Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  To that extent, then, we cannot control how the reader will receive our fictional message, nor should we be able as writers to assert such control. The best we can do, I believe, is write as carefully and as honestly as we can and let the reader make of our work what he will. If we write well, enough people will get enough of the message.

  The idea of fiction as a reader-participation medium is certainly not original with me. Here's a passage from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, published in 1760:

  Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation: As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all, so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good breeding, would presume to think all; The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding is to halve this manner amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

  For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.

  'Tis his turn now. I have given an ample description of Dr. Slop's sad overthrow, and of his sad appearance in the back parlor?his imagination must now go on with it for awhile.

  Isn't that lovely? I could explain at this point that the punctuation is Sterne's, and that they handled the odd comma and semicolon a bit differently in the eighteenth century. Or I could explain that I've never actually read Tristram Shandy, although I was once presumed to have done so for a course in the early English novel, but that I happened on this passage just last week in London. I was in the library of the British Museum, you see, and there was a case of first editions of important books, and while looking them over this passage leaped out and caught my eye, the copy of Tristram Shandy having been left open to this particular page. I promptly copied it down, and I might tell you as much and go on to talk about serendipity, and the manner in which that happenstance gave me the theme for this chapter. I might even go on to write yet another chapter on the manner in which serendipitous browsing can lead to ideas for fiction.

  But I won't, because I've learned not to explain too much.

  CHAPTER 37

  He Said She Said

  LAWSON CLEARED his throat. Bollinger was in to see me this morning, he drawled laconically.

  Oh? Jarvis mouthed. What did he want?

  Lawson's eyebrows crawled skyward as his eyes took the measure of the man opposite him. What do you think he wanted? he wondered aloud, the sarcasm dripping from his tones. He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

  Jarvis was alarmed. That's crazy, he insisted gamely.

  Lawson seemed unconvinced. Is it? he wanted to know.

  Jarvis was adamant. You know it is, he asserted, stressing his point by pounding the tabletop.

  Maybe, murmured Lawson. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

  We don't have to concern ourselves with the problems and identities of Myrna and Bollinger and Lawson and Jarvis in order to appreciate that something is very wrong with this passage. A quick reading would suggest that it's rotten dialogue, but that's not really the case. The dialogue itself is fine; it's just gummed up with a ton of unnecessary sludge.

  The simplest way to write good dialogue is to let it stand by itself. When we let our example stand alone it looks like this:

  Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

  Oh? What did he want?

  What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

  That's crazy.

  Is it?

  You know it is.

  Maybe. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

  The actual dialogue, then, works well enough when left alone. But the excesses in our first example are no worse than what lands on editors' desks every day, and (sad to say) not significantly worse than what occasionally finds its way into print. All of this asserting and mouthing and drawling just gets in the way, and the silly adverbs just make everything worse.

  There is no more important component of fiction than dialogue. The words your characters speak to one another do more to convey their nuances to the reader than any words you can employ yourself to sketch them. Dialogue advances and defines a plot, renders complicated developments fathomable, and permits fiction to raise its voice, speaking not merely to the mind but to the ear as well. It's not an exaggeration to maintain that a novel's readability?not its worth or quality, but its sheer readability?is in direct proportion to the amount of conversation it contains. The more nearly a novel resembles a play in prose form, the simpler it is for the average reader to come to grips with it.

  Which brings us to Rule 1: If your characters are good, and if the dialogue you hand them is natural, you should leave it alone as much as possible. Put them onstage and let them talk to each other. And stay the hell out of their way.

  The first thing you must do is learn to pay attention to Rule 1.

  The second thing you must learn is when to break it.

  A chief reason for breaking Rule 1 is in order to make it clear to the reader who's saying what to whom. I recently read a novel (American Made, by Shylah Boyd, if you care) in which all dialogue, including sections which went on for several pages at a clip, was allowed to stand utterly alone. There was never a single indication as to who was speaking?and this was true too of scenes in which half a dozen people were shooting lines back and forth. That's damned confusing, and in this case readability would have been greatly increased by chucking in he said and she said where necessary for clarification.

  Some exchanges don't need much of this. If one person is asking questions and the other is answering them, the reader will understand the question-and-answer format and follow it effortlessly for pages on end. When he said and she said are indicated, there's no rule as to how often they should be sprinkled in. This depends upon the length of individual speeches, the general rhythm of the dialogue, and other factors impossible to reduce to a formula, not the least of which is the author's presumably individual style.

  When else do you depart from the rule? Well, you might want to slow the pace deliberately and convey to the reader a sense of the scene and the interplay of the speakers; this may be as important as the actual information that passes between them in their conversation. Consider:

  Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

  Oh? Jarvis lowered his eyes, set his coffee cup down. What did he want?

  What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

  Jarvis searched the other man's face. Then his eyes went to the clock on the far wall. That's crazy, he said.

  Is it?

  You know it is.

  Maybe, Lawson said levelly. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

  This passage clearly does not read as quickly as it would with the conversation standing alone. On the other hand, the extra material may help us visualize the two speakers, especially Jarvis, and may give us more of a feeling of the unspoken interplay between them.

  Sometimes you'll want to use the saids as punctuation marks, popping them in to establish the rhythm, sometimes giving a string of them all to one character for emphasis:

  Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

  Oh? Jarvis said. What did he want?

  What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna. Seems she told him where you went the other night.

  That's crazy, Jarvis said.

  Is it?

  You know it is, Jarvis said.

  Maybe. But Bollinger doesn't think so.

  Said, said, said. Dean Koontz told me once that he makes it an absolute rule never to use any verb but said in dialogue. I suppose you'll stay out of trouble this way, but I do feel that any number of alternate verbs have their uses from time to time. They can be good accent points in dialogue, and the less frequently you employ them the more effective they will be. And they serve a definite p
urpose when you've got a line which can be read any of several ways and you feel it's important the reader gets it the way you meant it.

  Words like state and aver and affirm and declare, words that newspaper reporters use frequently so that their stories will read like newspaper stories, have little or no place in fiction. But words like drawl and murmur and whisper indicate how a line is spoken. Prose fiction, after all, differs from drama in that one is not assisted by actors on stage or film. It is the writer's job to shout or whisper. I won't give an example of this?I'm sure you get the point?but you might find it an instructive exercise to knock out a few versions of your own of the imperishable conversation between Lawson and Jarvis. (While I've shown Jarvis as nervous in earlier examples, the dialogue itself is neutral, and, by giving the conversation's superstructure the right coloring, Lawson might emerge as timid while Jarvis could be bold, dominant, untouched, or whatever.)

  In first-person narration, dialogue can never stand completely alone because the persona of the narrator exists to filter everything to the reader. The narrator's presence is a constant in first-person work, and if that particular voice drops out entirely in an extended dialogue sequence, the result is sort of jarring.

  In first-person dialogue, the narrator may limit himself to he said and I said. Or he may report what he sees as well as what he hears. Or, additionally, he may toss in thoughts and observations for one purpose or another, as for example:

  I let him sit there for a minute or two. Then I said, Bollinger was in to see me this morning.

  Oh? He started to take a cigarette from my pack, then remembered that he'd given up the habit. What did he want?

  I took the cigarette he'd rejected, thumbed my lighter and took a hit. What had Bollinger wanted? Hell, what did anyone want, I wondered. Why did anyone bother? Why did people get out of bed in the morning?

  But Jarvis didn't want to hear my Philosophy 101 lecture. So I looked at him through the smoke and said, What do you think he wanted? He's upset about Myrna-.

  I'll tell you, I'm getting a little upset about Myrna myself.

  This last example, you'll note, adds substantially to the word-count of our little scrap of dialogue. The words on the page still read rapidly enough; it's just that there are more of them.

  Does this mean the material is padded? Maybe yes, maybe no?the question can't really be answered out of context. Padding is wordage without purpose. If a whole book or story were larded with introspection and cigarette-lighting and the observation of minutiae, then you'd be justified in calling it padding or simple bad writing. But when certain scenes are stretched this way for a purpose, when the information contained in the bare dialogue is secondary in importance to other elements you want to convey to the reader, then the extra words pay their way.

  Sometimes a scene exists only to move a story along. At other times it's pivotal and possesses genuine dramatic value, and often in such instances the words your characters speak are of less moment than the changes they are going through while they speak. When you write such a scene, you want to slow the reader down a little?as we have seen?and make the scene take more of his time. You don't want to be a bore, of course, and you don't want padding to be identifiable to anyone as padding, so you make sure those extra unspoken words are interesting, either creating distinct sensory images, or delineating moods, or giving the reader something to think about.

  So let's amend Rule #1 accordingly, rendering it in a form that will make it supremely useful to all writers of fiction.

  To wit: Dialogue should be allowed to stand alone, pure and simple. Except when it shouldn't.

  Is that clear?

  CHAPTER 38

  Verbs for Vim and Vigor

  I MARMALADED a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying Tra-la-la as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning. God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)

  The speaker is young Bertram Wooster, the work cited is Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, and the author is P. G. Wodehouse of blessed memory. Wodehouse lived to be ninety-three, and wrote about that many novels, fitting them in between plays, musical-comedy lyrics, screenplays, essays, articles, and, I have no doubt, blurbs for the backs of breakfast cereal boxes and screeds to be tucked into fortune cookies. He did all of this with consummate grace, dovetailing a plot like DiMaggio gathering in a fly ball, making it all look quite effortless.

  I have lately discovered Wodehouse, and while I must have read a few of the books before I have never been as appreciative an audience for him as I find myself today. And what a treat it is to uncover a passion for an author who has written nearly a hundred books! Years of uncomplicated reading stretch out before me like an expanse of untrodden lawn. The only f. in the ointment, as the master might put it, is that one tends to go about talking like B. Wooster himself, to the extreme distress of one's companions.

  But I digress. Return your attention, if you will, to the passage quoted above. The operative word is marmaladed.

  The meaning of the word is by no means elusive. Even the dimmest reader grasps quickly enough that the speaker has spread marmalade on his slice of toast. Yet no dictionary in my ken allows marmalade as a verb. It is a noun, derived via the French from the Portuguese word for quince, and it means a preserve made by boiling fruit with sugar. It may also mean the fruit of Lucuma mammosa, or that tree itself.

  When he deploys marmalade as a verb, Wodehouse attracts our attention by using a familiar word in an unfamiliar fashion. We may read it in one of three ways. We can merely breeze along with the breeze, paying no particular attention to this unorthodox use of marmalade. Or we can note it, cock an eye at it, smile at the author's linguistic imagination, and keep going.

  Or, finally, we can think about it. We can muse that the language itself affords precedent for what Wodehouse has done here. When one lubricates a slice of toast with butter, for example, the verb to butter is in widespread use. If one can butter a slice of bread, why shouldn't one be permitted to marmalade it? One oils various articles?an engine, a watch, whatever. Could one oil a bowl of salad, preparatory to vinegaring it?

  This particular sort of verb play crops up often in Wodehouse. When Bertie picks up something or other and tucks it into his pants pocket, he's apt to describe himself as having trousered the article, whatever it might be. Now one does not as a general rule go about trousering things, but one does pocket them, so why shouldn't one be able to trouser them as well? Might a woman pick up a cigarette lighter and purse it? Or may one only purse one's lips?

  This is fun, and I hope it will spark an appetite for Wodehouse while stimulating an interest in what words are and are not permitted to do. But I dug that passage out of Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves for a reason. (Actually I had rather little digging to do; it's the first paragraph in the book.) It seems to me to illustrate, perhaps by way of exaggeration, the manner in which vigorous verbs strengthen a piece of prose.

  Someone?it may have been Hemingway?is supposed to have instructed all tyro writers to go through their work and cross out all the adverbs and adjectives. While a piece of prose thus treated would be precious close to unreadable, the underlying point is well taken. The vitality of English prose?and very likely all prose?abides in its nouns and verbs. The nouns are what is and the verbs are what's happening.

  Consider the following passage:

  Parker went through the window elbows first, the rotted wood and shards of glass falling out in front of him. He lowered his head, landed hard on his right shoulder, rolled over twice, and was moving before he was well on his feet. He heard shots behind him but didn't know if they were coming at him or not. He ran for a corner of the barn, and as he went around it a bullet dug into the wood beside his head, sending splinters toward his cheek.

  He fell, rolled some more, until
he was against the side of the barn and out of sight of the house. He put his hand inside his coat and touched an empty holster.

  That's not bad writing. It's very good writing, actually, with fast action vividly described. But it's not quite as good as the actual way Richard Stark wrote this passage in The Sour Lemon Score. Here's his version:

  Parker dove through the window elbows first, the rotted wood and shards of glass spraying out in front of him. He ducked his head, landed hard on his right shoulder, rolled over twice, and was running before he was well on his feet. He heard shots behind him but didn't know if they were coming at him or not. He ran for the corner of the barn, and as he went around it a bullet chunked into the wood beside his head, spitting splinters at his cheek.

  He hit the dirt, rolled some more, and wound up against the side of the barn and out of sight of the house. He reached inside his coat, and his hand closed on an empty holster.

  See the difference? When he goes through the window he dives and we sense the movement. The wood and shards of glass don't just fall out, they spray out. The bullet chunks into the wood beside him and we don't simply know it's there, we hear it and feel it because the unusual verb supplies sound and feeling. The bullet spits splinters at him, and the verb is doubly evocative, not only giving us a picture of what happens but endowing the moment with the contemptuousness of one person's spitting at another.

  He doesn't drop or fall. He hits the dirt?it's more active that way?and he rolls and winds up against the side of the barn. He reaches inside his coat. His hand closes on an empty holster.

  Wodehouse rewrote intensively. In a letter he described how he pinned pages of his current manuscript around the walls of his study, singling out those that were insufficiently energetic, returning to them again and again and reworking them. He was a perfectionist, convinced that every line of a Jeeves story had to have entertainment value.