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.