by Stephen King
The maître d’ stepped forward. “Can I help you, sir? We don’t open for dinner until six, but the bar—”
“I’m looking for Richie Martin,” Billy said.
Billy’s arrival in the cab is narration—action, if you like that word better. What follows after he steps through the door of the restaurant is pretty much straight description. I got in almost all of the details which first came to mind when I accessed my memories of the real Palm Too, and I added a few other things, as well—the maître d’ between shifts is pretty good, I think; I love the undone tie and the cuffs rolled up to expose the hairy wrists. It’s like a photograph. The smell of fish is the only thing not here, and that’s because the smell of the onions was stronger.
We come back to actual storytelling with a bit of narration (the maître d’ steps forward to center stage) and then the dialogue. By now we see our location clearly. There are plenty of details I could have added—the narrowness of the room, Tony Bennett on the sound system, the Yankees bumper-sticker on the cash register—but what would be the point? When it comes to scene-setting and all sorts of description, a meal is as good as a feast. We want to know if Billy has located Richie Martin—that’s the story we paid our twenty-four bucks to read. More about the restaurant would slow the pace of that story, perhaps annoying us enough to break the spell good fiction can weave. In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it “got boring,” the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling. If the reader wants to know more about Palm Too than can be found above, he or she can either visit the next time he or she is in New York, or send for a brochure. I’ve already spilled enough ink here for me to indicate Palm Too will be a major setting for my story. If it turns out not to be, I’d do well to revise the descriptive stuff down by a few lines in the next draft. Certainly I couldn’t keep it in on the grounds that it’s good; it should be good, if I’m being paid to do it. What I’m not being paid to do is be self-indulgent.
There is straight description (“a few solitary drinkers at the bar”) and a bit of rather more poetic description (“The backbar mirror . . . . glimmered in the gloom like a mirage”) in my central descriptive paragraph about Palm Too. Both are okay, but I like the figurative stuff. The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction—reading it and writing it, as well. When it’s on target, a simile delights us in much the same way meeting an old friend in a crowd of strangers does. By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage—we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way.4 Even if the result is mere clarity instead of beauty, I think writer and reader are participating together in a kind of miracle. Maybe that’s drawing it a little strong, but yeah—it’s what I believe.
When a simile or metaphor doesn’t work, the results are sometimes funny and sometimes embarrassing. Recently I read this sentence in a forthcoming novel I prefer not to name: “He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.” If there is a clarifying connection here, I wasn’t able to make it. I consequently closed the book without reading further. If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I’ll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn’t . . . . well, I’m in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don’t have time to waste with the poorly written ones.
The Zen simile is only one potential pitfall of figurative language. The most common—and again, landing in this trap can usually be traced back to not enough reading—is the use of clichéd similes, metaphors, and images. He ran like a madman, she was pretty as a summer day, the guy was a hot ticket, Bob fought like a tiger . . . . don’t waste my time (or anyone’s) with such chestnuts. It makes you look either lazy or ignorant. Neither description will do your reputation as a writer much good.
My all-time favorite similes, by the way, come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include “It was darker than a carload of assholes” (George V. Higgins) and “I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief” (Raymond Chandler).
The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary. I began learning my lessons in this regard by reading Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald; I gained perhaps even more respect for the power of compact, descriptive language from reading T.S. Eliot (those ragged claws scuttling across the ocean floor; those coffee spoons), and William Carlos Williams (white chickens, red wheelbarrow, the plums that were in the ice box, so sweet and so cold).
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be? And the harder you try to be clear and simple, the more you will learn about the complexity of our American dialect. It be slippery, precious; aye, it be very slippery, indeed. Practice the art, always reminding yourself that your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story.
– 7 –
Let us now talk a little bit about dialogue, the audio portion of our programme. It’s dialogue that gives your cast their voices, and is crucial in defining their characters—only what people do tells us more about what they’re like, and talk is sneaky: what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they—the speakers—are completely unaware.
You can tell me via straight narration that your main character, Mistuh Butts, never did well in school, never even went much to school, but you can convey the same thing, and much more vividly, by his speech . . . . and one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead:
“What you reckon?” the boy asked. He doodled a stick in the dirt without looking up. What he drew could have been a ball, or a planet, or nothing but a circle. “You reckon the earth goes around the sun like they say?”
“I don’t know what they say,” Mistuh Butts replied. “I ain’t never studied what thisun or thatun says, because eachun says a different thing until your head is finally achin and you lose your aminite.”
“What’s aminite?” the boy asked.
“You don’t never shut up the questions!” Mistuh Butts cried. He seized the boy’s stick and snapped it. “Aminite is in your belly when it’s time to eat! Less you sick! And folks say I’m ignorant!”
“Oh, appetite,” the boy said placidly, and began drawing again, this time with his finger.
Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb (Mistuh Butts isn’t necessarily a moron just because he can’t say appetite; we must listen to him awhile longer before making up our minds on that score), honest or dishonest, amusing or an old sobersides. Good dialogue, such as that written by George V. Higgins, Peter Straub, or Graham Greene, is a delight to read; bad dialogue is deadly.
Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but, as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), “A man’s got to know his limitations.” H. P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue. The following passage from “The Colour Out of Space,” in which a dying farmer describes the alien presence which has invaded his well, showcases Lovecraft’s dialogue problems. Folks, people just don’t talk like this, even on their deathbeds:
“Nothin’ . . . . nothin’ . . . . the colour . . . . it burns . . . . cold an’ wet . . . . but it burns . . . . it lived in the well . . . . I seen it . . . . a kind o’ smoke . . . . jest like the flowers last spring . . . . the well shone at night . . . . everything alive . . . . sucked the life out of everything . . . . in the sto
ne . . . . it must a’come in that stone . . . . pizened the whole place . . . . dun’t know what it wants . . . . that round thing the men from the college dug out’n the stone . . . . it was that same colour . . . . jest the same, like the flowers an’ plants . . . . seeds . . . . I seen it the fust time this week . . . . it beats down your mind an’ then gets ye . . . . burns ye up . . . . It come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . . one o’ them professors said so . . . .”
And so on and so forth, in carefully constructed elliptical bursts of information. It’s hard to say exactly what’s wrong with Lovecraft’s dialogue, other than the obvious: it’s stilted and lifeless, brimming with country cornpone (“some place whar things ain’t as they is here”). When dialogue is right, we know. When it’s wrong we also know—it jags on the ear like a badly tuned musical instrument.
Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers), the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person—were he alive today, he’d likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chat-rooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others—particularly listening, picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups. Loners such as Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue.
I don’t know if contemporary novelist John Katzenbach is a loner or not, but his novel Hart’s War contains some memorably bad dialogue. Katzenbach is the sort of novelist who drives creative-writing teachers mad, a wonderful storyteller whose art is marred by self-repetition (a fault which is curable) and an ear for talk that is pure tin (a fault which probably isn’t). Hart’s War is a murder mystery set in a World War II POW camp—a neat idea, but problematic in Katzenbach’s hands once he really gets the pot boiling. Here is Wing Commander Phillip Pryce talking to his friends just before the Germans in charge of Stalag Luft 13 take him away, not to be repatriated as they claim, but probably to be shot in the woods.
Pryce grabbed at Tommy once again. “Tommy,” he whispered, “this is not a coincidence! Nothing is what it seems! Dig deeper! Save him, lad, save him! For more than ever, now, I believe Scott is innocent! . . . . You’re on your own now, boys. And remember, I’m counting on you to live through this! Survive! Whatever happens!”
He turned back to the Germans. “All right, Hauptmann, ” he said with a sudden, exceedingly calm determination. “I’m ready now. Do with me what you will.”
Either Katzenbach does not realize that every line of the Wing Commander’s dialogue is a cliché from a late-forties war movie or he’s trying to use that similarity deliberately to awaken feelings of pity, sadness, and perhaps nostalgia in his audience. Either way, it doesn’t work. The only feeling the passage evokes is a kind of impatient incredulity. You wonder if any editor ever saw it, and if so, what stayed his or her blue pencil. Given Katzenbach’s considerable talents in other areas, his failure here tends to reinforce my idea that writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.
Many good dialogue writers simply seem to have been born with a well-tuned ear, just as some musicians and singers have perfect or near-perfect pitch. Here’s a passage from Elmore Leonard’s novel Be Cool. You might compare it to the Lovecraft and Katzenbach passages above, noting first of all that here we’ve got an honest-to-God exchange going on, and not a stilted soliloquy:
Chili . . . . looked up again as Tommy said, “You doing okay?”
“You want to know if I’m making out?”
“I mean in your business. How’s it going? I know you did okay with Get Leo, a terrific picture, terrific. And you know what else? It was good. But the sequel—what was it called?”
“Get Lost.”
“Yeah, well that’s what happened before I got a chance to see it, it disappeared.”
“It didn’t open big so the studio walked away. I was against doing a sequel to begin with. But the guy running production at Tower says they’re making the picture, with me or without me. I thought, well, if I can come up with a good story . . . .”
Two guys at lunch in Beverly Hills, and right away we know they’re both players. They may be phonies (and maybe they’re not), but they’re an instant buy within the context of Leonard’s story; in fact, we welcome them with open arms. Their talk is so real that part of what we feel is the guilty pleasure of anyone first tuning in and then eavesdropping on an interesting conversation. We’re getting a sense of character, as well, although only in faint strokes. This is early on in the novel (page two, actually), and Leonard is an old pro. He knows he doesn’t have to do it all at once. Still, don’t we learn something about Tommy’s character when he assures Chili that Get Leo is not only terrific, but also good?
We could ask ourselves if such dialogue is true to life or only to a certain idea of life, a certain stereotyped image of Hollywood players, Hollywood lunches, Hollywood deals. This is a fair enough question, and the answer is, perhaps not. Yet the dialogue does ring true to our ear; at his best (and although Be Cool is quite entertaining, it is far from Leonard’s best), Elmore Leonard is capable of a kind of street poetry. The skill necessary to write such dialogue comes from years of practice; the art comes from a creative imagination which is working hard and having fun.
As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters’ mouths, you’ll find that you’ve let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism. Not a week goes by that I don’t receive at least one pissed-off letter (most weeks there are more) accusing me of being foulmouthed, bigoted, homophobic, murderous, frivolous, or downright psychopathic. In the majority of cases what my correspondents are hot under the collar about relates to something in the dialogue: “Let’s get the fuck out of Dodge” or “We don’t cotton much to niggers around here” or “What do you think you’re doing, you fucking faggot?”
My mother, God rest her, didn’t approve of profanity or any such talk; she called it “the language of the ignorant.” This did not, however, keep her from yelling “Oh shit!” if she burned the roast or nailed her thumb a good one while hammering a picture-hook in the wall. Nor does it preclude most people, Christian as well as heathen, from saying something similar (or even stronger) when the dog barfs on the shag carpet or the car slips off the jack. It’s important to tell the truth; so much depends upon it, as William Carlos Williams almost said when he was writing about that red wheelbarrow. The Legion of Decency might not like the word shit, and you might not like it much, either, but sometimes you’re just stuck with it—no kid ever ran to his mother and said that his little sister just defecated in the tub. I suppose he might say pushed or went woowoo, but took a shit is, I fear, very much in the ballpark (little pitchers have big ears, after all).
You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart’s War, good story though it is, so sadly lacks—and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer. If you substitute “Oh sugar!” for “Oh shit!” because you’re thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader—your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.
On the other hand, one of your characters (the protagonist’s old maid aunt, for instance) really might say Oh sugar instead of Oh shit after pounding her thumb with the hammer. You’ll know which to use if you know your character, and we’ll learn something about the speaker that will make him or her more vivid and interesting. The point is to let each character speak freely, without regard to what the Legion of Decency or the Christian Ladies’ Reading Circle may approve of. To do otherwise would be cowardly as well as dishonest, and
believe me, writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see . . . . or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different. They are agents of the status quo. Not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.
As it happens, I agree with my mother: profanity and vulgarity is the language of the ignorant and the verbally challenged. Mostly, that is; there are exceptions, including profane aphorisms of great color and vitality. They always fuck you at the drive-thru; I’m busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest; wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first—these phrases and others like them aren’t for the drawing-room, but they are striking and pungent. Or consider this passage from Brain Storm, by Richard Dooling, where vulgarity becomes poetry:
“Exhibit A: One loutish, headstrong penis, a barbarous cuntivore without a flyspeck of decency in him. The capscallion of all rapscallions. A scurvy, vermiform scug with a serpentine twinkle in his solitary eye. An orgulous Turk who strikes in the dark vaults of flesh like a penile thunderbolt. A greedy cur seeking shadows, slick crevices, tuna fish ecstasy, and sleep . . . .”
Although not offered as dialogue, I want to reproduce another passage from Dooling here, because it speaks to the converse: that one can be quite admirably graphic without resorting to vulgarity or profanity at all:
