Fiction Writing 101: Dialogue & Time

I hadn't read Death of a Salesman in decades-- when I was much too young to understand it-- but after reading an op-ed in the NY Times about it (that'll be for another post), I decided it was time to read it again.  I'll write about the content in a future post (the same one I referenced above) because there are two things about the writing that struck me when I recently read Arthur Miller's most famous play. The first is dialogue.

The dialogue doesn't sound like the way people talk. It isn't an illusion of real conversation as I've talked about it my post about dialogue (here). The key is that Arthur Miller made a conscious decision to write this way. According to Christopher Bigsby, Miller wanted "to avoid naturalistic dialogue." He wanted to "create a lyrical language which would draw attention to itself. He wished... not to write in a Jewish idiom, or even a naturalistic prose, but to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the 'natural.'" The dialogue in Death of a Salesman (at least when I read it to myself instead of listening to it while actually watching the play) never does sound like a real conversation, and parts of it sound quite odd-- so much so that I re-read lines because the cadence was so unusual and awkward and because, as I stated in my dialogue post, I love dialogue.  The lesson: do what you want with dialogue, experiment with it, but make sure you eventually know what you're doing.

The second element that struck me in Death of a Salesman: Time.  I don't know what to say to readers who are uncomfortable with "nearly instantaneous time shifts" because I love the fluidity of time in stories.  Death of a Salesman takes place in one day, but time moves all over the place, literally on the stage and in what Miller called "social time" and "psychic time."  Bigsby explains it like this: "By social time he seems to mean the unfolding truth of the public world which provides the context for Willy's life, while psychic time is evident in memories which crash into his present, creating ironies, sounding echoes, taunting him with a past which can offer him nothing by reproach. All these different notions of time blend and interact, that interaction being a key to the play's effect."  The shifting of time is amazing in Death of a Salesman, amazing to realize that the story takes place within a twenty-four hour period.  It feels like years.  And as with the lesson in dialogue, feel free to experiment with time, but make sure you eventually know what you're doing.

The Color Midnight Made by Andrew Winer

I was sucked into Conrad Clay's world, and for those who read my Fiction 101 posts, you know that getting sucked into a fictional world is a very good thing.  It means the writing is successful. Conrad Clay is the ten year old protagonist in The Color Midnight Made by Andrew Winer and published by Washington Square Press. When I first started reading this novel, I wondered about the color metaphors/symbolism, and I wondered about the language, Conrad's speech and vocabulary, wondering if these would continue consistently throughout the book.  I stopped wondering because these elements worked very well, and as I said a few sentences ago, I simply got sucked in.  The story is sensitive and painful, painful in a good way.  There are happy and funny moments too, but Winer doesn't shy away from the difficult life stuff, and that's what makes fiction really good fiction. Conrad Clay is a white kid growing up in a mostly black community in the Bay Area.  His parents have a terrible marriage, but Conrad finds ways to connect meaningfully with people.  I highly recommend this novel.

Fiction Writing 101: Listening

So today I have laryngitis. And wow-- I said that (wrote it) like I planned on having laryngitis-- which of course I didn't. But it's been a good thing. I've closed my eyes for most of the day and listened. Listening's important for writers.  And when I see (not today, of course) people walking around with their heads down looking at tiny screens, I wonder how much they hear. Or do they tune everything out except whatever noisy indicator signals to them that they have to read or watch something on that tiny screen? They're missing a lot. But then again, most of them aren't writers though they text a thousand times a day, tweet hundreds of 140 characters a day, post crucial info on Facebook fifty times per day, and possibly blog several times a week. But that stuff isn't writing.  It's texting, tweeting, posting, and blogging. And most of it ignores listening. What did I hear today?  Everything.

Update:  So Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad) is telling a story on Twitter (@NYerfiction) starting today for ten days.  So maybe tweeting is writing.  The New Yorker calls it-- amazingly-- Twitter fiction.  So I'm wrong once again. Anything is considered writing, and I mean fiction writing.

Fiction Writing 101: What are You Writing About?

I usually have no idea what I'm writing about when I start writing, but I usually know what it isn't: a poem, a play, a screenplay, memoir, an essay, and a few other genres. So when I start writing, it's fiction. But that's all I know. (I know some call what I'm doing right now writing, but when I say I'm writing I mean fiction writing.) I don't write outlines. I do write words and sentences on bits of paper, and they collect on my desk.  If I have no idea what they mean when I look at them a week later, I recycle those pieces of paper.  If the words meant something to me, they'll come back because I don't forget anything that's important.  What words meant may get stuck in the recesses of my brain for a year, but I'll think of them-- and their meaning-- again at some point.

So how do I figure out what I'm writing about?  For one thing, I take a long time to get to the actual writing phase. I think and ponder and wonder for a long time. (As you may have guessed, I'm not a prolific writer. What do you expect when my Mercury is in Taurus?) Then when I feel ready, I write. Then I look at what I'm writing and figure out what it is I'm saying because what I've written is probably not the actual story. So I try to find the story, and that means letting go of a lot of words.  Yeah--delete delete delete. It feels great to let go. Sound scary? Watching reality shows about hoarders will cure you of being afraid to let go.

How do I find a story? If a sentence resonates with me, if a sentence makes me uncomfortable, if a sentence evokes an "oh my god" reaction, I'm probably getting close.  If I'm simply entertaining myself, tripping merrily along as I write, that's not the story. Put another way: what I write has to bother me. If I'm not bothered then nothing's there.

Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates

I hadn't read a Joyce Carol Oates novel in about ten years, but when I read about Mudwoman (published by Harper Collins), somewhere, I wanted to read it.  Maybe it was because of the academia in it and because I had a hunch Oates would be critical of some aspects of the world of the university from the point of view of a professor.  And maybe it was more than a hunch because I know that Oates is not afraid of exploring the dark side of anything. And Mudwoman is dark. And creepy. Haunting. And I was drawn into the story and really, really enjoyed it. The "present"part of Mudwoman takes place just a couple of years after 9/11, and the world in Mudwoman is dealing with issues that concern us right now, and the story telling itself is a mixture of present, past, and the imaginary-- nightmares, actually. And her prose is poetry.  If you want the anti-beach book, this is it.