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November 12, 2007

How Dialogue is Like Bowling

Anyone who bowls knows that the way to get a strike is to put the ball in the pocket, just off the center pin. If you put the ball right down the middle, you get a split. Well, dialogue is the same way. It works best if it's a little off-center, by which I mean that with dialogue what doesn't get said is as interesting as what does get said. It's the starts and stalls, the ellisions, that are often most characterizing.

Back when I was a kid, there was a Saturday Night Live skit called "Mister Slow-Reaction Man." Well, you get the idea. Dialogue is the same way. A character says something, and another character responds to something that was said a few lines earlier, or responds to only part of what was said. Characters listen to each other, but not fully. Good dialogue is glancing--characters talking past each other. If you want some good contemporary examples of this, I'd look at the work of Tobias Wolff and Charles Baxter, great dialogue-writers both. In my student stories, I see the kernel of really strong dialogue, but it's embedded in too much connecive tissue. There are too many full-sentences--the scene reads like the transcript of an interview with Connie Chung. Often it's just a matter of cutting out the waste. In fact, this is true of the work in general. I will sometimes take a student story and tell the writer, before I've even looked at the story, "OK, now cut it by 30 percent." It's a rare student story that doesn't improve that way. And not just student stories. I believe in working with a word-count. It's amazing what happens when someone forces you to trim the fat.

Posted at 06:50 PM in Guest Bloggers |

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Comments

Ryan

You said you enjoy working with a word count. Typically, how many words would you prescribe?

Posted by: Ryan | November 14, 2007 at 06:26 AM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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