Fiction Writer's Workshop Page 2

  Why did I write these words? There's a story in them, of course. The nasty trailer, the marriage falling apart, the guy shifting jobs, the woman and her "business." That's good stuff, and I'm going to suggest throughout this book that good fiction can be created out of things overheard. But for me the news about the woman, the trailer, the "business" was not as interesting as the response it got from the other woman circling the track: "Yucky."

  Why? Let's say you've never heard this exchange and you're writing a story. One character, Linda, is about to tell the other, say Helen, this juicy piece of gossip.

  'When he took that day job," Linda said, pressing forward, "she started going over there to that nasty trailer every morning, doing her business."

  Think like the writer now. What can Helen say? The news is out there. One choice would be to allow her response to invite the dialogue to slide forward, inviting another bit of news. This is so easy it's almost mindless.

  "You're kidding," Helen said.

  "No! Really?" Helen said.

  "I can't believe it," Helen said.

  "Wow," Helen said.

  I'm a realist. Writing dialogue is tough, and sometimes you just have to let the characters say something that allows things to trip forward. After all, Linda will probably have more to say. But Helen's responses above are just jabber. If a writer uses one of these lines, or one like it, he's just using jabber to indicate the back and forth of a conversation. Back and forth, like a metronome. I would argue that this is not how most conversation runs, for one thing, but frankly I think this type of thoughtless response forces the reader to slip on the word filter.

  What a waste that is. Think about it. You invite a reader into your story. The fact that you wrote it says you want the reader to pay attention to your words. So why let wasted words slip right into the mouths of your characters?

  "Yucky" is a better response than any of those I suggested. The woman on the track could have said, "You're kidding," and I wouldn't have been surprised. Frankly I tuned in at that moment because the word "yucky" related so much of what she was thinking. It might have been the nasty trailer she was responding to or the woman's infidelity or her doing "her business" while her husband was at work. And while it's not a word I used a lot before (although now I do use it, having since test-piloted it into conversations, which, later on, I'll recommend to you), it is a word that might describe a reaction to all three of these bits of news. (In a trailer. Yucky! Infidelity. Yucky! Doing her business. Yucky!) Beyond that, it seemed like a word a kid would use, a word far too young for those two women circling my basketball game. And, notably, I think it was a funny response to what might be called bad news.

  If I hadn't had my spiral in my glove box, I likely wouldn't have thought to write that down. But I'm in the habit because I make myself jot lots of things. A writer has many uses for a notebook, or a journal, uses that are well documented and well reasoned by writers far more accomplished than I. You should take notes vigorously. On everything. No argument here. But I'm telling you something a little more focused. I'm talking about jotting. Make a note on the physical circumstance, but keep it brief. No more than three words.

  By the fountain:

  What's the flower? What's the symbol?

  Running:

  No. No. No. I'm. I'm. I'm not.

  On a plane:

  That's why it always goes this way.

  So true.

  And weddings are usually a disaster because of it.

  New York:

  I take photographs. But I'm not a photographer.

  Per se.

  Right. Not per se.

  Right.

  A dark hallway, after closing:

  Are you with me?

  Right here.

  I mean.

  Yes, I follow.

  Cause it's important.

  I get you.

  These are stray jots. I culled them from several spirals, recorded over several years. I heard these on trips. I heard these during my lunch hour, as people passed by. Often I was one of the speakers.

  There were moments when I got everything I could and it was enough, and others when I only wrote down part of what I heard and it was too much. When I look back at these, I am pulled right back into the moment. The jotting marked "New York" is from a time I was in a baggage carousel at LaGuardia and these two guys were talking while staring at the flight arrivals, about as interested in one another as two cows in a field. The lines marked "after closing" were a conversation I overheard in the halls of my office building between two janitors as they sat in the student lounge on their break. They didn't know I was there, around the corner, using the echoes of the hall to help me listen, but I was, and I remember I wrote it down because I thought they sounded like two cat burglars.

  There are plenty of these jots I don't even remember hearing. The one at the fountain seems peculiar to me, almost contrived and at the same time just incomplete enough to be real. It could be that I made it up. Or that I heard part of it and made up the rest. Or that I overheard it incorrectly. It doesn't matter now. That's the point. By writing it down, whether it happened or not, whether I got it exactly right or not, I've given myself something to work with, something to drum through my head. These are rhythms. There is context within them. These are my jots. A few of them anyway. I got them by listening to the world. I got them, quite frankly, by crowding the people around me. That's the thing. To jot well, you have to crowd nicely.

  CROWDING

  Maybe you don't hear so well. Maybe you don't notice things people say. Maybe you like to have your space and think you should give others theirs as well. You don't want to get close. You don't want to crowd. It makes you uncomfortable. You're sure it makes others uncomfortable too. No crowding for you. Hey, quit whining. You're working here. Do it in small steps if you have to, but crowd.

  There are lots of ways to crowd. You don't have to break laws to do it. I insist that you don't have to make anyone uncomfortable either. There are certain places where you can't avoid overhearing conversations. As you can guess, these make good natural starting points. Subways are super (but notice how hard it is to hear, and notice how little people really say there). The baggage carousel at the airport, as noted above, is one of my favorite spots. Airports in general are nice places to crowd. There you can put up a newspaper and lean back to hear the guy in the row of seats behind you apologizing to his children for leaving them to go skiing. Or you can lean against a wall and listen to a family waiting for one grandmother or the other to step through the gate. People tend to resolve tilings at airports, or try to, if only temporarily. It's natural. These moments can be tense or sad or jubilant. They are nothing if not charged. You have to rely on that. The airport is a natural place to crowd, and it's easy because you can always pretend to be preoccupied with your own set of tensions, your own departures or double-parks or delays.

  There are other nice spots. Diners, with their back-to-back booths. Parks. Barbecue joints. Movie theaters, before the show. Lines at the bank. Baseball games. Airport limousines. Hotel lobbies. Convenience stores. Oil change places. Museums. Post offices.

  How do you do it? Take one step closer. Lean in slightly. Make yourself as quiet as you can and stare straight ahead. It's important to remember that when I use the term "crowding," I do not mean physical crowding. I mean conscious listening. I mean stealing the words from the air around you. It's a different relationship to the world. It is, I believe, one facet of the writer's relationship to the world. You are tuning in.

  In this case you, the listener, are nothing more than a recorder. A machine. Picture yourself as an inanimate object. Minimize movement. Pretend to be thinking hard about something. That way no matter what people say—and there will come times when they test the waters to see if you're listening—you won't show any reaction, so you won't stop them from talking. You won't interrupt the rhythm of what they say, not any more than any stray element of public conversation.

 
Must you crowd only in public? Of course not. Public conversation is only one sort of dialogue. But it's hard to learn to tune in when you've spent your whole life tuning out. So I'm asking you to change the way you think about public space. Make it yours. Do it consciously. Do it quietly.

  STEALING FROM HOME

  Do you have to go public? Does everything one hears and says within a story have to mimic the rhythms of public conversation? Don't you speak differently at home than you do in an airport? Doesn't private conversation have a rhythm of its own?

  Of course it does. My point here isn't to teach you a way of speaking. That's not my purpose anywhere in this book. I'm trying to show you how to pick up on what makes for good dialogue within a story. I'm asking you to listen to the dialogues around you, the ones you've been tuning out for years, to see how they differ from what you expected.

  The art of private conversation is one you've spent a lifetime working on. You probably think you have a good handle on it. In stories, most conversation is private; that is, it's directed between characters who know something of each other, or expect to. The pace and rhythm of the dialogue is completely tied up in issues like character, setting, the level of tension and even the structure of the story. These are issues we'll be dealing with throughout this book; they're ones that you'll deal with as you write stories.

  But the principles of crowding and jotting still apply, no matter how well you think you know your family, your husband, your best friend, your favorite uncle. The danger comes most often when you start writing a dialogue thinking, I know exactly how this is going to go. No surprises for you generally means no surprises for the reader. If you aren't hearing your characters, you're treating them like furniture. Each dialogue has to create itself, even if it has jobs to do (like resolving a conflict or delivering some key slice of exposition).

  So listen at home too. Crowd and jot. Remember that you are part of a tissue of life within these private contexts. How do you greet each other? What catchphrases does your family, peer group, etc., favor? Are they private too, making sense only within the group? Or are they drawn from the outside world? Do you finish sentences for one another? Does one person become more talkative in groups? Less? Is one person shy and demure in public but foulmouthed once you're alone in the car? These are rhythms. They help you create character, and in the end, stories. Your family, your private life, your past—that's where you find them. You'd be a fool not to tap into these things.

  Again, I urge you to be self-conscious about it. Don't just lurk in the shadows with your ballpoint and your spiral. Challenge your own preconceptions. Surprise the people around you. Get a rise out of them. Confront them with language. Walk downstairs and greet everyone with, "Hi-ho!" Or whisper your responses to all questions. Or better yet, whisper the same word. Try something like "monkeys." Don't push it. Just see if they surprise you in return, or if they are threatened, or if they threaten to commit you. Then work your way out of it, got to your spiral and write down what they said and how they said it.

  Private lives are as important as public lives when it comes to the rhythms of dialogue. In both cases, the key to starting out is listening to break your own preconceptions of the way people speak, of the things they say and of the way they say it. Listen until you are surprised. Then listen some more. This time you'll be surprised sooner. And sooner still the next time. You'll find that stories are brushing past you in hallways, at the hot dog stand. Then you have to select. Then you have to pick and choose. That's another step, but for the writer, there are far worse fates than being swamped with ideas, being struck down by rhythms.

  EXERCISES

  1. Listen to yourself. Spend the day recording everything you say. In the order you say it. Scroll out the whole day, recording everything you say, in a line-by-line fashion. Try to grab every sound. Every utterance. Don't leave out the little things, such as "hi" and "how are you" and "fine." Just record. Don't worry about punctuation. Or contexts. Don't note where you were or what time of day it was. Don't skip lines to indicate time passing or direction of dialogue. Just record from the moment you get up until the moment you go to bed. Don't explain it to anyone; don't even reveal it to anyone. Steal a few moments here and there to jot.

  You should find that this gets easier as the day goes on. If you have a job where you talk all the time, you might want to buy a small pocket recorder and let it run whenever you speak. Either way, there are two keys to this exercise: (1) Record everything in writing. Even if you tape parts of your day, take the time at the end to transcribe it into your spiral. (2) Shape nothing; that is, don't let yourself change the way you normally speak. When you find yourself doing this, stop talking. Just shut up. I think this is the hardest thing to remember when writing fiction.

  Save this recorded day as a document or database. Type it up line by line. We'll use it again and again.

  2. Lug yourself to a public place where you can crowd. If you live close enough, try the airport. But you could go anywhere people travel in bunches. Bus stations. Malls. Restaurants. Forget fiction for a moment. Go where the people are, even if you hate sitting in Denny's for more than the time it takes to drink a cup of joe. Remember my rule. To jot well, you must crowd nicely. Take your spiral. Take your time. Move like a special agent. Try sitting in various spots. At first, jot down everything. Shoot for the first three exchanges you hear between two people. Once you have that, move on. Check your watch, get up and go. No matter how good or bad the exchange was. That way you won't have to worry about getting punched in the nose for eavesdropping. Record ten or fifteen of these exchanges, using one word to describe the context, followed by a colon, then the exchange.

  When finished, look over what you have. Perhaps you see stories galore. Choose one and run with it. Don't wait for me to tell you another thing about writing dialogue. You've been triggered. You can't ask for much more from the world around you. Go and write. Then come back and read chapter two. But perhaps you got nothing. Just a bunch of how-do-you-do's and some exec rambling about the annual reports. Go back. This time be more conscious of whom you choose to crowd and why: The guy with the mohawk, the one carrying the car seat with an infant in it. Or the old couple, clearly arguing about a scarf. What about the two businessmen, nervously tightening up as they approach the;r rental car? Move in, brush by. Grab what you can. If you've gone this far, you'll be able to grab a few words in an odd context.

  Again, hold on to these. We will use them again.

  3. Script your day. Before you go to bed, write in order everything you are going to say the next day. Picture the day clearly: getting up, the breakfast conversation, parking the car, passing familiar faces in the hall. The next day, stay with the script. Risk disruption. Stop when things don't make any sense to you or the person you're talking to, but stop only at the last minute, only after you've stretched it as far as you possibly can. How much of the dialogue you ran into was predictable? How far did you get before someone said something you didn't expect? What was the element of change? Take note of what you were able to expect and what came out of nowhere. One of the mistakes writers make is to assume that there's a predictability to the everyday. Mundane conversations can be full of particulars of change. Think how much your conversation changes with something as simple as the weather. Or the news. Even the unpredictable moods of those around you. The point here is not to declare that we can't script our lives. You know that. Still, when you start a scene, you'll have a script like this somewhere in place, full of assumptions about where the dialogue should go. The point of this exercise is to make a script that must fight predictability as clearly as your life does every day.

  4. Try a little guerrilla dialogue at home. Think of a question that can't be answered easily. Something like "How much does your liver weigh?" or "How many garbage cans are there in the whole world?" Ask it of everyone you know. Press each of them to be as precise as possible, but don't explain your curiosity, even after you get an answer. Fend them off. Confo
und them by not giving in. List their responses. Record the answers, yes, but take note of their reactions. What questions do they follow with? How do they word them? Are they threatened? Thrilled? Puzzled to the point where they throw up their hands? What do they think you're getting at? What are they worried about?

  5. Using a long, overheard dialogue, such as the one from exercise two, remove all punctuation and lowercase all the letters. Just make the exchanges clear by skipping a line after each one. Hand the pages to two friends to read aloud. Tell them nothing about the circumstance or physical context of the conversation. As they read, follow along reading your own copy of the dialogue. Keep a pen handy. Mark their pauses. Underline the points where the readers get fouled up, where one sentence gets pushed into the next. Now punctuate the dialogue using the rhythms of their reading as your guide. Forget sentence structure. Don't fret the fragments. Just think rhythm.

  Writing dialogue is so much about the energy and direction of the story at hand that many of the things a writer does are intuitive. A turn here. An exclamation. A silence. I'll often hear experienced writers say they've developed an "ear" for dialogue. The implication is that dialogue exists in the world and writers merely record, with good writers—those with the "ear" for it—recording a little more clearly. The truth is, it's not solely about recording, or listening, but about shaping.

  When I speak of the energy and direction of a story, I am referring to its tone and emotion (energy) and tension (direction). Writers craft, or shape, patterns of energy and direction in dialogue. In many ways these become the signatures of their dialogue, the things that make the voices of their characters recognizable and sustainable. Writers may have an ear for dialogue, but what they work with is a voice, shaped and charged by the needs of story. What your character says is directed by the needs of the story.

  Classifying dialogue by techniques can be troublesome. Writers don't work that way. Most writers I know despise the very act of naming the things they do. It makes them too self-conscious to think of the patterns they create as they create them. I'm going to do some of that here, but only for the purposes of comparison. You should be looking for the occasional pause, the turn, the reversal, the silence that defines each of these moments. Naming the patterns is unimportant; reading to uncover them is a worthy task.