Writing Tools

by Roy Peter Clark

  • It explains something important about the subject.

  • It frames a problem or dilemma.

  • It adds information.

  • It reveals the character or personality of the speaker.

  • It introduces what is next to come.

  But quotes also contain a serious weakness. Consider this quote from a page one story in the New York Times: "Less than two percentage points we can handle just by not eating out as much." This quote comes from a woman named Joyce Diffender-fer on how her family copes with mounting credit card debt. But where is Joyce Diffenderfer when she speaks these words? In her kitchen? At the desk where she pays her bills? In her workplace? Most quotes — as opposed to dialogue — are dis-placed. The words are spoken above or outside the action. Quotes are about the action, not in the action. That's why quotes interrupt the progress of the narrative.

  Which returns us to the power of dialogue. While quotes provide information or explanation, dialogue thickens the plot. The quote may be heard, but dialogue is overheard. The writer who uses dialogue transports us to a place and time where we get to experience the events described in the story.

  Journalists use dialogue infrequently, so the effect stands out like a palm tree in a meadow. Consider this passage by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Thomas French on the trial of a Florida firefighter accused of a horrible crime against his neighbor:

  His lawyer called out his name. He stood up, put his hand on a Bible and swore to tell the truth and nothing but. He sat down in the witness box and looked toward the jurors so they could see his face and study it and decide for themselves what kind of man he was.

  "Did you rape Karen Gregory?" asked his lawyer.

  "No sir, I did not."

  "Did you murder Karen Gregory?"

  "No sir." (from the St. Petersburg Times)

  The inhibitions against dialogue in nonfiction are unfounded. Although dialogue can be recovered and reconstructed from careful research, using multiple sources and appropriate attribution, it can also be overheard. An angry exchange between the mayor and a city council member can be recorded and published. The writer who did not witness testimony from a trial can recover accurate dialogue from court transcripts, often available as public records.

  The skillful writer can use both dialogue and quotes to create different effects in the same story, as in this example from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

  "It looked like two planes were fighting, Mom," Mark Kessler, 6, of Wynnewood, told his mother, Gail, after she raced to the school.

  The boy had just witnessed the midair collision of a plane and a helicopter, an accident that dropped deadly wreckage atop an elementary school playground. We've already seen another passage from the same story:

  "It was one horrible thing to watch," said Helen Amadio, who was walking near her Hampden Avenue home when the crash occurred. "It exploded like a bomb. Black smoke just poured."

  Helen Amadio offers us a true quote, spoken directly to the reporter. Notice the difference between that quote and the implied dialogue between the young boy and his mother. The six-year-old describes the scene to his frantic mom. In other words, the dialogue puts us on the scene where we can overhear the characters in action.

  On rare occasions, the reporter combines the information of the quote and the emotional power of dialogue, but only when the source speaks in the immediate aftermath of the event, and only when the reporter focuses on both words and actions. Rick Bragg carries this off in his story on the Oklahoma City bombing:

  "I just took part in a surgery where a little boy had part of his brain hanging out of his head," said Terry Jones, a medical technician, as he searched in his pocket for a cigarette. Behind him, firefighters picked carefully through the skeleton of the building, still searching for the living and the dead.

  "You tell me," he said, "how can anyone have so little respect for human life." (from the New York Times)

  Leave out the parts readers tend to skip; make room for the parts they can't resist.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Read the newspaper for quotes and fiction for dialogue. Think about their different effects on the reader.

  2. Look for missed opportunities to use dialogue in nonfic-tion. Pay special attention to reports about crime, civic controversies, and the courtroom.

  3. Develop your ear for dialogue. With a notebook in hand, sit in a public space, such as a mall or an airport lounge. Eavesdrop on nearby conversations and jot down some notes on what it would take to capture that speech in a story.

  4. Read the work of a contemporary playwright, such as Tony Kushner. Read the dialogue aloud with friends, and discuss to what extent it sounds like real speech or seems artificial.

  5. Interview two people about an important conversation they had years ago. Try to re-create the dialogue to their satisfaction. Speak to them separately, then bring them together.

  In a wonderful essay, Nora Ephron describes a lady who hopes to become the winner of a national baking competition:

  Edna Buckley, who was fresh from representing New York State at the National Chicken Cooking contest, where her recipe for fried chicken in a batter of beer, cheese, and crushed pretzels had gone down to defeat, brought with her a lucky handkerchief, a lucky horseshoe, a lucky dime for her shoe, a potholder with the Pills-bury Poppin' Fresh Doughboy on it, an Our Blessed Lady pin, and all of her jewelry, including a silver charm also in the shape of the doughboy, (from Crazy Salad)

  I love what is not in this sentence: vague character adjectives, words like superstitious or quirky or obsessive. Ephron's litany of details opens Edna Buckley up for inspection. Cloudy adjectives would close her down.

  A story in USA Today described a teenage surfer in Hawaii who lost her arm in a shark attack. It began like this:

  Bethany Hamilton has always been a compassionate child. But since the 14-year-old Hawaiian surfing sensation lost her left arm in a shark attack on Halloween, her compassion has deepened.

  This opening fell flat, I think, because of the adjective "compassionate." Too often, writers turn abstractions into adjectives to define character. One writer tells us the shopkeeper was enthusiastic, or that the lawyer was passionate in his closing argument, or that the schoolgirls were popular. Some adjectives — ashen, blond, and winged — help us see. But adjectives such as enthusiastic are abstract nouns in disguise.

  The reader who encounters character adjectives screams silently for examples, for evidence: "Don't just tell me, Ms. Writer, that Super Surfer Girl is compassionate. Show me." And, to her credit, she does.

  Jill Lieber describes how Bethany Hamilton, from her hospital bed, "tearfully insisted" that the fifteen-hundred-pound tiger shark that attacked her "not be harmed." Later the girl meets with a blind psychologist and offers him the charitable donations she is receiving "to fund an operation to restore his sight."

  And in December, Hamilton touched more hearts when, on a media tour of New York City, she suddenly removed her ski jacket and gave it to a homeless girl sitting on a subway grate in Times Square. Wearing only a tank top, Hamilton then canceled a shopping spree, saying she already had too many things.

  Now I see. That girl really is compassionate.

  The best writers create moving pictures of people, images that reveal their characteristics and aspirations, their hopes and fears. Writing for the New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson describes a mother in desperate fear for the safety of her children, but avoids adjectives such as desperate and fearful. Instead she shows us a woman preparing her children for school:

  Then she sprays them. She shakes an aerosol can and sprays their coats, their heads, their tiny outstretched hands. She sprays them back and front to protect them as they go off to school, facing bullets and gang recruiters and a crazy dangerous world. It is a special religious oil that smells like drugstore perfume, and the children

  shut their eyes tight as she sprays them long and furious so they will come back to her, alive and safe, at day's end
.

  By re-creating this moment, Wilkerson leads us into the world of a struggling family, offering us the opportunity for sympathy. The scenic evidence is supported by the spoken words of the children:

  These are the rules for Angela Whitiker's children, recounted at the Formica-top dining room table:

  "Don't stop off playing," Willie said.

  "When your hear shooting, don't stand around — run," Nicholas said.

  "Because a bullet don't have no eyes," the two boys shouted. "She pray for us every day," Willie said.

  Writing for the Maine Sunday Telegram, Barbara Walsh introduces us to a group of girls facing the social pressures of middle school. The story begins at a school dance in a gym that "smells of peach and watermelon perfume, cheap aftershave, cinnamon Tic Tacs, bubble gum." Groups of girls dance in tight circles, adjusting their hair and moving to the music.

  "I loooove this song," Robin says.

  Robin points to a large group of 20 boys and girls clustered near the DJ.

  "Theeeey are the populars, and we're nooot," she shouts over the music.

  "We're the middle group," Erin adds. "You've just got to form your own group and dance."

  "But if you dance with someone that isn't too popular, it's not cool," Robin says. "You lose points," she adds, thrusting her thumbs down.

  What is this story about? The words I would choose lead me up the ladder of abstraction: Adolescence. Self-consciousness. Peer pressure. Social status. Anxiety. Self-expression. Vulnerability. Groupthink. How much better for us as readers to see and hear these truths through the actions of interesting young women, with their authentic adolescent vowel sounds, than from the abstracting lips of sociologists.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Some writers talk about doing research until they arrive at a dominant impression, something they can express in a single sentence. For example, "The mother of the cheerleader is overbearing and controlling." They may never write that sentence. Instead, they try to re-create for the reader the evidence that led them to this conclusion. Try out this method on some of your stories.

  2. Listen to stories reported and written for National Public Radio. Pay attention to the voices of story subjects and sources. What character traits do they reveal in their speech? How would you render that speech in print?

  3. Sit with notebook ready in a public place: a mall, a cafeteria, a sports stadium. Watch people's behavior, appearance, and speech. Write down the character adjectives that come to mind: obnoxious, affectionate, caring, confused. Now write down the specific details that led you to those conclusions.

  At its best, the study of literature helps us understand what reading scholar Frank Smith describes as the "grammar of stories." Such was the case on my first encounter with Emma Bovary, the provincial French heroine with the tragically romantic imagination. I remember my amazement at reading the scene in which author Gustave Flaubert describes the seduction of the married and bored Madame Bovary by the cad Rodolphe Boulanger. The setting is an agricultural fair. In a scene both poignant and hilarious, Flaubert switches from the flirtatious language of the lover to the calls of animal husbandry in the background.

  I remember it as a back-and-forth between such dialogue as "I tried to make myself leave a thousand times, but still I followed you" and the sounds of "Manure for sale!" Or "I will have a place in your thoughts and your life, won't I?" and "Here's the prize for the best pigs!"

  Back and forth, back and forth, the juxtaposition exposes to the reader, but not to our heroine, Rodolphe's true intentions. Ironic juxtaposition is the fancy term for what happens when two disparate things are placed side by side, each commenting on the other.

  This effect can work in music, in the visual arts, and in poetry:

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherized upon a table;

  So begins "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a poem in which T. S. Eliot juxtaposes the romantic image of the evening sky with the sickly metaphor of anesthesia. The tension between those images sets the tone for everything that follows. Eliot died in 1965, my junior year in Catholic high school, and a group of us celebrated the event by naming our rock band after the poet. We were called "T. S. and the Eliots," and our motto was "Music with Soul," our sophomoric attempt at ironic juxtaposition.

  How about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Valley girl becomes scourge of demons.

  The coupling of unlikely elements is often the occasion for humor, broad and subtle. In The Producers, for example, Mel Brooks creates a musical called "Springtime for Hitler," starring a hippy Fiihrer, and featuring Busby Berkeley-style dancers who form the image of a swastika.

  Moving from the grotesquely comic to the deadly serious, consider this introduction to the Philadelphia Inquirer's story of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island:

  4:07 a.m. March 28,1979.

  Two pumps fail. Nine seconds later, 69 boron rods smash down into the hot core of unit two, a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island. The rods work. Fission in the reactor stops.

  But it is already too late.

  What will become America's worst commercial nuclear disaster has begun.

  What follows is a catalog of terrible truths that officials will learn, along with harrowing details: "Nuclear workers playing Frisbee outside a plant gate because they were locked out but not warned of the radiation beaming from the plant's walls." The suspense that builds from those first short sentences reaches a peak when the failed nuclear reactor produces radiation that bombards workers playing Frisbee. Radiation meets Frisbee. Surprising juxtaposition.

  In some cases, the effect of juxtaposition can be accomplished by a few words embedded in a narrative. The narrator of the dark crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice lays out the plot to murder his girlfriend's husband:

  We played it just like we would tell it. It was about ten o'clock at night, and we had closed up, and the Greek was in the bathroom, putting on his Saturday night wash. I was to take the water up to my room, get ready to shave, and then remember I had left the car out. I was to go outside, and stand by to give her one on the horn if somebody came. She was to wait till she heard him in the tub, go in for a towel, and clip him from behind with a blackjack I had made for her out of a sugar bag with ball bearings wadded down in the end.

  James M. Cain creates a double effect in this passage, placing the innocent "sugar bag" between the mechanical "ball bearings" and the criminal "blackjack." A sack for sugar loses its sweetness when converted into a murder weapon.

  Olivia Judson, a science writer, uses this technique to tweak our interest in what could be a stultifying subject, the female green spoon worm:

  The green spoon worm has one of the most extreme size differences known to exist between male and female, the male being 200,000 times smaller than his mate. Her life span is a couple of years. His is only a couple of months — and he spends his short life inside her reproductive tract, regurgitating sperm through his

  mouth to fertilize her eggs. More ignominious still, when he was first discovered, he was thought to be a nasty parasitic infestation, (from Seed magazine)

  The author's point of view is a sly wink, the humiliation of the minuscule male sea creature serving as an emblem for his crude and increasingly miniaturized human counterpart. The juxtaposition is between worm sex and human sex.

  We would expect to see weird juxtapositions in the work of ironists and satirists, and so it goes with this passage about a baby killed at Christmas in a laundry room dryer:

  The shock and horror that followed Don's death are something I would rather not recount: Calling our children to report the news, watching the baby's body, small as a loaf of bread, as it was zipped into a heavy plastic bag — these images have nothing to do with the merriment of Christmas, and I hope my mention of them will not dampen your spirits at this, the most special and glittering time of the year, (from Holidays on Ice)

  Th
is conflation of offbeat images and ideas — the juxtaposition of a bizarre murder with the expectation of Yuletide frivolity — is David Sedaris at his best.

  Notice that I drew my examples from fiction, poetry, musical comedy, journalism, science writing, and satire — proof of the utility and versatility of this tool.

  WORKSHOP

  1. Feature photographers often see startling visual details in juxtaposition: a street person wearing a corsage, a massive sumo wrestler holding a tiny child. Keep your eyes open for such visual images and imagine how you would represent them in your writing.

  2. Reread your own work to see if surprising juxtapositions

  are hiding inside. Can you revise your work to take better advantage of these opportunities?

  3. Now that you have a name for this technique, you will begin to recognize its use more often in literature, theater, movies, music, and journalism. Make a mental note of such examples. And look for them in real life as you research your writing.

  The creepy experience of my youth was reading Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," a short, short story that begins in innocence: "The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green." What a splendid day to conduct the annual village lottery, I must have thought, and who will be the winner? And what will they win?

  The "winner," of course, turns out to be Tessie Hutchinson, whose prize is to be stoned to death, a scapegoat to the villagers' blind adherence to tradition: " 'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her." Those words still crawl up my spine, years after I first encountered them.

  Yet, the "surprise" stoning is foreshadowed right there in the story's first few paragraphs: "Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones." Surely, I thought, those stones must be instruments in some boyhood game. Little did I know they prefigured the story's unthinkable finale.

  Not long ago, I saw a movie that reminded me of the power