Fiction Writer's Workshop Read online

  Right: I'll drive.

  Left: You'll drive.

  Right: Yes.

  Left: What do you want?

  Right: Pancakes.

  Left: Stop it.

  Right: What?

  Left: You smell.

  Right: I've been drinking.

  Left: I said—

  Right: Just get in.

  Left: You smell. Leave me be.

  This has snap. Inferences can be drawn from it. It's not the whole story, absolutely not. But a lot of the story is in here, in this moment. Notice the techniques employed in this short space: repetition, interruption, changing the subject and echoing. There's very little exposition ("I've been drinking" qualifies, I suppose). There's also a clear sense of what each person wants, and not just in the moment, but perhaps beyond. The physical dynamic is clear enough. They are standing next to a car ("Just get in."). He might be coaxing (her "Don't touch me" line indicates his reaching for her to calm her). Her anger and his drunkenness are indicated in the way she echoes him ("You'll drive.") and the way he cuts her off.

  Not every conversation is this punchy or brief. You have to recognize that. But remember what you are teaching yourself by clipping down to this kind of pow-pow exchange. Compression. You are mastering tight, highly expressive exchange. This is not banter either. These are people talking. By just barely saying anything, they are saying everything. Against your best instincts, you have to remind yourself that less is more, that you are meeting your obligations far more artfully by holding back than you would by lathering it on.

  In Tobias Wolffs autobiography, This Boy's Life, are many examples of compressed dialogue. Look at the following dialogue without being introduced to the larger context of the book or the more particular one of this conversation. How much of it can you put together? The speaker is the narrator of the book, who likes to be called Jack.

  I was up on the school roof with Chuck. He was looking at me and nodding meditatively. "Wolff," he said. "Jack Wolff."

  "Yo."

  "Wolff, your teeth are too big."

  "I know they are. I know they are."

  "Wolf-man."

  'Yo, Chuckles."

  He held up his hands. They were bleeding. "Don't hit trees, Jack. Okay?"

  I said I wouldn't.

  "Don't hit trees."

  What sorts of things can you infer about these two? How old are they? What are they doing? What sort of relationship do they have?

  I'm about to give you the answers, so think before you read on. All of the answers can be taken from this dialogue alone.

  Well, they're kids, teenagers. Notice how Chuck ribs the narrator, the use of nicknames. They're on a roof, blowing each other grief. Chuck has been hitting trees. The sort of thing a boy does when he's fourteen or fifteen and has been drinking, which is what the two of them have been doing.

  Now read the dialogue again, with the particulars of context better drawn out. Are things better focused? Maybe a bit, but essentially the dialogue is give-and-take, a back-and-forth, mostly reflective of an attitude. In some ways, it is a clean representation of how lost the narrator was at this moment in his life, when he felt cut off from his mother, isolated and alone in a tiny logging town and headed in all the wrong directions. It is not the whole story. There is no attempt to summarize the event. There is no long look at Chuck, no direct statement of how drunk he is. The words the boys speak do the work. Yet there is very little substance to what they say (which is surely part of the point) except for "Don't hit trees." How does this dialogue run? Repetition, interruption, echoing and changing the subject are all evident.

  Here's another example of compressed dialogue, this one from Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh." In this story, a working-class woman named Norma Jean goes through a crisis of self-identity and feels her marriage has left her trapped. At the end of the story, she and her husband, Leroy, picnic on the battlegrounds at Shiloh. There, surrounded by the monuments and forests, far from their trailer, Norma Jean says, "I want to leave you." The dialogue that follows is both predictable and surprising, and it stands as a good example of successful compression.

  Without looking at Leroy, she says, "I want to leave you."

  Leroy takes a bottle of Coke out of the cooler and flips off the cap.

  He holds the bottle poised near his mouth but cannot remember to take a drink. Finally, he says, "No, you don't."

  'Yes, I do."

  "I won't let you."

  'You can't stop me."

  "Don't do me that way."

  Leroy knows Norma Jean will have her own way. "Didn't I promise to be home from now on?" he says.

  "In some ways, a woman prefers a man who wanders," says Norma Jean. "That sounds crazy, I know."

  "You're not crazy."

  Leroy remembers to drink from his Coke. Then he says, "Yes, you are crazy. You and me could start all over again. Right back at the beginning."

  "We have started all over again," says Norma Jean, "and this is how it turned out."

  "What did I do wrong?"

  "Nothing."

  "Is this one of those women's lib things?" Leroy asks.

  "Don't be funny."

  The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard.

  "Everything was fine till Mama caught me smoking," says Norma Jean, standing up. "That set something off."

  What you might notice here is how much less evasion is evident in this one. The pattern of interrupting exists, but the two characters stay on the subject, dealing with it in an amazingly small number of exchanges. This is a literal compression; words are squeezed out of the lines, until the expression is at its barest and clearest. By moving things toward the most minimal exchange possible, you begin to discover the marvelous potential of economy in language. Get this down and then you can release. Compress and release. Compress and release. Sounds like a birthing class. But we'll get to that later.

  A REWORKED DIALOGUE

  What did my student, the one with her pianist story, come up with on her five-word exchange exercise? She made some easy plot changes, getting rid of the arthritis, extending his recovery period to over a year, losing the pregnancy altogether. Still the conversation had weight. One week later she came back to me with this. Remember, the wife has walked in just after he has fumbled with the frame.

  His wife walked in, threw her keys on the table and regarded

  the mess. "What is this?"

  "Nothing," he said.

  "It looks like something," she said.

  "You have no idea."

  "I live here, Jack."

  'You couldn't have any idea."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "How could you?"

  "I am living in the miserable world you created."

  "Great, thanks for your support."

  "I don't know what to do anymore."

  "Fall in love with me again."

  "I am in love with you."

  I stopped reading there. This new section starts out pretty tight. It's far more tense, and the distance between them is more tangible. There is a gap between them; they aren't explaining to each other, at least not at first, but are merely talking to each other. But they begin explaining to each other as soon as she asks him directly, "What's that supposed to mean?" That is just a clever way of explaining to the readers, of answering their questions. Remember that in life, conversations do not go on for the sake of an audience.

  What the writer doesn't see is that there's no need to explain yet. The tension isn't high enough. The wife has only been home for about two minutes. It's too soon to be laying it all out there. More than anything, it's indicative of the fact that the writer has lost her balance and is trying to find it by allowing the dialogue to explain her way out of things. Besides she'd broken my five-word rule too many times to say that she'd really wor
ked at compressing. I sent her off, and she came back a day later. This time it looked like this. Again, the wife is regarding the broken glass when she begins.

  Her: What's this?

  Him: Nothing.

  Her: Looks like something.

  Him: You have no idea.

  Her: None.

  Him: You should know.

  Her: I should. Him: Yes, you should. Her: I don't.

  (He nodded.) Her: But I live here. Him: Yes.

  Her: Me. Us. I live here.

  Him: What's that supposed to mean?

  Her: I want to.

  The question appeared again! But this time it worked, because she wasn't answering a question that could sum up the story. She was answering a question for her husband and she was saying, indirectly, that she loved him and that she wanted to help. To my mind, the dialogue has come miles by this point. The exchanges, despite some obvious flaws, show real improvement. The tensions are better focused in the writer's mind. Again, I stopped at this point, reading no further. But there were pages of this stuff. My student complained that it had gotten too long. I assured her this was no problem unless she was unwilling to cut. "Cut more?" she said.

  Yes. Compression has many stages. I urged her to go through and look for longer passages. Again, she fell into a pattern of ignoring my five-word rule. Things like this appeared later.

  "I'm just so tired of walking around here like it's a mortuary. There is life out there, Jack. A life that's waiting for you. A life that just might not be so bad. But you just can't bring yourself to look for it."

  Compressed, that might look like this.

  "There is a life out there for you."

  Here's another exchange.

  Him: A part of me has died. Can't you understand that? Her: Of course. I mean I know how much your music meant to you. It's just been so long since your stroke.

  It can be compressed into this.

  Him: Part of me died.

  Her: Of course. I mean I know. It's just been so long.

  I1 told her to pluck out the most well-compressed lines from the entire seven pages and see what happened when she slapped them together. She was doing this from over six pages of double-spaced dialogue. I told her to fit it all into fifteen to twenty exchanges. I told her to release the five-word rule when she needed to, but to use it just one more time as a watchword. This is what she came up with.

  Her: What's this?

  Him: Nothing.

  Her: Looks like something.

  Him: It's a job. I was doing a job.

  Her: You dropped .. .

  Him: It broke. I was working and it broke.

  Her: I know you were working.

  Him: You have no idea.

  Her: None.

  Him: You should know. Her: I should. Him: Yes, you should. Her: I don't.

  (He nodded.) Her: But I live here too. Him: What's that supposed to mean? Her: I want to. I want to know.

  Him: I've done this. I broke this. (He motioned to the glass.) Her: I just wish you wouldn't sit here like somebody died. Him: Part of me did die.

  Her: Of course. (She knelt down next to him, brushed the broken glass from his sleeve.) I mean I know. It's just been so long.

  Him: No one could know. No one could possibly know.

  Her: I know. We know.

  Him: There is a life. I can see it.

  Her: There is.

  Him: It's just hard.

  Now is this new dialogue all that much better? Maybe. I certainly think so. It needs some scene to be sure. That will help with the pace. It's still melodramatic as all get-out. Frankly, I'd like her to leave him

  hanging. My bent as a writer is to avoid easy resolutions, since I find so few of them in my own life. But that's a question of aesthetic, of the writer's ideas, and this is not my story.

  But go all the way back to that first version. In this new draft, far less is revealed, far less direction is lent to the dialogue. Despite its relative speed, it feels more natural, more like people talking to each other. Beyond that it doesn't pin the writer into any new corners. This dialogue is not perfect, but if the writer keeps pushing the story outward now, toward the scene, it will be complete in the sense that this is all the characters have to say to each other in order for the reader to come closer to them and their story.

  WATCHWORDS FOR COMPRESSION

  Write this on an index card.

  Figure it out. Cut it out. Read it out. Turn it out.

  Use that card when you're working to compress a bloated dialogue. Do you know what it means?

  Figure it out: Know what the characters want and need. You don't have to tell it. In fact, you shouldn't. But you do have to figure them out. These desires, these needs are the tacit motivation for speaking. They are why we ask. They are why we tell.

  Cut it out: Write whatever kind of dialogue you want. Be as explicit as you need yourself to be. But then cut it to the barest bones. Have faith in the cuts you make. Be sure the core of the dialogue is clear expression. Cut everything you can, even as you are typing it. Compress.

  Read it out: Read the dialogue aloud. You don't have to be an actor. But you should be able to hear the voices at work. You ought to be able to tap out the dialogue in your own voice, even if the character is someone from an entirely different world. This is part of understanding character and prose. Reading aloud is a must. If you haven't begun reading your work aloud yet, get yourself to a fiction reading.

  You'll probably find that the fiction writer takes most care when reading his dialogue. That's the sort of care you should be giving your work as well.

  Turn it out: By this I mean two things. Once you've cut to the barest bones, once you're onto the real rhythms, release the dialogue a little. Allow a speaker to clarify, or maybe backtrack a little. To help you here, think of the techniques I gave you: repetition, interruption, changing the subject and echoing. These things can help to extend the focal points of a dialogue.

  When I say turn it out, I also mean turn the dialogue out into the physical world. Use the details of the world to refract the dialogue. Cars honking. Animals braying. Plates breaking. Tears falling. Snorts. Bells. Whistles. Chest thumping. Imperceptible twitches. Stomachaches. Corn flakes underfoot. The smell of spray paint in the air. Details are what make stories their own particular brand of pleasure, and the same is true of dialogue. Once you've trimmed to the essential, you've made much room for the physical world or gesture and circumstance. Take some pleasure in turning the dialogue outward.

  EXERCISES

  1. Decompress. Take a brief dialogue from one of your stories. It could start out as a short (no more than four or five exchanges), highly contextualized dialogue—something a new reader would be able to make neither heads nor tails of, the kind you might call "throwaway dialogue," at least now. Pluck it from the story as a whole, and rewrite it as the whole story. Decompress the entire story into this conversation. Remember your obligations: You have to create clear exposition, you have to draw the story toward certain themes and you have to use the dialogue to advance the plot. See what you can do in a relatively short space, say two pages, but go on if you must.

  2. Compress. Below you will find an example of bloated dialogue. Compress the dialogue using the techniques discussed. Determine what the characters want or need. Avoid exposition. Discover the tension, remembering tension means rhythm. Run with these. Go where you need to. Add details that make it more compelling. Employ actions that are well chosen, surprising and realistic, that is, no sudden foghorns in the middle of a church in Tempe. (Suspend your disbelief on your

  own time, bud.) Remember, compressed language strikes a certain pattern, but in search of the pattern, you must cut. Try rewriting this in live-word exchanges. How few can you cut it to without losing meaning?

  "Oh, Jenny," he whispered. "I'm unhappy. I mean, it's not that you don't mean a lot to me. You do mean a lot to me, a whole lot. Back in Tucson that time was special. I mean it. I meant it then too." He
shifted in his pew.

  "I bet," Jenny said, loud enough so that people started leaning in to eavesdrop. "Rob, ever since you went and joined the army two years ago, just because of the Gulf War, I have been living in that little crappy house with my parents, waiting for you to come back and tell me that you loved me. You said you wanted to marry me when we were on the water slide at Kings Island. Do you remember that much? My friends all have good jobs now. They've taken the best jobs in this town. And now you're running off on this hair-brained scheme to sell T-shirts out of the back of your '78 van, the one your parents customized? You were in the army. Don't you have more pride than to sell T-shirts out of the back of a van?"

  "Not just T-shirts. Embroidered T-shirts. And I'm not selling them out of the van. I'm just using the van to make deliveries. I took the refrigerator out to make more room. Besides, I do love you. That was no lie. I'm just a little lost now is all."

  "When I think of that van I just think of all the good times, Rob."

  "I know, me too. Like the time at the reservoir before the tournament? Remember that? When Jesse Hocken fell in that spillway."

  "How could I forget?"

  "I'm under a lot of pressure. The bank has an eye on me. My parents are watching. I just have to make a go of this. I'm just asking you to give me some time to get this embroidered T-shirt thing off the ground."

  "Yes, Rob. I will. But I have to tell you that six months is a long time. You will be out on the road, living the high life. Don't expect me to sit by and play the loyal girlfriend. I'm too worried about my future now. I feel very uncertain and lost."

  "I thought we wore getting married."

  "You probably did think we were going to get married. You could have had the church picked out for all I care. That's exactly what I think you're always talking to your mother about," Jenny said. A man next to them shushed her. "Oh you hush! I'm talking about my time in Tucson here and it's very painful. I'm just happy to be back here in Tempe."

  3. Engineer. Write a bloated dialogue, along the lines of exercise one. Now work like a compression engineer. If you are in a class, you could exchange dialogues to do this. If you are working alone, locate a long, windy dialogue within a book you know. You can stand in a bookstore and thumb through books until you find one. It's amazing how many are out there. Writers can be impressively self-indulgent.