Reading Like a Writer

Francine Prose

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061751899
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A distinguished novelist and critic inspires readers and writers with this inside look at how the professionals read—and write

Long before there were creative writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

As she takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—Prose discovers why these writers endure. She takes pleasure in the signature elements of such outsatanding writers as Philip Roth, Isaac Babel, John Le Carré, James Joyce, and Katherine Mansfield. Throughout, she cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.

SEVEN

Dialogue

AMONG THE THINGS I REMEMBER HEARING WHEN I WAS beginning to write was the following rule: you shouldn’t, and actually can’t, make fictional dialogue—conversation on the page—sound like actual speech. The repetitions, meaningless expressions, stammers, and nonsensical monosyllables with which we express hesitation, along with the clichés and banalities that constitute so much of everyday conversation, cannot and should not be used when our characters are talking. Rather, they should speak more fluently than we do, with greater economy and certitude. Unlike us, they should say what they mean, get to the point, avoid circumlocution and digression. The idea, presumably, is that fictional dialogue should be an “improved,” cleaned-up, and smoothed-out version of the way people talk. Better than “real” dialogue.

Then why is so much written dialogue less colorful and interesting than what we can overhear daily in the Internet café, the mall, and on the subway? Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page, or when they are trying to make the characters on it speak.

Once I assigned a class to eavesdrop on strangers and transcribe the results. I decided to try it myself, in a university coffee shop. Within moments I overheard a young woman telling her male companion about a dream in which she saw Liza Minnelli arrayed in white robes and a starry crown, dressed as the Queen of Heaven. What made the conversation doubly engaging was that the girl seemed to be romantically attracted to her friend, and was using her story as a means of seduction, unaware that he was, insofar as I could tell, gay. This fact was not unrelated to his lively interest in Liza Minnelli, yet another connection that his companion was preferring not to make.

Like this one, most conversations involve a sort of sophisticated multitasking. When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying, which is often not merely distracting but, we fear, as audible as what we are saying. As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.

A PIECE of good advice that beginning writers often receive warns against using dialogue as exposition and inventing those stiff, unlikely, artificial conversations in which facts are being transmitted from one character to another mainly for the benefit of the reader:

“Hi, Joe.”

“Nice to see you again, Sally.”

“What have you been doing, Joe?”

“Well, Sally, as you know, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m twenty-six years old. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for twelve years. I’m unmarried and very lonely. I come to this bar twice a week, on average, but so far have failed to meet anyone I particularly like.”

And so forth.

In nearly every case, this is a mistake. But there are, as always, exceptions to the rule, instances in which a writer employs dialogue not so much as exposition but as a sort of shorthand that obviates the need for whole paragraphs of exposition.

John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy begins:

In the small hours of a blustery October morning in a south Devon coastal town that seemed to have been deserted by its inhabitants, Magnus Pym got out of his elderly country taxi-cab and, having paid the driver and waited till he had left, struck out across the church square.

The paragraph goes on, at length, tracking Magnus Pym, whom we learn, has been en route for sixteen hours and is headed toward one of several “ill-lit Victorian boardinghouses.” At last Magnus Pym rings the doorbell, and is greeted by an old woman who says, “Why Mr. Canterbury, it’s you.”

Thus one line of dialogue informs us that Magnus Pym has been here before and, more important, is traveling under an assumed name.

Even when novice writers avoid the sort of dialogue that is essentially exposition framed by quotation marks, the dialogue they do write often serves a single purpose—that is, to advance the plot—rather than the numerous simultaneous aims that it can accomplish. To see how much dialogue can achieve, it’s instructive to look at the novels of Henry Green, in which many of the important plot developments are conveyed through conversation.

Throughout Green’s work, dialogue provides both text and subtext, allowing us to observe the wide range of emotions that his characters feel and display, the ways in which they say and don’t say what they mean, attempt to manipulate their spouses, lovers, friends, and children, stake emotional claims, demonstrate sexual interest or unavailability, confess and conceal their hopes and fears. And it all passes by us in such a bright, engaging splash of chatter that only slowly do we realize how widely Green has cast his net, how deeply he has penetrated. Green’s work not only demands close reading but also provides a paradise for the close reader who can only marvel at the wealth of information each line of dialogue provides, and the accuracy with which it shows people interacting with one another. No one else so fully inhabits his characters or writes them more from the inside, so that we feel that every line a character speaks expresses, and is fully determined by, the character’s circumstances and emotional state.

In this passage from his final novel, Doting, nineteen-year-old Annabel Payton has invited Peter Middleton, a student two years younger than herself, to have lunch at an inexpensive Indian restaurant near her office. Annabel has a crush on Peter’s father—as the awkward, somewhat thick-headed Peter may or may not be aware—and is attempting to extract information about Peter’s parents from her lunch companion. Word by word, the dialogue captures the rhythms of someone trying to discover something without disclosing something else, of an interlocutor who cannot stop pushing until she finds what she is seeking. It’s a model of social inquisition carried out by someone who doesn’t much care about the person she is interrogating, except that she would like to keep him from forming a low opinion of her and from figuring out what she is doing.

“Did your father happen to mention that he’d taken me out the other afternoon?” she inquired.

“No,” the boy said in an uninterested voice. “Should he?”

“We ran across one another in the street. I’m afraid I can’t afford anything like the gorgeous meal he provided.”

“But curry’s my favourite,” Peter claimed. “I wish I had it every day. Decent of you to ask me.”

“No, because I do truly enjoy seeing you. It takes me out of myself. And you’ve little idea how few there are I could say that of. Though, d’you know, it could be true about your father. He’s so terribly handsome, Peter.”

The boy broke into mocking laughter, with his mouth full.

“Look out for the curry,” she warned. “You’ll blow it all over me and the table.”

When he had composed himself he said, “Well I once ate a green fig looked exactly like Dad’s face.”

After a brief pause to discuss a mutual friend, Annabel persists:

“Are your parents still in love?” she asked.

“My mother and father? God, I suppose so. Are yours?”

“Not a bit. No.”

Peter went on eating.

“They don’t even share a room.”

Annabel describes her parents’ endless quarreling and asks Peter if his parents are like that, then goes on:

“How long have they been married?”

“Lord, don’t ask me. I wouldn’t know.”

“All in all, I imagine they were still very much in love,” she suggested.

“I expect so,” he said.

“You won’t tell them I mentioned this, will you?”

A few lines later, Annabel asks Peter if he thinks his mother is beautiful.

“Yes,” he said, rather gruff. “As a matter of fact.”

“Me too,” she echoed, but in a wan little voice. “She has everything. Hair, teeth, skin, those wide-apart eyes. By any standard your father’s a very lucky man.”

“Why?”

“To have such a wife of course. Would you say she liked me, Peter?”

“Fairly, yes. No reason not to, is there?”

“Oh none,” she agreed casually.

It’s hard to limit yourself to discussing just one scene from Green’s masterpiece, Loving. How can we possibly choose the passage that best illustrates the subtlety, the depth, the originality and complexity with which Green uses conversation to create character and to tell the minimally dramatic, low-key story that, thanks to the dialogue, seems positively riveting? In fact, would-be dialogue writers might want to close-read this entire novel about a group of mostly English servants (and in the background, their employers) on an estate in Ireland during the Second World War. One reason it’s hard to stop quoting this book is that each scene keeps turning and turning in tiny delightful increments, and it seems unfair to deprive the reader of the next marvelous development.

In this touching, sweetly comic, intricately choreographed moment, the two pretty young housemaids, Edith and Kate, have gone to the beach with the pantry boy, Albert, who is the assistant to the butler, Raunce. They have taken the three children they have been assigned to watch, one of whom is also named Albert. Raunce’s Albert, as he is called, is a melancholy, retiring boy who is unrequitedly in love with Edith, who is in love with Raunce.

In the hierarchy of the estate, a caste system in which gradations of rank and influence are precisely calibrated, Edith enjoys the power (at least, the power to tease) that she has over Albert. But the empathetic, decent Edith has no wish to hurt him. As Edith tells Kate in a later scene, Albert suffers from “calf love,” a concept that Kate mocks as something too hoity-toity and time-consuming for the likes of working people like them. Edith explains her kindness as the sympathy one might feel for a mouse that had caught its little leg in a wheel.

At the same time, something extremely complex is being suggested here: namely, the notion that Edith half-welcomes Albert’s attention because new love has made her more open to the pleasures and possibilities of the world, including the erotic—a sophisticated observation from life that runs counter to the received notion that the beginning of love always makes one more exclusive, more monogamous, more fixated on the beloved.

Until the following scene on the beach, Albert has hardly said a word about himself, let alone about his background or his personal history. Nor has the book given us much information about the boy, other than that he has yellow hair and often looks ill—though his real malady, we suspect, is an acute case of embarrassment and homesickness rather than any physical ailment.

The quiet interlude on the shore has been immediately preceded by a noisier minor event involving the three children, a “fair-sized” aggressive crab, and a riled-up pet dog named Peter, which Albert has called an ugly bastard and has shrunken from, a bit ignominiously. Now, to protect his brand-new blue serge suit, which (doubtless for Edith’s benefit) Albert has inadvisably worn to the beach, the thoughtful Edith invites him to lie beside her on her raincoat. She sits up to watch the children, and Kate snoozes beside them in the sun. It’s only a raincoat, so they are very close, though Edith has made it clear that their proximity is for the sake of the suit—which, we feel, is just the sort of thing that Edith would think of, and do.

He lay down at her side while she sat bolt upright to keep an eye on the children.

“I got a sister over at home,” he said low.

“What’s that?” she asked careless. “I can’t hear you with the sea.”

“I got a sister works in an airplane factory,” he began. If she heard him she gave no indication. “Madge we call her. They’s terrible the hours she puts in.”

He lay on his stomach facing inland while Edith watched the ocean.

“I’ve only her and mum left now,” he went on. “Dad, ’e died a month or two afore I came here. He worked in a fruiterer’s in Albany Place. It was a cancer took ’im.”

When he broke off the heavy Atlantic reverberated in their ears.

“Now Mr Raunce writes to his,” he continued, “and can’t never get a reply. And there’s me writes to mine, every week I do since this terrible bombing started but I don’t ever seem to receive no answers though every time ’e comes over I’m afeared mum an’ sis must’ve got theirs. To read the papers you wouldn’t think there was anything left of the old town.”

“That young Albert,” Edith yelled against the sea, “I regret we took him along.”

Raunce’s Albert looked over his shoulder on the side away from Edith but could not see how his namesake was misbehaving.

“You see with dad gone I feel responsible,” he tried again loud. “I know I’m only young b...