Fiction Writer's Workshop (15 page)

When I got home my mother was in bed with the lights out. "Honey?"

"Yes?"

"Come in and talk to me."

"Okay," I said.

"Rub my back, okay?"

"Okay," I said. I sat on the bed beside her. She smelled of bourbon.

"How was your date?"

"Terrific! I never had such a good time."

"How nice. Is she a nice girl?"

"Better than that. She's charming and sophisticated and intelligent."

"You're home earlier than I expected. Not so hard. Rub gently. You bruiser. I'm going to call you that: Bruiser. Is she playful? Is she like me? Does she say cute things?"

"Not an egghead, but she's dignified. She's straightforward. She says what she means."

"I think girls should be playful. That doesn't mean dishonest.

I'm playful."

"_______"

"Well, I am. Do you think she likes you?"

"How can I tell? It was just a first date." My fingers lightly stroked her neck to either side of her spine. "I doubt if she'll want to see me again. Why should she?"

"But why not? You're handsome and intelligent."

"Handsome! With these big nostrils?"

"Oh that's just your sister. She's so frustrated she has to pick on you. There's nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don't see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor." A long pause. "Nostrils... Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?" Small, high voice: "Are mine okay?"

A hopeless silence.

Study this dialogue out of the context of Edmund White's book and you might decide that it's a limpid ramble. All that meaningless chatter! Too many unnecessary exchanges. Too many trivialities. The writer uses dialogue exchanges solely to touch on plot issues. You might think I'd be pulling my hair out when I read something like this. To this I say, pay attention to the rule that questions the need for all rules, then study what the dialogue actually does. It's a sort of story unto itself.

It opens with an exchange of chatter, sure. But look how completely stripped down the scene is. The truth is, there is little attempt to set the scene, no description of the mother except for the smell of bourbon and the mention of her spine (two small, intriguing details). So the dynamic between mother and son exists on solely this plain of conversational niceties. Only when he agrees to rub her back does the physical circumstance come into play in some manner. Now look at the direction of the dialogue. The mother's character drives the conversation from the start. With each exchange, it presses closer in on her needs, rather than on her son's. ("Rub my back, okay?" "Is she like me?" "Are [my nostrils] okay?") On its own, each is a relatively benign question. But around these words, the bare and largely silent scene accentuates the narrator's isolation within this house, this family and this world. There's little movement and no sense of detail. Not much is revealed in the words themselves. Rather the silence of the scene, clearly reflected in the dearth of narrative detail and stated directly in the closing line, dominates. This pervading silence is as indicative as any single line. The story within the dialogue is of a boy cut off from any real sense of connection by a mother who can see little except herself. This thread can be seen clearly even here, out of context, taken as a story in itself.

Is that enough to make a successful story, that little summary? Surely not. My point is
not
that an effective dialogue can be a story unto itself. Rather, I want you to see that a good dialogue relies on many of the same principles of the larger story in which it appears. Character. Tension. Scene. They're all present. Even dialogue where the narration is toned down. In this case, these things work not so much for the words on the page as for the silence that replaces them.

Quieting a Character

Silence takes many forms. For the writer, cognizant of every force working within the story, it is often a matter of "turning down the knob" on one of those elements. Whereas, in the above example, White pares away the element of scene and minimizes the narrative consciousness, many writers silence one member of a dialogue in order to make the words of the other resonate on the page. In the following example from John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother," the narrator and his brother examine the outside of their family's vacation house. While we hear the brother, Lawrence, in conversation, the narrator is conspicuously silent. That part of the character's voice is turned down, but notice how memory and narrative consciousness rise up to fill his silence.

He pointed out to me, at the base of each row of shingles, a faint blue line of carpenter's chalk. "That house is about twenty-two years old," he said. "These shingles are about two hundred years old. Dad must have bought shingles from all the farms around here when he built the place, to make it look venerable. You can still see the carpenter's chalk put down where the antiques were nailed into place."

It was true about the shingles, although I had forgotten it. When the house was built, our father, or his architect, had ordered it covered with lichen and weather-beaten shingles. I didn't follow Lawrence's reasons for thinking this was scandalous.

"And look at these doors," Lawrence said. "Look at these doors and window frames." I followed him over to a big Dutch door that opened onto the terrace and looked at it. It was a relatively new door, but someone had worked hard to conceal its newness. The surface had been deeply scored with some metal implement, and the white paint had been rubbed into the incisions to imitate brine, lichen and weather rot. "Imagine spending thousands of dollars to make a sound house look like a wreck," Lawrence said. "Imagine the frame of mind this implies. Imagine wanting to live so much in the past that you'll pay men carpenter's wages to disfigure your front door." Then I remembered Lawrence's sensitivity to time and his sentiments and opinions about our feelings for the past. I had heard him say, years ago, that we and our friends and our part of the nation, finding ourselves unable to cope with our problems of the present, had, like a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a measure of this irremediable failure. The faint blue line of chalk had reminded him of these ideas. . . .

The narrator's silence is understandable and appropriate. It's clear that Lawrence isn't listening. The literal conversation has dropped away. Were the writer a mere tape recorder in a conversation of this length, we would surely hear, or see, the narrator make some response—some question to hasten things along, a nod of assent, a grunt even. But Cheever makes no attempts to duplicate, or even indicate, the narrator's responses. Meanwhile, the past rises up in the narrator's conscious, even as the brother regales the father for hiding in the past. Thus the contrary forces at work in the house, old and new, past and present, become part of the tension of the scene. These tensions are brought to a head when the family comes in from the tennis court.

It's hardly a quiet dialogue. Lawrence is venting and the past is roaring up in the narrator's mind. The physical world is shining through. But it is a dialogue, even though one person does not speak. The narrator is no less a part of the dialogue because he is silent. The narrative voice takes over and goes further into the questions that the story raises. Resisting the urge to respond in dialogue, to engage the narrator with the spoken word, is part of the muscle Cheever displays in his dialogue. It is a demonstration of control.

A WORD ON CONTROL

It takes strength to be silent. It takes control. Choosing when to stop, when to mute, when to strip away is a key to writing dialogue that is

well integrated with your fiction. As we've seen, silence is often an answer. Choose it, surprise yourself with it, rely on it. But never simply fall back on it because you are tired of a scene or an exchange. It is not a tool for the lazy. It must become an element of your language, a choice made from
within
a dialogue rather than as a means of getting out of one. Use silence to express, rather than to evade, and it will serve better than any thesaurus.

EXERCISES

1. Give bubble talk a try. Without reading them closely, collect the Sunday comics for a few weeks. Then ask a friend to "white out" the dialogue bubbles. Now, after examining each strip for the tone of the illustration and the accompanying gesture, create convincing dialogue. The words should accompany the pictures and fit within the bubbles. After a while, try to work against the meaning of the pictures. Let the words grate against the form of the bubble. Now turn this wit back onto your fiction, removing it from the bubbles and drawing the scene in words.

2. Set up a scene in which two people are arguing. You choose the argument. If you can't think of one, use the story of the two brothers in the bar. (Surely you can do better.) Write a two-page scene in which the two argue, but write it so the reader can only hear one of them. Silence the other, having him narrate the dialogue. We should never hear his words within the dialogue. This dialogue can become a rich tissue of memory, gesture and scene. Lean on these elements while writing it

3. Write a list of the particular gestures of your friends. This will involve carrying your spiral for a few days. Watch your buddies closely. Watch their hands, notice the way they walk, their stance when talking to others. List three particular gestures for each friend, or more if you can get them. Show the list around. See if people recognize their quirks. Save the list and refer to it while writing dialogue. It will be a rich source for many stories.

4. Draw a line down the middle of a page. At the top of one column, write the word "Place," and at the top of the other, write "Gesture." Now spend several days charting your own incidental gestures. Don't

watch for peculiarities so much as for the way you move in certain spaces. Here's a sample list.

This sort of list can be a rich and important source of detail for your stories.

5. Quiet the narrator. Write a back-and-forth narrative (in which the first character speaks, followed immediately by the other, followed immediately by the first character and so on), but don't put in any of the details of the physical world. Use a simple "he said," "she said" format, but remember, no locations, no "props," no background. The scene should involve something urgent, but not dangerous, so the characters feel compelled to speak (such as have an argument), but not so urgent they are reacting to the world around them (not a rainstorm) . After ten exchanges, allow yourself one, well-chosen physical detail within the dialogue and no more. Press the dialogue to an appropriate moment of silence. Once finished, examine. Are the elements of story there? What's missing? How can you press that into the exchange without employing the narrative voice? Do it.

A
ll my life the people around me have been dancing a strange two-step with radio, TV and the movies. I have friends who never listen to the radio, because they consider talk radio declasse or they like picking their own music. I have another set of friends that never watches television, for the usual set of reasons: too mindless, too predictable, bland writing, fuzzy sentiments. Many people I know share the same feelings about movies, particularly commercial ones, which tend to be written and rewritten so often they become a mishmash of homogenized ideas. I accept all of that as the general truth.