by Colum McCann
—PETER CAREY
Fuhgeddaboudit. Dialogue on the page is never real. You could go out this moment and tape a story being told on the street and then transcribe it, but even then it will probably never seem absolutely true.
A dialogue might not be true, but it must be honest. And what it must do is have the appearance of ease. It must look as if it just naturally slipped its way onto the page. A properly written piece of dialogue will complement all your surrounding sentences.
There are so many rules, or suggestions, when it comes to dialogue. Forget the ummm and forget the errrs: they don’t translate on the page. Try not to use dialogue to convey information, or at least a slab of obvious information. Interruptions are great. Try writing a conversation between three, four, five people. Let the dialogue work for itself. Use he said and she said, but avoid clumsy descriptions. Forget about the overblown gasping, exclaiming, insisting, bellowing.
Make your dialogue distinct from the surrounding description, not just in rhythm but in length too. It will break up the prose. Have it be a respite on the page, or have it tee up the words that are about to come. Increase the stumbles and the restarts: a character repeating himself on the page is not necessarily a bad thing.
Make each character distinct. Give them verbal tics. And never forget that people talk away from what they really mean. Lies are very interesting when they emerge in speech. Make action occur within the conversation. Seldom begin in the beginning: catch the dialogue halfway through. No need for hellos or howareyous. No need for goodbyes either. Jump out from the conversation long before it truly finishes.
Remember that mystery is the glue that joins us: we love the unheard. The reader becomes the most complicit eavesdropper.
Even if using dialect, or patois, or Dublinese, you must realize that there is a reader at the end of the sentence. Don’t confuse them. Don’t knock them out of the story. A wee bit is enough to get a Northern Irish accent. Don’t go Oirish on yourself. Don’t fall into stereotype. No arragh bejaysus and begob. No overdone Southern twang. It’ll make y’all wanna holler. No Jamaican overdose, mahn. No Bhrrooklyn nasal noise.
Rather, suggest the music in the reader’s brain in the most subtle way. That’s enough. One little clue is all you need to give. The reader will take it from there. The dialogue will dialogue itself. Follow it. Don’t get too caught up in mirroring reality.
And, hallelujah, written dialogue doesn’t have to follow grammatical rules. Mess up your sentences as much as you want. You have freedom to roam. Freedom to explore. What boundaries can you cross? To signal dialogue, do you use quotation marks? Do you use dashes? Do you use italics? The truth is that you can use all three, even within the same novel and perhaps even within the same story. It’s a way of giving an accent to your words.
In shorthand terms, quotation marks are the norm, the dashes are experimental, the italics can be torturously poetic. Using no indicator of dialogue at all is a real bravery on a writer’s part, but it can be very effective when done properly.
Study the masters. Roddy Doyle. Louise Erdrich. Elmore Leonard. Marlon James. And always remember that what we don’t say is as important as, if not more so than, what we do. So study the silences too, and have them working on the page. You soon find out how loud the silence really is. Everything unsaid leads eventually to what is said.
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
—TRUMAN CAPOTE
Have a conversation with what you write. Read your work aloud. Walk around your house and forge your way through the ceiling. The sky is more interesting than ceilings anyway. So don’t just whisper it: speak it ALOUD. Risk the embarrassment. Take the slagging. Put some throat in your work.
Your partner, your roommate, your friend, your child, may think you’re mad, but that is perfectly all right—sanity is overrated anyway.
You need to hear the rhythm of your words. The repetitions. The assonance. The alliteration. The onomatopoeia. The music of it all. Be John Coltrane. Toni Morrison. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Find the inscape of your language. Create new words. Find the infinite jazz. Discover the dappled dawnness.
When you read aloud, you hear the original intent. You see where the music works and where it falls away. You discover rhythm, or the lack of it. You uncover rhymes. And you also find many mistakes. Be happy to discover them. Take your red pencil to them. Cross them out. Find a new word, or a series of words. Then read aloud again and again until it’s working. Become the actor you always wanted to be. Find the music: rap or funk or fox-trot, it doesn’t matter. Tape yourself with a recorder if you have to. Listen again. Let your sentences form a landscape. The idea of joy might need a long crazy ungrammatical sentence running on foolishly yeah breathlessly without care or custom just rapture pureness moving as if there’s a horse galloping underneath the words. Sadness, on the other hand, might need to be curt. Sharp. Dark. Alone.
Reading aloud will also bring you to new places. You are suddenly out of your house. You’re going somewhere new. Don’t be afraid of getting lost. Journey as far as you can. Find the dusk and the gloom. Fill your lungs with it. It’s the only way you’ll negotiate the light. Be worried. That’s okay. The dark is something to sound out too.
Brecht asked if there would be singing in the dark times, and he answered that yes, there would be singing about the dark times.
They are indeed dark times: be thankful. Sing them.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
—WILLIAM FAULKNER
The simplest questions are sometimes the hardest, but the who-what-where-when-how-why construction is the fuel of the writer’s fire.
If you have an omniscient or third-person narrator, that’s fair enough, you’re God, and God gets away with just about everything (even Her own capitalization). But if you’re doing a first-person narration, you have to ask yourself a lot of very important questions.
Who is telling the story? This is possibly the easiest one, though it may take a while to determine their exact nature. You decide on a narrator and you begin to breathe life into them: embark on that adventure. It may even be told by multiple first-person narrators, but you should know them inside out.
What happens? This is commonly called plot (more on that conundrum later), but it is also helixed in with all the other questions. What happens is influenced by the who and the where and the why. The narrator will only tell his version of events. He or she may or may not be unreliable (in fact, nearly every first-person narrator is essentially unreliable). The what is the human music of time ticking.
Where are they telling it from? This is a tougher proposition. You must imagine the geography of the place from which your character has decided to tell the story. Imagine the very room, the city, the countryside, the ship, in which they dwell. This is the place in which they have chosen to narrate the story and it is key to how the story gets told. Even the wallpaper affects the nature of our words. The table. The window. The hospital bed. The jail cell. The laptop. The tape recorder.
Never forget this—place affects language. It always has and always will. Telling a story from the Birmingham jail is a lot different than telling the story from the banks of the Mississippi. Telling a story from 7 Eccles Street is a lot different than telling the story from a bordello in Zurich. So, consider carefully where your narrator is sitting when they tell their story.
When in time are they telling the story? This one’s crucial and something even the best writers often tend to forget. From what point in time is something remembered? Telling a story that happened yesterday is a lot different from telling a story that happened ten or twenty years ago. The moment of the drama is inherently changed. Time has shifted us. You must know at what point they have decided to open their veins to the story. Make a decision and stick to it. T
ime is distance. Distance is perspective. Perspective is all about language. So, know all three to enable the fourth. And then let the story unfold in whatever time seems true. (The present tense of a first-person narration is very tricky indeed—how can someone be telling a story while they are simultaneously experiencing it?) You must discover the moment of the story. This is the thing upon which everything hinges. When is the absolute moment? When did the world change? When did the clock hands stop?
How does it tie in with everything that has gone before? How has it unspooled itself into the world? How have things happened? How is it that we have learned to remember, or catch the moment in flight?
And finally—and this one may be the most elusive—do you know why your narrator is telling the story? Everyone tells their story for a reason. To heal, to murder, to steal, to re-create. To fall in love, to fall out of love. To annihilate. To titillate. And even when she tells the story just to make us laugh, the storyteller’s purpose generally lies beyond mere entertainment. Stories matter. They send our kids to war. They open up our pockets. They break our hearts.
If you can uncover your character’s true need for telling her story, you will have found a reason to keep telling it. When you unmask the why, you will find the language unspooling at your fingers. Be grateful. And go.
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
Every work of fiction is organized somehow—and the best of them are more profoundly organized than they ever let on. Our stories rely on the human instinct for architecture. Structure is, essentially, a container for content. The shape into which your story gets placed is a house slowly built from the foundation up. Or maybe it’s a tunnel, or a skyscraper, or a palace, or even a moving caravan, driven forward by your characters. In fact, structure can be any number of things: you just have to make sure that it doesn’t become an elaborate hole in the ground into which we bury ourselves, unable to claw out.
Some writers try to envision the structure beforehand, and they shape the story to fit it, but this is so often a trap. You should not try to stuff your story into a preconceived structure. That, as the old expression goes, is akin to six pounds of shit wrapped in a five-pound bag.
Stories are agile things. They’re elusive. They’re brisk. And sometimes they’re fugitive. So, the containers they go into should be pliable. You should have a grand vision, of course, an eventual endpoint, or at least the dream of an endpoint, but you must be prepared to swerve, chop and change direction at the same time. The best journeys are those where we don’t exactly know what road we will take: we have a destination in mind, but the manner of getting there should be open to flux. Sometimes you have to abandon the journey altogether, retrace your footsteps, and take a different path. This is so much akin to finding a country in which you want to live, then a province, then a patch of land you love. On this land you want to build a house in which you truly want to dwell. In the creation of this structure, this house, you must become digger, bricklayer, joiner, mason, carpenter, plumber, plasterer, designer, tenant, owner, and, yes, ghost in the attic too.
A proper structure mirrors the content of the story it wants to tell. It will contain its characters and propel them forward at the same time. And it will generally achieve this most fully when it does not draw too much attention to itself. Structure should grow out of character and plot, which essentially means that it grows out of language. In other words, the structure is forever in the process of being shaped. You find it as you go along. Chapter by chapter. Voice by voice. Ask yourself if it feels right to tell the story in one fell swoop, or if it should be divided into sections, or if it should have multiple voices, or even multiple styles. You stumble on through the dark, trying new things all the time. Sometimes, in fact, you don’t find the structure until halfway through, or even when you’re close to being finished. That’s okay. You have to trust that it will eventually appear and that it will make sense.
The point of view will matter greatly. You might want to have a dark room in the house. A paneled library. A certain character will lead you there. He or she will give you the language to create the atmosphere: the curtains, the desk, the lamplight, the secret passage under the floorboards. The room must reflect the character. They dwell there. Another character will want a sunroom. Another character will want to sit, granitic, at the island in the kitchen. Others will want a circular staircase. Others are happy in the coal shed.
Just go and have a look at any house or structure that is being built in your neighborhood. Look at how bare it strikes you at first. Look at how impossible it seems that this big crate of plywood and nails and air will eventually become a place where people will love and hate each other to death. Then come back the following week. And the week after that. Allow yourself to be astounded by the physics of change. What was nothing is now something.
When it comes to structure, you will often be surprised by how mathematical the work of great writers happens to be. Don’t worry. This math is a discovered thing. They didn’t set out to be this way: they found it as they worked their way through. In this way, they are different from architects. They are not bound by hard-and-fast rules. They are not crimped by law. The math comes through poetry. And the poetry, then, is suspended by the math.
So, write and rearrange, write and rearrange, write and rearrange, and eventually you will begin to see the structure emerge. The harder you work, the clearer the structure will become. It will take on a shape that you recognize: a shape that never could have come simply. The difficulty had its purpose.
Now that you have a house—or an approximate one anyway—you will demolish a room here, add a turret there, rearrange a staircase down into the basement, reposition the chimney. Eventually you will have somewhere you truly want to dwell. Then you walk around the structure and add a doorway here, a wall there, trim an edge here, adjust a piece there, reorder, fix a few of the unruly angles, put the furniture in, clean the windows of all the dust.
Then you will have to invite a guest to come look around your home. The reader will not want to see the foundation, or the wiring behind the walls, or even the architectural plans. That is—and was—your work. Your secret. The reader should feel comfortable in the structure, be it palace or hut or boathouse.
Never forget that the reader nearly always moves forward in a more or less straight line through your structure, even if the writer skipped around in its creation. So put yourself in the shoes of your visitor and look around critically. Is it ambitious enough? Does it have too many windows? Have you built something that nobody has ever built before?
In the end, only you know the secrets of this creation. Structure is the sculpture within the stone. You chisel it into life. It will eventually find its way into the museum of good storytelling. Begin with language and the content will then shape the form.
One final note: you won’t have to live there forever, thank God. In this life, nobody stays in one place. You will depart the house with a hammer and nails once more.
Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.
—STEPHEN KING
We teachers, we editors, we agents, we readers, often make a mistake by concentrating too much on plot: it is not the be-all and end-all in a piece of literature. Plot matters, of course it matters, but it is always subservient to language. Plot takes the backseat in a good story because what happens is never as interesting as how it happens. And how it happens occurs in the way language captures it and the way our imaginations transfer that language into action. Any fat man can come down the stairs, but only Joyce can make stately plump Buck Mulligan descend the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lie crossed.
So give me music then, young maestro, please. Make it occur the way nobody ever made it occur before. Stop time. Celebrate it. Demolish it. Slow the clock down so that the tick of each and every second lasts
an hour or more. Take shotgun leaps into the past. Put backspin on your memory. Be in two or three places at one time. Destroy speed and position. Make just about anything happen. Bring back high buildings across the skyline. Unmuddy the Mississippi.
Maybe in this day and age we are diseased by plot. Let’s face it, plots are good for movies, but when over-considered they tend to make books creak. So, unbloat your plot. Listen for the quiet line. Anyone can tell a big story, yes, but not everyone can whisper something beautiful in your ear. In the world of film we need motivation leading to action, but in literature we need contradiction leading to action, yes, but also leading to inaction. Nothing better than a spectacular piece of inaction. Nothing more effective than your character momentarily paralyzed by life.
The greatest novel ever written has very little apparent plot. A cuckold walks around Dublin for twenty-four hours. No shootouts, no cheap shots, no car crashes (though there is a biscuit tin launched through the air). Instead it is a vast compendium of human experience. Still, this doesn’t take away from the fact that every story ever told has some sort of plot (especially Ulysses, which perhaps has more plot than any).
In the end, what plot must do is twist our hearts in some way. It must change us. It must make us realize that we are alive.
We must care about the music of what happens. One thing leads to the next. And the issues of the human heart unfold in front of us. Such, then, is plot. Anything can happen, even nothing at all. And even if nothing happens, the world still changes, second by second, word by word. Perhaps this is the most astounding plot of all.
When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER (IN A LETTER TO HIS EDITOR)
It’s not a throwaway thing to tell you the truth. It’s not a throwaway thing, to tell you the truth.