Fiction Writer's Workshop Page 7

  In the meantime his life falls into shambles. He sinks into depression. He loses jobs, a concert tour falls through. He and his wife survive for a while on their savings, then on his disability income, but finally are in desperate straits. He must give up. He has to go out into the world and get a real job. He finds nothing, nothing he could ever love anyway. One night while working to frame some rare sheet music, a hobby taken up on the advice of his physical therapist, he fumbles with his project and drops it on the kitchen floor. His wife comes in to help him clean up. She speaks.

  Before she speaks, let me pause here and say that this is a synopsis of a story a student presented to one of my workshops. We discussed the story in class at some length and afterward. There is, to be sure, an edge of melodrama to it. The timing is off too, as the character's descent into desperation is entirely too fast, as is his recovery (some six weeks all told). The writer was aware that she might be treading on certain cliches here, but she was interested in the story of a man who was the only one who could perceive changes in himself, changes that disturbed him so that they transformed him, from a gracious charming talent to a grumbling, groping has-been. She began the story nicely, with a focused image of his hands separating eggs for a cake batter. The narration slipped into a brief description of his music, of the act of playing as it felt and sounded to the protagonist, whose name was Jack. There was an awkward scene of him slamming the piano lid shut after a botched sonata (which the writer agreed was too much the cliched act of a frustrated pianist and agreed to cut). From there the story moved unevenly across exposition and narrative with a limited amount of dialogue between Jack and his wife (with some fine moments in between) until the moment with the broken frame, which clearly was, to the writer's mind, the turning point of the story, if not something more.

  In some ways this was a typical early draft of a story by a talented young writer. It was not a great story, but it was not a lousy one either. It had, as most early drafts do, its major weak spots, but it possessed strengths too. You may be holding your nose at the plot line, but it's probably more a matter of my poor synopsis than the flaws of the story itself. More importantly, as a teacher, I'm not going to kick somebody off her idea. That's not my job. You may think you've heard the same story told a thousand times—in movies, on television ("M*A*S*H!" you scream) or in your own life ("My cousin was a flutist until she broke her teeth in the spokes of my bike!"). Stories are constantly recycled. Journeys. Returns. Triumphs. Defeats. Change. Stasis. Writers shift the level of tension, the terms of the conflict and a new story is created from the bones of the old. Big news. But that's not the point. Readers of fiction (not to mention teachers of writing) have to accept that fact. Readers rely on it. These patterns keep us telling stories. So you live with it. The trick is to make each story unique with the echoes of your own voice, to show the details of the world in a way that convinces us we are seeing the core of it in front of us, perhaps for the first time.

  Frankly, I liked the story of the pianist well enough just for the first scene, and I hung with it all the way, despite its flaws, until Jack sat down at the kitchen table. That's when the dialogue proper started up. Here's what followed, taken, with that wonderful student's permission, straight from her story.

  "Jack," she whispered, "I just can't do this for much longer. I can't do it alone. Jack, I need you back."

  "I know. God, Joan, don't you think I want to help? Don't you think I'm dying to have a purpose? I have lost everything that made me, me. Don't you see that. It's like starting over again."

  "Why can't you just work like everyone else until we figure out what to do? I mean, can't you do that for me? Don't you love me enough for that? Don't you think I deserve that?"

  "Of course you do. But you have to understand, delivering boxes of cookies to grandchildren and office supplies to businesses is not me. That's not what I do. And I don't have any solutions now. I'll think of something—I will."

  "Jack, you are not a concert pianist. And you never will be. As terrible as that sounds, you have to learn that getting over it is the best thing you can do for yourself."

  "I know, but just give me some time to figure out what I can-do. Just give me a couple of weeks—maybe my hands will get better—"

  "Jack, we don't have that much time to be wasting while you figure out what to do." Her voice faltered as she picked her hands from the floor and covered her face in them.

  "What do you mean we don't have any time? We still have some savings from my last tour. We're not doing so badly, right?"

  A piece of glass stuck in her forehead sent a drop of blood over her wrinkled hands. She uncovered her face. "Jack," she whispered, "I'm pregnant."

  "What?" he stammered.

  "Jack, we're pregnant and we need money for the baby. You need to go back to work tomorrow. I'm sorry but there isn't any other way."

  "My God, how long have you known?"

  "Since you had the stroke. I was going to tell you right after you got better. But then the arthritis came and I didn't think you could handle it. I wanted you to be happy. I wanted us to be happy. And six weeks ago I didn't think you could be happy."

  "When were you going to tell me?"

  "I just wanted you back on your feet again. And the doctors told me anything upsetting, any kind of responsibility, could trigger the depression. God, Jack, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how you would react."

  "Well, now I know it's over."

  "What's over?"

  "My dream. My dream to get it all back. My dream to concentrate on me for the first time in my life so I can achieve the only thing I ever really wanted."

  "Well, it's good to know that's the only thing you ever really wanted."

  She went to bed. And so did he.

  Call this dialogue what you will. Stilted. Flabby. Wooden. Artificial. It's bad. My student called it that. She knew it didn't work. Heart and soul, she knew. Her story had been cranking right along too. Before this exchange, the characters were beginning to come into focus. Jack appeared to be puzzling it all out, deciding where he fit in, if he could change and how. His wife was tense about the massive disruption in their lives, but there was no reason to think she was hiding anything from Jack. The pacing of the scenes was fair. And, notably, the longest dialogue exchange up to that point was four or five lines. Then she started this dialogue and it flew out of her control. I told her I thought the dialogue was crappy, that the story fell apart at that point. She knew it didn't work even as she wrote it. But she still stuck it in there, hoping it could save the day for her story. To my mind, and I think to hers, it did quite the opposite. It sunk the story like a stone.

  MAKING DIALOGUE DO TOO MUCH

  What happened? For one thing, the writer tried to do everything with the dialogue. Look at this exchange closely. You'll find many of the structural elements of an entire story.

  Exposition/setup: Things such as, "You are not a concert pianist." The mention of the stroke, the arthritis, the doctor's warnings, the dwindling money, the savings, the tour, the other jobs, the big news. The whole story is restated by the characters in this passage.

  Conflict: Her "I need you" vs. his "I need more time." These are said, then said again and again.

  Building tension: "I just can't do this for much longer." The tension in the dialogue comes from the frenetic pace as much as from the conflict between them.

  Metaphor: The bit of glass in the forehead, the blood running over her hands. These are, notably, the only uses of scene within the dialogue. No where else do we see a detail from the kitchen. These moments are so dramatic, so melodramatic really, that they demand to be read metaphorically. The tiny cut is representative of the stroke; the blood on the hands represents his useless hands. This could work in a scene that was drawn together around other convincing details. Now they seem like bland, easily read metaphors taking the place of strong scenic detail. Too bad. They were pretty good images.

  Climax/secondary tension:
"I'm pregnant." Out of nowhere, the early concerns and tension are shot to pieces.

  Realization/epiphany: "Well, now I know it's over." Not much of one, but a realization nonetheless.

  Resolution: She went to bed. And so did he. And thank God they did too.

  Their conversation as a believable piece of dialogue was over after a few lines. In fact, I might suggest it was done when his wife spoke those first lines, "I just can't do this for much longer. I can't do it alone. Jack, I need you back."

  When Dialogue Fails

  I would call this dialogue bloated. It's a lot of raw information to get into a scene, let alone into a series of convincing dialogue exchanges. You might be able to get that much story into a page and a half of text, and you might be able to come up with a circumstance in which you would want to, but, as I say elsewhere in this book, sometimes it's best just to shut up.

  Clearly my student goes too far. There is excess throughout. The language has no rhythm to speak of. There is no physical dynamic at all, no tangible sense of scene working in any way to heighten, or even focus, the tensions in play. The dialogue breaks just about every rule I suggest here and in class.

  What went wrong? The writer was trying to hinge her story on this conversation, to use it as a fulcrum for the tensions she'd balanced up to this point in the story. Would Jack fall apart? Or could he rise above this? The themes of the story were framed here in his words; look and you'll see his sense of self-worth, his identity, his reference point on the future. He may sound like an overindulged sot here, but he's got flashes of humanity in the things he says. He just goes on too long, as does she. And the more they speak, the more trouble they get themselves into. The student admitted that the pregnancy had at first been an attempt to knock some energy into the dialogue. I told her then it was the first thing that should go.

  A Strategy for Bloated Dialogue

  What can you do with dialogue like this? First, I might suggest that you try writing it. Yes. Try it. Elsewhere in this book I discuss stories that are nothing more than an extended dialogue. If you try to write an entire story in dialogue, you'll find you have a lot of obligations. Even if you decide to ignore scenic details—ambulances wailing, coffee rings on the table, the speckle of birds against the distant sky— you'll have to make the tension turn here and there. You have to do it in the spoken word. It's incredibly hard. But as you've discovered in your own writing, or maybe here in this book, there are ways to do it. It can be a burden, especially when the whole story is written with this conceit in mind.

  So when you feel the whole story leaking away into a bit of expository dialogue, my first suggestion is don't stop yourself. Write every bit of it. Crank it out. Squeeze every sentence out of the mouths of the characters. Why give in, especially to what I'm suggesting is a bad habit? Well, don't let it become a habit. Just do it when you know things are falling apart. Sometimes this can be a helpful way of getting at the issues of the story. Perhaps you'll even find some conflicts you didn't recognize before.

  But once you've felt what it's like to expand a story to its full bloat within a given dialogue, you'll see how dizzying expository dialogue can be. Just as with the "Brady-ized Dialogue" in chapter six, you can begin to feel you are writing for children, cueing the reader to each bump on the Oregon Trail of your logic. So finish it. Write every bit of it. Extend it to the point of absurdity. Then take these pages of dialogue to the side, pick up your red pen and get to work. Cut. Compress. Cut some more.

  COMPRESSION

  To defeat bloated dialogue, you have to learn to compress your language. Strip it to the barest bones. Cut everything. Use no gestures. No scene. (Not for now, anyway.) I told my student to rewrite the whole scene in five- or even three-word exchanges accompanied by only minimal scenic detail. I insisted that no character be allowed to speak more than five words at a time. Perhaps you think that can't be done. My student certainly thought that.

  "Five words?" she said, dumbfounded.

  "Five words," I repeated.

  "Come on."

  "I mean it," I said.

  "That's hard."

  "Compress."

  "There's a limit."

  "Sure there is."

  "Five words."

  "Five."

  "That's not natural."

  "Listen to yourself."

  Get it? I'm using my old hat advice from chapter one here. Dig out the exercises in listening. Does anyone ever set her life up so completely as Jack and his wife do in their dialogue? Hell no. Remember your shorthand here. Words have meaning. Grant them that. Use them wisely. You give them more power when you use words sparingly and in tension with other words.

  First, figure out what each character wants. There are few moments in life like the one between Jack and his wife, when needs and desires are being laid bare. Jack wants his life to be the way it was before. His wife wants their life to become what it might be. In a rhetorical sense, they are trying to persuade each other. Even if their emotions are not fully on the surface in this scene (and this is an issue the writer can decide later), there should be a sense of urgency in the things they say. Adhering to the three-words rule, at least for this draft, should help add that.

  Second, avoid exposition. Remember that most relationships are held together with tacit threads, things unspoken. Jack and his wife are married, so it's easy to see that they would know their history, that they would know the other's argument even as it's being made. But this advice holds true for most relationships and, notably, for most dialogue.

  Consider this scene. A waiter comes to the table. A customer peruses the menu. Almost every element of the relationship is tacitly evident in the first words spoken: "What can I get you this evening?" They both know what's up. They understand and accept what's about to transpire. They both want things (the waiter, a clear order and generous tip; the customer, good service and hot food), but they don't state the entire circumstance either.

  "Hello," said the waiter. "Have you had enough time to look at the menu, that piece of heavy-stock paper embossed with the full range of choices we offer in the three major categories— appetizer, entree and desserts—as well as a drink menu and sundries on the back there? I decided to see if you were ready to order now because I had a lull and I'm hoping to get this order started before I start on that guy's Caesar salad, which is an awful hassle since we use real anchovies and I have to peel open a new tin every time I make one. What a nightmare! At the very least, you might be ready to order a drink now from our full-service bar, which is right over there, just past that brass rail, next to the entrance."

  If the world were full of waiters like this, we'd all be ready to eat at home a lot more. But in some ways he's telling it like it is. The truth is, it's actually kind of nice that a person doesn't state everything he wants, everything he knows and everything both of you accept every time he speaks to you. Dialogue often becomes bloated with exposition, by the need to remind the reader of the basic tensions at work, to explain the circumstance beyond what is realistic and necessary. There's a false triangle many writers get trapped in. In this paradigm,

  In the false triangle, the reader is the primary audience, the one for whom the words are being spoken. Thus, dialogue is shaped to the needs of the reader, rather than to those of the other character. Dialogue directed in this fashion sounds phony because it is phony. These aren't people talking. These are people "demonstrating" conflict or "actualizing" tension. The dialogue sounds wooden because its conceit is self-congratulatory. The writer who embraces this way of doing things suggests that the world he depicts is a cheap gauze, a mere filter for his ideas. If you are trying to write convincing, compelling stories, the relationship between the characters ought to be your primary concern.

  the writer sees the characters talking for the benefit of the reader, as if the characters were speaking essentially to the reader.

  What is the real model? Well, I hate models. They remain best written upon blackboards, where t
hey can be erased, turned into dust by whoever happens along next. Still, there is probably a way to understand the relationship better by looking at a revised version of the false triangle. In this version, the energy of meaning runs from the reader, as secondary audience, toward both the character and the words themselves.

  In this version, the meaning moves in more than one direction, and the reader is given some responsibility in the process. Here the reader looks at the conversations themselves for meaning, as well as the characters. The key is not to think of models as ways to succeed in crafting your dialogue. Remember, characters speak to each other, not to the reader.

  Let's return to compression. Remember tension means rhythm, and rhythm means interruption. When you are compressing, you can pull a dialogue together by using the rhythm of the exchange to your advantage. Allowing characters to interrupt one another, to complete sentences, to repeat each other, is a way of reflecting the two items discussed earlier: what they want and what they know. When you are consciously boiling things down, the way you are in the act of compression, you have to rely on rhythm, interruption and flow within a dialogue. I'm telling you to go to five-word exchanges. You will get stuck. When you're stuck on which five words to use, have one character change the subject briefly or abortively. Or let one character cut the other one off in midstream. Or think of one as an echo for the other in a given moment. The exchanges in compressed dialogue ought to be like drums speaking to one another.

  RHYTHM

  Think in terms of beats. Read the following exercise, but while doing it, pound your left hand on the desk in beat with one character's lines, pound your right hand in beat with the other's. Use the number of words to represent the number of beats.

  Left: You're drunk.

  Right: I'll drive.

  Left: Not with me.

  Right: I'm hungry.

  Left: Don't touch me.