Converse Conversation

Dialogue is a siren's song leading the story teller into the temptation of trying to find it in the way characters speak as opposed to placing it directly at the roots of how they act.

For some years, you listened carefully, working to capture on the page what you heard out there in such realities as the coffee house, the workplace, even the classroom.  As a consequence, your dialogue reeked of authenticity but conveyed boredom in conversational form.  You in effect gave voice to boredom, thinking it would be interesting if it sounded real but dooming it from the get go for that very reason.

Since those days of conversational characters, over-explained and linear story lines, you have with the fervor of a circuit-riding preacher advocated the view of dialogue in which it is specifically:

not conversation.
not really American English.
not a tool for explaining the story.
not a platform for addressing the reader.
not the author speaking to the reader in any way.

With these embargoes in mind, you have moved closer to the interior of story telling rather than story by description.  You are pleased to be in this position because among other things, you have wanted to be here without being able to articulate the mechanics of why you wished to be here.  It was somewhat like being sympathetic with your need to involuntarily shout ouch or worse, when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

Understanding what characters want is a major step forward; so is what you understand to be subtext, the difference between what a character actually feels while saying what is actually said at the time.  These two elements have moved you closer:  (1) awareness of what the character wants, and (2) the sensitivity to the fact of the character being caught in the bind of having to speak to appearances--the Social Contract, if you will--while feeling indifferent or oblique to it much less in hearty endorsement.

In an exchange with your literary agent yesterday in which she told you of a friend who'd been fired as editor in chief of a publishing house because of his irreverent behavior toward a martinet of a publisher, you were reminded of a similar situation in which you, as editor in chief, were fired because of your relationship with the publisher.  The man who fired you was a significant force behind your learning the inner life of dialogue.  Occasionally one meets such persons in life and while they may seem a puzzling quantity at first, they merit close attention not only in what they say but in ways their behavior speaks to who they are and what they want from others.

As you noted to your agent, "Your friend the late Pockell reminds me of  how I 'left' my ed in chief gig at the scholarly publisher.  The  Publisher was a short, martinet of a man whose behavior taught me much about writing dialogue."  You went on to recall a particularly memorable exchange with him, EHB:

"You didn't tell me you went to Yale."
"Because,"  I said, "I didn't."
"You wear J. Press.  Only men who attended Yale wear J. Press."
"But I didn't attend Yale."
"And you wear striped ties with houndstooth jackets.  You dress Yale."
"An accident.  I have no idea what people wear at Yale."
"How do you rationalize not wearing Brooks Brothers?"
"I don't rationalize it.  I simply don't do it.  With the exception of one shirt, an emergency purchase, I tend not to like Brooks Brothers clothing."
"Odd.  Very odd.  You appear neat in spite of it."
When members of my staff saw us together, they would say loud enough for me to hear it, "Well, there's the long and short of it."

Such exchanges remain in memory and help forge the structural nature of exchanges of dialogue, which is a kind of ladder by which the characters reach higher emotional levels of involvement with the cosmos of story.

Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, X

In our daily wading through the streams of ideas and language with which we seek familiarity in our chosen craft, there is invariably up there in the stream ahead of us the flashing metaphor of the tail of a dam-building beaver or a speckled trout, seeking a fly to finish off its lunch.  With luck, we catch full sight of these metaphorical notions, these ideas and excellent arrangements of words that, in combination, become the stories we write about.

Because we are writers and, by nature, curious to see how the other ladies and gents in the craft are doing, we read.  We read particular writers because their work has so many flashes of wording or idea.  In some cases our favoring these writers we read is so complex and demanding that we scarcely take the time to articulate what it is about their work that so beckons to us.  It is important to step out of--to continue the metaphor--the streams of our own language and time, going back into the past, going to other places as well.

Aha, I can already hear some of you young and middle-aged writers with a particular complaint:  I only have the one language.  It is not quite fair that you, because of your shall we call it generational access to other languages have an advantage.  You and your brother and sister geezers have heard middle-Eastern and perhaps Asian languages at one time or another.  And some of you, the complaint continues, actually have been instructed in Latin and Greek, making your wading streams and fishing holes and wine-dark seas all the more diverse.

All these arguments may hold some weight.  I did persist in my studies of Spanish from about grade five onward, and I did live in places where I picked up enough awareness of profanity to be able to render racial, social, and sexual insults in a number of tongues, but to make my point here, I'm going to speak of other writers, writers to the north of us and considerably to the east, both groups of which speak an English that is only a cousin to our English.  I start with my favorite, a man who wrote one of what I consider the most splendid, evocative lines that transcend his being English and me an American.  He is the poet, John Keats, dead since 1831.  The line of which I speak is from his poem "The Eve of St. Agnes."  It is, in fact, the third line of the poem:


 ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass...

After the many times I have read the poem, by the time I reach that line, I have no doubt it is cold when, shortly, we meet a lonely herdsman, at his prayers and rosary, his fingers quite numb --quite in keeping with the other creatures of this vision of a dramatic moment.

I am similarly fond of the novels of my Canadian neighbor, Janette Winterson, whose writings about love reveal yet other dimensions of that remarkable state; as well I treasure the mordant wit of her fellow Canadian, Mordecai Richler, and the mischievous, rollicking possibilities of mocking solemnity that find their way in and about the works of Robertson Davies.

And true enough, writing in his native Australian English, the splendid poet Les Murray causes me to stop my reading and glance at the metaphoric stars he has cast in the metaphoric sky.

The urgency I cast upon you is that you not be satisfied with the mere recitation of your own language, rather that you look beyond the boundaries it has set for you, looking for words as hoary and wise as the old trout who has resisted being caught all these years.  There are words and phrases and rascally ideas hiding in the fifteenth century prose and ideations of Geoffrey Chaucer, words and phrases and visions that collide within the situations set before us by a remarkable twenty-first century short story writer, Deborah Eisenberg.   Those collisions of word and sound and nuance are the reasons why our stories must never become the literary equivalent of farm-raised fish; they must swim about in the free waters of risk.