the girl still watched him.
Robert Jordan drank half the cup of wine but the thickness still came in his throat when he spoke to the girl.
“How art thou called?” he asked. Pablo looked at him quickly when he heard the tone of his voice. Then he got up and walked away. 

Nothing is said - he just asks her what her name is. But the sensual description of the simple meal, followed by that question - a question that is really a declaration - immediately tells the reader what's going on here. More doomed love.
Dialogue, if it's used right, shines a light into the character you're writing about. Dialogue is the lamp Diogenes carried: it reveals an honest man in daylight.
It should never be trimmed around with the author's instructive adverbs - we should never write:

"Oh, yeah?" he laughed sarcastically.

because if you write that, you're stealing from the readers, who should be discovering the character of the people whose story they're following, by the tone and content of their speech, not through a big authorial finger pointing down from above, saying: "Looky, this is what I mean."
And remember that dialogue doesn't have to be the truth. Sometimes the most powerful words are those your readers know to be lies. In Casablanca there is a scene where a naive English couple is approached by a helpful stranger on the street. He puts his arm around the man's shoulder and says:

I beg of you, Monsieur, watch yourself. This place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere, everywhere.

Naturally, when the Englishman pats his pocket, his wallet is gone. A wonderful piece of dialogue. A beginner would have had the earnest warning, but Casablanca's writers whip it around and give it a spin, by making the very man who's warning them be the thief. Fabulous.

Image systems

Having slept through the TV showing of Forbrydelsen 2 (the Danish original of The Killing, season 2), I went back to watch the first episode again, and was pleased to see that they've got a big image system thing going. 

Image systems, for those not familiar with the minutiae of fiction, are used, often unconsciously by writers, more often as a conscious part of the storytelling by filmmakers, to hint at secrets, and to express the theme and to make a coherent emotional whole of the story.
Hitchcock was the boy for image systems - if you look at his Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, etc, each one has its own image system - dank in Psycho, vertiginous in Vertigo, sneaky in Rear Window. The Psycho image system is cogged to some extent from Henri-Georges Clouzot's spectacularly nasty Les Diaboliques, in which the plan to murder a woman gradually seeps up through the chinks in the audience's subconscious through the use of endless watery images: a dripping tap, an emptying swimming pool, a murderous bath.
But probably the most famous image system is that in Casablanca, which Robert McKee uses as his illustration in his useful seminar Story. Casablanca is riddled with subtext, both in the text and in the visuals: it's full of arches, the costumes of the lovers Rick and Ilsa grow closer in design as they grow closer to each other; a conversation about clothes in the market is a coded love scene.
Time is also a constant image - even the theme of the song is As Time Goes By. Ratcheting up the tension of the fast-approaching Nazi victory (as it seems in the film), an adorable old couple who are supposed to leave for America the next day explain that they are speaking only English now, to practise. "Sweetness heart, what watch?" the gentleman asks, and the lady answers: "Ten watch." "Such much!" he exclaims. Knowing as we do that these, as with millions of their like, are more likely to be murdered, the conversation has an extraordinary bittersweet horror.

And when the Germans in Rick's Café Americain strike up a pugnaciously anti-French Die Wacht am Rhein, and having stood it for long enough, Ilse's Resistance hero husband tells the band to strike up the Marsellaise and every liberty-lover in the café sings along - even, in the end, the girl who's getting off with the Nazis - you'd need a heart of stone not to be moved.

So it's pleasing to see that Forbrydelsen II is riddled with an image system whose meaning will become clearer as the episodes go on. So far, it involves a particularly bloody colour of red, in curtains, in heroine Sara Lund's blood-red jumper, on the walls, in hints of the blood-red Danish flag with its Crusader's cross, in a disturbing spiral staircase filmed from above, and in the curtains of rooms, in rectangles or squares in the background of many scenes.

The rain pours and pours down out of the heavens - or rather, it seems as if the world is just full of rain without it actually coming from anywhere. No one wears a hat or a hood or puts a newspaper over their head, they just stand stoically in it like cows in a field. (Why don't cows get shelters in fields, by the way? Surely they're just as miserable as the rest of us in the fleeping rain?)

There's also another dominant image: big wedge-shaped buildings, seen first from the outside, then entered to find that some organisation is leaning down on a fragile human; or big wedge-shaped tunnels down which the heroes must venture. And there's another rectangle that joins both systems: the military dogtags, sheared in half so that the numerals on them echo the slit windows of those buildings. 

It's also full of roads, bridges, railways, slick with rain, dividing one part of the story from another. 

And last, there's a forest glade with brutally broken-off stumps: we see it first at the very beginning, with the corpse of the first victim tied to one of these stumps, in a memorial garden - to Resistance fighters, the underground army that fought the Nazis who occupied Denmark, a powerful image, since the Danish army and its deployment in Afghanistan is already making itself clear as a large part of the story. This glade is echoed in the visiting room of the prison, where a psychologically scarred ex-soldier has, first, a conjugal visit with his wife, then a visit with a friend who is fleeing back to Helmand to escape whatever's going on; in that innocent-looking room with its mural of forest trees, he tells Raben - the ex-soldier that "it's not over". But soon he will be dangling like a blood sacrifice too.

There are the books, like the cowboy novel by Stetson Cody slapped on the desk by the pudgy but hardass new justice minister; the Chagall coffee-table book, the meaningful (I assume) Danish titles briefly lingered on in the bookshelves of various characters. 

Then there are the pictures: the new Minister for Justice's office is decked with black-and-white photos of his predecessors; his greeting present from his party is a framed photo; he finds in a briefing document the police stills of the murdered woman in the memorial park. It turns out that her killer has videotaped her. The strong and fierce and solitary Raben, alone in his cell, has covered the wall with his little son's pictures of dragons, strong and fierce, blu-tacked on the cement. 

What do the images mean? Already the heart knows; as you watch, your heartbeat speeds up when certain colours or shapes appear, your mood sinks at others. Ten episodes to the end of this series; the story will have borne out the warning of the images.