Fiction Writer's Workshop (21 page)

What makes you want to write a story? Perhaps you see an odd chap on the street, limping along, dragging a shopping bag full of oyster shells and you think,
"There's got to be a story there."
Perhaps you remember an old friend, the way he stuck to his guns in the middle of an argument you once had, and think that was something worthy. Perhaps you see patterns in your life—the children at the beach, the birds in your backyard, all of them leaving—and the mood strikes you. Maybe you throw a line down and see where it wants to go. It doesn't matter. The trick is to be self-conscious about what works for you. Know your quirks.

UNEXPECTED TURNS

This chapter has been about using dialogue to lead you to stories. This book has focused on crafting the voices of your characters more clearly and effectively. I'm proposing that you let your characters, or more specifically their dialogues, lead you to new places.

Remember the false triangle from chapter four? There we differentiated between the primary audience and the secondary audience. It was Aristotle who first proposed that all dramatic dialogue has two audiences, hence each line of dialogue, each moment of dramatic exchange has two entirely different meanings. This is an idea that's pretty intuitive for any writer. The primary audience is the person being spoken to, the person to whom the words are directed. The secondary audience is the actual audience (in a theater) or the reader. The writer, according to Aristotle, is in a kind of conversation with both audiences. Remember that the false triangle failed as a model because the meaning was directed primarily at the reader rather than the other characters. That's an understandable mistake. The relationship between the writer and the secondary audience is probably the most easily understood. We write because we read. Within a story, things happen, words are spoken, for the benefit of the reader. When done well, these mechanisms blend into the story seamlessly.

I'm not going to blather on and on about Aristotle. You should be reading that stuff anyway. Get busy. What I'm going to propose is a third audience. Nobody's going to be citing Chiarella in two thousand years (I am clearly more of a Roman than a Greek, by habit and gene), but I am suggesting that you, the writer, become a sort of third audience to dialogue. Listen to your characters. Listen to your world. Within the process of writing, become an audience to your characters. Most people don't tune in as easily to the idea of a writer in conversation with his characters, but anyone who has written knows the writer assumes the persona of his characters when they speak; he speaks
through
his characters to other characters. Now I'm asking you to listen to them. Let them ramble. Let them take you to unexpected places.

The idea is to start with your character's words. Don't start with a conceit. Start with a word. Don't start in a place. Start with a word. Don't start with a conflict. A word! Say the word. Hear the word. Now you are audience to yourself.

Do it long enough, do it hard enough, record enough of what you think and hear and see and you'll start to be able to form a context and circumstance that is surprising, even to you, the one who thinks she knows herself so well. The idea is that the story will take you places. The characters will tell you things. Sometimes you can sit back and listen to your characters. Don't expect much. They may just tell you where the FoodMax is. Just have faith in them. But they may show you things you've only half-known all your life.

EXERCISES

1. Reframe a conversation. Choose one of your existing dialogues. Strip it to a bare-boned exchange, eliminating the original scene. Now ask someone to create a list of five concrete details from the world. Tell him to vary the list. He might hit all the senses or choose a detail from five separate locales. Have him give you his list on an index card. Tape the index card to your computer monitor, or carry it with you, but in any case, read it several times. Then begin rewriting the original dialogue by pulling these details in. You may have to reshape the location, the setting and the circumstance, but work within your original dialogue as much as possible at the start. As you proceed, allow the dialogue to react to these new elements. Characters might pause in new spots, be more willing to reveal what they are after or be more circumspect, depending on how they react. Let the details into the dialogue. Allow them to lead it to new places.

If you don't have anyone to help you list these details, you might create a list of your own, but make it random. Scour your spiral notebooks. Don't decide you are going to take the scene that takes place in a truck stop and move it to an office building by simply listing five details from the lobby of your nearest skyscraper. Challenge yourself. Choose all kinds of details, from all sorts of places.

Feel free to choose one of the lists below as a starting point too, but try to use each as a group, and avoid choosing five items merely because they are easily connected.

a bowl of beans dishwater a paper cut cows lowing chewing carrots

an old dog a siren

a blacklight poster the interstate McDonald's

an armadillo blasting caps a weathered porch clean underwear an island

two kites too much salt boot prints tuna salad a phone ringing

2. Take one or several lines of overheard dialogue and, changing the context and speaker, start a story there. Suppose you heard someone say, "No, no. One shelf up," at the supermarket today. Start there. Open the story with those words—"One shelf up"—and from there, start adding details. A name. A new setting. Think of each sentence as part of the process of focusing your vision. At the end of the first paragraph, if you don't see a scene, start again. Same opening line, different speaker, new setting. Try this four times. Read each one. Examine what has happened within the process of starting four times. Which is most successful? Least? Which is furthest from the dialogue trigger? This exercise can often cue you in on new ways to start longer pieces.

I
n the introduction to this book, I said there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to writing dialogue. That just isn't so, as there are a few particular elements about writing dialogue that are governed by rules, such as punctuation; and other things, for example, your use of adverbs and present participles, are elements for which you should create your own individual hard-and-fast rules.

Where do you go with your questions, especially the ones that may seem silly, about dialogue form and format? In this chapter, you'll find answers to some questions you have asked, and others for questions you never knew had been posed. Some of this is advice. There are a few rules. It's meant to help you set up a few rules of your own, to help you pick apart a few misconceptions, while providing some answers for the sorts of specific questions a writer comes up with when writing dialogue.

ON DIALOGUE TAGS

There are several ways to say "she said." She barked, bellowed, shouted, screamed, whined, worried, wailed and waffled. She moaned, whispered and whimpered. She protested. She cackled, cooed and coaxed. She yelled, stammered, stuttered, chortled, coughed, blared, bleated, trumpeted, sneezed, sniffed, hissed, hacked, hooted, harped, haggled, panted, begged, pleaded and pondered. She posited, questioned, spat, sang, trilled, snickered, expounded, uttered, demanded, gasped, groaned, jeered, jested, jabbered and joked. She pronounced, declared, queried, spewed and spumed.

While she may have done all that, the truth is, she
said
it.

New writers tend to lose faith in the word "said." They think they overuse it. My first piece of advice here is to not worry about it. Use "said" in your dialogue tags and nothing else. Concentrate on the words your characters say and the way they say them. Your first obligation should be to their words. Get the words right first.

Still, if you're worried about using "said" too much, that's understandable. It's a small word, and in the course of a long dialogue, it might be used dozens of times. From the very start of our lives as writers, we are trained not to repeat. I used to have a teacher who razored out repeated words on our papers—focusing on unnecessary words such as "very" and "was" and "really"—so that we were left with actual holes in the graded paper. He would hold each paper up in front of the class and the sunlight would leak through it onto the linoleum. "Repeating is lazy," he said. "The mark of a writer who doesn't care."

Admittedly, there is some problem to using the word "said" over and over. Editing yourself as you work, watching for repetition, varying your word choice—these are fine techniques for strengthening your prose, fiction and nonfiction alike. The word "said" repeated often enough becomes, finally, a beat in the pulse of the language. In particularly short, rapid-fire dialogue, the pulse of this word can become overwhelming. The dialogue is flattened out by the straight repetition of the word.

So in a dialogue that's flat, you're in a real double bind. In that sense, overuse of the word "said" is probably a red flag going up that problems exist elsewhere. Look at the dialogue below.

"Hi," she said.

"Hello," he said.

"Did you have a good day?" she said.

"I sure did," he said.

"Good," she said.

It stinks. And the use of "said" is only part of the reason why. In other spots in the book, I've discussed insinuating tension into dialogue. Here most of the dialogue tags are unnecessary, but no amount of engineering can make this dialogue work. Remove all the "said's" from the dialogue tags and it gets no better. It's just tensionless jabber.

The problem, as with most lousy dialogue, exists in the words spoken by the character and in the level of tension between the characters. So remember your first obligation: the character's words.

What about a dialogue that's full of tension? What if the words are coming out right and you want to find a way to ease yourself out of repeating the "said's"? Read the dialogue below out loud. It takes place as a character arrives home after spending the last of his Christmas money on a boa constrictor. He arrives after having been in a fairly serious car accident, and his concern is that his snake, hidden from his wife in a large box, has been injured.

"You're red," Jeanine said.

"A snake. I bought a snake," I said.

"You bought a snake?" she said. 'You bought a snake."

"From Andy . . . ," I said. "I bought the snake from Andy."

"Oh my God!" Jeanine said. "It's in the box! You brought a snake in here!"

"No, no," I said.

"It's in the box," she said. "I know it."

"Wait, wait. Just a second," I said.

"Get it out!" she said.

"Don't," I said.

"You can't do this," she said. "Not in my house."

There are two points to notice here. The use of said is
not
overwhelming. The dialogue moves forward because of the tension and is not fundamentally interrupted by the use of "said." The tension between these characters drives the scene forward. The second thing to notice is that all of the "said's" do not appear at the end of each line of dialogue. The use and placement of dialogue tags is varied. For instance, many of the dialogue tags are "buried" in the middle of lines. ("It's in the box," she said. "I know it.")
Dialogue tags can and should be buried in the middle of the lines of an individual character.

BURYING DIALOGUE TAGS

This is very simple really. You take a line of dialogue and find a moment of natural pause. Moments of pause include natural pauses as reflected by punctuation. Look for commas and periods, for moments when the character stutters or gropes for words, or for a moment when the two characters are interrupted. At that point, insert a tag. The key is to make the pause created by the placement of the dialogue tags suit the movement and direction of the character's words.

Here's a single piece of dialogue spoken by one character. Look for spots to bury a dialogue tag.

"Ellie, I'm frustrated. I've been living a double life for years. My life has been a series of bad decisions, and now I'm trying to change."

Picking a point to bury a dialogue tag here is fairly easy. Looking at the sentence again, I'll place markers at potential spots for the tag.

"Ellie, (1) I'm frustrated. (2) I've been living a double life for years. My life has been a series of bad decisions, (3) and now I'm trying to change."