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by Fiction Writer's Workshop (mobi)

  2. Grab your clicker and turn on the box! Watch one channel until you hear one intelligible sentence. Write that down. Now, before you get into the show, change channels and listen again. Pick up another line. Click again. Write until you have ten separate sentences from ten separate channels. Now reread them. If you have time, put them away for a week or two, until you aren't clear which one came from which channel. Then take the list and, using these random lines as triggers, try to craft mini-scenes around each one. Start with the line you overheard. Strip away the original context and use the line as a starting point to build a new one. Work hard to make these news words suit the context and character you create. Even if you are using a line from a commercial for a butcher shop, try to use the line in a way that makes the words sound like someone speaking. Remember, tone is everything.

  3. Write a scene from one of your favorite movies. Without reading the scene from the screenplay first, watch a five- to ten-minute section from one of your favorite movies as a piece of fiction. Keep notes. Try to write down what most of the characters say. Now start writing a mini-scene, translating the film into short fiction. Try to make your writing work the same way the movie does, that is, it ought to achieve a comparable tone, the same effects. Create the setting, set up the circumstance, show the characters as you feel appropriate. Now, start

  to fill in the original movie dialogue. Use as much of it as possible. Show it to a reader when finished, asking him to mark moments when the dialogue seems contrived or forced. Rewrite, making the characters speak in convincing voices. When finished, look at the differences you have created. These gaps between forms are the heart of the matter when it comes to watching movies as a fiction writer. Try this with television too, and you may find that the gaps are insurmountable.

  4. Blindfold yourself and listen to a good movie, for example Chinatown, Mildred Pierce or Bringing Up Baby. Keep a pad in your lap as you listen, and mark the number of times you hear a line of dialogue that appears to be mostly expository. Now do the same thing with a bad movie (do I have to make suggestions here?). What do you find? Do better movies use less expository dialogue? In what ways? Use specific lines as examples. Now read a story and keep the same count. As you listen to a movie, listen for lines that seem artificial or forced. Do the same thing with a good story. Make the same sorts of comparisons as you did in the first half of this exercise. Take note of how rarely a character must speak in fiction and how often they do speak in movies. This is another gap you must seek to understand.

  You've been at the computer for hours, and it all sounds like the same old horse hockey. Your tone is way off. You have no sense of place, and your usual feel for where a character comes from, of his identity, is just plain missing. All writers have been there. You've been there, or in a place like it. The solution: You wait for the next thing you hear. Learn this quirk; put it in your bag of tricks. Use dialogue as a trigger for stories.

  I go back to my old advice first. Listen. Don't talk. Listen. If you've trained yourself to be a conscious listener, almost any line of overheard dialogue can make a starting point. I am sitting here at my computer. I know this moment well. It is 10:34 in the morning. Downstairs my two sons are talking with their mom. I can hear snatches of what they say. My older son fell last night and hurt his arm. It is still sore and he's going in for an X ray this afternoon. Some old friends are coming to see us today, just for the day. He is talking nonstop, tense about the arm (as he broke it once already) and unhappy about having to miss our friends' visit. As I said, I can only hear snatches of what they say. So I decide to crowd them a little. I sit at the top of the stairs. I am recording whatever I hear from my son.

  Is that good?

  When are they coming?

  Am I in my seventh year or my sixth?

  Swimming

  Is that a deal?

  How long

  Make sure Anna knows

  Yes

  I fixed it, no I didn't

  I almost fixed it

  Not a lot, not a lot

  No money. No money.

  I'm not having orange juice

  OK. OK. Anything but that.

  Bad Mamma.

  No. It's not our table.

  Yes.

  Baked potatoes. I don't like them.

  When are they going to be here?

  When? When?

  When?

  As I said in chapter one, listening is king. If you want to write, you have to have faith in the world around you, particularly in the voices around you. I'm saying that you can use these voices as more than part of the story. Remember to look for the whole. I've said it before: In the voices, in the words around you, whole stories are waiting.

  So what's inviting about the above list? First off, recognize that it isn't a treasure trove. I love my son, but he's not out there to give me material for stories. Some of the lines stink. So you have to ignore a certain amount of what's there. I encourage you to ignore the context too. Just look at the words. The next step is to isolate the lines that suggest something to you. The key here is to eliminate character, as well as context. Just use the words. Once they're on the page, they should become suggestions. Once they show you things you haven't seen before—a circumstance, place and person—then expand, tease the story out.

  Pick the line "When? When?" and attach it to an anxious six-year-old and it seems pretty explainable. It could be a "When do we get there?" kind of thing, like a long summer vacation drive. That sort of sums it up. But when a story can be summed up by a line of dialogue, that line of dialogue should be thrown out. Remember the power of suggestion. What if the line "When? When?" was coming out of the mouth of a doctor, standing in a brightly lit hallway? Or what if it were shouted toward you by an unseen person down a dark alley? Or over

  the phone, by a nervous liquor store salesman. How am I doing this? I'm literally jumping around to different places where this dialogue might have occurred. I am using dialogue to lead me to place. It doesn't matter which way these are attached. The key is learning that they are and using them that way.

  I go on elsewhere about connecting character to dialogue. This is different. This is using dialogue to help you invent characters, to find places, to lead you to stories. Find the words that hold an entire story. First, pin the words to the page. Record. Start with these words. Or work toward them in an existing story. Fill the blank spaces with them and see what happens. Let the character come from a new direction and pick them up.

  Of all the lines from the above list, these are the ones that I'm fairly interested in.

  No. It's not our table.

  No money. No money.

  Make sure Anna knows

  OK. OK. Anything but that. Why? I think each of them suggests another character. Each of them stands as a piece of a conversation, whereas other lines (such as "Swimming" or "Baked potatoes. I don't like them.") could be the first words of a monologue. They're fine. You may like them better. All lines are good if you can use them. But for me, the best idea is to pull the words toward another person, to implicate and ignite a human circumstance. So I gravitate toward the lines where another person has just spoken or seems to be called on for response.

  Once isolated, I tend to write these words by hand on an index card. I tape that card to the top of my computer so I see it each time I come in and sit down to start up. Or I carry it with me through the day, using it to write down phone numbers and shopping lists so I pull the card out at many different times, in many different contexts. Either of these works for me. The computer thing works because then I start up with the line working through my mind. I'm a big believer in mantras. Say the words again and again. So you can hear them without saying them. Frankly this is part of isolating the words from their original source. In this exercise, after I take the words from my son (or whomever), I try to forget he said them. Isolate. Remember: words. You are creating the space, the context around them.

  If you're really groping to find character,
brainstorming is always a good idea. Write the words on one side of an index card. Read them to yourself. Turn the card over and write down the first thing that comes to mind.

  Fairly mundane. But a decent start. Do it again, thinking of a new circumstance. Then again. In each case, make the detail more specific, more contextualized. Yet, remember to make each the start of a new story. Things may clash. Don't worry, you'll be doing lots of crossing out. You can work on consistency later. You are working as fast as you can here, trying to surprise yourself with detail.

  Why these details? Why these names? Well, it's a brainstorm. I'm writing the first thoughts that came to my mind. Where these thoughts came from shouldn't be the point, but I can tell you that I really tried to picture a new setup each time. The first place I chose, the restaurant, had to do with a vision I had of people waiting in the lobby of a beautiful restaurant. I literally did what I asked you to do, that is, turned the card over and came up with a new circumstance, and I was struck by the idea of a person stealing a table from in front of a trailer. I don't know why. I think the line itself—"It's not our table"—suggests a warning, sounds a note of caution. There's no real good reason for either line, but now they suggest starting points, or perhaps two points within the narrative. Then, as I urged you to, I tried to get more specific. I chose Jan, because, frankly, I just watched a movie starring the 70s heartthrob Jan Michael Vincent last night. I wasn't picturing him though. Just a name, a word, a sound. The next lines come from trying to restart the restaurant story. They grow more tied to a particular adventure I had with my brother when I visited him in Salt Lake City. Nothing too marvelous. But when I look back at the list now, I

  think I begin to see the shape of a single narrative there. Nothing concrete yet. But I have an opening scene, a setting, even a hint of tension.

  I'm not sure where the monk could be used (though I'm not sure he couldn't be used), but if I were working this brainstorm into a story, I would feel free to cross out the monk detail if it made me feel I was stretching things, pushing the narrative toward the point of absurdity. Cross out. Leave stuff behind. Never let an exercise like this stymie you. Never let any hint stand in your way. If it didn't work then, it wasn't the hint for you, or it was a crappy exercise. This is general advice here. If you get stymied, turn away and start elsewhere. Frankly, I hope that's not happening here. I'm hoping I'm giving you ways around the "blocks" that sometimes come our way. I'm not just generating work here either. I do this stuff. It works for me.

  Now brainstorming is wonderful stuff. The best stories in the world probably live inside a writer's notes. But they don't mean much unless they get into a story that gets read. So don't do too much of this. Try it two or three times a day. Just be quick and increasingly precise. Allow your imaginative field of vision to contract or expand as it needs to, but don't force yourself to work on and on. Even if you hate them at first, these notes should grow stronger, and narratives will begin to grow out of them.

  Again, the point here is not to be a simple recorder of the world. You have to use your recordings as points of departure. You are training your imagination to use the mundane, generally ignored details of everyday life and cast them into new frames. Ignore, isolate, reinvent, expand. I often tell my students to do this with an image. If something is powerful in a given circumstance—say the sight of a deer in the early morning at the edge of a golf course—then make it more powerful by ignoring that circumstance and using the image somewhere else, by isolating and reinventing it. Imagine the deer at an intersection in the city in the early morning hours. Put the deer at the end of a pier as the first two fishermen of the morning approach. Both of the new images are more surprising, more powerful. It's the same thing with words. Ignore, isolate, reinvent, expand. They can trigger stories. The trick is not to allow them to trigger the easiest story, the one that's right in front of you, but to allow them to help you see new possibilities in the stories right in front of you.

  DISCOVERING TENSION

  Are any words good enough? Do all words hold a story? Maybe. But you're far smarter than me if you see elaborate stories in every word you hear. You're also probably a very confused person. Get some help. The rest of us should look back at what I've said from the start. You have to ignore. You have to isolate. Put on the word filter. Slash and burn. Cut and run. Whatever. Just get to the core.

  But what happens when you like a word or a line and you don't know where to go with it? What happens when you can't sense the momentum within a line or the scene that surrounds it? There are a number of ways to get started.

  Add another voice. Let's suppose you're starting with a line from my son's little ramble, say, "I'm not having orange juice." The obvious suggestion is to have a character respond, even to a line that is basically a statement. Forget place, forget time, forget circumstance. There'll be plenty of chances to fix that as you go along. Respond. Allow yourself to be the voice of the other character. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Put the character up against it. But when you are speaking in the character's voice, answer from the developing point of view. When I ask my students to do this, to cross-examine their characters by engaging them, they tell me it's like developing a lie. I disagree. It's rather the opposite. It's developing the truth, discovering it, or uncovering it. So ask questions of your character. Be obvious for a while. Remember you'll be crossing things out wildly.

  1: I'm not having orange juice.

  2: Why?

  1: It hurts my stomach.

  2: What's wrong with your stomach?

  1: I have a sensitive stomach.

  2: Since when?

  1: Since forever. Since I can remember. Since I was a kid.

  2: I never knew.

  1: Well I do.

  2: I'm sure.

  1: I'm not having orange juice.

  Elsewhere in the book, I talk about the direction of dialogue, about patterns of evasion and questioning. The idea here is to try not to be conscious of patterns. Simply hear voices, using one voice to reveal the other. Remember you aren't shaping voices so much as coaxing them forward, asking them to bring their stories along for the ride. My thinking is that you should try it several times, shooting for a different tone in each version. In the above bit, I am trying to find the tension. There's no particular direction. The tone is fairly neutral, but prodding. If I try again, this time shifting the tone to a somewhat angry one, the rhythm and pace shift quickly.

  1: I'm not having orange juice.

  2: Why?

  1: I have a sensitive stomach.

  2: Come on.

  1: What?

  2: Just cut it out.

  1: Cut it out? What do you mean?

  2: You're whining.

  1: Whining? Are you saying I'm a whiner?

  2: You got it. You're addicted to medical attention.

  1: Meaning what?

  2: Meaning nothing.

  1: That's not true.

  2: Get off it. You're an addict. You can't help yourself.

  1: I just don't want any orange juice.

  2: Then leave your stomach out of it. You don't want orange juice, don't drink it. But you don't have to tell me all about your insides. We're all a little sick of hearing about your guts all the time.

  1: All I was saying . ..

  2: I know. I know. No orange juice.

  Remember, within these micro dialogues, you have to resist the urge to tell the entire story with the words of the character. When you're using one character simply to tell the story, rather than as an autonomous voice, that's when you go back and cross out.

  Remember too that adding tension does not always beef up dialogue. Some of the best dialogue in the world is somewhat aimless, yet is more artfully revealing, particularly of the dynamic between characters, than any exposition could hope to be. Early on in William

  Kennedy's novel Ironweed, we meet the book's protagonist, Francis Phelan, an ex-baseball player and out-of-work gravedigger, now a hobo in the North
east. The book involves his return to his native city, Albany, and his brief visit with the family he left behind years before, after he was responsible for the death of his infant son. In the first pages of the book, before any of this has been revealed, Francis and his sidekick, Rudy, have what appears to be a fairly aimless exchange as they walk by a graveyard where some of Francis' family is buried. It starts after Francis ties his shoe.

  "There's seven deadly sins," Rudy said.

  "Deadly? What do you mean deadly?" Francis said.

  "I mean daily," Rudy said. "Every day."

  "There's only one sin as far as I'm concerned," Francis said.

  "There's prejudice."

  "Oh yeah. Prejudice. Yes."

  "There's envy."

  "Envy. Yeah, yup. That's one."

  "There's lust."

  "Lust, right. Always liked that one."

  "Cowardice."

  "I don't know what you mean. That word I don't know."

  "Cowardice."

  "I don't like the coward word. What're you sayin' about coward?"

  "A coward. He'll cower up. You know what a coward is? He'll run."

  "No, that word I don't know. Francis is no coward. He'll fight anybody. Listen, you know what I like?"

  "What do you like?"

  "Honesty," Francis said.

  "That's another one."

  This is a conversation that works in two ways. First time through the book, it helps the readers see the relationship between these two men, allows them to hone in on Francis' edginess with regards to the world of men. Knowing the plot of the book from my summary above, it is possible to see the haunting resonance this conversation has for a man about to revisit his past. Still, keep in mind that the scene begins with a paragraph of Francis tying his ragged shoe and ends when they turn the corner. It is a fairly self-contained scene, seemingly a ramble and little more, and yet as the rest of the novel grows, that dialogue—with its references to sin, prejudice and cowardice— becomes a focal point. Tension does not dominate the conversation. It pervades it. Still, many readers would say they missed that moment entirely, appearing early (page 11) in a 220-plus-page novel. The important thing for you to take away from this is the way the writer is letting the conversation lead him into the themes of the work, the ideas in play within the conflict. The tension is plainly there for the writer. It is also driving Francis, who's fearful of what he'll confront upon his return. Still, taken in the full profile of the novel, set against the many conversations these men have, it appears to be nothing but a conversation between two longtime travelers. And that is the way it should be.