So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  WHAT DOES HE OR SHE DO WHEN ANGRY?

  WHAT DOES HE OR SHE DO WHEN DEPRESSED?

  WHAT IS YOUR CHARACTER’S MOST CLOSELY GUARDED SECRET?

  IF YOUR CHARACTER COULD UNDO ONE THING THEY HAVE DONE IN THEIR LIFE, WHAT WOULD THAT BE?

  IF THEY COULD HAVE ANY WISH, WHAT WOULD THEY GET?

  WHAT DO THEY DO FOR FUN OR AMUSEMENT OR TO UNWIND?

  FAVORITE FOOD OR TYPE OF MEAL?

  SET YOUR CHARACTER IN MOTION ACROSS A ROOM AND DESCRIBE HOW HE OR SHE MOVES:

  WHAT IS THE MOST PHYSICAL THING THAT THEY DO REGULARLY (WORK OUT, WALK, DANCE, CLEAN THE HOUSE, HAVE SEX, PLAY TOUCH FOOTBALL)?

  DO THEY HAVE ANY PETS? DID THEY AS A CHILD?

  IF THEY HAD THE POWER TO HURT ANYONE WITHOUT BEING PUNISHED, WHO WOULD THEY HURT?

  WHAT IS THEIR BIGGEST FEAR? THEIR MOST IRRATIONAL FEAR?

  WHAT DO THEY RESENT MOST THAT ANOTHER PERSON DID TO THEM OR CAUSED TO HAVE HAPPEN TO THEM?

  WHAT IS THEIR RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION, IF ANY?

  WHAT DO THEY REALLY BELIEVE IN?

  HAVE THEY EVER HAD A NICKNAME? AS A CHILD? AS AN ADULT? HOW DID THEY FEEL ABOUT THAT NICKNAME, AND HOW DID THEY ACQUIRE IT?

  HOW OFTEN DO THEY FALL IN LOVE AND WHAT HAPPENS?

  DO THEY HAVE A PHYSICAL OR CHARACTER TYPE THEY REPEATEDLY ENGAGE?

  FANTASY LIFE? CONTENT AND FREQUENCY OF DAYDREAMING?

  Exercise:

  Write a brief static description of a minor character in your novel or memoir. Use some of the answers to questions in the dossier above. Then write one scene in which one or more salient characteristics of your person is revealed in action and dialog.

  4

  How to Avoid Writing Like a Victim

  I recently read a manuscript that could have been the saddest book in the world. It was written by a single mother who works two jobs to pay the bills for herself and her young son. Drawing on parts of the writer’s life, the book is about a woman who moved to LA when she got out of college and lived in a bug-infested third floor walk-up in a building full of junkies. She loses her job as an assistant to a Hollywood character actress and finds one as an exotic dancer. She’s dependent on speed and booze and worse, she falls for the sleaziest, most arrogant, least responsible guys in LA: guitar players in heavy metal bands. After sex they forget her name; they steal her money; they hit the road with groupies. She makes her living from the dollar bills that drunks tuck into her G-string. The guy she truly loves—and marries on a weekend bender—has her committed to a mental hospital, and then some bad things start to happen.

  The events in this book can bring you way down, but it was actually a lot of fun to read because the writer told the story with a tough, ironic voice; because she completely accepted herself, her bad choices, and the consequences of those choices. She snorted crystal meth. She screwed around. She lived in a dump. But she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t asking forgiveness. She’d been down and out but she wasn’t trying to teach other girls not to go down the primrose path. She’d been badly treated, but she certainly wasn’t trying to lay blame on anyone. She was simply setting down the facts of her life, one after another until they snowballed into absurdity.

  Readers often bristle when writers present themselves as victims. Having been deeply hurt, offended, wrongfully treated, as we all have been at times, it’s difficult to avoid conveying self pity. It’s harder still to be even-handed, to see different sides of an event or relationship. Sometimes a person had no hand whatsoever in causing her misfortune. So how is she to write about it? There are probably as many answers as there are writers who take the time to solve the problem, but there are some techniques worth mentioning. One is humor.

  Sometimes we can catch readers off-guard if we can make them laugh at situations that, treated in a more conventional way, might seem self serving or self-pitying. In one of our classes a woman presented a piece that, in the hands of a less skilled writer, might have sounded like your typical my-husband-left-me-for-a-younger-woman story. Except that she compared her husband’s trophy wife to a white lab rat and kept the metaphor alive (including references to her spare, vegetarian diet; her quick, nervous movements; her overbite) until the class was in stitches.

  I’ll never forget a story by Primo Levi about three friends who were prisoners in Auschwitz who had not had a drop of water to drink in days. Parched to the point of near madness, they were nonetheless assigned by the Germans to strip the scrap metal from an old basement. Two of them, working together to wrest an old pipe from the rubble, find some rusty water trapped in the elbow of the pipe and selfishly drink it all. Marching back to the camp, the third friend senses their sudden contentment and confronts them. The story is about how people treat each other in desperate situations and how victims can turn into abusers. Writers who experienced the Holocaust have every reason to portray themselves as victims, yet in the hands of a brilliant memoirist like Primo Levi, a story may be as much about the complex social hierarchy in a concentration camp, and thus about the nature of survival and free choice, and become even deeper in its universal implications. It is difficult to remember that in any horrible situation, there are many things going on at the same time as the horror. People like and dislike each other; power struggles develop; petty resentments do not disappear, nor do human longings. Writing about these other aspects will not dissipate the horror but might make it all the more real. Two lovers meeting in the midst of war is not an common device for allowing the reader to more deeply feel war’s personal consequences. The Diary of Anne Frank is especially moving because each member of the families in hiding is not a helpless lamb, but a person with very real and sometimes quite selfish human needs.

  The oldest chestnut of the creative writing class is Show, don’t tell. Make a scene in which an action unfolds, rather than simply report it. In attempting to avoid writing as a victim, making the decision to allow a situation to unfold in a scene permits your readers to participate in the situation and make up their own minds about its implications. Stating “My father was an irresponsible drunk who always let us down,” might be less effective than a scene in which a father comes home to his hungry children on Christmas Eve with an armful of meat pies given to him by a charitable neighborhood baker and then, drunk as a lord, stumbles on the way upstairs and crushes the pies. It’s well to remember that as a child we may have been unhappy, but we didn’t always think of ourselves as victims while the situation was unfolding. We were sometimes focused on those pies. More often than not there were other people involved and we were thinking of their welfare or privilege. Or strategizing about how to save ourselves. We may not have been thinking at the moment what we now can put into words as adults.

  In Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, it was a given to the children that their father drank. They didn’t think of Dad as evil, but as Dad, and that Dad liked his whiskey. They thought a lot about food and being cold and their mother and the neighborhood and strategized how to steal fruit from the corner store. One of the reasons Angela’s Ashes kept so many people riveted, instead of throwing the book aside in despair, was the author’s ability to charm the reader. He used humor. He used language. He created a memorable voice. He drew vivid scenes that allowed the reader to become involved in the action, to hear and breathe the world of Limerick, and to be kept in suspense about what in the world would become of this unlucky family. In telling this story, a less skilled writer might have simply poured on the misery. But young Frank McCourt was not a victim. He was a plucky kid whose father drank too much and whose early life was one of intense desire: for food, for warmth, for safety, for peace between his parents.

  The key is control. Victims do not control situations, but writers do. Although the heavy metal musician screwed-around on the L.A. stripper, she continued to dance for a living even though he didn’t like it. She retained her attitude, her opinions, her friends, her very bad habits. Primo Levi was refused food and water and badly mistreated, but he retained his cri
tical involvement and his interest in his society. The same is true for Frank McCourt. Poor and hungry, he never lost his curiosity and his wit; his ability to comment on the adult world. He continued to mastermind schemes for getting food; to be an active participant in his neighborhood and his family. Although in each of these examples, the characters have been deprived or ill-treated, the ill-treatment did not totally overcome them or define them. They continued to be active participants in their world.

  Exercise:

  Choose a situation in your life when you felt you were treated unfairly, or a time that was particularly hard on you, and try to write about it a way in which you do not come off as a victim but as an active participant.

  You might write about it with humor, using exaggeration, or unusual description, or intriguing images (think of the metaphor of the rat, for instance). Or let the action snowball into absurdity. (See the chapter on writing humor for more techniques.)

  You might use explicit detail, so that the reader is focused not on you but on the situation.

  You might focus on the society; that is, the social interaction going on between the characters.

  You could center on your specific needs and desires at the time, getting what you want (like those pies) instead of how badly you were treated.

  You might simply allow the action to unfold, event by disastrous event.

  What you do not want to do is to tell the reader how to feel. The object of this exercise is to allow readers to make their own judgments from the facts. But because you the writer are supplying those facts, you have a great deal of control indeed over the reader’s judgment.

  5

  The Uses of Dialog

  One of the most foolish mistakes a prose writer can make is to overlook the uses of dialog. To ignore what dialog can do for you is analogous to using a computer with an 80 gigabyte hard drive as nothing more than a typewriter; why only write letters with a tool that can run your entire house? Because a play or a movie script looks like it’s entirely made of dialog, it’s easy to assume that dialog is more important for the playwright or screenwriter than the writer of prose. It’s also easy to think that dialog is simple; just a couple of people talking.

  To the extent that there are rules of dialog in writing fiction or the memoir, they are a loose set of rules. In the same way that writers of stream-of-consciousness do away with conventional sentence structure, some writers disregard conventional methods of punctuation. They don’t use quotation marks; they may not use a new paragraph for each speaker; they employ colons or em-dashes to introduce a new speaker. Although this is not wise, it is not illegal. It’s all in a writer’s style, a personal issue. There is no Great White English Teacher in the sky, with a bolt of lightning in one hand and a red pencil in the other. The only really important rule is this: The dialog has to work in context—meaning, on the most basic level, that the reader always has to know who is speaking and what they are saying. (This is not as obvious as it sounds.) On a more advanced level, it means that once you understand what dialog can do, it will work for you, becoming a vehicle you can employ to carry some of the load of your storytelling.

  Many writers of non-fiction, of memoirs and autobiographical novels, write long passages of absolutely boring and sometimes incoherent dialog. Then they justify the mess by saying, “But this is exactly what people sound like.” Or worse, “I taped it.”

  Having a good ear means writing dialog that sounds idiomatic. Just because you are writing about things that actually happened, does not mean you want to transcribe the way people actually speak. If you have ever listened to a tape of a normal conversation, you will hear a great many repetitions, interruptions, non-sequiturs and unfinished sentences. Conversation typically meanders, repeats, meanders some more.

  People spend an enormous amount of time talking about the weather, about how-are-you, about television and what they had for lunch and nothing at all. There is a time for banal conversation, mostly when you want to reassure someone that you are sympathetic, that you mean them well or want to put them at ease. But your book is rarely the place for an exact transcription of human speech. You’re a writer, not a courtroom stenographer. There are very skillful writers who describe people’s dreary lives in what would appear to be the most commonplace exchanges, but Ann Beatty and Harold Pinter have labored long and hard to construct dialog that sounds as if it were lifted from an elevator and, in point of fact, is highly compressed and worked over. Lillian Ross, the legendary New Yorker magazine interviewer, regularly made her subjects sound like egomaniacal boors by seemingly transcribing what they said. In fact, as the novelist Irving Wallace observed about Ross’s book on Hemingway, she was “selectively listening and viewing, capturing the one moment that entirely illumines the scene, fastening on the one quote that tells all.”

  What you are doing with so-called realistic dialog is creating the illusion of idiomatic speech. What you are really doing is creating highly edited, highly selected representations of human speech.

  In the novel Storm Tide, the main character, David Green, meets Stumpy Squeer, slow and somewhat retarded, but the kind of fellow that can live his life out in the small town where he grew up because people watch over him. Rather than introduce Stumpy as an inarticulate mumbler, which might have been closer to a real life portrait, we decided to choose dialog that infused him with some pride and purpose:

  Stumpy was short and thick, fifty more or less, with barrel-like haunches that made him seem to roll forward as he walked.

  Judith stood on the steps, “Let’s go, you guys! Gordon. David. Lunch!”

  “Will you join us, Stumpy?” Gordon’s voice was deep and courtly.

  Stumpy shook his head no.

  “Going to get back to your book?” Gordon asked him. “Stumpy’s been working on one for three years now.”

  “Four,” Stumpy said.

  “Really?” I loved the idea. Stumpy Squeer, hermit savant. “What are you writing about?”

  “Not writin’. Been readin’ it,” he said. “Almost finished, too.”

  In good writing, fiction or non-fiction, dialog always exists to make a point, preferably many points at once. Most important, dialog characterizes the speaker. Because the reader takes note of everything a character says, the reader will develop attitudes about that character. Dialog also gives the reader the illusion of discovery. Remember that old chestnut of Creative Writing 101? Show, don’t tell? Dialog is the perfect vehicle for showing action unfolding or a character’s attitude changing in a scene. Moreover, the information learned through a conversation might register more deeply than the information the author narrates or reports, because the reader feels she has overheard the characters say it and has thus discovered it by herself. If I told you a certain Hollywood producer was untrustworthy, you might believe me but it wouldn’t stick long in your mind. If you read the dialog of a telephone conversation in which this fellow, within ten minutes of introducing himself for the first time, guaranteed me an executive producer’s credit for a film on a book he had not yet read, and offered to buy me a hundred shares of a hot stock to boot, you wouldn’t trust him any more than I did. Because you were witness to his own words, his dialog.

  In English, due to the French overlay on the Anglo-Saxon, and the Latin and Greek derived words over those layers, we have levels of formality. So, in order for a geneticist to describe what he does in the lab, he can either say: “I sequence the genetic patterns of the Drosophila melanogaster.”

  Or,“I map fruit fly genes.”

  The use of formality versus informality in speech, the use of colorful idioms, the use of slang and obscenities, the misuse of words, all tell you something about the character who is speaking. Obviously, the choice of formal speech versus slang may tip off the reader to that character’s level of education, even his pretensions. Further, when that character chooses to use formal speech, or with whom he uses it, may give insight into that character.

  I knew a man who was
college educated, well read and articulate. He worked in a white-collar profession. But when he spoke with blue collar or service trades people, in the pizza joint, at the auto repair shop, his language reverted to a tough guy parody of street talk. It might be that the man was insecure, so that his personality mirrored those to whom he spoke; or perhaps his background was more blue collar than he liked to let on and he felt comfortable revealing more of himself around certain people. Creating ambiguity such as this can enrich your storytelling. Without telling your readers what to think, you enable them to develop theories of their own. In Storm Tide, the character Crystal tells different versions of her past to different people. Characters in books, exactly like people we know in life, are not one dimensional but complex and sometimes contradictory in their actions and intentions. We can convey that in our dialog.

  Mastering the jargon of particular professions is always important to a writer. Too much jargon can be unintelligible, but English contains many sub-languages, and mastering them can make your piece seem more real. Not that your characters will ever really have to sound exactly like a lawyer or a geneticist or an arson detective would speak, but you should master enough of their idiom to create the impression of such a person.

  Many of the submissions we get at the press sound artificial. People think because they’ve seen TV shows about every conceivable kind of character that they can write those characters. But without taking the time to learn about them, they are seldom rendered as anything more than caricatures and types. We have read manuscripts in which trial scenes were unconvincing because the writer had never bothered to witness one except in TV dramas; novels in which the police behaved in unconvincing ways which any simple review of procedures with a knowledgeable police officer would have fixed.