Archives for June 2015

A Writer’s Lists

June 22, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Writers are naturally drawn to articles about lists of this or that. It’s probably because most of the instruction in the art and craft of writing is presented that way: “Six Ways to Improve Characterization” or “Ten Keys to a Writer’s Success” and so on. Look at any cover of any writer magazine and you’ll likely spot two such articles.

We writers are suckers, drawn in by such titles in hopes to discover the magic formula that removes the effort, frustration, and depression, generated by our chosen vocation. If you’re completely and wholeheartedly dedicated to that kind of thinking, you might move to Florida and pick up the search for Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, likely in some gator-infested backwater of some flea-bitten, mosquito-plagued swamp. (But wait, that is Florida!)

Any trip from point A to point Z always looks straightforward on a map, i.e., a list, which, like a map, presents an objective representation of places and the roadways that connect them. But maps don’t show the realities of travel—variables of traffic and road conditions, the weather, and the little things that can interject sometimes painful and/or frustrating encounters that alter, sometimes substantially, your originally intended journey. Writing is always such a journey. Writers don’t get off track, they drive off track. A writer rarely seeks the smooth-surfaced highway. The really good views are usually off road or when you confront ruts and potholes and washed-out bridges. Maybe that’s why we like the idea behind lists—to have a modicum of a sense of control. Keep this in mind as you review the following listed items.

Most lists tend to be short and concise and rarely include in their specifications the downside vicissitudes that one who uses them is likely to encounter. Travel articles rarely depict the once clean and neat traveler covered in the dirt and sweat from changing a flat tire along a country roadside with no shoulder. Instead we see a beautiful model sipping a Mai Tai poolside at a luxury resort looking across an expanse of white sand barely populated with tourists and their half-crazed children. Funny isn’t it. We who write fiction are so easily sucked into the fiction that a list is that white sand beach of organizational and creative nirvana?

The articles about lists that grab our attention tend to present neat and formulaic, and, usually chronological and simplified pronouncements. That works well with journalism and its dedication to short bursts of objectively presented facts through the inverted pyramid supported by a few quoted authorities. Articles structured around a list instead tend to be little more than conclusions without much if any support. They are not impacted by the messiness of emotions encountered during efforts to execute them. Inside the boundaries of the highly subjective and emotional world of fiction writers, the neatness of the inverted pyramid gets caught up in the quagmire of creative thoughts of a world filled with conflict and emotion.

I recently ran across an article authored by Travis Bradberry that did include a modicum of insight into each item it listed. Most of Bradberry’s insights come from Zillow CEO and Hotwire.com co-founder Spencer Rascoff and reflect an approach to life more than keys to success. They apply to most of our vocational efforts, but some miss the mark when applied to the life of a writer. The primary focus of the article is about disconnecting and taking advantage of opportunities to relax offered by the weekend—recharging-your-batteries-time.

Rascoff suggests never going into the office on weekends, and claims to check his e-mail only on at night. (Good luck with that!) Weekends, he says, are an important time to unplug from the day-to-day and get a chance to think more deeply about your job, company or industry. Weekends, he says, offer a great chance to reflect and be more introspective about bigger issues. The geographic disconnection for an office helps here, but for most writers, the office is in a bedroom or in the corner of an alcove.

Bradberry also cites a Stanford study that found once a workweek exceeds 50 hours, productivity drops off, and after 55 hours there’s virtually no point in spending the additional hours. Apparently, the study showed that people who work 70 hours a week get about as much accomplished as those who work 55.

Rascoff’s list isn’t about how to wring as much effort out of those 55 hours as you might otherwise achieve from 70 less efficient and less productive hours, but what “successful people” do to find balance on the weekend so they come into work on Monday morning functioning at 110%. As a writer, you might about now pick up the slight scent of snake oil. But we are duty-bound to explore deeper.

First, you’re supposed to disconnect on the weekends and avoid the constant barrage of stressors that prevent you from recharging your batteries. That does not mean shirk work, but rather schedule it in short blocks of time to, say, check and respond to e-mails or write a memo or report. Treat work like the most important exercise for losing weight—setting down your fork and pushing yourself away from the table.

Secondly, Rascoff suggests investing time to reflect and contemplate your job, project, industry, or organization. The weekend, he says, backs you away from the day-to-day and offers a chance to see, review, and reflect on what you do.

Some of that reflection can take place while you exercise, he suggests. Although trying to cram a week’s worth of exercise into a Saturday afternoon run is probably counterproductive, a consistent weekend physical activity can reduce stress and let your brain come up with new and/or improved ideas. Writes Bradberry: “Innovators and other successful people know that being outdoors often sparks creativity.”

This is difficult to apply for writers (and other creative types) simply because their brains function at two distinctly separate levels—the public one that produces the effort, and the subconscious one that produces the ideas. They tend to be involved in near constant phases of reflection and contemplation. They are key parts of a writer’s job description.

Keep in mind the synergistic relationship between the two. Ideas produce writing and writing produces ideas. When the weekend rolls around, the fellow who spends his week generating widgets can turn off the widget producing thinking process, but that’s not so easy for the writer, and, in fact, may well be ill advised. A well-fed subconscious has neither a clock nor calendar hanging on the wall and might just be when it reaches critical mass and spits out a thought of great or potentially great value.

Writers need to keep a notebook and pen, or, alternatively a small recorder handy at all times, and especially on the weekend when you’re not tethered to your favorite writing spot. And remember, for some inexplicable reason, exercise encourages creative thoughts but without any guarantee you will remember them. Take notes or dictate, but be careful not to be too cryptic. You don’t want to lose the energy of the moment. I cannot tell you how often I’ve written down some flash of an idea in cryptic shorthand and then found myself unable to decipher it later.

Rascoff also suggests that you have a weekend passion to pursue. Passion makes one think differently, he says. It’s like sprinkling fertilizer on the flowerbed. Something may bloom a little bigger and brighter. If your passion involves the creative, you’ll discover it’s not so much an effort to fertilize but to capture the bloom when it bursts forth. The warning label that should be attached to this piece of advice is that the relaxing writer needs to stay away from thinking too deeply. You can’t relax by doing something as or more demanding than your passion for writing. That is the road to disaster. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe had his orchids (and beer)—somewhat mindless activities but ones that created relaxing enjoyment. One of my best friends is a painter but is also passionate about photography. The effort he invests in finding a shot riding his bicycle around the lake and park near his home during moments of relaxation enhances his sensitivities for composition, colors, and textures of the subjects on his canvass.

Schedule micro-adventures, says Rascoff. I actually enjoy going to the grocery store. It presents a cacophony of people, products, and produce to observe and inspect. There is an art to finding the perfect Avocado, or to unravel the messaging on product packaging or uncover the unhealthy truth about its contents. A trip to the bookstore or a simple window-shopping walk around the mall may serve the same purpose for a writer. It might be as simple as brewing a cup of your favorite tea and sipping it on the deck as you watch or listen to the world go by, or in my case, enjoying a good cigar and glass of Porto. “Studies show that anticipating something good to come is a significant part of what makes an activity pleasurable,” according Rascoff, so anticipate the fun of your micro-adventure.

Don’t sleep in. Rise on Saturday at the same time you get up on Monday. To do otherwise, according to Bradberry, disrupts your circadian rhythm and actually can make you tired and less productive. Part of that early weekend morning is “me time,” says Bradberry—when you pursue your passion. He points out that your mind reaches its peak performance from two to four hours after you wake up, so start the day with an exercise routine, then sit down and exercise your mental activities to maximize the value of this mental rhythm.

Plan for the upcoming week, says Rascoff. Set aside a half-hour on the weekend to plan the coming week. By giving it a little thought and structure, you can achieve gains in productivity, and the week “feels a lot more manageable.” For us writers, this might involve setting production goals or a plan to set aside a few hours doing research at the library, or taking a short trip through your favorite bookstore. There’s a great deal of insight to be gleaned from watching others shop for books or talk about the one(s) they’re reading.

If you’re counting, that’s only five items. Number five in Bradberry’s list is to spend quality time with family. Depending on your age and circumstances, you may not have family that involves traditional relationships and rug rats, so try to spend a little quality time with a friend. Not every weekend mind you, but frequently, my good friend the painter—who lives five states away—and I will spend an hour or two on the phone talking away like the stereotypical women across the back fence on laundry day. It’s amazing how much better I feel mentally after one of our talks. We don’t gossip much, but discuss projects or topics of common interest and share our opinions and insights on a broad range of subjects. It’s amazing how much breadth and depth comes out of a casual conversation between two creative people.

You will notice that I didn’t number the list either. There’s a reason. By gleaning and distilling your own list you’ll likely come up with one that fits your specific needs and situation. That’s the kind of list that can actually work for you. The survival rate of a new habit improves if it arises from your own assessment, evaluation, contemplation, and effort.

There are a couple of list items not mentioned by Bradberry that a writer should keep in mind. These may increase the amount of time and effort you will want to set aside on the weekend schedule as part of your planning for Monday. Besides brainstorming, you might find the need to do some outside research for the project you’re working on. I’ve discovered that some of the knowledge I thought I had about a topic was not all that complete or accurate—some embarrassingly so. If you are going to add your own “facts” or “reality” to your writing, it’s important to get them right.

There is a difference between fiction and the realities it uses as a foundation for story. What drives me nuts about television police procedurals is not that they tamper with the realities of criminal investigations, but get the procedural stuff so wrong that it detracts from my willingness to buy into the situation. (Don’t get me started on courtroom scenes!) A little research can alleviate or at least lessen this as well as lead to the discovery that your topic, or some aspect of it, is a little more complicated than you originally expected and demands altering your approach to be more effective. The challenge is how much research is enough to insure the necessary dose of reality into your writing. That decision is driven partly by how deep into your topic you need or intend to drill to capture the appearance of reality you desire. Just remember, there are lists that help you set your goals and lists that help you keep track of where you are and where you intend to go. Those are the lists that work for you.

Realize, too, that from your relaxed weekend reflections, you may come up with a new direction for you writing project or discover that what you have written falls short—that gaps (or chasms) exist between what you have already written and what you need to write. And sometimes, your weekend ideas crumble or come completely apart when you try to launch them into the realm of credibility and believability on Monday morning. Don’t despair; it’s the cost of doing business for writers—with or without weekends. Simply put: “Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t.

For the writer, what happens on the weekend, when you actually make an effort to relax your brain, is it can come up with fresh ideas that may well take your project on a slightly different and better direction. But weekend ideas can be fragmented and not yet coalesced into as yet a workable idea. Fragments from the weekend, if not managed, can spin away and be lost forever.

You might try talking to yourself when you’re working on that Saturday exercise. You’ll be amazed at the quality of the conversation you can have with yourself when you’re batting an idea back and forth. If you’re out walking and afraid someone might think your nuts, talk into your recorder or phone and pretend you’re being normal—after all that is part of what you do as a writer.

Dialogue Realities

June 11, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

It’s very easy for the dialogue you write to come across as stilted, stiff, and un-natural. Were you to secretly record and transcribe actual dialogue among or between friends at the coffee shop, much of it most likely would make little sense on paper. Missing would be all the facial expressions and other cues that substitute for words and are the ingredients of a more intimate communication process.

Consequently, when you construct the dialogue between friends in a piece of fiction, you can’t make it really real but present something that the reader can follow with some ease and is willing to buy into. The mind tends to erase the “he saids” and the “she saids” of attribution, but might get tripped up if the flow of an interchange seems forced or unrealistic or if your effort falls on one side or the other of the balance between being too informal or too formal. Dialogue is sort of like the porridge in “The Three Bears”—it needs to be just right.

Conversation that is read requires sufficient connectedness to the characters and the action to be understood by the reader. By connectedness, I mean the back and forth can’t get disconnected from the characters and become confusing. Because the structure of dialogue essentially starts out as unreal because of the additions of attribution and description, it takes very little for it to miss its target to come across to the reader as a realistic and flowing interchange between or among characters. Your characters need to slip into a level dialogue that is a few shades shy of a transcription. The conversation must follow basic rules of written composition yet have a sense of the loosey-gooseyness of the real McCoy.

Words are words, but conversation includes so much more: tone, inflection, facial expressions, bodily reactions (e.g., a shrug), eye movements, and pauses to enhance clarity or to display contemplation. That’s why courtroom testimony is done in the Q and A style—to maintain control and insure that the focus is on the testimony. But it is conversation—the repartee of the players—that best opens an interaction more likely to flow into the truth. Courtroom questions usually focus on a single inquiry. The lawyer asks, listens, then follows up with an additional question or questions in an effort to assure that the jurors receive the desired facts. Unfortunately, the technique can result in the testimony slipping into a monotone that can put everybody to sleep. Conducting good examination and cross-examination is an art form and are arduous tasks for the lawyers and the jurors. It must present action even though the words that must do that are confined to counsel table and the witness box. Even a courtroom interchange that contains massive doses of emotionality shows up pretty bland on the printed page. Written conversation removes virtually all emotionality. There are no narrative descriptions.

It the plight of the trial lawyer to make his or her examination or cross-examination of a witness exciting enough to keep the jury attentive, capture the mood of a moment past or the one unfolding, yet be complete enough so the transcript preserves the heart of the content.

But the harder task is for the writer who must make the electric courtroom scene come to life from words. And that is why dialogue can be difficult to write. Words used to capture and preserve clarity can come at the expense of excitement, and perhaps more importantly, the sound of normalcy. A conversation involves a substantial percentage of non-verbal hints and cues and content—from eye movements to body language—that wrap the words and their tones, inflections, and intensity. How to give a reader a sense of all this information in an exchange of dialogue is the task of the novelist.

Writers employ various techniques to try and capture the sense of a real conversation. The late Robert Parker used rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue with minimum attribution, which you can literally see if you watch any of the installments on the Hallmark network. Read Parker’s books and watch the television productions and it becomes readily apparent that Parker’s wrote scripts rather than novels. The problem is that all of Parker’s characters speak in the same truncated manner, which results in stories unrealistically populated with characters who share the same speech pattern.

Mark Twain differentiated his characters and interjected the reality of conversations through the use of dialect, which can be a pain in the butt to read. Other writers opt for long discursive descriptions of the scene or explanations of a conversation. William Faulkner’s descriptive paragraphs trundle along for pages.

Raymond Chandler was a master of blending description and limited dialogue in a way that painted the scene yet kept the action flowing:

I took hold of her and she came into my arms without a word. I picked her up and carried her and somehow found the bedroom. I put her down on the bed. I peeled her skirt up until I could see the white thighs above her long beautiful nylon-clad legs. Suddenly she reached up and pulled my head down against her breast.
“Beast! Could we have a little less light?”
I went to the door and switched the light off in the room. There was still a glow from the hall. When I turned she was standing by the bed as naked as Aphrodite, fresh from the Aegean. She stood there proudly and without either shame or enticement.
“Damn it,” I said, “When I was young you could undress a girl slowly. Nowadays she’s in the bed while you’re struggling with your collar button.”
“Well, struggle with your goddamn collar button.”
She pulled the bedcovers back and lay on the bed shamelessly nude. She was just a beautiful naked woman completely unashamed of being what she was.
“Satisfied with my legs?” she asked.
I didn’t answer.
“Yesterday morning,” she said, half dreamily, “I said there was something about you I liked—you didn’t paw—and something I didn’t like. Know what it was?”
“No.”
“That you didn’t make me do this then.”
“Your manner hardly encouraged it.”
“You’re supposed to be a detective. Please put out all the lights now.”

Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird on the other hand blended paragraphs of pure description into a weave of description and dialogue tinged with dialect to enhance her characterizations. Note, too, how she employs dialect to confirm the differences between blacks and whites:

The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard—Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafetida, snuff, Hoyt’s Cologne, Brown’s Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.
When they saw Jem and me with Calpurnia, the men stepped back and took off their hats; the women crossed their arms at their waists, weekday gestures of respectful attention. They parted and made a small pathway to the church door for us. Calpurnia walked between Jem and me, responding to the greetings of her brightly clad neighbors.
“What you up to, Miss Cal?” said a voice behind us.
Calpurnia’s hands went to our shoulders and we stopped and looked around: standing in the path behind us was a tall Negro woman. Her weight was on one leg; she rested her left elbow in the curve of her hip, pointing at us with upturned palm. She was bullet-headed with strange almond-shaped eyes, straight nose, and an Indian-bow mouth. She seemed seven feet high.
I felt Calpurnia’s hand dig into my shoulder. “What you want, Lula?” she asked, in tones I never heard her use. She spoke quietly, contemptuously.
“I wants to know why you bringin’ white chillun to nigger church.”
“They’s my comp’ny,” said Calpurnia. Again I thought her voice strange: she was talking like the rest of them.
“Yeah, an’ I reckon you’s comp’ny at the Finch house durin’ the week.”
A murmur ran through the crowd. “Don’t you fret,” Calpurnia whispered to me, but the roses on her hat trembled indignantly.
When Lulu came up the pathway toward us Calpurnia said, “Stop right there, nigger.”
Lulu stopped, but she said, “You ain’t got no business bringin’ white chillun here—they got their own church, we got our’n. It is our church, ain’t it, Miss Cal?”
Calpurnia said, “It’s the same God, ain’t it?”

In True Grit, Charles Portis combined pure description with runs of blended descriptive dialogue:

He stirred as I came through the curtain. His weight was such that the bunk bowed in the middle almost to the floor. It looked like he was in a hammock. He was fully clothed under the covers. The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed. Rooster coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone. He seemed in no way surprised to see me so I took the same line and stood with my back to the stove and ate my apple.

Portis then launches into dialogue that brings the scene to life but still expands the descriptive elements:

I said, “You need some more slats in that bed.”
“I know,” he said. “That is the trouble, there is no slats in it at all. It is some kind of damned Chinese rope bed. I would love to burn it up.”

“It is not good for your back sleeping like that.”
“You are right about that too. A man my age ought to have a good bed if he has nothing else. How does the weather stand out there?”
“The wind is right sharp,” said I. “It is clouding up some in the east.”
“We are in for snow or I miss my guess. Did you see the moon last night?”
“I do not look for snow today.”
“Where have you been, baby sister? I looked for you to come back, then give up on you. I figured you went on home.”
“No, I have been at the Monarch boardinghouse right along. I have been down with something very nearly like the croup.”
“Have you now? The General and me will thank you not to pass it on.”
“I have about got it whipped. I thought you might inquire about me or look in on me while I was laid up.”
“What made you think that?”
“I had no reason except I did not know anybody else in town.”
“Maybe you thought I was preacher that goes around paying calls on all the sick people.”
“No, I did not think that.”
“Preachers don’t have nothing better to do. I had my work to see to. Your Government marshals don’t have time to be paying a lot of social calls. They are too busy trying to follow all the regulations laid down by Uncle Sam. That gentleman will have his fee sheets just and correct or he does not pay.”

The dialogue comes across as being almost overly formal, but in fact it captures the marshal’s effort to come across as being very formal and proper. He mostly applies proper English and speaks with little dialect. This exchange not only paints the scene and hints at the marshal’s real character—the spitting on the floor—but puts in context the two characters: the above-average and brash young Mattie Ross’ and the rough-around-the-edges Marshal Rooster Cogburn who she wants to hire to find and arrest the man who killed her father. They dance around issues and topics, picking them up, dropping them, and moving on. You can sense Rooster moving away from any topic that might draw a conflict of opinions. Aware of a potential fee, he strives to make a good impression. Mattie is a proper young girl, and makes the only impression she knows. It’s the marshal who is playing a role and the dialogue captures his efforts and the scene without being intrusive to the flow. Portis creates a reality and puts you smack dab in the middle of it. His narrative description disappears into the conversation. Portis paints the scene with a very fine brush lightly applied.

As an experiment, I once gave a literature class copies of the script for a radio play by Louise Fletcher entitled “Sorry, Wrong Number.” It’s about a sickly woman who overhears a telephone conversation, due to some electrical glitch, of two men discussing the planned murder of a woman. It becomes obvious, at least initially to the audience, that the woman is the intended victim. There are three characters and some sound effects, yet after listening to the performance, the students were able to draw diagrams of the bedroom layout and describe the characters.

There are no tricks. Readers have imaginations, and a writer needs to supply only enough dialogue and description to let the reader dip their own brushes into the scene and paint the details. You would think that the “Sorry, Wrong Number” experiment would have produced a very wide range of descriptions, but in fact the students’ descriptions of the room and furniture were surprisingly similar.

MAN: (OFF MIC) What’s that? (ON MIC) Just a minute,                               George.             (PAUSE)                            Oh, our client tells me that at 11:15, a                            train crosses the bridge. It makes a noise                            in case a window is open and she should                            scream.
AGNES:       Hello. What number is this, please . . .
GEORGE:   OK, I understand. That’s 11:15 the train,  eh?
MAN:       Yeah Do you remember everything else, George?
GEORGE:   Yeah. Yeah. I’ll make it quick . . . as little           blood as possible because our client does            not wish to make her suffer . . .
MAN:       That’s right . . . you’ll use a knife?
GEORGE:   Yes, a knife . . . it will be ok. Then afterwards, I’ll remove the rings and the  bracelets and the jewelry in the bureau drawer because our client wishes it to look like a simple robbery. Don’t worry, everything’s ok, I know . . .

SFX: BUZZING SOUND AS PHONE   DISCONNECTS.

AGNES:       (STAGE WHISPER) Oh! How awful!
SFX:       PHONE DIALING
AGNES:       How unspeakably awful . . . Operator!
OPERATOR:   Your number, please . . .
AGNES:       Operator! I’ve just been cut off . . .
OPERATOR:   What number were you calling?
AGNES:   Well, Operator, I was supposed to be  calling Murray Hill 4-0098, but it wasn’t. Some wires must have got crossed. I was cut into a wrong number – and I – I’ve just heard the most dreadful thing – something about a – murder – and – and Operator, you’ll simply have to retrace that call at once . . . I . . .
OPERATOR:   I beg your pardon? Uh, may I help you?

Of course Agnes’ distraught condition, coupled with the operator’s near autotomic responses assures that the tension will mount. But note that on paper, the words are virtually flat. Almost awkward. But in the hands of actress Agnes Moorehead, the first 1943 broadcast mesmerized radio audiences. CBS rebroadcasted it something like seven times and ultimately it was made into a movie in 1948. Were you to strip out the script formatting and turn it into pure dialogue, it probably would come across as even less realistic. The burden falls to the actors to wrap the script in effective diction, inflection, and rhythm.

Strip the script free of its descriptive direction, and the story likely would fail. Read the script like a paragraph from a book and it’s not exciting. But read it out loud, and dramatically—following the narrative directions—and the words paint the scene, especially if you interject the female character’s growing sense of fear into her diction and voice.

A radio script demands presentation by someone to interject the tension and stress of such a scene. In a narrative format it might come across more like this:

Agnes suddenly realized she had in some mysterious way cut into another conversation. She instinctively pulled the receiver away from her ear and shook it as if that would free up some blockage in a tube. When she placed it back against her ear, she could hear a slight static hiss and pressed the phone closer to ear.
“Just a minute, George,” said a man with slightly hoarse voice. It was apparent he was talking to someone.
“Oh yes,” continued the voice, “our client tells me that at 11:15, a train crosses the bridge nearby. Makes a noise in case the window is open and she should scream. No one would hear her.”
Agnes again pulled the phone from her ear and looked into the receiver, as if she would be able to see the man who was talking. She put the receiver against her other ear and demanded, “Hello! What number is this, please?”
There was no response. In the background the 10:30 cross-town express announced its mournful arrival into the heart of the city as it noisily crossed the elevated bridge.
The man asked, “Do you remember everything else, George?”
“Yeah, yeah,” came the voice. “I’ll make it quick . . . as little blood as possible because our client does not wish to make her suffer . . .”
“That’s right. You’ll use a knife?” said the man.
“Yes, a knife. After, I’ll remove her rings and bracelets and take the jewelry from the bureau to make it look like a home-invasion robbery gone bad.” George cleared his throat. “Not to worry, everything will go just fine.”
A loud buzz filled Agnes’ ear and as she pulled the receiver away she could hear the connection break and she was suddenly alone with a dial tone.
Rendered an invalid by a long ago bout with polio, she was unable to get out of bed and go to the living room to check the phone there. It was late and the housekeeper was gone. She felt alone and abandoned and unable to do anything that might help that poor woman whose murder . . . she looked at the clock. The woman had less than forty minutes to live. What could she do? What could she do? She picked up the receiver and frantically dialed.
“How unspeakably awful! . . . Operator!”
Finally a voice said, “Your number, please.”
“Operator! I’ve just been cut off.”
“What number were you calling?” the operator said in a disinterested and robotic voice.
“Well, Operator, I was suppose to be calling Murray Hill 4-0098, but it wasn’t. Some wires must have got crossed . . .”

At this point, Agnes was appalled but had not become frantic, which begins to happens farther into the tale when she starts to put two and two together and then hears a noise and realizes there is someone downstairs who could not be her husband because he was out of town on business. You can literally see the importance of the role of descriptive narrative.

How would you reconstruct it?

Review the narratives and you will likely be able to pick places where you could interject additional descriptive verbiage to further enhance a sense of rising suspense, but you can also see the need to be careful and not let the growing suspense become too overwrought.

The above examples are not intended to be definitive, but to show the ways that narrative description and dialogue can be blended so that neither commands the other but work well in a collaborative way to enhance the other. Some writers prefer to stop the dialogue and present narrative description. Jack London did that very effectively. William Faulkner’s descriptions went famously on for pages because the characters’ character lay at the heart of many of his stories.

Rules? A risky business, but, in writing dialogue:
1) Be on the look out for effective examples by other writers—read their work and analyze what they did; you might copy them down or key them into a page to get a feeling of how the words came together;
2) Story is king, but if it’s not supported by realistic dialogue and effective narration, it will fail;
3) Never, ever try to be a show off. The last place to hang bling is on the words of your story;
4) Balance. It takes surprisingly little to bring your characters to life descriptively, but they don’t start to breath until they start to talk;
5) If the descriptive narrative is not absolutely critical to the action and dialogue you probably don’t need it;
6) Never interrupt the flow of a story to interject description. Description is the salt and pepper, not the main course. It enhances the flavor of your story when blended into the mix;
7) Read what you write out loud. Your dialogue needs to flow and move the story forward; your narrative descriptions need to enhance the reader’s sense of place, the action, and the realness of the characters; and,
8) Dip your brush lightly into the jar of descriptive details and paint gently. You’re creating a portrait, not a billboard; and,
9) Like the cabbie said to the fare who asked if he knew the way to Carnegie Hall: “Practice, practice, practice!”

Runyon’s Writing

June 4, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Some of the best writing advice comes not from textbooks or journal articles but book reviews. Reviewers typically don’t give advice on writing, but instead identify and explain why the efforts of other writers have, in their opinion, worked or haven’t. Reviewers sometimes state their opinions straight out, but more often than not you will find their wisdom woven into their broader insights and comments. For example, about Timur Vermes’ Look Who’s Back, reviewer Daniel Torday, in a recent edition of “The New Times Book Review,” quotes E.M. Forster to distinguish the difference between the novelist and the historian:

The historian deals with actions and with the characters of men only so far as he can deduce them from their actions. It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

That’s a great description of the burden/responsibility that a novelist carries, to dig deep in order to create and describe a character who lives well beyond normal surface observations and public behaviors. It’s nice to be reminded of that. Half the fun of reading the Time’s book review section is to find these little gems of advice and restatements.

Within the compliments and criticisms of a book review, can lurk the wisdom of the ages. The sometimes weighty observations from those on the outside looking in can be very helpful to those of us who toil on the inside and occasionally look out through foggy windows.

Instructors give how-to directions while reviewers tend to focus on the efforts behind the writing process to explain a writer’s work. Even if they are wrong, they can still be helpful. The reviewer’s efforts should invite contemplation of the writing process and motivate writers to experiment with their own work—to draft a better narrative or create dialogue that fully inflates an otherwise partially expanded character.

The advice here is to not limit your reading of reviews to learn about what other writers are doing, but how they’re doing it, and extract insights on how to improve your own narrative or dialogue or characterizations. This sometimes requires that you read “between the lines” and use your analytical skills to extract the wisdom from a review.

Easy enough. The problem is that as a writer you frequently feel guilty about taking time off from your own efforts to read about the writing of others. You may be hung up on some detail, stuck on a plot point or effort to create a credible transition, or mired in one of an infinite number of road hazards a writer encounters along the way. That is the best time to take a break, downshift, explore a detour or take a side road, or pull into a rest stop and watch the traffic go by. Let your engine cool and yourself relax. The sights, of course, are the different approaches and perspectives obtained from observing other writers. I cannot tell you how many times I have suffered through a problem only to later discover that had I taken a breather and looked around—read some stuff by other writers—I would have avoided a great deal of pain and angst.

Unfortunately, pain and angst are part and parcel of a writer’s life. Sometimes it seems you’re stuck at some intersection and no matter which way you turn there you are. The problem is that when you take a little R & R and sit down to read, you don’t really read. You’re lucky if you skim, and were someone to spring one of those recall quizzes at you, you likely would flunk. How many times have you read an article and by the time you reached the end realized you had consumed words but acquired no insight or wisdom the writer may have had to offer because your mind was mostly someplace else?

Reviewers can help. They get paid to read and explain. They are fascinated by the opportunity to try and figure out what a writer was up to and assess the qualities and weaknesses of his or her efforts. You can learn to analyze your own efforts by reading the analyses of others. They can assist in removing the emotionality and inject objectivity that every writer needs to apply to their own self-observations and assessments.

However, like writers, not all reviewers are created equal. When I wade into “The New York Review of Books,” I often feel I’ve crossed into some sort of Never-Never Land where the books take back seat to the intellectual pontifications of the reviewers.

You want to read a book review that delivers an overview of a book’s content, of course, but hopefully it also offers something you can learn from the reviewer’s insights and opinions about another writer’s efforts. To a writer, that’s the equivalent of gossiping across the back fence.

I sometimes wonder why so many writers clamor to get their book reviewed because I fear book reviews can be used to avoid buying and reading the actual book, but take credit for doing so. On the other hand, an astute analysis of a book by a capable reviewer will likely enhance book sales—like a movie reviewer’s description of the action makes you want to go to the theater and find out the ending. Thus, a good book reviewer can also serve as a literary mentor—steering us towards good investments and away from wasting our time.

But that depends on the commitment—and honesty—of the reviewer. It can be a waste of time to read the work of a reviewer who is more intent more on displaying his or her own literary style rather than providing insights into the works of others. A good reviewer will explain, in detail, the whys behind his or her opinions. The less-than-honest ones use the work of another to launch their own pet theories or self-serving horn blowing. I ran across one of those aggravations recently and use it as an example of what to watch out for when you invest your precious time in the book review section.

I always considered Damon Runyon a master of characterization. From more than two dozen stories, his characters found their way onto the silver screen. Today, many of his characters and some of his techniques from the 1920s and 1930s come across a bit stereotypical—products of the Depression era romanticism—but Runyon’s style of presentation remains powerful and a writer who reads and analyzes him can take away some important lessons that have contemporary application. A tweak here, a modification there, and you give it new life.

Then I stumbled across a 2009 piece by Alan Gopnik on Runyon in “The New Yorker,” and quickly realized I had found someone more interested in grinding axes rather than helping us hone our own literary points. Gopnik writes, after reading a series of Damon Runyon stories, of “being startled by the lack of characterization.” Runyon didn’t “really study gangsters,” writes Gopnik, “he just makes up a cookie-shape called Gangster and bakes extras as needed.” All the life, he concludes, is in the language. Gee, and here I am, operating under the impression that that is precisely where a story resides—in its language—and that the best characterizations arise from words woven into the narrative and dialogue of story.

Runyon’s characters became memorable to the readers of the day and were brilliantly transferred from ink to the silver screen in such black and white gems as “Lady for a Day,” “Little Miss Marker,” and “Guys & Dolls (Broadway first).” Though products of a different era, the foundational literary qualities they contain still resonate. The qualities of the “present” of anything are traceable from the qualities of their historical foundations. That we slide into a low-slung sports car to take the freeway to the supermarket doesn’t make taking the original Model T on rutted roads to a country general store less important or meaningless. It takes a past to pave a course to the future. It’s that continuum that pauses to make our present. Prior wisdom is the key to the experience and knowledge upon which we build the future. The goal always is to make the next effort better than the one just completed. It’s myopic to discharge the past as having no value. Frequently the newest ideas come from applying new perspectives to old ideas.

The further I waded into Gopnik’s article, however, I realized it was he who failed to glean insights of value from Runyon’s work by not investing the effort to harvest and understand the lessons contained. Perhaps he prefers a style of characterization that slaps you in the face rather than whispers in your ear, or vice versa, or one you have to decode from intellectual machinations. Perhaps he suffers from a case of sour grapes. Whatever it is, I found his article an example of sophistic effort to fill editorial space—a dressed-up hack job concocted to create some “new” analytical piece to quench a magazine’s thirst for “fresh” content.

Perhaps I’m too harsh. Gopnik is no slouch, but he appeared to follow an unfortunate emerging technique of finding fault with the efforts of predecessors in order to elevate his own literary stature. To find a new hook. True criticism discovers, analyzes, and explains rather than denigrates. It’s better to credit those who built the foundations on which your efforts rely rather than try to claim them as your own by dressing them in different clothes to conceal their heritage. There is nothing entirely new and trying to make out like something is, and that you’ve invented or discovered it, borders on sophism, or fraud.

After a second reading of his article, I decided Gopnik had stated conclusions rather than presenting a thoughtful analysis supported by describable and definable explanations. I always get suspicious when I read one writer slam another less as an act of criticism than an apparent attempt to intellectually elevate him or herself. Gopnik has done the latter. He slaps the label “pop formalist” onto Runyon, then states that “Runyon’s appeal, though it has to be fished out like raisins from the dreary bran of his O. Henry-style plotting, came from his mastery of an American idiom.” I searched for but did not find any clear explanations or definitions or examples of those terms in the article.

By page three of his piece, Gopnik had sunk his literary harpoon into Runyon at least three times, using this passive-aggressive technique. Besides labeling Runyon as “pop formalist” to create a straw man to tear down, Gopnik first applies his label, adds a longer-description of his own design, then wanders off into a border-line stream-of-consciousness exploration of pseudo-intellectual rantings that likely would draw from any accomplished eighth grade language arts teacher the comment: “You need to stay on point, but in order to do that, you need to state a point clearly, then support it.” Here is what I mean—from a quote in which Gopnik criticizes a longish example of Runyon’s writing:

“Here are all the elements of Runyon’s voice: the perpetual present tense, the world without conditional moods, the stilted, overelaborate attempt at precision, and, above all, a way of life and social class evoked purely through vernacular.”

Is Gopnik saying these “characteristics,” or Runyonesk techniques, are bad, always bad, or merely bad when used in certain ways? He never explains, and that’s when I began to suspect Gopnik was trying to establish a sort of intellectual superiority over Runyon but didn’t want to come right out and say it and show himself to be a literary snob. Indeed there is a difference between the literary and the popular forms of writing, but why criticize someone very good as a popular writer because he is not a literary one? Runyon was not writing like a literary snob but as the consummate storyteller he was. Before writing screenplays, Runyon had already built a reputation as a sports writer, and probably could take credit for helping make baseball the all-American game. He told his stories using a style that matched his characters and their circumstances and situations and at the same time met the desires of a contemporary audience. His writing entertained!

Rather than share a wisdom achieved through careful study and an analysis of Runyon’s writings to describe, explain, and put it into perspective, Gopnik serves up comments such as: “Though Runyon is still in print, and still read, he has in recent years slipped into the nether land of ancient boozy anecdote and old photographs where newspapermen of his vintage end up.” Gopnick should be so lucky. The fact that “Runyon is still in print” indicates longevity, and longevity is an element of the ongoing relevance and credibility of a writer, and certainly not a synonym for having “slipped” into some nether land. Gopnik’s logic rivals the great Yogi Berra’s comment about a popular New York eatery: “People don’t go there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

Still, Gopnik does get around to crediting Runyon with having a “great ear” that, beyond the words, “also give us a license to listen—a license to listen to street speech and folk speech with a mind newly alive to the poetry implicit in it.” It was Runyon’s discovery, concludes Gopnik, “that the right way to get the soul of street-speakers was not to dress their language down but to dress it up.”

Bingo!

Mark Twain deserves some credit here, too. He taught us how dialogue, in dialect, can be an effective tool of characterization. By the end of Twain’s description of Tom Sawyer, you are ready to fork over two bits for an opportunity to slap some whitewash on Aunt Molly’s fence. Twain brought scenes to life by use of the vernacular and through the five senses. So did Runyon.

As a writer, you need to read the work of other writers analytically. What is it that the author was trying to do and did s/he achieve it? Why? How? And, most importantly, what can you glean from his or her efforts that might help in your own?

From Runyon, you can find takeaways of value. His techniques worked for his time and place and subjects, and a substantial percentage of them still do. Knowledge about and understanding of the art and craft of writing doesn’t suddenly become unusable due to the passage of time. Careful what you might toss aside or throw away because the paper it was printed on has yellowed with time. That shortsighted approach dampens creativity like water on a flame.

Runyon’s bigger-than-life characters stay with us. In her book Creating Unforgettable Characters, Linda Seger explores ways to achieve that in your own writing. Her list of topics includes:

Defining the character
Creating backstory
Understanding character psychology
Character relationships
Adding supporting and minor characters
Dialog

What constitutes good writing is pretty close to timeless. Runyon’s stuff did what Seger suggests we do. Runyon’s efforts still offer fundamental insights on that which good writing and great stories depend. Rather than condemn, one’s time would be better spent learning how to analyze, amend, and apply. Like Henry Ford’s Model T, Runyon’s words are reliable and durable.

[To obtain a deeper insight into and understanding of Runyon, hunt down Jimmy Breslin’s 1991 biography. Or check out the Brian Lamb’s interview with Breslin about the book, still accessible on C-SPAN.]