How to Write Fiction (5 page)

Writer's workshop 4

Experiment with your own voice and learn to recognise the voices of others

L
ike point of view, the voice of a story might come naturally in the first draft and never need changing. But you might also find, as you explore a story, that you need to rethink the voice completely. Point of view and voice are bound up very closely because the voice belongs to the narrator whose point of view we're hearing. If you change one, you're likely to need to change the other.

The voice that comes most naturally to you is your own, so we'll start with that.

1
Think of some example of minor conflict that you've been involved with in the last week with a member of your family or a friend. Write a short account of it as if for a diary you're keeping: you're writing it just for your own interest and you're the only reader.

The readership of this was you alone, so you weren't thinking about its effect on anyone else. You might have mentioned things that mean something only to you, and you might have used shorthand words that only you understand.

As soon as you start thinking about someone else reading it, you'd want to change things: not so much in the events described, as in the way you've described them. You might need to explain things more and you might want to make sure that your reader feels the same way you did about the incident.

2
Write the incident again but this time write it as a letter to a friend (not the one you're having the conflict with).

The voice is still yours but the writing has changed to take account of the reader. You have to be clearer and you might have to explain things: above all, you need to make sure that the reader sees the conflict the same way you do. You'll be choosing your words for their effect on the reader. The reader is a particular individual: the words you choose will be affected by what you know of that individual, too. Notice where you've made changes and what sort of changes they are.

Let's now borrow someone else's voice.

3
Imagine you are that person you've been in conflict with. In that other person's voice, write a letter about the conflict. The letter is addressed to you: this letter will be the mirror image of the one in exercise 2.

Now you're looking at the incident from the other person's point of view and you'll also be using their voice. As well as interpreting the events differently, this other person will express themselves differently.

Think about how that person uses language: do they use the same sort of vocabulary you do? Do they talk more formally, or less? Are they more articulate than you, or less? Are they rational or highly emotional?

So far, all these voices have been versions of real ones. Now let's use them as a basis for a fictional one.

4
Take the last exercise and list the characteristics of the voice – word use, syntax, imagery, punctuation and dialogue – and describe this voice.

Now rewrite the paragraph, exaggerating those qualities. Don't worry about going too far – this is only an exercise. Make the word use ridiculously colloquial or ridiculously formal; make the syntax absurdly long-winded or incredibly terse, and so on.

You might never have tried writing in such extreme ways before – you might find that it broadens your own range of voice.

When all is said and done

Dialogue is the lifeblood of your novel – the credulity of your characters depends on it.
DBC Pierre
shares his hard-won techniques for writing fluid, believable conversation

W
hat characters say to each other in a book will make or break it. Their dialogues not only move the story along, mask and unveil truth, slow or quicken pace, cause or dampen conflict; they make the work credible or incredible.

And as if that doesn't already sound hard enough – they must also make us forget we're reading them.

A few basic laws govern dialogue and, once applied, their effect will be immediate. If you're beginning to make your characters speak, I promise these basics will help.

Unnatural is natural

Our programming as listeners and readers creates a need for technique in dialogue: these are two different things, as you'll discover when you try to write what you hear. At first I couldn't understand why the conversations around me wouldn't translate verbatim to a page; but a refraction effect applies, sentences strangely bend, like light hitting water. The first law then: natural speech looks unnatural when written.

Record someone's speech and you'll hear how peppered with reversals, repetitions and omissions it is. In its quest for meaning, the brain filters these out, delivering us a clean, packaged concept, which is great – until you try to write it. The way around this is concision. As an exercise, start with the dialogue you want to write, then remove every third word, or cut the sentence by half; cut it until the meaning no longer survives, then add back the few words which return the meaning you want.

You'll be surprised by how few words a sentence needs to do its job. Readers will fly through dialogue, it's one of the great pleasures of reading and one which puts them at the heart of the action – don't slow or stop them, except by design. Tight dialogue may look curt at first, but let it rest overnight then look again; you'll see that in the reading brain, economy is natural.

Show, don't tell

You might be sick of this catchphrase, but it's a rule which applies particularly to dialogue, as this is where you will show things rather than tell them. Where it might be easier to describe an action or setting in prose, the reader will become more involved in your work if your characters expose things through dialogue and action. For instance, this might be an interesting piece of prose:

Then there was Barry, wearing his usual sour face. Rather than complain of the cold, or put on a jumper, he had a habit of drowning his food in salt, as he said this stimulated the body's temperature-regulating mechanisms. Of course it was because he simply liked salt but was ashamed to admit it after warnings he'd received about his health. Still, he usually froze at dinner to prop up this facade.

Now note how engaged we become when we see the tale unfold through dialogue. This exchange says all the same things:

“Pass the salt,” said Barry. Mother frowned at this and he didn't meet her gaze. “Not a crime, is it?” he mumbled, “a bit of salt? Against the cold?”

“If I thought it'd cheer you up I might pass it,” she said. “Or you could just get a jumper like the rest of us.”

“They say chillies regulate body temperature,” chimed Silvia. “And tea.”

Dan finished a mouthful, leaning back: “Tea regulates by making you sweat. He's hardly going to sweat. Lucky if he's any fluids left, I've filled the shaker twice already.”

“Not a crime, is it?”

“Ask Doctor Brice. Ask him after you've popped a vein.”

Beat around the bush

One element of spoken dialogue which we aim to preserve is indirectness. If you listen to how we speak you'll note much of what we say assumes that we know each other. More than this, much of our speech is just a cover – for barbs, for questions, for things we don't want to deal with directly.

This is all good in writing. It draws readers in because it not only seems natural, but makes them eavesdroppers, it gives mysteries to unravel, suspicions to confirm, which are as rewarding in books as in life. Your character Richard, for instance, in life or in a book, would never come out and say: “Nell, I hold you and your absences responsible for the pressures on our marriage.” Instead, we would guess it from an exchange like this:

Nell clattered downstairs: “I might be late home.”

“Could've sworn I left it around here.”

“Feel free to ignore me.”

“Works well enough for you.”

Let it flow

Flowing dialogue has to be balanced with letting readers know which character is speaking; but dialogue with too many “he said”s and “she said”s is irritating. It's a perennial challenge to clearly identify who's speaking without lumbering the exchange with repetitious words. While the beginning of a dialogue should firmly show who speaks and who answers, if the conversation continues you will need some new tools to keep it natural, unobtrusive and rhythmic.

One of a new writer's first responses can be to substitute other verbs for “said”. While you can get away with a certain number of basic substitutions, they quickly wear thin. There are more elegant ways to identify your speakers.

First, don't put all your attributions at the end – try breaking sentences with them:

“By the time I left the pub I could barely see them,” said Richard.

“By the time I left the pub,” said Richard, “I could barely see them.”

Try shifting attributions around to find where they fit best. Better still, attribute with action; take the opportunity to show what Richard is doing as he speaks:

“By the time I left the pub,” Richard lifted the blind: “I could barely see them.”

Tag your voices

Perhaps the sharpest tool in the armoury, one that removes attributions altogether, is the speech tag – this is one of the grunts or tics we agreed to eliminate at the beginning. Across the length of a story readers come to know a character by the style of their speech, by idiosyncrasies. Everyone has their habits, whether beginning replies with “Hmm” or “But” or “Well”, pronouncing things a certain way, or having a characteristic pause.

The key here is to pick one or two for each main character, and lead their sentences with them. Don't overuse these tags, wait until you're at full stretch to attribute dialogues – but then, with a tag each, your characters can chat at some length without needing to pause for a “said Richard”.

Don't worry if the tags seem awkward at first – add them to mark for yourself who's speaking; they'll develop and become more subtle as your characters settle into themselves.

Few tools in writing have such immediate effect on the page as these do, fuelling confidence, boosting the work along. We live in the best time for dialogue-heavy books – because it's fast, and we're fast, and it makes us eavesdroppers and ticks commercial boxes if you want to be published. Pace sells and dialogue is pace; you can still make unique, compelling characters, and you can still write a unique work around them – but a reader who falls into good dialogue on the first page of a book is in your pocket.

“Treat him bloody well,” said Richard.

DBC Pierre is the author of three novels including the debut Vernon God Little, winner of the Man Booker prize, the Whitbread first novel award, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize, and the James Joyce award. His latest novel, Lights Out in Wonderland, is published by Penguin

Writer's workshop 5

Speech borrowed from real life is often the basis for authentic dialogue

D
ialogue that's completely invented, with no reference to real speech, is likely to be over-correct and a bit dull. The speech of real life is usually energetic, quirky and surprising. Writers might as well borrow some of that energy if they can.

1
Record a real conversation somewhere. It can be between strangers, or people you know. There can be as many people talking as you like. You can be one of the speakers if you wish. Then transcribe it as accurately as you can putting in all the “ums” and “ers” and the parts where it gets vague and incomprehensible.

It's very rare for a piece of real speech to have nothing interesting about it at all. The first thing is to isolate what's good about the speech in the transcript, or at least what's least dull. What's good might only be one phrase, but that's enough to go with. Ask the following questions:

• Which parts of the transcript, if any, already work on the written page?
  
• What is it that makes those parts interesting?
  
• Is it the subject of the conversation? Are interesting ideas being expressed, interesting anecdotes being told?
  
• Is it the situation?
  
• Is it the characters themselves? Do they sound like interesting people?
  
• Is it the language that's interesting?
  
• Is it unintentionally interesting: so repetitious or rambling that it ends up being funny? Full of tantalising half-finished sentences that make you want to know more?
  
• Is it funny? What makes it funny, exactly?
  

Now that you've isolated whatever is interesting about this speech, use it as the basis for a piece of fictional dialogue. You'll want to lose all the dull parts and exaggerate whatever strengths you've found in it. You're likely to find that these would have been difficult to invent.

2
Rewrite the transcript, shaping it to maximise its strengths. If necessary, make it clearer in meaning. This time, write it out as dialogue, using attributions rather than as a simple transcript, and add any gestures, expressions, tones of voice, etc, that are important. If its strength is something about the way the people are talking rather than what they're saying, experiment with ways to get this across. For this exercise try exaggerating everything.

This is now an edited version of reality. The next step is to make the leap into fiction, which may use very little of this real speech. Think about these choices that you might make:

• Would you use realistic or stylised dialogue?
  
• Would you use direct or indirect speech? Try both to see the difference it makes.
  
• Would you add more narration, and reduce the dialogue to a few lines? Or would you keep it almost all dialogue?
  
• Would you streamline it down to its basics, or would you allow it to blossom into a full-blown scene?
  
• Would you delete any characters, or add more? Would you combine several characters into one?
  
• How would you use punctuation?
  
• How would you use attribution?
  

3
Rewrite the dialogue, experimenting with these possibilities. Make as many changes as you can.

Now the real test: read it aloud. Even better, get someone to read it aloud to you. Make a note of where they stumbled, where the words went together awkwardly, where the sentence was too long or complicated to keep track of, where the words made unintentional rhymes or repeated sounds. Above all, just listen to whether it “sounds right”. If it doesn't, it isn't.