So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  When writing about the conversation between yourself and another person, one that actually happened, you’d have to have an eidetic memory or a tape recorder to get that conversation exactly. Happily, that’s the last thing you want to do, even in a memoir. You want to imply what a person conveyed and how they said it; shorten the conversation and get to the point. In the memoir Rookie Cop, the writer, a one-time police spy, wore a body wire, saved the transcriptions of his tapes, and was in the rare position of being able to provide a word-for-word account of his attempt to draw information from a bombing suspect. The conversation meandered for thirteen pages in first draft and was so full of meaningless exchanges, interjections, hesitations, expletives and in-jokes as to render it unintelligible, however accurate. We had to cut it down to a half-page in which the flavor of the cat and mouse exchange was preserved and the important information was efficiently delivered.

  Writers who equate reality with transcriptions of speech have similar problems with dialect: vernacular English, for example, and the various forms of rural English, English that has a Yiddish or a Spanish flavor. How realistically should you portray the dialect you are working with? You want people to read and understand what you have written. You do not want to erect an impenetrable wall of dialect between the reader and your work. I saw the classic reggae outlaw movie, The Harder They Come, many times, and if I did not catch every word of the Kingston, Jamaica patois, I was carried along with the action, the setting, the music. So I knew exactly what was going on. When I picked up a novel written (by an American) in the same dead accurate patois, I could not penetrate it and simply gave up trying. No one can give you a formula for dealing with this problem; it’s a question of style and may well vary from work to work. Flavor is what you are after, not the exact pronunciation of a dialect so thick no reader will be able to understand it. Many good Black writers demonstrate mastery of the levels of idiom and dialect from street jive to commencement address formal, as the demands of the piece and the situation warrant.

  In the novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, Connie Ramos, a Chicana, is drawn to the door of her New York apartment:“It’s me, Dolly!” Her niece was screaming in the hall. “Let me in! Hurry!”

  “Momento.” Connie fumbled with the bolt, the police lock, finally swinging the door wide. Dolly fell in past her, her face bloody. Connie clutched at Dolly, trying to see how badly she was hurt. “Qué pasa? Who did this?”

  The author is using only a few Spanish words to give us the flavor of the speaker. Another way to use foreign phrases is to quickly and unobtrusively translate them:The waiter bowed. “Encore du café, Monsieur?”

  I nodded and he filled my cup with thick black coffee.

  It is obvious that if you are writing historical fiction, you want to avoid anachronisms, for instance in a piece set during the early nineteenth century. Remember, the farther back you go, the less accurate will be your rendition of the language and the more you will be simply creating an illusion of eighteenth century language for example. If you get too sucked in to writing the language of the period, you will produce something quaint and curious and mostly devoid of interest to modern readers. That verisimilitude is the reason few readers actually made their way through Mason-Dixon , Thomas Pynchon’s novel, even when they had devoured his previous work.

  I had this problem in my novel City of Darkness, City of Light about the French revolution. I had to figure out how to convey the highly idiomatic, somewhat secretive, often obscene and usually colorful language of the sans culottes, the most revolutionary working class of the revolution. I realized that the nearest equivalent in modern language would be Black ghetto speech. But I also realized after I had played with this, that it would simply render my attempt to give verisimilitude to 18th century life, ideas, manners, the absolute quietus. Nobody would believe these were people talking in 1792. So I gave up that idea and produced a language, not nearly as slangy as the actual language and not nearly as obscene or colorful.

  Realistic dialog, no matter how accurate, is not always what you are aiming for. If you are writing a science fiction piece about characters from another universe, your characters should not sound like your neighbors. You would want to give an alien flavor to their speech. Flavor is the key word. It has to be intelligible. All aliens speak English or you have no story, unless your story is about the difficulty or inability to communicate from one culture to another. Similarly, if you are writing about your aged grandfather from the old country in his youth, he should not use current slang or up to date idioms. But neither should he, say if he arrived on a passenger ship from Italy, speak exactly as he did when he got off the ship. His speech has to be intelligible.

  Dialog also reveals character in showing what someone is trying to accomplish by what they choose to say. Is your character using words to flatter? Using words to lie? To provoke guilt? The words that you put in a character’s mouth inform our opinions about that character. Those words tell us how characters view the world, the way their minds work, what they want, without the author telling us.

  We were having an idle conversation about our car breaking down some years ago when an assistant of ours said, “My girlfriend and I think you should get a BMW.” A helpful enough comment at face value. But what did her dialog reveal? That outside of work, she and her lover talked about us (we certainly didn’t talk much about them) but more important to us, they viewed us as having a hell of a lot more money than we had.

  Although dialog can reveal deep character, silence can be equally revealing.

  “You’re telling me you were not with her?”

  Bob sighed, as if preparing once again to endure her paranoid questioning.

  “Because if I ever found out. ...”

  He shook his head. He was tired of this.

  “She’s my best friend, Bob. The only friend I’ve made in this town.”

  “For the last time. I was hunting with Reggie. We got a late start back and spent the night on the road. I can show you the motel receipt.” He dug into his wallet. “Do you want to see it?”

  “Reggie is in Milwaukee. He called looking for you an hour ago.”

  Not a word emerged from Bob’s lips but if he’d been smoking he would have issued a perfect “o.”

  She did indeed grab the receipt.

  It is not necessary to have pages and pages of dialog, and in fact it is in general not a great idea to do so. You can give the meat of a scene in four exchanges. You can pass hours, days, years of time. In the following example, the passages of time are italicized:I called my agent just after mailing off the manuscript. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”

  “I look forward to reading it this weekend,” he said.

  Exactly three weeks later, I gave him a call. “What do you think?”

  He brushed me off. “I need some more time with it.”

  I called again in a month, this time after a stiff drink. “He’s in a meeting,” his secretary said. “He’ll call you back.”

  He never did. Two weeks later, I strode into his office. I was not new to this game. The longer they took with their response, the worse they thought of the book. It was back to teaching, if I could get a job after all this time. Just keep your dignity, I told myself, grasping the side of his desk to keep my hands from shaking. “Tell it to me straight,” I said.

  “I have to be honest with you,” my agent could not meet my eyes. “We’ve looked everyplace. I must have taken it to the country. I think I’ve lost the damn thing.”

  You notice that many lines of dialog have a tag. Tags are vital. Now the most common tags, he said, she said, are dull but also transparent. That is, the reader tends to ignore them, to use them simply as markers. Sometimes each speaker is distinct enough, identified either through their speech patterns or the content of their response. The reader always knows who is speaking, even in a long exchange. It is important always to check your dialog and make sure the reader never has to go back and count li
nes to figure out who is saying what. That breaks the flow and takes the reader out of the story. A participant in one of our writing classes told us that her grade school teacher used to hang a chart listing all the verbs you should substitute for said. (My own grade school teacher told us that sitting under our desks with our heads between our knees would protect us from the atom bomb.) Likely, she wanted to inject a little action into the children’s writing. But don’t get too fancy, as in:

  “Well, hello, Little Girl!” vociferated the wolf. “You must be off to Grandma’s house,” he hypothesized.

  Action or description tags (in italics below) are great, because they attach the words to bodies, moving or still, and allow us to see as well as hear the characters.

  From Three Women:

  She wakened curled in the backseat to find that Chad was checking them into a motel. They all fell into the bed and more or less slept until it got noisy in the morning. Then they all took turns in the shower and Chad shaved.

  “How come you aren’t shaving?” she asked Evan.

  “I’m going to grow a beard. Great disguise. I look older with five o’clock shadow.”

  She made a disgusted grimace. “Just don’t expect me to kiss you!”

  He grabbed her and rubbed his cheek against hers. “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”

  They were both giggling as they fell on the bed. Chad came in whistling. “Leave you guys alone for five minutes and you’re at it. In permanent heat, that’s what you are.”

  Elena said, “I think we should all do something to change our appearance.”

  Chad shrugged. “Who’s looking for three kids. Runaways are a dime a dozen.”

  “Your father’s going to want his car back.”

  Chad waved that away with an airy gesture. “We’ll have to ditch it at some point and get another.”

  “Oh, sure. We can trade,” Evan said. “Hi, want to trade your old Ford Escort for a nice BMW, no questions asked?”

  “For the time being, let’s get as far as we can in it.”

  “I’ve never been to California,” Elena said, curled up again in the backseat with a bag of potato chips that would do for breakfast.

  They walked around the mall until the traffic thinned out. Finally, Chad saw what he was waiting for. A guy pulled up in a dark blue Ford Taurus. His girlfriend was waiting in the passenger’s seat while he ran into the liquor store. He left the engine running.

  Chad yanked open the door on the passenger’s side. “Out.” He shoved the gun into her neck.

  “Don’t hurt me!’

  “Don’t scream, or I’ll shoot. I don’t want you, just the car.” He pulled her out. “Evan, drive.” Evan flung the backpack behind him and fumbled for the parking brake.

  Chad motioned Elena into the backseat, and they lurched off. “Okay, Elena. Where do we go?”

  “Turn right at the light.” She turned on the overhead and looked at the map Evan had bought. “Okay, just keep going. We’re heading for the interstate.”

  You should also be aware of the uses of direct versus indirect dialog. Direct dialog shows us your characters speaking. Indirect dialog (italicized below) sums up what they said.

  When I last saw Rebecca, it was in the lobby of the J.W. Marriot on 54th Street. She was charging toward the elevators, followed by a bellman pushing a cartload of matching Gucci luggage. “This is the most amazing coincidence,” she said. “How long has it been? We must have dinner. Come up to my room for a drink first. I’ll be here until Monday and then I’m flying down to Miami. To see Mom,” she added, as if, five years after our divorce I still referred to her mother that way. I said that I was only here for a sales conference and would be leaving that evening. “Oh come now. You can’t stay a few hours more?”

  I replied that I was sorry, no. Rebecca fixed me that reproachful glare. “Oh, yes. I imagine, Doreen, is it? ... would be absolutely incapable of spending another night without you.” When I said I had to get back because someone was house sitting my cats, Rebecca glowed with a rosy smile, “You’re no longer married, are you?”

  Indirect dialog has a flattening effect that can be used for irony, humor, distancing; to diminish the importance of one speaker in order to emphasize the other. It can also be used to summarize action or information the reader already knows and that you don’t want slowing down the action by repeating.

  “Good morning, Mr. Chalmers,” I said to the principal of my fourth school in as many years. I began my story, but he simply glanced at the fat file folder on his desk and told me not to bother.

  In the following example, Bud Hiller, a very minor character is depicted solely by indirect dialog. What matters here is not what Hiller says but the fact that Suzanne is under economic pressure and forced to take on certain types of cases:

  From Three Women:

  It was not a case she wanted. She contained herself, listening, questioning him, taking careful notes with Jaime backing her up. Bud Hiller had inquired coldly who Jaime was upon entering her office, but now it was as if Jaime were a cat on a chair.

  Hiller orated on, his injuries, the stinginess of his dead father, the perfi dy of his siblings and their spouses, how his previous la wyers had failed him and his just cause. She listened, she took notes, and she thought how she would love to show him the door, but this case leaked money through all its flimsy seams. She had come to a financial crossroads where she must take cases that would pay her bills instead of cases that excited her legally or ethically. She was still the litigator she had always been. She could find a new angle to use. She began to plot her strategy in getting Bud his money and doing his siblings out of theirs.

  Unless someone is telling a story, a very involving story, watch out for long speeches. Even if someone is giving a speech in a story, you can give the flavor of the speech in a paragraph or give us some important highlights, interspersed with reaction. Dull dialog is a much more common problem than too much clever repartee, but that also can carry a book astray if it gets out of hand.

  Some writers choose to use no direct dialog at all, while others rely heavily on dialog. Again, there are no hard and fast rules. Dialog can hasten the unfolding of your story by revealing elements of the plot that the reader and/or the other characters do not know. In the following example, a woman discovers that she and her friend Michael did not just spontaneously fall into bed.

  From Waiting for Elvis:

  When Jane wakes up, she sees Mike propped on one elbow, looking at her. They have slept barely two hours, between sunrise and now. He kisses her immediately, against her protestations of morning breath.

  “How can you look so appealing, first thing in the morning,” he says.

  She tells him she is probably a mess, that he must just like her with rumpled hair and without her glasses. Only then does she realize that Mike did not wear glasses last night, nor has she seen any contact lens accoutrements in the bathroom. “Can you sleep in your contacts?” she says.

  “Don’t get mad.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be angry,” he says.

  “What are you talking about, Mike?”

  “I wanted to see you,” he says, “All of you.”

  “And?” She feels herself blushing, but still does not know what he’s getting at.

  “I picked up some of these contacts you can wear overnight.”

  She gets it, now—this is the same as stopping at the pharmacy on a condom run—he was laying-in seduction supplies. She is touched that he wanted to look at her in bed, but a question remains.

  “Did you get some of those for last weekend, when you were here as my houseguest?” She wonders if he will answer truthfully.

  “Well, yes, but. ...”

  Again, dialog allows the reader to make up her own mind about a character, because she is judging the character in action, on the character’s own merits, from the character’s own words, rather than being told by the author what to think. The use of dialog makes it easy to c
reate dramatic scenes that alternate with straight narration, and thereby show the action of a story enfolding.

  Exercise:

  In no more than one page, create an interaction between two characters, written all in dialog, attempting to incorporate the following techniques:1. Using dialog to pass time

  2. Using action or descriptive tags

  3. Using indirect dialog.

  You can create a situation of your own choosing, or use one of the following situations. (Remember that when there is conflict, when one speaker wants something the other does not, there may be an interesting element of dramatic tension in the dialog).

  A very worried parent tries to convince his/her child that her (or his) boyfriend or girlfriend is a bad choice.

  A person who can no longer stand living with his/her roommate is trying to suggest that the roommate move out of the apartment they share.

  A diner in a high-priced restaurant finds a worm in his salad and wants his dinner free. The management finds this request excessive.

  Two people who dated twenty years ago meet by chance at a conference. One would like the relationship to resume. The other is not convinced.

  A taxicab pulls over for a fare at rush hour. Two people reach it at the same moment, each attempting to convince the other they need it more.