Fiction Writer's Workshop (9 page)

Environment means something. People who aren't heard, for instance, tend to speak louder, or to shut up entirely. But you should write to discover or uncover the environment and the tensions within it. Don't assume that the lower-middle-class family in which both parents work and are frazzled by debt is the spot where a child's voice might go unheard. Write to create a convincing circumstance and you might find that children go unheard in Martha's Vineyard just as they do in Tupelo. The idea is this:
Don't get sociological when shaping a character's voice.
Don't make presumptions as a writer about the way these environments work. There is nothing more icily calculated than a character whose words are used by the writer to take a poke at a social problem. Characters should speak, but only when they must, rather than when the writer needs them too.
Write dialogue to discover character rather than to reflect a set of givens.
In fact, push yourself to work against the givens and your dialogue will crank you into discovering entire stories as well as fully voiced characters.

I'm warning you about a pitfall here. These problems often come up when writers assume that accent, diction and use of slang define a character in some holistic fashion. They assume that writing dialect can bring them closer to the characters who speak in dialect. These writers often stumble forward, sacrificing character for a particular voice. The character's voice, and the presumptions behind it—quite often about race and class—becomes a mask, a scrim, between the character and the writer and, in the long run, the readers and the story in front of them.

There is no quicker way to fail, no quicker way to sell yourself short than to write unconvincing dialect. Your best intentions become mawkish charades. Readers are challenged not to live in your story, to get at the heart of what you have to say, but to "check" the loose strands of accent and spelling. It's one thing if you've spoken patois since childhood or if you grew up speaking the clunky street talk of

Brooklyn, but it's quite another when you assume to have mastery over the music and meaning of a dialect simply because you've heard it here and there. Here's a good watchword for dialect:
Do not use the language unless you live the language.

CURSING

Kelman's book, like many others I read, is about full up with the word "fuck." You may think this word should never appear in print. That is your right. If so, I suggest you never print it. But whether you like this word or hate it, whether it's ugly or beautiful to you, it's a word that tends to leak its way into a lot of dialogue these days. Frankly, its frequency in our culture probably has a lot to do with the ocean of language we swim around in every day. Its history seems ancient to me. It was once used to shock, to shake up the status quo, to make people listen. Now, its life cycle in the lexicon is almost complete, as it represents little more than a lazy adjective, a dim frequency of anger. For some it remains a potent verb, an accented adjective, particularly when crossing lines of culture. Whether you banish the word from your stories or not, I think there's a way to think about cursing in general that can speak to dialogue writing in particular.

"Swearing," as we called it in my family, appealed to me as a boy in the distant way that adulthood seems glamorous to a child. It marked time. Soon I would be twelve, or fifteen, or eighteen and be able to use whatever sort of language I wanted. I listened with glee to the way adults put curses together. I looked forward to driving a car too and to getting my own place to live, but the ability to curse, and, more importantly, to curse well, seemed the blood rite of adulthood.

I spent blocks of time at the dinner table trying to figure out ways to insinuate the word "ass" into the evening conversation. It struck me as a dirty word but not so filthy as to send my mother for the wooden spoon. It was a testable word choice, a prime piece of newfound, eight-year-old diction, oily and ready for the speaking. I decided to use it casually in the course of telling a story at dinner. I waited until I had the corn on the cob completely buttered before I began.

"We were outside at lunch today," I said, taking a casual bite, "and Charlie Viles got stung by a hornet." I do not recall much reaction to my stories. They were generally true, though I often told them as a means of testing my parents' limits. My father, I think, favored a shrug,

while my mother generally cued me along with another question, leading me, she hoped, to some reasonable point or revelation. Still they favored conversation, valued it as a linchpin of intelligent adulthood. After I told the part about the hornet, I distinctly remember a disinterested pause, which I knew I could fill right up for everyone's benefit. So I added, "Right on the
ass."

My younger brother, who had been there for the stinging too, chimed in, "Right on the
butt!"

"Bottom," my mother said. My father clinked his fork against his plate, stared at me.

"Ass," my youngest brother said. "Ass, ass, ass, ass." He sensed the power of the word too. I laughed. He was a good kid.

I waited for my father's response without looking at him. Only two weeks before, he had asserted the adult's privilege to words like this when my report card came back with three tardies. It was fresh in my mind. He had stared at the card, turned to my mother and said, "This really fries my ass! What the hell is tardy anyways? Why do they even keep track of tedious shit like that?" I was at the kitchen table then too, in the same chair where I would later float the word ass like a friendly weather balloon over the pork chops. My jaw dropped. Fried ass! What the hell! Tedious shit! Three straight sentences. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am! To my disappointment, my father downplayed his own transgression by focusing—unfairly I thought—on the fact that I couldn't get myself to school on time. But I remembered it well.

Now, after my own use of the word "ass," I hoped he would remember that he too was capable of multiple curses, without interruption, right here in our own kitchen. When I turned to look at him, he pointed a fork at me. "Don't say ass. You're not allowed that sort of language yet."

There. He had said it.
Yet.
Language like that had to be earned, by age, or experience, or brute task. Use of such language in conversation was a privilege. You had to earn it. I believe such is the case with good fiction. Never be lazy with the language. I know that is the case with good dialogue.

I'm not arguing that characters should be allowed to swear at every turn. Nor should they be encouraged to. The truth is, adults can't swear all the time. If they do, they tend to be looked on as pretty tedious shit. But they can, and do, swear. That's what my father was trying to tell me all those years ago. If they do it well, they choose their moments, pick their phrases and employ their wit. They grow into a use of language that suits them. That's how it should be with characters too.

The strong curse is

Pointed and precise.
When you are dropping the word in out of habit, you've hit the point of too much. Hear it, precisely.

Quickly and forcefully crafted.
Vary your use of words such as "fuck." Later in the book, I go on and on about adverbs and repetition. Same applies here. Shape and vary the language you use.

Revealing, both intentionally and unintentionally.
Language (that is, diction) changes when emotions are charged. But that might be the moment where the swearing drops away. Work for the surprise.

These are the ways I'm encouraging you to create your dialogue. Good dialogue, whether windy or compressed, snappy or rambling, generally follows these principles. Like the good curse, strong dialogue lends shape to characters, even as the characters shape the words themselves.

ALL, BUT NOT EVERYTHING

If I'm going to give you any principle to lean on at all, it should be this one:
All, but not everything.
What I mean here is that we should be able to hear
all
that a character is through his words, but we don't have to hear
everything
he says. You are not a recorder. You are not trying to capture every word spoken. I hope I proved to you in the first chapter that capturing every word spoken does not make a story in itself. The story resides in smaller units, in the words themselves, in the moments of silence, in the pace and pause of exchange. All, but not everything.

Assume you have a character who is fond of exclamations such as "Golly gee" and "Gosh darn." Perhaps you are basing this character on a car dealer you know particularly well, and following my earlier advice, you have documented that this car dealer fellow uses the two words as often as forty times in a morning. That's all well and good, but you can't assume there's room for forty "Golly gees" in your story. Nor, more importantly, is there a need. These sorts of personal exclamations and catchphrases go a long way in a story. Remember rhythm. A well-timed "Gosh darn" goes a long way toward establishing who that character is. Unnecessarily sunny. Absurdly happy. Overly demonstrative. Genuinely nice. It could be any of these things, or all of them. Use catchphrases like this, time them well, but don't assume you are building a strong character because you lace your dialogue with personal exclamations. The same applies to idiomatic expressions. They tend to sound like blather when used too loosely.

Dialogue is one part of character. It should be consistent, well chosen and purposefully paced. Add too many catchphrases and the well-rounded character starts to flatten out like a crepe at high altitude. The principle of All, but not everything asks for inclusion of all that makes a character shine as himself, but at the same time demands a measure of this sort of thoughtful exclusion.

The same principle applies to cursing. The words "fuck" and "fucking" have got to be the most overused exclamations in the contemporary idiom. I hear them seventy times a day. On the golf course. On the basketball court. In the parking lot of the discount store. On the corner near the Centurion club, just as some guy is about to throw a bottle of malt liquor at the wheel of my car. When someone gets burned at the stove. When I nick myself shaving. On
The Dennis Miller Show.
When the Cubs lose. When the deficit rises. It seems to me that the only time I don't hear the word thrown around like a Handi Wipe at a convention of two-year-olds is when I'm at work, when I'm talking to my children or when I'm watching network television. I hope the first two will never change, but you never know what will happen with network television.

EXERCISES

1.I said diction rules. Let's prove it. Pick ten friends, preferably ten people from different parts of the country or the world. Ask them the same question, something easily answerable, but nothing that requires only a yes or no. Try for something open-ended enough that they will want to answer without asking more questions: Why should I have to know the nine planets? Aren't you sick of Michael Jordan? What would you do with a dead cat? Something they'll want to answer before they give you grief. Record the answers, with a tape recorder if you'd like. Now write the answers, word for word. Skip nothing. Read them back to yourself. Try to hear your friends' voices in the words, without imitating them. Pass the answers around and see if your friends can recognize each other. Chances are many of them will say, "Only Red would say that," rather than, "Only Red would say it like that." Take a highlighter and mark the series of words that make each answer unique. Use one of the answers to begin a story. Now write a page or two that crafts a character around that answer, rather than around the friend who said it. Let the voice grow through your sense of character.

2. Translate one of your existing dialogues into a dialect you feel you know pretty well. Do it three times. On the first go-round, exaggerate the sound and accent of the words as much as possible. On the second run-through, use wholly correct spelling, but make the diction and syntax reveal the dialect. Then, in the third run-through, combine elements of the sound of language (that first translation) with the logic of language (the second dialogue). Combine both examples by taking an equal number of elements from each. What parts work better? Where does diction capture the rhythm? Where do accent and idiom more readily succeed?

A
pianist has recently had a small stroke. Weeks later it's clear that his hands, once the useful implements of his art, will betray him for the rest of his life. Doctors confirm that he's unlikely to ever make a full recovery. Now when he sits down to play, he finds himself, despite the best efforts of his therapists, his strength coach and his all-too-patient wife, just a beat or two behind, almost imperceptibly, but uncontrollably, off. Like any stroke victim, he has struggled to relearn the routine acts of everyday life—walking, talking, opening jars—and on these matters he has more than recovered. He cares nothing for the subtleties of speech and even less about walking without a limp. It is his hands he wants back. Fully and absolutely.