 |
Dearest Readers,
Last week, I got to spend an evening with a friend in NYC eating savory pastries (imagine a hand-held pot pie/shepherd's pie or a calzone made with phyllo) and talking about life/writing. Because we don't see each other often, there's always an element of playing catch-up, which I enjoy immensely in part because this friend is a playwright. (At The Sewanee Writers' Conference two summers ago, a brilliant novelist observed that the general hotness rankings of writers by genre is playwright > poet > novelist > essayist. They are 100% correct, and I think the mathematical calculation is something like "an inverse relationship between profitability of work and aesthetics.") Anyway.
I love talking with not-essayists about writing because they are all better-looking than I am, but also because there's something about being outside of my comfort zone that makes me more open to offbeat analogies or metaphors, which is how—at this point in my life at least—I am best able to think and learn about writing. Being prescriptive is for the birds. Alec (this friend's name is Alec) writes amazing dialogue. Which, I mean, yes, let's hope he does, as a playwright. But I find myself particularly envious of the way he's able to capture an entire character just by making them talk. (He recently recorded "The Mon Valley Medium," which you can watch here to see what I mean.) I dislike writing dialogue. I don't know how to listen for it, either. When trying to capture people in writing I am most easily able to imagine and thus articulate their gestures. Sometimes I suspect I am an essayist because it allows me to point to a tradition of exposition instead of revealing that I struggle with scene-writing. TWO TECHNIQUES FOR DIALOGUE
Every bit of dialogue should do more than one thing/should serve more than one purpose. These things could be building character, furthering plot, creating humor, describing setting—the list is very long. With fiction, you're crafting a representation of speech; with nonfiction, ideally, you're capturing those perfect lines. In grad school, a linguistics professor projected an image of nine+ line drawings onto a screen, all beverage containers—wine glass, beer stein, demitasse, lowball—and asked in complete seriousness, "Which cup is the cuppiest cup?" Close your eyes, and conjure a memory of being in high school or college and having homework (alternatively, call to mind having to read something for work):It's late, and you're tired—or maybe you're not tired, but you would really just like to be done with the thing you are supposed to be doing so you can do something else (like lying on the ground listening to "Queen of Peace" on repeat)—and you have to read a thirty-page chapter/report before you can be done. You open the cover of the book/folder and discover that the thirty assigned pages contain several block quotes and lists and line breaks. A small bubble of light that blooms inside your heart! Now imagine that you open the cover to find not a paragraph break in sight. Dialogue is a great way to add texture to the reading experience, particularly in longer pieces of writing.
AN UNTESTED ANALOGY
When I asked Alec how he listened for dialogue, he described it first as "tempo." For those of you who are musicians, maybe that is an obvious comparison, but like I said earlier, multidisciplinarity is my happy place. He generously continued: "I think about how long it takes for a person to make their point." At which point I galaxy-brained, because that is something I understand, mostly from a perspective of being an impatient person with ADD who is not entirely unaware of conversational conventions. How long does it take your character to make their point? I'll be using that one for a while. I hope you find it useful, too. (Please feel free to thank Alec as well.)
Until 2023,
AS
PS. If you'd like to hear more from me about writing/craft stuff, please consider becoming a Rumpus Member. As I'm writing this we have 341 Members, but we're 259 away from our 600 end of year goal. In addition to perks like year-round-submissions (if you JOIN at the yearly level), you'll also receive a biweekly newsletter that includes exclusive content from writers and our editors, including a quarterly craft talk from yours truly. Plus, you'll be helping us keep the site un-paywalled, funding our writers, and fueling the lit scene outside of NYC. |
 |
READING LISTSFICTIONHave I ever told you about the night your great-grandfather broke curfew? It’s a bigger deal than you think. After all, son, “curfew” is a bastardized term. You think of teen movies and groundings post-midnight joyrides when you think of that word, when in fact curfews were once tools of war, used by countries in conflict in order to buy and sell fear to people without means to understand it. And what was Korea, at that point?On the farm, I understand exactly the degree to which I have come to depend on alcohol, since in the first three weeks I think about it frequently and get worried and even look for it twice in the farmer’s house, and on the fourth week I am less interested, and on the fifth week I do other things. Five weeks is a long time on the farm.ENOUGHBefore my father killed her, my mother spent her evenings telling me the story of how she came to America. Every night, the way she started was with something new. The ocean was like a blue sky beneath us, she said. Just like the eyes of the immigration agent. He was so handsome, she giggled, bringing her palm up to her cheek as if to squeeze the blush out of it. COMICYour daydreams spared you from the awkward thread of reunion. You've already shared sheets so shyness should be irrelevant.
INTERVIEWS AND REVIEWS
Talking with . . . Reviews of . . . |
 |
|
A LOVE STORY
(excerpted from Davon Loeb's The In-Betweens our Feb. Book Club pick)
Sometimes they played tennis together. I bet he still thinks of it often, and maybe the sun remembers it too—the way it would shine on her skin, like it was shining on her. And her skin did look best in the month of May, her birthday month, and he bought her a present to match her racket. He might surprise her on the next serve. She was rather terrible at tennis, even though she swung as if she thought she was Billie Jean King, and she was not Billie Jean King. So, he always let her win. Match point Harry and she’d twirl, her skirt spinning like an umbrella top. He’d hold his breath, try and capture the moment, capture her smell, capture her happiness. And even then, her perfume made flowers outside the fence pollinate and attracted bees that buzzed nearby. And Harry held his breath longer, to keep her in—maybe hold it forever if he could. She said let’s play again. They did play, even after the other courts emptied. And after that, when the Polos and Dockers and Benzes and BMWs all drove away, he thought about what he might say, reaching into his pocket like reaching into his chest and then kneeling to give her the present.
He thought about everything that led up to that moment. He thought about when they first passed the mouth mirror and scaler, when she was just his dental hygienist, she, who was working at the dentist office while finishing nursing school and in the military. He thought about how he always held the door for her when seeing her almost a mile away in the parking lot. So what if he was late for his first appointment. So what if the secretaries suspected. So what if everyone knew. He thought about the love they had made, as if breathing for the first time, as if breathing into each other, a resuscitation of sorts. He thought about the way her irises looked when their eyelashes touched, like all the soil of Earth planted somewhere inside her eyes—how the world would ignite and felt like it might explode following that next kiss. How he didn’t care if that did happen, if the world ended, as long as they were together—how it would all be worth it. She was worth it. And how on those tennis courts, he wasn’t sure if he was chasing the ball or if he was chasing her.
. . .
|
|
We're more than halfway through December, and we still need 259 memberships to meet our goal of 600 for the start of 2023. These make great GIFTS for yourself or another writer in your life, especially when paired with our Letters in the Mail program. |
|
| |
Your support keeps The Rumpus going! |
|
257 Haywood Rd Unit 201
Asheville
28806
United States of America |
|
| | |
|
|
