Fiction Writer's Workshop Page 5

  There's a difference between the voice of your work and the voices you employ within it. You have to be able to recognize this difference and take advantage of it.

  Undoubtedly, there are times when a single character will want to tell a story, be it long or short, and that character's voice will become the vehicle for the story, if not its whole reason for being. That's narrative voice. But each character within a story speaks with his own voice as much as, if not more than, in the voice of the writer. Ironically, your job as a writer is often a matter of separating yourself from your own voice, of tuning into the particulars of character and of growing the voice within it.

  There are certain obvious factors. Age, for instance. Think of all the children you know. Pause at the municipal pool. Does the sunburnt, jubilant five-year-old drum the same conversational rhythms as the sullen fifteen-year-old lifeguard? Of course not. Aren't the two so far apart in circumstance, experience, vocabulary and even knowledge of the world as to make a comparison pointless? I start with children here because the differences between ages are so readily apparent. Age separates and defines.

  Compare in your mind's eye—or in your spiral notebook, should you be traveling—that sunburnt five-year-old at your local pool in, say, Metropolis, Illinois, to the five-year-old in Dade County, Florida. The similarities may shine brightest at first, but with a little listening, you'll start to hear the edges of the words and sentences reveal the particulars of each kid's life. You have to listen for particulars like pace, tone and word choice. Not surprisingly, I think it helps to record this stuff in your spiral to look at the way each kid's words fall together. Soon it's more than an age you see. It's the circumstance; it's a family; it's the local dialect; it's the way these kids are talked to and the places where they are heard.

  DICTION AND DIALECT

  Where I live now, in western Indiana, people tend to drop the "to be" verb from their sentences when they speak. When looking at a dirty rug, they say, "That needs washed," rather than, "That needs to be washed." Frankly, it's a pretty solid economy of language that allows this, but the habit does grate on the ear at the outset. When I first moved here, I couldn't quite pick up on this difference. I put down the local dialect to a matter of twang and accent. Only when I started writing about my life in Indiana did I realize that words were missing, and only when I started to give voice to characters who lived here did I start to hear and—once on the page—see the differences of the rhythms of their language. The spiral notebook comes into play again. Record.

  My mother looks at the dirty rug and says, "That is filthy. It ought to be cleaned." My neighbor says, "That needs washed." My cousin from Long Island: "That's gotta be cleaned." A librarian in Maine: '"That needs a washing." My brother looks at the dirty rug and says, "Nice. Sandblast that thing." Did I show these people the rug? Of course not. I listened to them.

  When I wrote those responses, I tried to think of these people as characters. I gave them a chance to speak. If I've listened hard enough, the subtle differences in diction and syntax should reveal themselves. Again, it's often a matter of pace. My brother tends to punch his words out in quick bursts; his diction tends to be a reflection of attitude. My neighbor, a former fireman, is a taciturn, commonsense fellow. Hie fewer words the better. My mother tends toward precision, exactness. Do I think these things consciously, as I am letting each character "speak"? Not at all. But I do try to call up certain resonances of each person's voice. I do try to hear each one, literally. If you can't hear your characters speak, then what they say most often ought not be said. That doesn't mean they can't be in the mix. It might mean that they don't have to speak. My father, for instance, would just look at the dirty rug and shake his head at the fact that I had let it get so bad. That, too, is a sort of dialogue exchange.

  The differences in the above responses are mostly a matter of diction, or word choice, and syntax, or word order. Diction is the key element in the initial shaping of a character's voice. Forget the sound of his voice for a minute. Forget accent. Forget pace. Think word choice.

  Whether we do it sloppily or beautifully, speaking is one of our primary skills as human beings. Yet when we do speak, we hardly encounter the choices we are making. Rarely do we think of our words as a matter of choice. Consider how difficult it can be for some to write and deliver a speech. Each word read aloud in that circumstance is a reminder of the choices the writer/speaker made. Word choice becomes an issue.

  Yet when you fall into a conversation with a woman while waiting for a bus, you don't take a deep breath and think, Geez, now I have to think of some words. I have to choose what I'm going to say. Perhaps I'll start with a present participle. You speak. The words well out of you. You are a human being. You are an animal of language.

  In the above example, where people look at the dirty rug, each response is different enough from the other that the reader can begin to hear the same voices the writer is hearing. Notice that there is not a lot of work going on with accent and tone. You can create strong dialogue by concentrating on word choice. Those other factors—the way you say it, your accent, your use of idiom and dialect—are all secondary to word choice. When crafting dialogue, diction rules.

  Good diction lends precision. When chosen correctly, a character's diction can show us who she is, what she knows. John Casey's wonderful novel Spartina, the story of Dick Pierce, a struggling Rhode Island Fisherman, is a book in which you can see the diction associated with a job as ancient and complicated as fishing. At first, the terminology seems obtuse to someone who's never lived near the water, but soon the reader sees the precise way the characters speak of the job at hand as a sort of natural shorthand. In one scene, Dick is forced to leave an inexperienced woman in a smaller boat following a marlin already hooked, as he sets out to follow a second marlin. After catching the fish, he radios a plane, which they have been using to watch for large fish from above. Read the scene that ensues and notice how much the particular word choice, the idioms of the job, define the understanding these men have of the job. Mark the words you are unfamiliar with in this context.

  Parker raised the plane, which they could see way back where they'd come from.

  The pilot said the first fish seemed to be still going, still fast to the keg, the dory tagging along.

  Dick said, "Maybe we should've took our chances, just let the spotter find the keg."

  "The plane can't haul the fish," Parker said. "Maybe she'll scare off the sharks."

  No! terribly confusing, but if you didn't understand that the fish had been "kegged," harpooned to a line attached to a metal keg, you'd be at a loss. And if you didn't know that a "dory" was a small boat and t hat the "spotter" was the plane, you'd be struggling too. You might recognize the idiomatic use of the word "fast" in "fast to the keg" as meaning "holding" or "attached." I could have explained all that before you read the selection, but that would be supplanting the use of precise diction and appropriate idiom. These words and expressions are appropriate because they are appropriate to this world.

  Moreover they are appropriate to these people. It's no great secret that all of us use language in a fashion forged from some conglomerate of social forces. In the example from Spartina, we see the edges of a regional dialect in this line: "Maybe we should've took our chances, just let the spotter find the keg."

  The line has grammatical problems and missing words. We'll get to dialect soon, but notice how Casey is doing it. A subtle mix of idiom, precise choices of diction and minor variations in syntax (word placement).

  In Frederick Busch's strange and wonderful story "Dog Song," the protagonist, a judge, wakes up in a hospital room after having driven his car into a telephone pole. Each time he wakes, he is faced with a memory that reveals more and more of his complex and painful life to him. He often wakes to his own pain and to the presence of unfamiliar people—nurses, doctors, other patients—who appear in the story as disembodied voices. Here's one such scene. Notice how the small variations in
the order of this stranger's words help us to draw a picture of him.

  He heard his breath shudder now, in the salmon-colored room, mostly shadows and walnut veneers. Then he heard a man say, "You wanna nurse?"

  "Who?"

  "It's me. You can't turn, huh? Listen, Your Honor, it's such a pain in the ass as well as the armpit, the crutches, I'm gonna stay flat for a while. I'll visit you later on, you can look at me and remember. I'm the guy said hello the other time."

  "You're in here with me?"

  "Yeah. Ain't it an insult? You a judge and everything. Like the doctor said, it's real crowded."

  "This is too crowded."

  "Well, listen, don't go extending any special treatment to me, Your Honor. Just pretend I'm a piece of dog shit. You'll feel better if you don't strain for the little courtesies and all. Your wife's a very attractive woman, if I may say so. Hell of a temper, though."

  In this case, the character comes to life through his words alone, since the protagonist can't see him. Read the voice aloud. Once you've read it through, gauge for yourself: What sort of man is the judge's roommate? What can you tell from his tone? Is he threatening in some fashion? Insincere? Is he a poor man? A dangerous man? If he had used standard English, would we have lost some sense of who he is?

  The original line from Spartina, which appears previously, is this.

  Maybe we should've took our chances, just let the spotter find the keg.

  Translate it so it reads grammatically, and it loses some authenticity.

  Maybe we should have taken our chances and just let the spotter plane find the keg.

  Translated even further to make the situation crystal clear to the reader, we begin to see why we need to hear the voices through variations in diction and syntax.

  Perhaps we should have risked losing the first fish. We could have let the spotter follow the keg.

  Here I've created dialogue that clarifies the dilemma they are in, but it does nothing to show who they are. This is an example of dialogue serving the needs of the story rather than the realities of the characters. The words people choose (diction) and the way they use them (syntax) can do much to show us who they are. We do not have to reinvent language to show peculiarities of a dialect. We can and should make use of the language as we know it. That is the key to varying diction and syntax. Reinventing them is poetry. Using them accurately and convincingly is a particularly important key to writing strong dialogue.

  THE QUESTION OF DIALECT

  Most people assume that dialect has to be a part of dialogue. My answer is that it can be, and in certain circumstances it ought to be, but the writer must never feel compelled to duplicate dialects simply for the sake of "authenticity." The writer who thinks she is writing dialect because she is clipping the ends off of words and stretching out others is often taking delight more in her own experimentation that in any real sense of story. She may be shooting for a folksy charm or for a root authenticity, but most often she fails miserably. Try all you want to make the words unrecognizable—misspell them, cut them in half, throw in a fistful of apostrophes, sound out every groan the character makes—the truth is, they are still words you're dealing with. Consider this example. Two grandmothers sit on a porch in Tennessee; one of them is hying to convince the other to go into town to get a pie from the grocery store to serve at dinner the next day.

  "Sho' 'nuff smo time leff fo you to git on downtown fo' 'nother pan dat pie."

  "Ain't but a-our o' two leff in the day. Dat walk take lease three hours, dere and back."

  "But 'choo know dey love dat pie. Ah shore-ly do. You too. Ah love to serve that pie at a good suppa. Please git on."

  "Ah had a car, Ah'd go. Aint no car workin' in walkin distance tis whole place. Ah know you want dat pie. Ah know you do. Ah set out, maybe to barra Kip's hahrse and buggy."

  "Ah hope so, light's afailin."

  This is incredibly bad. The story is okay (we'll get to that). But the language is absurdly disguised behind the pretense of dialect. To be sure, it is an exaggeration. But each choice made by the writer—a misspelling here, an apostrophe there—is a little piece of what most people consider to be the essence of writing dialect. That is, it shoots for the sound of the words rather than the words themselves. In this case, it is difficult to read, complicated to decipher and once done, it's hard for the reader to get a sense of anything outside of the basic question set up by the exposition that preceded it.

  But wait. Perhaps you can read it, and while maybe you can't understand every detail, you like it. That's right, you think, that's the way they talk in the South! You like reading dialogue aloud, sounding words out for their music. I give you high marks for liking the music of language, but if you like this kind of writing, buy yourself a French horn and try to blow Shakespeare through it. You're sure to get a clearer use of language than that garbage. While you're at it, you might coat-check your preconceptions on human beings in the southern half of the United States because no matter how poor, how ignorant, how little traveled people in Tennessee might be (or in the Bronx for that matter), they use language when they speak, and language is more than jamming a washcloth in the mouth of the speaker to get at the "sound." Don't be so high-minded as to assume you know a dialect because you've seen some reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard and you own a copy of As I Lay Dying. All language has a logic; all language has dignity. It's words as much as sounds.

  If you are from Tennessee, right now you are (rightly) about to throw this book across the room, because every attempt at tonality in that exchange is slightly off, every instance of localized syntax is forced and there are, you can surely see, inconsistencies of dialect even within the sentences these people speak. Go ahead, throw it. But only if you're from Tennessee. Then pick it back up because we're about to translate that passage and fix it.

  The first thing to do with any piece of dialogue is figure out the story. Read that crummy one about the pie again. Don't look for the entire story, but more simply for the story of this dialogue. In a case like this, with bad dialogue, we're translating more than anything else. Still, not surprisingly, you should begin with character. What does each person want? Determining this should allow you some sense of pace and rhythm. Examine tension next. What is holding these people together or keeping them apart? Then I'd look at setting. What's brought them to the same place? Where are they?

  As we saw in chapter two, when discussing tension, these are good diagnostic questions for nearly any dialogue. The answers to them show us what dialogue should do in the broadest sense:

  • bring characters and conflict into focus

  • be driven by the needs of the characters, more than by the needs of the story

  • locate us, give us a sense of where we are, who we are listening to

  Lett's apply these questions to the dialogue involving the women and the pie.

  • What do they want? The women seem to want pie. But one woman wants, or needs (we can't be sure), the other woman to go get the pie. It appears someone is coming to visit them ("dey" love it; there is mention of a "good suppa"; there's anxiety about getting the pie before night falls).

  • What's holding them together? It would appear they depend on each other somehow. One woman is urging the other to do something for the both of them. It would appear that the issues of the larger story might come out of this question.

  • Where are they? Somewhere isolated (as the walk for the pie is over three hours), as they don't seem to have any neighbors with cars who could help them.

  When a story is choked by dialect, the way this little dialogue is, you have to work your way back to story through language. The writer of this sort of dialogue would probably say you have to read it aloud to understand it. When you do that, it becomes clear that "Ah" equals "I" and "dat" is "that." This is a good illustration of relying too heavily on dialect. Right now you are probably saying words like "Ah" out loud. To some of them, this reads like the sound the doctor asks you to make before he
swabs your tonsils for strep; for other readers, it is more nasal, sounding like a grunt made in midstride of an argument ("Ah ... yeah. That's true, but... ah ... I have another point to make on that matter."). The word has become a sound. A word created to mimic sound has to be an absolute success in terms of its music. There are entire novels where this happens (Alice Walker's The Color Purple comes to mind), but in these books, the entire thread of the novel teaches the reader the language of these sounds. We can't presume to do the same within the short dialogue we're discussing, but tweaking just a little bit for tension and otherwise just translating the dialogue, it looks something like this.

  Sho' 'nuff smo time leff fo you to git on downtown fo' 'nother pan dat pie. "There's still time enough for you to get downtown for another pan of that pie."

  Ain't but a-our o' two leff in the day. Dat walk take lease three hours, dere and back. "Ain't but an hour left in the day. That walk would take at least three hours, there and back."

  But 'choo know dey love dat pie. Ah shore-ly do. You too. Ah love to serve that pie at a good suppa. Please git on. "Please get on. You know they love that pie. I surely do. You do too. At a good supper, I love to serve that pie. Please."

  Ah had a car, Ah'd go. Ain't no car workin' in walkin distance tis whole place. Ah know you want dat pie. Ah know you do. Ah set out, maybe to barra Kip's hahrse and buggy. "If I had a car, I'd go. Ain't no working car even in walking distance. Shoot. I know you want that pie. I know it. Maybe I'll set out to borrow Kip's horse and buggy."

  Ah hope so, light's afailin. "I hope so. The light's failing."

  The language here contains plenty of dialect. But now the dialect is basically confined to word choice and syntax rather than spelling and misspelling. The machinations of dialect no longer keep us from meaning; rather they lead us to it. The accent is there for the reader, but it doesn't overwhelm the scene. Nor should it, ever.

  Dialect That Works

  There are writers crafting excellent dialect out there: Gloria Naylor, Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Alice Walker, the poet June Jordan, Susan Straight, Sapphire, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Earl Lovelace, among others. Then there are the champions of the ages. William Faulkner comes to mind immediately. What works beautifully in Faulkner's dialect is that it is so heavily modulated with the narrative it becomes a sort of true music. The sounds of the characters' language tears through the narrative consciousness of the novel. It is a part of the sound of the whole novel, the whole experience of reading a Faulkner story, the experience of Faulkner's world. Consider this passage from The Bear. Watch how the narrative shifts fluidly from the one dialect to the other and then into the movement of the narration. In this scene, seven strangers wander in to join in Major De Spain's epic hunt for the bear.