Fiction Writer's Workshop

  Index

  Do me a favor. Pick nearly any two books of fiction from the shelves of a library or bookstore. Read a few pages of each, and compare the treatment of dialogue. Odds are, you'll find that the two are miles apart. One writer is burying himself in dialect, while the other writer uses almost no spoken words at all. Or one writer's characters sound like fortune cookies, while another one's sound exactly the way your mother did when she was chasing you around with that wooden spoon when you were six. Who has it right? One thing is clear: Every writer grapples with dialogue in her own way, and for every reader there are certain writers who get dialogue "right."

  What's the secret? Well, if I had the answer, I'd put it in a spice bottle and charge you by the gram. Practice, I guess. Keep writing. To that sort of advice, I grant you my own first line of dialogue: "Thanks for nothing, babe!"

  There is no secret, except to learn how to trust the language you hear, to learn to hear the people around you and to expose yourself to as many voices (and techniques) as possible.

  This book should help you with some of that. It works to show you ways to relearn listening, to break down the dialogue you come across in your own life and in your own reading. It will find ways to help you generate dialogue to lead you to stories and make existing dialogue work better within your work. It attempts to help your dialogue sound more like "real life" without losing the flavor of your craft.

  What it won't do is set you up with rule upon rule. I have one rule and one piece of advice. I'll give them to you here, so long as you're browsing. The rule: Above all else, work. The advice: Question the need for rules in matters such as these.

  This book is an attempt to provide you with a series of examinations of what makes "good" dialogue good, and how to make "bad" dialogue better. The first chapter starts out by looking at the dialogue you hear, the second moves to the dialogue you read and the third, fourth and fifth ask you to examine the dialogue you write, suggesting specific methods and patterns for editing. The next two chapters attempt to show you ways to use the dialogues you come across and the dialogues you create to lead you to new stories. The final chapter tries to answer the nuts-and-bolts questions of dialogue, including format, punctuation and the use of dialogue tags.

  I've tried to make it entertaining. I hope you'll hear a little of my own voice in the middle of all of this. At times, I'm sure, my prejudices show through; at others, you'll catch a bit of my attitude. But what's a conversation without a little of each of those?

  So, lots of energy and no hard-and-fast rules. Well, maybe a few hard-and-fast rules. Use them if they make sense to you. And since, in these pages, I set forth an argument for putting a premium on economy, I ask that you turn the page and start the dialogue.

  The world is crowded with voices. While we can retreat to our silences from time to time, most of us are called on to speak and listen for the better part of every day. From the beginning of our lives we listen, in preparation to speak. As infants, we first listen to the world, to the intentional and unintentional prattle of the adults, before we speak. Later, given voice in the world, we speak and find that sometimes we are listened to, other times not. So we try different strategies. We recite. We give reports. We greet one another. We yell. We joke. We cajole. We blurt out secrets. We lie. We tell stories.

  If there's anything you're an expert on, it's your own voice. I'm not referring to the sound of it, though presumably no one sounds as much like you as you do (unless you're Johnny Carson, and then everyone thinks he sounds more like you than you). I'm referring to your voice as a reflection of who you are, of your consciousness. The words you choose, the idioms you select, the metaphors you rely on, consciously or unconsciously, this is your voice as I define it. It is you. They can put you in jail. They can throw you in the hole. They can soundproof the room. They can even take away your cigarettes! But you still have your voice.

  So what's so hard about writing dialogue? It's just speaking, right? Well, the truth is, writing dialogue is not all that hard. I can teach you ways to fill up pages with the stuff. There are many writers who do it exceptionally well, propelling plot lines along, carving entire scenes out of dialogue. One would think it's like setting up a microphone in front of the world. "You create a character. As you write, you begin to know her, until you feel, finally, that you understand her. When she speaks, you might expect to feel that it's like turning on a faucet, that the words ought to flow out of her in a torrent. Only if you're lucky. Whether they do or not, you'll find that writing dialogue is not a matter of including everything that's said. This is a physical and intellectual impossibility. Writing dialogue is a craft that demands that you shape what a character says so that it's representative, artful, revealing and honest.

  Good dialogue is like no other part of a story in that it can, and it ought to, give some sense of being an event unto itself. Good dialogue lends the readers a sense that it is happening outside the writer's control, while clearly it is anything but outside his control. When dialogue slides in between the quotes, it says to the reader that there's another voice at work here, another source. It's an illusion for the most part; though of all the elements of fiction, good dialogue comes closest to reflecting the world accurately, if only for a flash.

  So you have a voice. Start writing dialogue, right? Well, no. Not surprisingly, I'm going to ask you to start the way you began all those years ago, back when people used to carry you around in their arms, back when they encouraged you to play with the wooden spoons as if they meant something, back before you were such an expert on your own voice, Mr. Smartypants.

  I want you start out by listening.

  JABBER

  If you really listen to yourself talk, you might find that you sound like a moron. I know I do. On the morning I started this book, I did what I always do when I talk to my students about writing dialogue: I listened. I spent an entire day listening to myself.

  You can't write convincing, compelling dialogue in fiction unless you like to listen. I'm not talking about listening to the vireos chirping in your redbud or the Great Northern rumbling along the north side tracks either (although these sorts of sounds surely ought to find their way into your fiction). And I'm not talking about listening for "real meaning" either; no deconstruction allowed, no groping for metaphors. This sort of listening is not about sounds, not yet anyway. It's not about paradigms or constructs. I'm telling you to listen to yourself. This is about the ways you use words. Now this is hard to do. Harder than you might imagine. When you really listen to yourself, you can't help shaping what you say. When that happens, you won't sound like yourself, defeating the point of the exercise outright. You'll find you have to control your self-awareness so the entire day isn't spent in some sort of meaningless charade, you rasping like Christian Slater or popping words out like Cary Grant.

  The key to this sort of listening is a method of recording. You could use a tape recorder—there are uses for tape recorders, which I'll get to—but for this exercise, I recommend writing everything down. It's possible to do it as you go, pausing after each sentence to record, but the self-consciousness question comes up, not to mention the dirty looks. You have to keep people around you unaware so you can fall into the normal patterns. At the same time, you have to stay aware, to listen and find time to record.

  Scribbling in the Notebook

  Since it's awkward to end a conversation by scribbling down the last few words, I decided to keep a mental tally until my next free moment, during which I did any necessary scribbling in a red spiral notebook, which I carried with me everywhere I went. I didn't worry about what anybody else said. Only me. I didn't worry about noting the time of conversations or to whom I was speaking.
So I have no idea when, or why, I said, "Have you taken care of your dog's nails yet?" But, late that morning, I did. It's in the notebook.

  What was I left with at the end? Various discoveries. I was distressed to find that I use the word "yup" all the time. I found that I am no artist when it comes to the passing line. By this I mean the sort of thing you say to someone as you stride past. "How's it going?" qualifies. (Six times.) "What's up?" was my distinct favorite when I was younger, but has now diminished in frequency to no more than once or twice a day (in my spiral notebook it appears only once). How could I use a word like "howdy"? (I do though, a lot it seems.) I found that I have a series of more personalized greetings for those who turn square to me (things such as 'To" and "Good morning, all!"). I discovered that I have an awful habit of calling people by their full names in lieu of a greeting, as if this were some sort of hail, some new information for us both ("Lynn Gram!" "David Newman!") In all, I said "hello" eleven times, nine of them when answering the phone, once to my secretary and once to my son, while trying to break his gaze from the television ("Hello? Why aren't your socks on your feet?"). Twice I used the catchy "Y-ello" instead. (Lord.) I also used a sound, something like "uh" but my own personalized "uh," more like "eh" or "eah"—a sound that seemed to punctuate any compound complex sentence I was forced to put together, as if I had to—eah—grope for each clause like a man trimming a bush one branch at a time.

  A typical page in the notebook looked like this, with each line being something I said.

  That was about fifteen minutes of talking, I think, to eight or ten different people. I believe most of this particular section occurred in the halls outside my office, with my co-workers or with my students. Whenever I ducked back inside my office, I scribbled in my spiral. Whenever I felt I was slipping into Cary Grant-speak, I just stopped talking, or found an excuse to go record in my spiral.

  I was able to keep up with this from the time I woke until I went into my first class (about five hours), and I started again after my last class too.

  What does it leave me with? Where's the connection to fiction? Well, I now realize that I jabber. I chatter on. I am, as I said, a wellspring of cliches and euphemisms. These are the very words and phrases I worry about most in my student's work and in my own. This sort of stuff has no place in fiction. In class, I say things like these: Avoid cliches. Don't let the dialogue rattle on. Compress. Don't lose the tension of a dialogue. And yet, when I talk, I sound like everything I am warning against. I sound, more disturbingly for me, like a prattling moron.

  But sometimes jabber tells a story of its own. Return to my spiral notebook page. What can you draw out of it? Lots of greetings. Those took place in the halls of my office building, as I've already said, where I run into lots of students and fellow teachers. It's also because I teach at a small Midwestern college, where everyone seems to say hello no matter what mood they're in. These are matters of context, of setting. You also find very few complete sentences. Most of the exchanges are punchy, three or four words and no more. This too comes from context—the halls of a college between classes—but it also has to do with character. It's what I like to do. I float around, give people grief, then move on. Does everyone talk like this? Lord, no. But there was a time when I thought I spoke in full sentences. I've since found that, at one time or another, most of us don't. Finally, although I didn't punctuate the jabber, if you look closely at it, you'll see some rhythms, and in those you see my own tensions and stresses: I was worried about picking up my children; I was telling a student he had to give me three pages, no less; I was late, feeling overwhelmed. You see this in the incomplete sentences too.

  Context, character, rhythm, tension and stresses. You'll be hearing a lot on these matters. I find them within a twenty-minute segment of my own life. You can too. It's worth studying the way you talk, the ways people around you talk. In these you can find the shapes of life. And by listening, you can begin the process of shaping dialogue to suit your fiction.

  LISTENING: TUNING IN AND TUNING OUT

  Listening is not easy. We train ourselves to tune out language. To get through a day during which you move from point A to point B in our culture, you have to slip in the word filter. Forget what you say for a moment. Button your lip. But think about all the words you hear. Deejays on the radio. Paging calls at the airport. The calls of a waitress to her short-order man. The voice at the drive-through. The two guys in the row behind you in the theater, the ones who just won't shut up. Not to mention the guy at work, the one who goes on about rebuilding an engine while you try to carve out ten silent minutes to eat your tuna salad on rye.

  To live our lives without going bonkers, we run a sort of white noise over the top of all of this. We tune out, and we are trained to do so from the very start of our lives. We treat words the way we might treat junk mail or a forgotten toy. Words become scenery. The jabber of a cartoon on the television is a part of the background, even if it is in another room, part of the scenery in a home, the sort of voice we live with, the words no more than pulses, sounds without meaning.

  Not me, you say. Maybe you live in the mountains, with your wolf, to whom you speak three words a day. Maybe you just boil the coffee in a tin pot and then chop wood for winter. At night you might lie down and say a blessing. Then you go to sleep without having said twenty words. No tuning out for you. No rush and razzle of contemporary life. Congrats! But I still think you should go buy a spiral. In fact, drive all the way into Butte, go to a mall and buy it at a chain drugstore. While you're at it, try not tuning a few words out. You'll be looking for the earplugs before you know it ("Aisle seven, on the right, next to the swimmer's ear drops. Right down there. Keep going. A little farther. There. Right in front of you. There. Look down. Yes. There. Okay.").

  I have a sister-in-law, whom I like very much, who is hard of hearing. Every Christmas, I sit next to her on the couch during the festivities and find that she can hear me only when I shout directly into her ear. She won't wear her hearing aids. This past year, I asked her why. She told me that they work too well. "Hear too much," she said. "I hear everything—everything—when those are in my ears, every word that's spoken within forty yards. I hear people's stomachs. Everybody's shouting. And people talk so much. So many wasted words. Jabber. Jabber. Jabber."

  It's a sad fact really that we are forced to filter out so much in contemporary life. We are assaulted by images from the moment we are born. No argument here. But we are in a hailstorm of words too. And to survive, we have to filter, tune out, stop listening. But to write

  fiction, you have to listen. You have to tune in. Eavesdrop. Take note. But you also have to listen carefully. Select. Edit. Pare down. This is tuning out. These are opposite sorts of disciplines, but they are part of the same act. I guarantee it. Think of the world as if it were a short-band radio, which you can crank up when you need to. Indeed, you need to be able to turn up the power on your listening abilities to catch even the most stray signals on the most obscure channels. There are several ways to do that.

  Jotting

  First thing, start a journal. A spiral notebook like the one I used in the earlier exercise about listening will be fine, but it should be small enough to carry around with you. I have one I keep in the glove compartment of my truck. While I don't slip it into my pocket every time I leave the truck, I have taken it with me to meetings, malls and at least one county fair. Jot in it. Listen for good fragments. Try to catch oddball phrases.

  How do you do this? You have to be comfortable eavesdropping for one thing. Sometimes you just get lucky. I play in a regular basketball game at noon, and the court is situated alongside two others in the middle of an indoor track. Before the game starts, I stretch my Achilles tendon like there's no tomorrow. I find this is quiet time for me, so I listen. A day or two ago, while the game was shaping up on the court, two or three groups of people were walking or running around the track. One couple caught my attention—two women, dressed in street clothes, wa
lking. I could tell they worked in an office from the way they dressed and that they were fairly serious about the walking from the look of their shoes. Normally I would pass right by these two without a thought. Prime candidates for the word filter from the get-go. But as I stretched, I found they were easy to watch, cruising the far side of the track. One of the women, the heavier one, was doing most of the speaking, and the other one was listening. Soon they passed out of my line of vision and I started answering the hoots from the court—"Let's Go!" "Shake it out!" "Skin up!"—then as I passed from my stretching spot, I found that I was walking behind the women, as they had circled the track. And for a moment, I was close enough to hear one of them say, "That's what's funny about all of it."

  Having seen even at a distance that it was a fairly animated story, I wanted to hear the rest, and as I was directly behind them, I took a step or two along the track, pretending to limber up some more. "When he took that day job," the woman said. Then no more. Someone from the court bounced me a ball. I caught it and walked behind, now fully tuned in. The woman went on. "Well, she was over there all morning just doing her business in that nasty little trailer."

  The other woman howled. "Yucky!" she said.

  At that point, I made a key mistake in my listening exercise: I casually bounced the basketball once. They became aware of my presence crowding them on the track. They fell silent and I slipped back, still disturbingly interested in that nasty little trailer, begrudgingly joining the game. Later, when I was in my truck, I took my spiral in hand and wrote down their exchange. I made a note about where I heard it, but not a long one.

  Two women, circling: When he took that day job, she was over there doing her business in that nasty little trailer. Yucky.

  This is jotting. I do it all the time. It's not exact recording. It's capturing a phrase or words and a circumstance. Nothing more. It's a fine starting point for writing dialogue. Just grab the words for whatever reason, and slap them down so they stay with you.