Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Employing direct dialogue
Magnetic characterization
Character, setting, and types of stories
In Parts 1 and 2, you’ve been introduced to some generalities about writing and a number of its most minute details. Part 3 is about assembling all those components—along with some new ones—into coherent works of creative writing that stand on their own, in their entirety. What might have seemed overwhelming without the content in this book’s first two parts is now fully possible. You are ready.
Part 3’s chapters address the three fundamental things that make a narrative: character, setting, and action. Chapter 7 focuses on characterization through the avenues of dialogue and authorial design. The idea of design also informs Chapter 8 and its information on rendering setting. As you’ll discover, setting can function as everything from a kind of camera to action itself. Settings can even be characters, as witnessed in all the horror movies that have been made in which a house possesses is a nefarious personality. As you know, characters do things; they make things happen. Chapter 8 covers the kinds of things that can happen: the patterns of plot that endlessly repeat themselves in creative writing.
Believe it or not, by the end of Part 3, you’ll have knowledge of all the requisite tools to generate creative writing of your own.
CHAPTER 7 Magnetic characterization
In this chapter
· Dialogue that’s direct
· Dialogue that’s indirect
· The writer’s interpretation
· Recurring characters
Characters are the most important component of any narrative. Without them, there wouldn’t be much of a story. Characterization is an essential skill to master, therefore, because characters are vital parts of any creative writing, from books and short stories, biographies and autobiographies, to poetry.
The development of a character is a very detailed process and one that requires a lot of thought. In fact, creative writers often describe it as “living with their characters,” because for some writers, their characters come to be as vivid as real people—perhaps more so. Fully realized characters can be as complex as real people, so you need to consider many factors when introducing a character to your readers. Among them are physical details, the other characters surrounding the primary one, things the character does, and what the character says or thinks.
So where do you begin? Usually with a lot of written notes and background that’s never going to appear in your completed piece of writing. Indeed, some creative writers create entire life stories on their characters before they even start to write. They know where they were born, whom they first kissed, when they were arrested, and how many fillings they have in their teeth. I don’t happen to work like that, but I do believe you need to know more about your character than what appears on the page. If you don’t really know who your character is and how he or she might react in a certain situation, you’ll never be able to create believable 3-D people.
As you should know by now, characterization is more effective when the author reveals traits about the character through the afore-mentioned ways and allows the reader to make his or her own judgments, rather than stating character traits directly. Once again, showing rather than telling usually is the way to go. With that in mind, in this chapter, I focus on character dialogue and various types of characters, along with the writer’s challenge of interpreting characters correctly so they perform the way you want them to.
DEFINITION
Characterization is the act of describing the qualities of someone or something in attempt to make them or it seem real.
Employing direct dialogue
You probably can recall, many of the memorable moments in books and film are those in which a character addresses someone else. Here are some favorites:
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”
—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
“Play it, Sam. Play ’As Time Goes By.’”
—Casablanca
“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”
—The Graduate
“Yo, Adrian!”
—Rocky
“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ’Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
—Dirty Harry
“Nice to meet you, Karen. My name is Doug. That’s God spelled backward with a little bit of you wrapped up in it.”
—Anonymous
First, a quick grammar reminder: direct dialogue almost always is set off by commas, whether they come in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end. Some creative writers employ neither commas nor quotation marks in their direct discourse, but for most readers, these novelties prove distractions rather than conveying an artistic point.
The punctuation is the easy part. It’s not a difficult rule to follow or to understand. What gets me when I sit down to edit my own creative prose is that I usually have too much direct address in my dialogue. Even after three or four passes through a draft, I still find instances of direct address I need to change because they follow too closely upon each other. They’re too clumped together, and that’s as distracting as improper punctuation or any other kind of compositional redundancy.
Of course, the issue isn’t that direct address is wrong or ungrammatical (providing you use your commas the right way). In fact, direct address can be the simplest and most logical way to let your readers know who a character is talking to when multiple people are present. The problem with overdoing direct address is that your dialogue starts to feel stilted. It doesn’t flow. It feels forced and dry. Fake. And that’s definitely not something you want your readers to feel.
Pay attention to direct address in your edits. Try to take out every instance of direct address you think your piece can do without. I feel as though I never remove enough, but it’s something to shoot for.
WRITING PROMPT
In the accompanying excerpt, chart every instance of direct discourse. Then go back and determine which can be effectively cut or revised to make the excerpt collectively read better.
When not at school we often frequented cemeteries. Why? “Because a lot of them are beautiful and no one’s usually around,” she said, “and sometimes the tombstones are flat so you can lay down on them and watch the sky.” There was more to this, of course, though I did not realize it until much later. Part of what had attracted me to Emily was her fascination with death: with physical being and its lack. Her mother, she said, had bore many children, some of them afflicted or dead on arrival, and one of Emily’s favorite and most entertaining pastimes was musing upon alternative scenarios involving these doomed or damaged siblings.
“If that one hadn’t died,” she’d lament, “I’d have had a playmate almost just my age.”
“What if he were right in the head?” she’d say, another time, of a younger brother who wasn’t. “Wouldn’t all the girls think he was handsome?”
Despite this sad family history, however, or perhaps because of it, Emily was not very sympathetic toward the shortcomings of other people and, in fact, took great pleasure in criticizing their flaws.
“Have you ever noticed how ugly most people are?” she asked me once. “You’d think they’d try to make up for it by being more agreeable.”
Her fascination with death and critiques of others had led her to a profound fondness for the carnal aspects of existence: slumber, food, and—especially—sex. Indeed, as if vaulting beyond any ordinary natural impulse, Emily seemed determined to couple with as much frequency as circumstance and her impressive resourcefulness allowed. And so there would be a cold, hard tombstone beneath my back, bouncing breasts and blushing, grunting face above, while a blue sky, stars, or the clouds of night or day wheeled above.
“Emily, I don’t want you just for this,” I would say, believing I meant it, even as my bobbing cock nodded otherwise.
On one such occasion some lines came to me from the Jove and Europa story translated in my Latin class a week earlier: “Dignity and love are seldom known to go to bed together.” I wondered then and know now I did not love her. She was the first girl I had sex with, which for a fourteen-year-old boy seems like love, and we enjoyed some of the offbeat-young-couples-fun that made me think we might could be a couple. But for the most part I found myself shrugging off too much contemplation or misgiving and, as they say, simply enjoying the ride. Walking on jelly legs, surroundings a confusion, head and body reluctant to process them in the wake of what they had just experienced, I would absently consider her in retrospect.
“So this is having your brains f---ed out,” I would remark in my mind.
Though it disappointed me at the time, I have grown to be glad that she was the one who ended it. Of course, many of the clichés one expects of a terminating teenage relationship came into play, including the moment when she said, “We can still be friends.”