Fiction Writer's Workshop (20 page)

Again, the point here is not to be a simple recorder of the world. You have to use your recordings as points of departure. You are training your imagination to use the mundane, generally ignored details of everyday life and cast them into new frames. Ignore, isolate, reinvent, expand. I often tell my students to do this with an image. If something is powerful in a given circumstance—say the sight of a deer in the early morning at the edge of a golf course—then make it more powerful by ignoring that circumstance and using the image somewhere else, by isolating and reinventing it. Imagine the deer at an intersection in the city in the early morning hours. Put the deer at the end of a pier as the first two fishermen of the morning approach. Both of the new images are more surprising, more powerful. It's the same thing with words. Ignore, isolate, reinvent, expand. They can trigger stories. The trick is not to allow them to trigger the easiest story, the one that's right in front of you, but to allow them to help you see new possibilities in the stories right in front of you.

DISCOVERING TENSION

Are any words good enough? Do all words hold a story? Maybe. But you're far smarter than me if you see elaborate stories in every word you hear. You're also probably a very confused
person.
Get some help. The rest of us should look back at what I've said from the start. You have to ignore. You have to isolate. Put on the word filter. Slash and burn. Cut and run. Whatever. Just get to the core.

But what happens when you like a word or a line and you don't know where to go with it? What happens when you can't sense the momentum within a line or the scene that surrounds it? There are a number of ways to get started.

Add another voice.
Let's suppose you're starting with a line from my son's little ramble, say, "I'm not having orange juice." The obvious suggestion is to have a character respond, even to a line that is basically a statement. Forget place, forget time, forget circumstance. There'll be plenty of chances to fix that as you go along. Respond. Allow yourself to be the voice of the other character. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Put the character up against it. But when you are speaking in the character's voice, answer from the developing point of view. When I ask my students to do this, to cross-examine their characters by engaging them, they tell me it's like developing a lie. I disagree. It's rather the opposite. It's developing the truth, discovering it, or uncovering it. So ask questions of your character. Be obvious for a while. Remember you'll be crossing things out wildly.

1: I'm not having orange juice.

2: Why?

1: It hurts my stomach.

2: What's wrong with your stomach?

1: I have a sensitive stomach.

2: Since when?

1: Since forever. Since I can remember. Since I was a kid.

2: I never knew.

1: Well I do.

2: I'm sure.

1: I'm not having orange juice.

Elsewhere in the book, I talk about the direction of dialogue, about patterns of evasion and questioning. The idea here is to try
not
to be conscious of patterns. Simply hear voices, using one voice to reveal the other. Remember you aren't shaping voices so much as coaxing them forward, asking them to bring their stories along for the ride. My thinking is that you should try it several times, shooting for a different tone in each version. In the above bit, I am trying to find the tension. There's no particular direction. The tone is fairly neutral, but prodding. If I try again, this time shifting the tone to a somewhat angry one, the rhythm and pace shift quickly.

1: I'm not having orange juice.

2: Why?

1: I have a sensitive stomach.

2: Come on.

1: What?

2: Just cut it out.

1: Cut it out? What do you mean?

2: You're whining.

1: Whining? Are you saying I'm a whiner?

2: You got it. You're addicted to medical attention.

1: Meaning what?

2: Meaning nothing.

1: That's not true.

2: Get off it. You're an addict. You can't help yourself.

1: I just don't want any orange juice.

2: Then leave your stomach out of it. You don't want orange juice, don't drink it. But you don't have to tell me all about your insides. We're all a little sick of hearing about your guts all the time.

1: All I was saying . ..

2: I know. I know. No orange juice.

Remember, within these micro dialogues, you have to resist the urge to tell the entire story with the words of the character.
When you're using one character simply to tell the story, rather than as an autonomous voice, that's when you go back and cross out.

Remember too that
adding tension does not always beef up dialogue.
Some of the best dialogue in the world is somewhat aimless, yet is more artfully revealing, particularly of the dynamic between characters, than any exposition could hope to be. Early on in William

Kennedy's novel
Ironweed,
we meet the book's protagonist, Francis Phelan, an ex-baseball player and out-of-work gravedigger, now a hobo in the Northeast. The book involves his return to his native city, Albany, and his brief visit with the family he left behind years before, after he was responsible for the death of his infant son. In the first pages of the book, before any of this has been revealed, Francis and his sidekick, Rudy, have what appears to be a fairly aimless exchange as they walk by a graveyard where some of Francis' family is buried. It starts after Francis ties his shoe.

"There's seven deadly sins," Rudy said.

"Deadly? What do you mean deadly?" Francis said.

"I mean daily," Rudy said. "Every day."

"There's only one sin as far as I'm concerned," Francis said.

"There's prejudice."

"Oh yeah. Prejudice. Yes."

"There's envy."

"Envy. Yeah, yup. That's one."

"There's lust."

"Lust, right. Always liked that one."

"Cowardice."

"I don't know what you mean. That word I don't know."

"Cowardice."

"I don't like the coward word. What're you sayin' about coward?"

"A coward. He'll cower up. You know what a coward is? He'll run."

"No, that word I don't know. Francis is no coward. He'll fight anybody. Listen, you know what I like?"

"What do you like?"

"Honesty," Francis said.

"That's another one."

This is a conversation that works in two ways. First time through the book, it helps the readers see the relationship between these two men, allows them to hone in on Francis' edginess with regards to the world of men. Knowing the plot of the book from my summary above, it is possible to see the haunting resonance this conversation has for a man about to revisit his past. Still, keep in mind that the scene begins with a paragraph of Francis tying his ragged shoe and ends when they turn the corner. It is a fairly self-contained scene, seemingly a ramble and little more, and yet as the rest of the novel grows, that dialogue—with its references to sin, prejudice and cowardice— becomes a focal point. Tension does not dominate the conversation. It pervades it. Still, many readers would say they missed that moment entirely, appearing early (page 11) in a 220-plus-page novel. The important thing for you to take away from this is the way the writer is letting the conversation lead him into the themes of the work, the ideas in play within the conflict. The tension is plainly there for the writer. It is also driving Francis, who's fearful of what he'll confront upon his return. Still, taken in the full profile of the novel, set against the many conversations these men have, it appears to be nothing but a conversation between two longtime travelers. And that is the way it should be.

FRAMING TENSION

No matter how holistic you try to be, there are still some techniques you do well and others you do not. Most of my students simply hate approaching similes, whereas I think of them, when done well, as a pleasure both to read and write. I have one friend who hates writing dialogue. It takes her days on end to write one page of the stuff. She avoids it by keeping her characters inside themselves, thinking more than talking. Still, the dialogue she produces is always intriguing and sharp.

I knew another guy several years ago who always started his stories with an argument between two characters. He began with tension and felt it invariably led him to the heart of stories. Thus he forced tension on his characters. He let them run with it, back and forth, then stumbled when it came to a resolution or even a pause, when his gaze was forced outward. He liked the possibilities of argument and little else in his dialogue. The world around his characters continually eluded him. When he started in on scene and place, he often called me for a detail. I'd tell him to look around.

"There's nothing to see. They're in a movie theater," he would say to me. "It's dark. There's no scene."

"How about the movie?"

"What am I supposed to do? Say, 'They were watching
Yentl'?"

"Be nonspecific. Don't name the movie."

" 'They were watching a movie about rabbis.' Jesus, you're forgetting the conversation entirely."

But I wasn't forgetting the conversation. I was encouraging him to push the conversation outward. I wanted him to use his own particular quirks as a writer (which included a good sense of how to write snappy arguments, his ability to
start
a story with an argument and move from there, instead of moving
toward
an argument at the end of a story) and move from those strengths toward things he hadn't considered. Frankly, my advice was to
get off the conversation, not forget about it, to frame the conversation with a level of detail,
seemingly random, even to the writer, from the scene around it.

I don't see anything wrong with being vague about details of setting. I liked the line about the rabbis. That detail still makes me want to frame a conversation around it.

In the movie theater, two friends are whispering to one another.

"What am I supposed to do? I'm at a loss."

Someone shushed them from three rows behind. Candy turned and shook her head. "You have to stay strong. Don't let them mess with your kids," she whispered.

"That's just it," he said. "That's the point."

He looked at the screen. It was a movie about rabbis. A woman was serving soup to a man she loved. "Jesus," he said.

"Looks good," Candy said.

"What?"

"Good soup." She kept her eyes on the movie.

I don't know what the conversation is about there, and it's certainly not a starting point for a story. But it may be a scene from within a story: Maybe the man is going through a divorce. Maybe his kids are in some trouble with the law or he owes money to someone dangerous. I chose the line about the kids from one of my notebooks. It was something I overheard on television sometime last spring. I wrote it on the top of a page that ended up going blank. "Don't let them mess with your kids." I just liked the attitude of it (though I had taken it from a sappy television movie). I repeated it three or four times, then wrote it down and forgot about it. I used it here, to start to particularize the tension. Of course here, on the blank slate of this invented scene, it becomes a trigger for a set of circumstances, or for an entire story even (more on this later).

Dialogue Reacts

But the particular direction of this dialogue is elusive. The conversation is not particularly focused. It reacts, both to the subject at hand and to the movie on the screen in front of them. That's life. Rarely are things as focused as we think. The detail of the movie is so peculiar it helps to punctuate the conversation. If I had said they were watching
Yentl,
it would have been a whole different kettle of fish. It could work.
Exterior detail is a contribution on the part of narrative to dialogue,
it reveals the connection between these two elements of fiction. Even as you allow characters to speak, you should be moving the sensibility of the story along. It's one job, connected by many mutually driven tasks. Just like the dialogue above, you keep moving, in more than one direction, all at once.

The way I started that dialogue is different from the way my friend started his all those years ago. I took a detail from the world around me (the movie), added to it (the soup) and let the conversation work around it. I find the argument within the setting there, whereas my friend was struggling to find the setting within the argument. These are our individual quirks, our own strengths. You have to learn to recognize yours, to use them to connect your disparate skills as a writer into one whole act. Where does the story in the theater go from there? I don't know. Why don't you take it and find out? Send it to me when you are finished.