Terms of Tin-Ear Meant

Several years ago, you heard a writer say of another writer we both knew, He has a tin ear for dialogue.  This term, tin ear for dialogue, stuck with you because it crystallized a complaint you had about dialogue that didn't seem to earn its way.

The writer who made the complaint had anything but a tin ear for dialogue.  You and he were almost exact contemporaries, him having been the editor of the campus humor magazine at UC, Berkeley, while you were causing the UCLA humor magazine to be kicked off campus for a parody on Richard M. Nixon, whose eventual Presidential Tapes would reveal his own tin ear for dialogue.

The writer had begun a slow but steady career in science fiction magazines, being prolific and humorous.  You became the acquisitions editor for two of his books, all the while thinking about the implications of having a tin ear for dialogue and looking for ways to remove any such tendencies from your own.

What good fortune for you that you were editing writers whose dialogue drove  to some dramatic flash point much in the manner of a young dog trying to get at its evening meal.  Reading focused dialogue in books and magazines was one helpful thing, having manuscripts in production before you quite another.  

One writer you were pleased to have on your list--not your friend from university days--introduced another important term to you when he observed that you were doing some close reading on his dialogue.  Close reading, at the time, meant slow-paced focus, a spot check for innuendo, clues, personality markers--a term you could have done better to have understood during your university days.  Better late than not at all.

Soon, tin ear and close reading became concepts that produced a complete change in the way you read, did so to the point where another term, Reading for Pleasure, meant something light years away from its original meanings.

The original--for you--writer with the tin ear for dialogue went on to become a rarity by default.  He was one of the few writers to publish only once in the famed Gold Medal paperback original novels series.  Most of the writers who published once with Gold Medal managed to publish again.  For the time, the price was right and some writers, such as your friend, Day Keene, managed a lively supplementary income on royalties after the novel had sold enough copies to earn back the advance.

The tin ear for dialogue writer--we'll call him Jack--shook his head in disbelief while he was telling you about a refusal from Gold Medal.  "What could possibly be wrong with my dialogue?"  he asked, in the process dislodging a blob of mustard from his Tommy's Hamburger and onto his shirt as we watched passing traffic on Sunset Boulevard.  "I mean, I write plays.  What is a play if it is not dialogue?"

You said, "A play is a story."  While you still believe this to be an absolute truth, perhaps neither of you was able to see how the same thing could also be said of dialogue.  Perhaps you were both still trying to deconstruct the things characters in stories say to other characters, all the while thinking the equivalent of yet another term, elephants in the living room.

The truth is, while you respected Jack's intelligence and his tastes in reading, you were both aware that you'd never encouraged him to submit a novel to you.  You knew something was wrong with his work, part of it related to Tin Ear for Dialogue, but beyond that, you had no words for suggestion, much less for understanding.  At one point, you even found yourself agreeing to collaborate with Jack on a project of his that you loved in concept, but had met with rousing indifference among editors.

After a month or so of meeting and sharing pages, Jack called off the collaboration, telling you that people simply do not speak the way you portray them as speaking.  At last, you were getting the idea about Tin Ear.  His characters, even his women, all sounded like him when he spoke in loud, affected dramatic intent.  

You often did not recognize where the sounds of your characters were coming from.  But you did have the sense they were not coming from you; they were coming from the place where all your characters come from when they are not you.

You believe there are few persons in the world who will admit to being bad drivers, poor or indifferent lovers.  To that list, you will add few writers who would admit to writing bad dialogue.

You may have a tin ear for dialogue, but somehow that does not seem to matter.  Your characters know exactly what to say, and how to say it.

The Death of Any Man Diminishes Me, But at Times, the Obituary Buoys Me up

The effects on your writing life and sensory memory of Ernest Miller Hemingway are profound to the point where you still cannot write a first draft of anything without seeing some traces of his influence.  Through the years, this presence has improved to the point where the most significant signal is your use of the word "and" to connect independent clauses.

Hemingway, himself, was a shadow in your life because a son of his was a classmate at UCLA, who showed EMH a parody you'd written of The Old Man and the Sea, which EMH said was "pretty good stuff," which you took as high praise, given the things young Hemingway showed you from the old man in his letters.

After a time, you began to see why you were drawn to Hemingway's work, in particular because you knew you could pick out his narrative voice from any blind sample, a matter of some importance for you because of your longstanding belief in the power of voice.  You also appreciated EMH's assessment of Mark Twain, whose voice you treasured the way opera buffs prize and contest with one another over the power and resonance of male tenors and baritones, female sopranos.

You found EMH's contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, more to your liking for tone, themes, and depth of psychological insights, all of which you hoped to incorporate into your own fiction, once you understood how.  In the long run, you felt a closer kinship to Fitzgerald's work and because you'd sat across the street, staring at the place where he lived at the time of his premature death, and because you'd had opportunities to chat with persons who'd known him.

Yet another writer of that time intrigued you, a distinctive voice being one of his more distinctive characteristics, but also because he seemed to write more about things you felt closer to hand for you.  He also seemed to you to be saying Screw plot.  This was a matter of some great significance to you, because it was borne home to you on several critical occasions that plotting was not your strong suit as a writer, nor was it ever likely to be.

This author, William Saroyan (1908-81), seemed to be more accessible through his writings, by which you mean that you were aware of a person beyond the work, no small matter of importance to you because you wished--and still wish--to be the rudder of the person doing the writing work.
Here was a man who knew story, was able to introduce tangible themes and their consequences into his narratives, but was not too preoccupied to pause for a taste of melon or a more elaborate picnic on the way to delivering a solution.

You met him only once, here in Santa Barbara, where you'd agreed to participate in a writers' conference only after you'd heard that he was to be the keynote speaker.  Even at that, your meeting was brief.  "I'm so glad to meet you, Mr. Saroyan,"  you told him.  "Bill,"  he said.  Please, call me Bill.  And now, you must excuse me."  He made a gesture suggesting he needed to get with all deliberate speed to a restroom.  "Dragon,"  he said.

At which point, you returned to your place at a table prepared for dinner guest participants in the conference.  One of the sponsors of the conference was a local winery.  Their products were in generous presence.  You began to partake, comfortable in the first-name rapport established between you and a great favorite.  Mindful that the empty seat at the table, just to your immediate right, had the name tag, W. Saroyan.

Fifteen minutes elapsed; no W. Saroyan.  Helping yourself to another glass of pinor noir, you remarked, "He must have enormous kidneys."

Another half hour.  Salad plates cleared.  Authentic Santa Maria Tri-tip served.  Still no W. Saroyan.

At length, a troubled young woman, assistant radiating from her earnest face and pointedly neat blouse, suit skirt, and single rope of pearls, approached the director of the conference, herself no longer as comfortable nor at ease as you.  The assistant bent to ear level, whispered.  The director's face reflected the winter of her discontent.  She nodded, folded her napkin, placed it at the edge of her setting, stood, approached you.

"Mister Saroyan,"  she told you in a stage whisper, "is at the Elk's Club, drinking doubles and telling the bartender to go fuck himself for refusing to keep pouring.  I'm afraid he's in no condition to give his speech this evening and I'm asking you now to step up for him."  She watched you for a long moment.  "If you don't mind my saying so, you're going to need some coffee."

You did, indeed, need some coffee.  Even so, you felt the need, midway through your presentation, to sit, which you did on the very lip of the stage, a hand-held microphone in your hand as your desperation caused you to ad lib, "Let's get comfortable and take off the gloves, shall we?"

In subsequent years, you've had the delightful opportunity to serve on the same faculty as Bill's, for he, by his own invitation, has invited that intimacy, son, the eponymous Aram.  It was not by accident, you believe, that one of your oldest and dearest friends pressed into your hands a book he assured you would change your life and the way you thought about writing.  The book, Obituaries, previously unknown to you, was a collection of obituaries written by Bill, many of them written because, although he did not know the deceased, thought he might have liked to do so.  Other of these fanciful essays, were of a piece with what he apparently told the on duty bartender at the Elk's Club that night in, you reckon, 1970 or 71.

The friend who loaned you the book was right.  You remember it to this day, at least thirty years after the fact, and yes; it did change your life by allowing you once again to see how Bill was no stranger to opening up new and wonderful inventions and challenges, and yes, it did change the way you thought about writing, in the sense that for you, the antic always trumps the staid convention.

Only today, you discovered a source for securing a copy of Obituaries; only today, you ordered it; only today you discovered from Aram that it is one of his favorite books as well.

The Writer as Street-Crossing Guard

In the process or articulating the tools of narration for your students, your clients, and for your own composition, you've outlined narrative, interior monologue, and dialogue, but with one quick point on an outline for your lecture, you might have come upon a term and concept for whom you are the likely father.

Dialogue is the medium of communication between characters, a straightforward exchange until, as you like to do to make sure your points are being taken, you can demonstrate nuance, or choice, or the spillover from the effect dialogue has on characters to the point where it also has an effect on the reader.

Say one of your students arrives late to class, late enough to feel a bit defensive.  Say further, that the student arrives in time to overhear a heated, bordering on acrimonious exchange between two or more fellow students, with the possibility of you trying to wedge in for the purpose of restoring some order if not peace.

The late student cannot help but register some response, possible ones being alarm, undifferentiated adrenaline, wariness, surprise, confusion.  Other possibilities include a combination of all these, because no one has demonstrated the invariable singleness of an emotion.

Reverse the polarity by having the late student arriving in time to hear gales of laughter and pervasive sense of merriment and mutual enjoyment.  This time, the late student's responses are more likely to be positive, convivial ones, tinged with the regret of not having been there sooner in order to get the full effect of whatever hilarity it was that produced such amused responses.

If dialogue is effective, whatever effect it will have on the reader, it will also provide some feelings for the reader, who becomes your substitute for the student who arrived late.  There is an exception:  The reader will have caught the full force of the dialogue and interaction between characters.  

The reader will have been there from the start of the scene, may not have missed the most salient of the writer's intentions in constructing the scene and its resulting dialogue as it now stands, no doubt after a few revisions and as well the editorial process.

The next step, beyond dialogue, is narrative, which is all the movement,response, evocation, description, and nuance that come from action other than dialogue.  Pretty straightforward.  Now comes another aspect of narrative, the thoughts and inferences of characters to which the reader is made privy.  

Another way of approaching this narrative tool is to say of it that it is equivalent to the reader being able to eavesdrop on the inner sensitivities of at least one character, the person chosen to serve as the filter for the story.  This was not, she realized, going to be easy.  Or, He knew he was going to have to put more effort into solving this problem; his attempts so far had given him nothing to go on.

The next step in the scale of potential narrative may be either a fresh vision on your part or the possibility of you being asked how it was you took so long to see this.  You will call it outer narration, by which you mean all aspects of story that are not dialogue nor interior monologue.  

Outer narration is an account of the filtering character, the point-of-view character, involving movements and responses that are action beats rather than internalized thoughts or questions.  John ran as fast as he could to head off the runaway horse.  Thus, outer narration.  Who was he kidding?  Did he actually think he could outrun a horse?  Thus interior monologue.

Outer narration, as you see it, hits a brick wall if it is rendered, John was cold.  Such rendition is stage direction, which is also authorial intervention.  John began to regret setting off without a jacket.  Another matter.  No hint of the author there, directing traffic.

A Tense Moment or Two in the Story

The primary goal of fiction is to somehow cause the reader to believe, against all evidence and historical conventions to the contrary, the characters within the story are real and the events they initiate and in which they participate are of equal fact.

From this critical point, opinions about goals of fiction vary, often to a considerable degree and with spirited argument.  This was not always the case.  In 1719, nearly four hundred years ago, a writer named Daniel DeFoe produced a narrative, The Life and Strange, Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of  York.  

The novel's subtitle went on for a good deal after that, with the usual language relating to this narrative "being an account of" a man who had been the sole survivor of a shipwreck, forced to endure for twenty-eight years on a small island near Trinidad.

Think early best-seller because the narrative went through a number of printings in the first year of its publication, and may well have remained in print in one form or other all these years later. While arguments are plentiful that playgoers understood the dynamic of story being performed before them, they had little or no reason to take De Foe's work for anything but absolute reality, thanks to a popular event in which a sailor named George Selkirk had been rescued to great fanfare from a similar fate. 

In 1740, readers of Samuel Richardson's narrative, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, had only staged dramas and an awareness of Robinson Crusoe to go on. Readers thoughtPamela it was real, most of them concerned for the eponymous heroine, in today's terms, rooting for her to keep her chastity until marriage to the randy young son of her refined lady employer. 

A great many of Richardson's readers were outraged to find they'd been hoodwinked, led on, seduced into believing Pamela was a real person, her employer a real person, the lecherous son of her now deceased employer every bit as randy and willing to take such opportunities as came his way.

In those ago years, one of the goals for such narratives was to dramatize and, thus, instill some measure of morality.  Possible interpretations of Robinson Crusoe and Pamela abound, including those wherein Crusoe was a slaver, a mutineer, or a simple mercenary advance guard of British colonialism.  Pamela, as her subtitled narrative suggests, is all about the honor and sanctity of marriage, the then massmarket approach to a virtuous woman marrying up in social class, and, of course, as we see later in Jane Austen, "they all lived happily ever after."

Novelists have been trying to achieve the same effect ever since, including wannabe writers who have neither read nor heard of Pamela or her creator.  The idea of a printed, fictional narrative was still new enough in those early days of the genre to lay the groundwork for that leap of faith readers and writers have been aware of for all these years.

Beyond that goal of convincing the reader, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that character and event were authentic, there emerged the concept of the roman a clef, the novel with a key, in which readers were led to believe that such a novel, although supposedly about fictional characters, was indeed about real ones.  Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale was widely believed to be one, in particular because Maugham swore it was not.

The main characters in Cakes and Ale were based on the beloved novelist, Thomas Hardy, and his wife who, upon his death, took up with a more commercial and apparently frivolous novelist named Horace Walpole.  There was also a character in the novel named Willie Ashenden, who walked with a slight limp, as Maugham did, had attended medical school, as Maugham did, and had his name used for a novel, Ashenden, or the Secret Agent, whose author was Somerset Maugham.

Although the verb tense known as the subjunctive is by no means limited to English, it seems perfectly suited for the kinds of interior monologue and reflection that have become increasingly more useful and common in the novel, at the same time helping us to bring us--reader and writer--closer to the inner workings of characters.  In consequence, the characters seem yet more real, peeling away several layers of resistance to the reader questioning the character and the validity of the character.

For a delicious sampling of this tantalizing kind of interior monologue and subjunctive verb tense use, we have no farther to look than Julian Barnes's splendid 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, where we are privy to what characters thought, what they might have thought, and what they might have thought they heard or understood from what they saw.

No mountain goat leap of logic or convenience of rhetoric to say of the subjunctive verb tense that they deal with circumstances not reflecting objective fact, rather an individual character's imaginative or speculative view.  What a lovely way to approach our reading and writing of fiction, with so much contemporary focus on ambiguity and irony.

He might have been wrong to think so, mightn't he?

Operating Statement

The more you read, edit, and teach, the more aware you become how rare it is for a narrative voice--any narrative voice--the get the traction of clarity, expressed with the grace of empathy and authenticity.

The ideas and notions that have come out of you over the years bore the eagerness and sincerity of Wilbur and Orville Wright with their attempts at getting off the ground and remaining aloft for more than a few moments.  When there was a sense of lift, you were exulted because this was what you sought, the rush of no longer being connected to the ground.

Much of your efforts have been focused over the ensuing years to remaining aloft a bit longer, being able to maneuver, catch a thermal, and wheel about on the updraft of an idea much like a hawk, scouring the hillside for a sight of its dinner.

You are drawn to the dark, the noir, the adjustments and settlements individuals with dreams and ambition often make with the Cosmos, which includes hard wired humanity along with their own sense of being on a mission and being right about it.

A major feature of the dramatic narrative is some variation on the theme of The Quest, whether it is a hero's journey or that of a rogue.  The Quest may be a search for some abstraction such as an identity or for a specific item, such as the Maltese falcon, which turns out to be so far illusory.  The Quest might also be a spiritual one in which an individual of faith seeks a merging with the godhead, or a reach for great wealth and/or power with which to pursue goals that may be selfish and later become altruistic or the reverse of these.

Such stories end with an exposure of naivete or cynicism, depending on the mood of the writer by the time he or she has worked through the permutations of opposition, loss, and the energy necessary for the final push of inspiration that leads to a dramatic outcome. 

You're reminded of the Brechtian voice associated with a song sung toward the end of The Three-Penny Opera, a cynical aria to happy endings and the recognized sense that things don't work out the way they should because, even if they do, people can't let the matter rest there.

People always want more of something or less than what they have brought upon themselves, and in consequence, these are the individuals who have helped the rest of us form a notion of what an ending or closure should be.  They either all lived happily ever after or they knew they were going to have to live with the experienced consequences of a clusterfuck.

You go about now with a clutter of voices in your head from the writers and their characters of books read past and present, seizing upon the merest silence for a chance to express their own vision of which forces govern and propel the Universe.  

Some of those voices are romantic in nature, which, in your terms has to do with such romantic themes as All for Love, the Latinate version, Amor vincit omnia, and the brotherhood/sisterhood of Humanity.  Other of these voices say in effect that the fucking one gets is not worth the fucking one gets, and, still on the subject, the bittersweet notion of liking to be kissed while one is being fucked.

You still enjoy rooting for underdogs, helping little old ladies across the street, and going out of your way to greet stray dogs.  Your preferences for characters are individuals who may not expect the best but do not settle with ease for the worst.  You'd rather get sick eating too much ice cream and cake at a birthday party than getting drunk and throwing up at a boring celebration.

There is pleasure in seeing a truly vile person being brought up in full humiliation and in participating in a conversation fueled by three or four beers.  Mean drunks turn out to be sober passive aggressives, writers who produce fiction as a way of discovering how they stand on an issue are more likely to inspire than irritate or bore you.

A greater truth is that you go forth most days alone, filled with a sense of good will to most of the persons you encounter, but not taking much of anything for granted.  So long as there is a story to cause you some unanticipated feeling, be it remorse, happiness, exultation, or a sense of having blundered into some degree of competence, you bear no grudges and are not looking for a fight.

A Short Course in Short Fiction

From the things you have learned about each man, Aristotle (364 BCE--322) led a life quite less troubled than Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49).  

Aristotle put his relative lack of troubles to work as one of the most original and cogent classifiers of the world around us.  To an enormous extent, he influenced the way we see things, the way we think, and the way we go about assembling logical processions of thought. He also classified and expounded on the nature of story, his related work Poetics, still in print and use.

Poe was known to have troubles with his health, with his notable intolerance for alcohol, his need to write copiously for little money, and the enormous possibility that he was weighted down with severe depression if not its opposite, manic aspect often seen in the bi-polar personality.  In spite of these distractions, his critical writing was of high order and his fingerprint is still seen on that wonder of dramatic concision known as the short story.

Each man had some cogent and noteworthy things to say about story and construction, sharing one particular belief, sometimes referred to as a unity. Each means to have the story take as long in performance as it would take in Reality, were it, of course, real and not a contrivance.

Poe wanted what has become known as the short story to be something that could be read in an hour or less.  In his own writings, we could begin to see what he had in mind about the time span of the story.  We can look at his famed "A Cask of Amontillado," and see it being played out in real time, right up to the payoff, "For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat! "

In this one sentence, Poe opens the vault of time, not only on his story but on the entire medium of short story. Fifty years have elapsed between those two closing sentences.  In the bargain, this suggests that the narrator has repeated this story more than once, dining out on it, as it were.  This view adds yet more subtext to the tale, sending the short story out into the world with an admonition that it not be linear, rather that it have nuance and possibilities for ambiguity.

No ambiguity about the revenge Poe's narrator, Fortunato, wreaked on Montessor, but enough ambiguity about Fortunato having told this story more than once to give some weight to your interpretation.  "A Cask of Amontillado" was first published in 1846.  

Sixty years later, William Sidney Porter, AKA O. Henry, published a short story that has become in its way as iconic as the Poe.  This story, "The Gift of the Magi," has evolved somewhat in its narrative device.  The story is being presented to us by an omniscient narrator who could be Porter, himself, or any storyteller, even to the point of an ending summary to make sure we readers "get" the full intent of the unselfish nature of Jim and Della.

"The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi."

While charming, even to a point endearing, the Porter/O.Henry narrative is linear, with only that brief irony of each sacrificing their greatest treasure for the other.  The last line of dialogue is Jim, suggesting, "And now, Del, why don't you put those chops on?" meaning why don't you get dinner started.  

Okay, someone in a modern household has to prepare dinner, or we send out for Chinese or a pizza, but imagine the possibilities of the opening of that story as a twenty-first century narrative. "Wait a minute, you sold your father's watch. and now you want me to make dinner?"

At the moment, you're reading a collection of short fiction by a new writer, Phil Klay, called Redeployment, recent winner of the National Book Award.  Dramatic narrative has evolved long past the frontiers established by Poe, but for all Klay is original, disturbing, and emblematic of the moral responsibilities of which William Faulkner wrote and spoke, his work still has the fingerprints of Aristotle and Poe.

Getting the Neighborhood Dialect Right

Many of your writing habits were informed and influenced by those two consummate grouches, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and Ezra Pound.  You discovered the work of each in your late teens, took them in as though they were pure oxygen and you in a state of gasping.

Now, over half a century later, both are still with you, in ways that disturb you, so far as Hemingway is concerned, and impress you when you come to revise and see Pound, winking at you.

So far as you can tell, you are like neither in attitude nor levels of self-importunates.  On a quantitative basis, one Hemingway, The Collected Short Stories, resides in your bookshelf devoted to short story.  Of Pound there are The Confucian Odes, and Personae, plus a volume devoted to unraveling his most well-known longer poem outside The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.

When someone asks you who your favorite short story writer is, Hemingway gets a flicker of awareness as you pass over him, Fitzgerald, and Cheever, a nod back in time to D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, but then the little white ball from the roulette wheel lands into the domain of Deborah Eisenberg, where it comes to rest.

Were someone to ask in the same spirit about your favorite poet, you'd stop for a long moment to consider the conversation you once had with your now departed friend, Peter Wigham, who professed poetry at UC, Berkeley.  Wigham shook his head ruefully at his belief that the thing that stopped Pound from greatness and recognition is the fact of no one ever taking the trouble to keep lines of Pound in memory.

Wigham did not know about your freakish memory at the time, but you cut loose with arguably one of Pound's shorter-but-famed poems: " The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough."You went on until he cut you off, but not before you got out, from The Cantos, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage Whose world, or mine or theirs or is it of none?"

So, you would likely say Pound, except when you don't, because you say Yeats, not that he was any less caught up in his own mythology as Pound, but because of one poem which sometimes comes to you, in waking or sleeping moments, and shoves you against the wall to consider:

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

You would say Yeats, as you once did to John Sanford, who said, "That crazy son of a bitch," because he'd had personal dealings with the one you'd name if you didn't name Pound or Yeats.  

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

That, of course, is William Carlos Williams.  Every time you pick up his In the American Grain, it is as though you are being offered the book you'd been looking for all those years when you were looking for the book that would teach you how to write.

The thing you picked up from Hemingway is the way he used "and" to connect independent clauses.  After all these years of self-editing and having "and" called to you attention as a habit word and, as an editor, calling it to the attention of those you edit.

What all this brings to you, however, is a novelist who has fallen between some impressive cracks, gone from out midst since 1999.  As Dennis Lehane does and Robert Parker often did, George V. Higgins wrote of working-class Irish from Boston's south side.  As these two worthies do and did, Higgins heard something extra, so that were you to see it in print, you would know with a certainty, yes, this is how they spoke:  This is authentic South Boston Irish working class dialect.

But it is no such thing. Higgins' dialogue is informed by it, but it has been distilled in his writers' imagination.  You would not be surprised by the Irony of some South Boston readers, coming upon such Higgins novels as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, then being led to conclude, So this is how we are supposed to sound.  We'd better get on with sounding this way, because Higgins' way is the better way.

You came upon Higgins' novels about midway through your career of wanting to hear the authenticity of the clamor in your own head, not wanting it to be led off pitch by the sounds of others.  Higgins, and by extension, Parker and Lehane, are as far away as possible from your own people, yet they are identifiable as coming from a neighborhood.  The closest contact you've had with these three is the fact of having edited the man who put Parker's Spenser and Hawk to television.  All were helpful in your discovery of what and where your neighborhood is.

Nice coincidence that your last editing job was about a man who grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Santa Barbara.  But coincidences do not make neighborhood dialogue; you have to get close and listen for that.