Fiction Writer's Workshop (14 page)

10 the circumstance.

Dramatic gesture.
A dramatic gesture is one in which the gesture

itself is designed to have meaning that reinforces the human exchange. Sometimes these are simple cliches. A woman stubs her cigarette out in an ashtray after she finishes dumping her boyfriend. An executive swats a fly on his desk as he fires an employee. A boy's eyes grow shifty as he lies to his father about stealing cars. These are the sorts of gestures we see in bad television. They are visual cues, dramatic cliches and little more. Frankly, unless intended to exaggerate a moment to the brink of comedy or cliche, they are better left unused.

Using dramatic gestures successfully is a question of lifting the movement out of the realm of the stock, the familiar. Quite often it might border on cliche, but the successful dramatic gesture rises above that. It particularizes a human condition, just as a story describes one. It may be symbolic at its core, but to the reader, the strong dramatic gesture is specific to the story. In Raymond Carver's wonderful story "A Small, Good Thing," the parents of a boy who dies from the consequences of a hit-and-run accident are hounded by a baker who has been left with an unpaid account on the boy's birthday cake. The baker makes crank phone calls, which the mother receives while the boy is hospitalized and later after he dies. At first she can't make the connection and has no idea who is calling, but at last she figures it out. She and her husband confront the baker in his kitchen early one morning. He is horrified at his callous mistake. He begs their forgiveness, then asks them to sit and have some coffee. He then offers them bread, calling up communion, images of nurturing, healing human rituals. Offering the bread is a fine example of a dramatic gesture.

"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope

you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going.

Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. "It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world here."

It's not the level of drama that defines the dramatic gesture, it's the potency. This small moment harkens to the idea of providing and protecting. It's a sort of communion between the characters, a ritual of forgiveness. The gesture takes on a level of significance because it speaks to all parts of the story and to other larger stories of the world. There's no sense trying to calculate these moments in advance. A dramatic gesture succeeds when it grows from inside the story. You'll have to learn how to turn up the gas when the moment is right. The point is not to grope around for the right symbolic gesture but to teach yourself to trust gesture and recognize drama.

Particular gesture.
Easier to craft and more useful perhaps is the particular gesture, which involves a movement or action unique to an individual. A woman who touches the top button of her blouse before she speaks. A man who holds both hands out in front of him, fingers pinched together, as he sings. These sorts of things are all around you. Your friends are a wellspring of these tics and triggers. You have to be a wickedly precise observer to train yourself to zero in on particular habits. I once played Softball with a guy who slapped himself on the forehead with two fingers before he would recount a bad fielding play. My brother droops one shoulder when he lies. My wife sometimes pulls paper napkins into tiny squares when she is finished eating. Observing pays off in other ways too. I've played poker for years with a history professor who wraps his fingers around the edge of his cards when he's holding a good hand and keeps them flat on the back of the cards when his hand is shit. (Sorry, John.)

Obviously these gestures are directly connected to individuals, and as such are useful in any exchange between characters, even when they are not speaking. The movements your characters invent, favor or rely upon are as much a part of them as the words they choose. So don't merely
listen
and wait,
watch
the character too.

The beauty of particular gestures is that they are easy to find in the life around you. Try watching a conversation from a distance great enough that it keeps you from hearing what's being said, but not so far that you can't see these small exchanges taking place. Take note of every tiny movement. The shifting of weight from foot to foot. The brief glance into the distance. The arm clamping the briefcase to the chest. Even while talking directly to another person, you can pick up new details. It's odd to talk to someone you've known for years and notice for the first time that he chews his gum from side to side. Still it's something you've seen all along, a part of dozens of past conversations between the two of you, and you hadn't noticed. You might begin to feel that your eyes are trespassing, but watch closely for changes in expression. How the face moves! The longer you look, the more you will find.

A human being controls more than language when speaking. Conversation is a matter of balance and direction, muscle control and manners. Readers will remember the particular gesture, rising out of a real character, long after they forget the dramatic one, calculated for mere effect.

Incidental gesture.
The incidental gesture is useful in turning the dynamic outward toward the setting or circumstance. The grave robber bats the gnats from his face as he scratches the dirt off the lop of the coffin. The little boy plugs his ears as the ambulance whips past. The woman quietly returns a nod from across the restaurant. These sorts of things can be helpful with timing and rhythm. Quite often these gestures are a matter of setting and circumstance.

Let's go back to the brothers at the bar. What are the typical ambient noises in a bar? List them from most to least obvious. The jukebox. The cash register. The clicking of the balls on the pool table. A group of people laughing at a joke. A bell behind the bar, rung loudly on a strong tip. The one-armed man, nursing a Bud at the end of the bar, rambling on about a speeding ticket. What are the sources of movement and light within a dark bar on a Saturday afternoon? The flicker of the golf tournament on television. The door to the street, and to the daylight, flopping open then shut. The scattering of pool balls. The bartender wiping the counter. Each of these elements of scene is a potential reaction for the character. The brother might wince at the light from outside. He might jump at the snap break on the pool table or lift his hands so the bartender can pass through with his rag. These are all movements incidental to place. They don't indicate attitude or character. Anyone would do the same thing. Still, movements like this tend to get overlooked by the writer struggling with a dialogue. The incidental gesture can be used to fill a pause, or to define a silence too. You have to learn to trust these gestures within dialogue, just as you would the spoken word.

Place

Notice how the incidental gesture rises out of the circumstance or setting of a given dialogue. Place can, and should, be part of a dialogue. We cannot stop the interruptions of the world, and just as we interact with the world (as in the incidental gesture), so too does it interact with us.
Allow the setting to become part of your dialogue.
This is another means of quieting a dialogue, since it takes the word right out of the speaker's mouth.

At the start of Albert Camus'
The Stranger,
the narrator's mother has died. He travels to the home where she lived to settle her affairs. At one point, he finds himself in a room with the caretaker of the home, looking at his mother's casket. They speak, but the conversation is as much between the narrator and the place as it is between the two men left there.

When she'd gone the caretaker said, "I'll leave you alone." I don't know what kind of gesture I made, but he stayed where he was, behind me. Having this presence beating down my neck was starting to annoy me. The room was filled with beautiful late-afternoon sunlight. Two hornets were buzzing against the glass roof. I could feel myself getting sleepy. Without turning around, I said to the caretaker, "Have you been here long?" Right away he answered, "Five-years"—as if he'd been waiting all along for me to ask.

After that he did a lot of talking.

The room is largely quiet, but the tension is palpable—between the two men, between the narrator and his world—and it is reflected in

the details of the room, which speak to him as loud as any voice. Those hornets! Every time I see a hornet inside my house, bobbing along the ceiling toward escape, I think of that conversation and the light shining through that glass ceiling. Still, looking at the passage again, I see that the conversation itself is quite slight. Its effect is a matter of positioning the characters just so and allowing the world to speak in their silence.

Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg" is a son's chronicle of his father's failed attempts at being an entrepreneur and showman. His father, a failed chicken farmer, buys a tiny restaurant near a railroad station in a rural part of Ohio. He wants the spot to be remarkable, something memorable to passersby, so that people will spread the word. He lays out baskets of eggs and lines the shelves with the genetic oddities collected in his days on the chicken farm. He attempts to perform for the customers as they wait for the trains. In the story's one section of dialogue, we hear the father's failed routine as he tries it out on a customer.

... he did not know what to do with his hands. He thrust one of them nervously over the counter and shook hands with Joe Kane. "How-de-do," he said. Joe Kane put his newspaper down and stared at him. Father's eye lighted on the basket of eggs that sat on the counter and he began to talk. "Well," he began hesitatingly, "well, you have heard of Christopher Columbus, eh?" He seemed to be angry. "That Christopher Columbus was a cheat," he declared emphatically. "He talked of making an egg stand on its end. He talked, he did, and then he went and broke the end of the egg."

My father seemed to his visitor to be beside himself at the duplicity of Christopher Columbus. He muttered and swore. He declared it was wrong to teach children that Christopher Columbus was a great man when, after all, he cheated at the critical moment. He had declared that he would make an egg stand on end and then when his bluff had been called he had done a trick. Still grumbling at Columbus, father took an egg down from the basket on the counter and began to walk up and down. He rolled the egg between the palms of his hands. He smiled genially. He began to mumble words regarding the effect to be produced on an egg by the electricity that comes out of the human body. He declared that without breaking its shell and by virtue of rolling it back and forth in his hands he could stand the egg on its end. He explained that the warmth of his hands and the gentle rolling movement he gave the egg created a new center of gravity, and Joe Kane was mildly interested. "I have handled thousands of eggs," father said. "No one knows more about eggs than I do."

He stood the egg on the counter and it fell on its side. He tried the trick again and again, each time rolling the egg between the palms of his hands and saying words regarding the wonders of electricity and the laws of gravity. When after half an hour's effort he did succeed in making the egg stand for a moment he looked up to find that his visitor was no longer watching.

Although the scene involves a lot of talking, notice how little of it the reader actually hears. Anderson slowly drops the father's words as the scene progresses. The customer never speaks. Gesture and the details of place combine to take the place of words. The tone of the narration does the work of the customer's reaction. The primary audience—the customer Joe Kane—is accosted by the father's act, probably overwhelmed by his words, yet the secondary audience is able to see the whole failure in a broader, more irrefutable light, without reading every single word of the act. This is a circumstance where a man is trying to be chatty, yet the purposes of the story are better served by concentrating on the balance of monologue, physical expression and scene.

QUIETING THE NARRATOR

Up to now we've seen the silence that accompanies pauses and breaks in conversation. We've further seen that these silences need not be "quiet" in the traditional sense. The tools of narrative ask the writer to fill them with the squeaks, groans and whistles of everyday life. This is what a narrator does. He fills in; he sharpens; he shapes. But just as you have to quiet characters from time to time, so that dialogue is sharp and well chosen, you have to understand that there are moments in a story when a dialogue can take over. When the words of the characters will suffice. In these moments the writer must quiet the narrator and resist the urge to fill.

Edmund White's masterful memoir,
A Boy's Own Story,
is a chronicle of the author's coming-of-age and coming out of the closet in the 1950s. Like most nonfiction, it relies upon the elements of fiction for the shape and tone of the story. The truth is, it is as much a novel as most novels hope to be. In one scene, the high-school-aged protagonist returns home from one of his first and only dates with a woman. It went well and, torn between his emergent homosexuality and the desire to make his family happy, he feels some hope that he might be able to transform himself into an upstanding heterosexual, despite his deeper realization of who he is. Upon returning home, he finds his sleepy mother wants to hear how the date went. The dialogue breaks about every rule I've suggested to you so far. (The long blank space in the middle of the dialogue appears to indicate an expletive.)