Fiction Writer's Workshop (13 page)

L
ook at the Sunday comics. Everybody's got a bubble of her own, and words crowd it to the max. Every page, bubble after bubble. In the really talky strips—the serials such as "Rex Morgan, M.D." and "The Phantom"—many of the panels have more than one bubble in each. It's a bubble-rama. Everyone talking, filling his bubble. More than that, every panel and every bubble has a purpose: the setup, the buildup, the punch line and the reaction. Crystal clear. Some artists even manipulate these bubbles for each stage of the process. Considerate bastards.

The dialogue in Sunday comic strips is worth studying. It barrels forward because it must. In the serials, exposition is a part of every exchange; readers have to tune in the tensions quickly. Therefore, each exchange is likely to begin with a reminder ("You may have Kat lied up in the backseat of you car, but you've forgotten that I've had a set of spare keys since our run-in with Dr. Develin!") and end with an unresolved crisis ("Have you mentioned that to Red?"). This stuff could never work in fiction, except as camp, but then again, fiction writers don't have to ink all those bubbles either.

So what's to learn? Economy for one thing. There you can begin to see that space and time are an issue in dialogue. As in fiction, language is the premium. The comic strip writer can't flap on and on, nor can he allow his characters to do so. An intelligent, focused use of language wins out again and again. While each strip may rely on its own formula, it's important to realize this is a constraint for the writer as much as it is an assurance. These writers may not have to create realistic dialogue, but then again they are rarely given the space to try it. Those who succeed manage to mix voice, gesture and circumstance in so few words that the sheer economy ought to be praised by fiction writers, if not imitated.

But look at a page and all you see are bubbles. Read too much of that stuff and the temptation is to give in to the bubble mentality. In fiction, this refers to the understandable instinct to include dialogue in every "moment" of the story, as if each scene, half-scene, flashback demands the voice of each character. But, listen, this is a hard one:
Sometimes you have to shut up.

QUIET DOWN

In this chapter, I'd like to talk about two ways of shutting up.
Quieting a character
is perhaps the easiest to grasp. Often it's a matter of trying not to answer questions with dialogue but with action. There are also ways to quiet one character within the literal dialogue to let another character take over: understanding that no response is sometimes the best response, shifting the focus at the moment we most expect to hear something, avoiding the temptation to be overly explicit, forcing the physical world into play at surprising moments. Another element of silence is
quieting the narrative,
a form of stripping your dialogue to the bare bones for the sake of focus or pace. It does not require a quiet setting, merely a setting that drops away for a time, allowing the dialogue to take over. The writer quiets the narrative presence. You shut yourself up in a manner of speaking so that only the dialogue exchange stands on the page, unadorned by external detail or tension.

In any case, it's a question of learning to value the instinct to say less, to trust the story and its various silences. In a book about writing dialogue, a book that concerns itself with filling the unseen bubbles of fiction with good words, this message on silence might be the most important of them all.

SILENCE AS RESPONSE

There are moments when silence comes naturally to a character or scene. In these cases, silence seems the natural answer, an extension of the exchange between two people. Let's look at Chekhov's masterpiece "The Lady With the Pet Dog" again. Gurov, the married Muscovite, and his new love, Anna Sergeyevna, walk on the pier. They have only recently met, and, drawn to each other from the start, they are on their way to a painful and wonderful sort of love. In the scene below, notice how persistent and natural Anna's silence seems.

The festive crowd began to disperse; it was now too dark to see people's faces; there was no wind any more, but Gurov and Anna Sergeyevna still stood as though waiting to see someone else come off the steamer. Anna Sergeyevna was silent now, and sniffed her flowers without looking at Gurov.

"The weather has improved this evening," he said. "Where shall we go now? Shall we drive somewhere?"

She did not reply.

Then he looked at her intently, and suddenly embraced her and kissed her on the lips, and the moist fragrance of her flowers enveloped him; and at once he looked round anxiously, wondering if anyone had seen them.

"Let us go to your place," he said softly. And they walked off together rapidly.

Anna's silence is as sure a response to their impossible love as any words Chekhov might have chosen. Twice within this section, silence is the trigger for Gurov; twice it pulls him forward better than any spoken invitation. Here, silence beckons stronger than words.

There are moments when nothing can be said. Many things might stand behind this sort of silence. Pain. Conflict. Resolve. Here, the person stops speaking because silence is the only answer. Silence
is
the response. Notice that Chekhov isolates Anna's silence into a one-line paragraph. This is the most familiar example of silence—silence as statement. Although the occasion for it is uncommon, this kind of silence is the most easily rendered.

CHOOSING SILENCE OVER WORDS

But what about when people are talking? What about when a conversation is simply flying along? How do you know when to turn off the spigot of jabber? Other times, when you're sitting in front of your computer screen, pushing your way through a tough stretch, it can feel like you are dredging words from a character. What then? It is often tempting to wait until you simply hear the words loft themselves

from the mouth of your hero. You know what I say. Often that's just the thing to do. Listen and wait.

Assume you're writing a scene in which two brothers are arguing in a bar. They reach a moment during which the younger brother will reveal his secret. Say he stole money from his brother at a low point and since then he's felt himself in a spiral. You lean back in your chair and decide to let the conversation make the choice. You wait to hear the words of the younger brother, to feel for the tension in what he says next. You expect it to come easily. The story has been building toward this for days now. But hours pass. Then it is time for your dinner and you're going dancing later! So you run the conversation in your head for several days until you hear any number of words and dozens of exchanges between them that never quite focus the moment between the brothers. Hold on. What if the brother didn't speak? What if he held the secret? What if he said nothing?

In another section of this book, I might tell you quite the opposite. Just put it on the page, I'd say. Be honest. Be direct. Trust the words. All of that is good advice. Sometimes that's just the thing, but not always. Maybe there's another way to continue this exchange. Work against your expectations of what should be said. Say less. Say nothing. Let the scene take the weight.

Here's a different example. Say two boys are walking through the woods. They have collected a handful of mushrooms, against the wishes of their mother. One boy has goaded the other into it for reasons he won't reveal. As they walk, they debate about what to do with the mushrooms now that they've collected them.

"You know they're poison," Kelly said. 'You know it."

Jim pulled up on the barbed wire fence and motioned for Kelly to pass under. "Go on."

Kelly stepped under and held the wire for Jim. "I just want to drop them right here. What if the poison's right here, on our hands?"

"That ain't so. The poison's in the mushroom. You got to eat it."

'Yeah. But one bite. That's all. We should have a bag. We shouldn't be walking. This could be leaking right through my

skin right now." He held a mushroom between his thumb and forefinger.

"That is stupid. Don't be that way."

"It can happen."

"Can not. Just 'cause you say it, doesn't mean it's a fact."

They stepped over a log and stopped. To their right a twig broke. Kelly dropped a mushroom. Jim wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I want to kill Pearson's dog," he said.

Kelly shook his head and picked up the mushroom. Then he stepped forward and Jim followed.

There. Just at the moment you would expect the debate between them to get hotter, the scene veers into silence. That's a good example of letting the scene, or the moment, take the weight. It was not the moment I intended when I began this scene, which I took from one of my notebooks. But my sense is the silence served me well, as Kelly gains some element of power by not speaking. I decided to let them keep moving, to allow the plot to trip forward, to work a bit more with the place, to let the characters stew. I discovered the moment by allowing silence to be the equal of words.

Surprise yourself with silence.
This is not a means of surprising the reader necessarily; this is about you, the writer. It's about rendering a moment, about picturing it even as it happens. Strangely, this is just another form of trusting the words.

In the worst sort of dialogue, answers are provided for the reader more than for the character; there, resolution comes more for the shape of the story than for the shape of the characters. Go back to I he two brothers in the bar. If the reader has known the brother's secret for fifteen pages, is there any drama in stating it now? Perhaps, if what the writer wants is the reaction of the other brother. Doesn't silence press harder against the tension the reader feels? Doesn't it offer the possibility of something tacit, something deep and unstated between the brothers, rising up to fill the moment? If the story is close to its end, shouldn't the resolution be more than flicking a switch with a line of dialogue? Certainly.

Remember,
your reader is a secondary audience to dialogue.
The primary audience for a line of dialogue is the character himself. As such he has a different set of knowledge, usually far more limited, than the reader does.

The character within the story ought not to speak from within the story so much as from within his life. A character doesn't know anything about resolution. He don't need your stinking resolution. If he's a real person, a real character, he's speaking so he can go on, or because he can't, not because the story is near an end.

When a character goes silent, holds back or turns away in a moment like that, much is revealed. That silence stands as an act in itself. That silence might heighten tension or provide resolution, signal a parting of ways or, by contrast, an agreement. Sometimes the answer lies in not speaking, in keeping quiet.

FILLING THE SILENCE

But consider moments of silence in your life, moments when two or more people are gathered and no one speaks. To be sure, there are not many of these in the average day. For most of us, there aren't enough. Waiting at the bus stop maybe. The silent prayer in church. The pause before tee-shot. The counter at the half-empty coffee shop. The subway ride in a strange city. While some of these moments may be quiet, none of them is silent (not even saying the prayer), and not a one of them is still. The world moves in moments like this, the physical dynamic between human beings swirls along.

The silence I'm referring to is not a vacuum. Things happen. You must find ways to fill the silence reliably and convincingly. The different types of gesture encompass an array of options. Recognizing the function of place, or scene, reveals another set of possibilities.

Gesture

But what fills the empty space when characters go quiet while the scene persists? It's a bit trite to say that conversation is more than words, but at its core, you're looking at a series of exchanges, both verbal and physical. When the words stop, the physical world does not dry up. Cigarettes are offered. Eyes shift. Hands run through hair. Fingers tap tabletops. People wave for waiters. Kisses are given. Each of these gestures can be as significant within a dialogue as any spoken words. Often more so.

We've already noted that physical gestures can and should play a role in dialogue, in what is being said and how. But they can also be used to fill the silence. Used well, they ought to define it. There are different gestures a writer can employ. Each is useful in nagging a difficult dialogue along. Some cut straight to the meaning of the conversation; others are particular to character; others, still, are incidental