Fiction Writer's Workshop (7 page)

Two couples on a hotel balcony in Cairo, at night, drinks in hand

Two men ice fishing

Two women painting an old church pew

Three children who discover a shoe box full of human teeth

T
he way people speak defines who they are. Think of the people you know. Everyone knows people who are uncomfortable in a room with even one stranger in it. They clam up, setting their faces calmly and firmly against the unfamiliar circumstances. Or people babble, despite their best intentions, trying to poke in something to say at every turn, keeping the conversation under their control, where the unfamiliar person is kept at a distance. Two rhythms, one circumstance, two entirely different characters.

Run with me on this. With the first character, the silent one, don't you automatically get your own sense of the character details? Gender? Clothes? Position in the room? All that and more, without a word. The same probably holds true about the babbler. She might laugh at her own jokes, or repeat herself, or interrupt repeatedly. We begin to see who she is without hearing anything particular from her.

Dialogue feeds through, and grows from, character.
Voice, as an element of dialogue, is a product of the writer's understanding of an individual character.

PARTICULARS OF CHARACTER

There is a lot of talk in fiction writing about finding your voice. It is, in most senses, a search every writer undertakes, finding out what she wants to say by discovering
how
she should say it. It is an issue of craft, a question of talent, work habit and common sense. But it is important to recognize that finding your voice as a writer is an issue of narrative control rather than of shaping the voice of your characters.

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.