Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Dialogue - You Don't Say!

Whither dialogue in the novel?

I mean just what do tranches of conversation bring to the prose table? In stage plays, any dialogue is layered and given subtext through the performance of the actors. All verbal communication in normal life takes place through the spoken word being augmented by facial expression, inflection, other physical gesture and the context of it being said.

The novel cannot offer sustained versions of all these buttresses, without the text grinding to a halt. You simply can't ascribe description of a facial expression or a hand gesture to every line of dialogue you write. As a form of shorthand, you could append 'he said acidily' or 'she averted her gaze as she said', but too much he said/she said grates pretty quickly.

I find where you get swathes of unmediated dialogue in novels, it is usually the writer trying to lever in back story. It's clumsy and more importantly, people don't spend swathes of time filling in events and describing incidents, at least not without commentary and judgement, which rarely gets a look in since the writer is only concerned with back story issues. Conversation is not the right medium to transmit such information.

Where conversation is important, is in allowing the reader to hear the character's voice. IE, its an adjunct of any physical description the author may have given, to enable the reader to picture the character more fully in their mind's eye. But in this way, you only need a modest snatch of conversation to convey how the character talks and how that reflects back on their personality. So for me, conversation is impressionistic and no more. Don't overload your dialogue with points to get across. And please save the reader from unmediated pages of dialogue, which always has me wondering what a character is doing with their hands and where their eyes are really focussing in the room.

I say all this having had a background as a playwright of 15 years. I can write dialogue. But I don't find it terribly germane to prose fiction. If you ever get the opportunity, see if you can eavesdrop or bear witness to a real life social situation such as someone being asked to explain their actions to a superior. Concentrate very hard on what is said, how the person describes their actions and tries to justify it or apologise for it. I promise you, if you had tried to write a pre-emptive version of it for prose purposes, your version would bear no resemblance to the actual version. You may claim that this is merely a shortcoming in the writer's craft, that they need more work. But it's for all the reasons I give above, about a playwright's ability to render just such a social scene, because he is assisted by flesh and blood actors, whereas the prose writer only has linear sentences flat on a page. The reader has to play both parts in any dialogue. Already that is limiting.

In one of my novels I played with these problems. The second third of the book was 'set' in cyberspace forums and messaging. This allowed me to tweak some of the restrictions. For example, by giving the time of each MSN post, the reader can gauge what lies behind the response - was it immediate, or did the poster give it some thought before replying? (The equivalent of a meaningful 'pause' in a playscript). Then there was the random element of posts that cross, thus fissuring the logic further. (I had great fun with this when recreating imaginary forum exchanges, where narrative logic was completely fractured as different voices cut across each other and responded asynchronously).

Yet the thing that really surprised me in the writing of these sections, was that my main character's voice necessarily changed. Prior to that in the first third of the novel, he expressed his thoughts and the odd fleeting verbal banter with his cronies, in his thick Yorkshire dialect. I wrote that section in his vernacular tongue. But in the second third where he was communicationg online, he didn't write in dialect. As a reasonably well educated bloke, he typed full words, not the bastardised prefixes and suffixes of local dialect. Since he was a character who was hiding his true identity from the reader anyway, this slippery quality between his morphing in and out of different voices suited the story rather well, but was one I had not forseen until it revealed itself. But it does suggest that people do formulate their thoughts in slightly different language than they speak in. And certainly different to how they write.

Tuesday, 22 September 2009

Self-Knowledge in Fiction

How much self-knowledge does the writer bestow on their main character(s)? In a detective novel, clearly the flatfoot must start off with very little information, or there wouldn't be much of a plot to unravel. If the gentle reader ever solves the clues ahead of the 'Tec, then the novel is a busted flush. But I'm really posing the question of literary fiction.

What type of narrator does the reader yearn for to lead them through the world of that particular novel? A reliable narrator, whose trusty eyes they can bank on for transmitting all scenes, or an unreliable one, with whom the reader is playing cat and mouse as to the veracity of what is being imparted. In the case of the former, whereby the reader consigns themselves wholly into the care of the reliable narrator, how much self-awareness does the character possess? If the novel is a process of revelation and a journey to self-awareness in the character, the reader can only suckle knowledge at the permitted drip-feed rate. The reader has very little independence of thought, can scarce escape the plodding velocity of the character arc that leads them by the nose. The reliable and self-aware narrator is just too too omniscient, too inviolable. The reader can gain very little by viewing through such self-assured eyes. But in such cases, you scare have a journey worth undertaking in the first place.

So to the unreliable narrator. The one who you cannot take their word or their world view as sacrosanct. There are plenty of reasons for a narrator being an unreliable tour guide throughout the novel. They might be deliberately playing with the reader. They might be deluded in their perceptions of the world around them, Jane Austen's "Emma" Woodhouse is a classic example of this latter type. She is chock full of knowledge about manners and propriety, yet she cannot see the love of the man in closest proximity to her. Okay, forgive me now for a great blasphemy, but in the early 21st Century I don't really want to concern myself with writing a book of manners. Besides there's no such thing as propriety any more is there? That in itself is something that interests me enough to want to explore it.

So how can you have a self-aware, but unreliable narrator? Surely they are mutually exclusive? If the narrator is ultimately deluded, how self-aware can they be said to be? Returning briefly to the character arc notion above, of the book as slow-release character self-insight, working from the externality of the character's situation and boring inwards, ever inwards until their true essence is obtained, to me this precisely mirrors the onion layers of unpeeling, that forms the praxis of the psychotherapy couch. Me, I like to plunge the reader straight inside the head of my narrator. A crash landing amongst all the built up mess of sensibilities and predilections already set in place within the character. (For at the beginning of the novel, they are adult and fully formed already, not some unworked marble awaiting the plot's chisel to transmogrify them). From there, their self-awareness allows them to cast back into how they got there, but also into the environment around them that dictates their current fate. From the internal reaching back out towards the external. For I am interested in relationship. To others, to institutions, to society, to forces unknown. The actual nature of connection. My characters try and grapple with those connections that are submerged from plain view. The ones that underlie where they find themselves in the world. The power dispositions predicating all relationships. For that I demand self-aware and perceptive characters. They know who they are already; what they try and penetrate is how they stand in relation to those others they encounter in the novel.

Yet that doesn't make them omniscient and omnipotent. The loom of those very same forces into which they thread themselves, may completely strip them of the ability to use their knowledge to free themselves. In my novel "A,B&E" I have one character who knows everything about her current plight, but struggles to kick against the pricks in order to liberate herself from her societal exile. The epigraph I used for that novel comes from Steve Tesich's novel "Karoo": "Saul knows everything, except what to do with what he knows". In my novel "G", I have a character again well positioned in terms of insight, but shackled by the sectarianism of Northern Irish culture and being a Mother at a time when the men of violence are decommissioned back into the domestic realm. Her 'character arc' is reacting to these new dynamics, while both shielding and encouraging the development of her young daughters. Then there is a character who is monitoring the authorities who have mounted a siege of her community. Again, well versed on her dilemmas, but restricted as to action by the external situation in which she finds herself. In "Not In My Name", the main character is a terrorist, so for all his full inhabiting of 'normalcy', the character is in fact a willfully unreliably narrator (as against Emma Woodhouse being unconsciously unreliable). The knowledgeable mosaic spun by the character, is in fact a tissue of lies from beginning to end. He does play with and manipulate the reader's sensibilities. He is the most unreliable and knowledgeable of narrators and he throws down the gauntlet to you the gentle reader.

Thus full knowledge of characters is not necessarily enough to save them in the course of the novel. There are plenty of fissures within their character that degrades the full value of their supposed knowledge. They have perception, but they also have countervailing emotions and sensibilities. It is all determined by their relations both to others specifically and society in general. The lacuna between thought and action that afflicts most of our species. In short, they eschew simplistic characterisation and the dreaded arc that can be plotted on a graph.

Do people in real life really have character changes? Unless they find God, not all that much. We are creatures of emotional habit. We repeat the same behaviour patterns as the head quacks tell us endlessly. That's why I don't really buy into novels of drip-feed revelation, but seek to offer a different dynamic. They possess a level of observation that does demand some reciprocity of perception in the reader. In short, they challenge you the reader, challenge your world view, maybe even goad you a tad, but they are not so invulnerable that the reader cannot feel there is no room to strike back, to unpick the stray seams of the narrator. And probably to feel delight in doing so. To give as good good, if not better as you get from the character laid out in two-dimensional print, but who inhabits the three-dimensions (and possibly more) of your imagination.

Self-knowledge in characters mirrors the mechanism of knowledge in the reader, that which presumably impels a reader to pick up a book and outline the voice of the author silently inside their own head in the first place...

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Missing Statement

The concept of writing some sort of 'Mission Statement' is too self-aggrandising. While I may prattle on about the Twenty-First Century novel needing to do something a bit different to those of the preceding century, I am not seeking after converts among fellow authors. I am content to try and offer any jaded readers of fiction something they may find refreshingly 'other'. On "You Write On" an online writing community, I have been branded a "Literary Jihadist". A badge I wear with pride if the plaintiff meant it in its sense of an individual struggle, rather than a cultural one. (I suspect such quodlibets were beyond the accuser, an elision of mein kampf and kulturkampf).

Anyhoo, the position of ploughing one's own furrow is no less self-indulgent. Wallowing in one's own solipsism. If your writing is too subjective, too personal an artistic 'vision', no reader is going to get it now are they? The novel, in whatever form, still has to communicate to countless subjectivities of its unknown readers. That means it must have points of convergence within that strange interchange; wherein an absent writer whispers silently inside the private intimate space of the reader's mind.

I also steer clear of the concept of laying down a rulebook. There are no flaming rules. Language is plastic, grammar and idiom constantly mutating. Is there even a formal written language left anymore? If there is, there is no compunction to compose all fiction in it. Witness the vernaculars of so many Scottish authors. Rather than rules, there is only the market for books and all sorts of nostrums as how to best play it as a writer. Wannabe authors then drawing their own conclusions as to what works and bureaucratising them into a code of 'good practice'. Temperamentally I am an anarchist. Formally I am an auto-didact. The number of 'Classic' novels I have read can be counted on the fingers of my two hands and maybe one of those plastic hands in display windows of jewellers. Bling bling rather than carated diamonds. I was a member of those generations not taught grammar at school. Good, I see it as a strength not a weakness. There is an element of me making it up as I go along when I write. So I eschew rules. I can hardly lay down prescriptions if I ignore them myself now can I? But at least I feel no constraints on experimenting.

So to this end, my only personal target in writing a novel is a pursuit of emotional intelligence. A writer in absentia can only appeal to a reader through lacing his/her imagination with emotion. And through this, maybe share notions of what it means to be human in this fluxus of the early 21st century.

Emotions, good. Take a gander at a thesaurus: 'Joy' has 1 & 1/2 columns of synonyms. 'Unhappy' covers 2 columns. 'Drunk' covers more than either, while 'reprove' covers 4 whole columns. There appears to be a bit of a shortfall in the words conveying emotional states. If you were to plot an emotional spectrum, you might have 'elated' or 'ecstatic' at the pole of the scale for 'happiness', but would you really use such words with writerly pride? I find it curious that we are served relatively poorly in our lexicons for the fundamental emotional states. You can be wrathful, but is it significantly different from the primary emotion of anger? Then there are those feeling states that are borderline. Are fear or vengeance actual emotions? Is numbness the absence of emotion due to shutdown? Jacobean medical theories posited 4 basic feeling humours, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic. Are we little advanced in terms of our possible lexicon of feelings than this? So the direct approach to emotional intelligence renders little, well er 'joy'.

Writers only have words in their utility belts. Playwrights are supplemented in their words by the skills of the actor, in inflecting their words, in facial expressions, in other accentuating gestures. In that private susurration between novelist and internal reader, there is no facial expression unless described on the page. No gesture unless specified. And just as the playwright cannot put in every 'um' or 'er' to reflect 'real' speech patterns, the novelist cannot really append a description of a gesture or an expression to underscore every single penned line. The text would grind to a halt.

Emotional intelligence does not just derive from 'realistic' character. So much character analysis is akin to reductionist psychological types. I am not really interested in portraying character in this pre-determined, pre-set way. I am more after giving impressions of a character. Primarily through VOICE. How they express themselves, in thought or speech. Vocabulary, idiom, metaphors. I don't describe the physicality of my characters, but I believe you will have the fullest picture of them just through how they express themselves. How they view themselves and others. Theirs is the voice that must commune with the reader. If the reader is receptive to the seduction of a character's voice as written, then the emotional intelligence can flow between the two.

As said, all we have to construct this VOICE, are words on a page. But we have rhythms, lyricism, assonance and reverberation, to assist the reader's imaginative envisioning. Whether singly, or in combination, I am looking for words to throw up echoes over and above themselves. Maybe individual words that have opposite meanings, or different meaning shades, but both are suggested within the one usage. Or words that have deviated from their original root meanings. I honour puns and made up distortions of words, all as pieces in the mosaic I am after weaving. I yearn for word plosions inside the mind of the reader, dropping my cluster bombs of lexical bomblets, some of which will detonate, others which will lay dormant but little matter. I desire the literary equivalent of Mongolian overtone singing: whereby the larynx produce the normal harmonies, but the resonating anatomy of the throat region produce the overtones. I want to set in motion that same resonance within my audience. Lacking calcified bones, I only have the vibrations of words rubbing up against other words. The language is rich, but it is not just the extent of vocabulary. It is the relationship between the words, how they spark and sculpt one another.

Some of the above entails dense layering. You have to offer the reader a sporting chance, for us to take a joint victory lap with laurel wreaths cresting our unpinched brows. So I break up my sentences. Choppy. Staccato. The shrapnel of jagged thoughts, which after all are not linear in the human mind, even if dreary old grammar orders and arranges it so when set down in print. Within online writing communities, I am reproved for ungrammatical sentences and breaking the rules (!) Well I'll just have to take that on my chins. Like I say, can you enlighten me as to how human thought is syncopated? Sometimes nothing comes to mind despite our best efforts, other occasions see us overwhelmed in a flurry of thought sparked off by some catalyst. All coloured and tinted by our emotions.

Language, language, language. It all comes down to language. It is both our marble and our chisel. But to merely delight in words themselves is self-indulgent and limiting. There has to be content of worth through the words. I am interested in the world, the culture immediately around me. The hidden trends, the submerged power and status relations. I want to go under surface perceptions and skin deep analysis and challenge the reader with they way they may look at the world. Possibly make them re-evaluate their emotional take on certain things.

Emotional intelligence. It's what makes us human.

Pleasure, there's an emotion for you. I hope you are able to luxuriate in my words. To commune with my characters love 'em or hate 'em. And then scratch the dermatitic itch provoked by the themes of the novels.

I'll have a book out soon enough and if you're minded, you can judge for yourselves.

Sunday, 6 September 2009

Crazy Gulf (500 words story)

You make me feel this small...

My heart compacted knottily tight. Pounding, pounding. Pestle and mortar. Turning me inside out. Evacuating through the dimples and pores. Compressing my being, the flakes of my soul whittled away. Until only the multi-layered carcinoma of my heart remains. Shrivelled and tumescent simultaneously. Wound and wounded. My body has been shelled so I can present myself in the palm of your hand.

Here you come in my direction. Advancing upon me with your metal cane. Desultorily drop me to the ground. Cruelly beat me with just a single crisp metal thwack. Send me spinning, head over heels in repudiation. Now I have to shield my eyes, even as I tumble and fall. Inclining down the camber, being palpated all the way by plastic green blades. Not dissimilar to the presentation verdancy used by greengrocers to display their fruity wares. Only here I veer past a display globule of cement, no wait, from its faint linger of mint, I glean it's actually hardened chewing gum.

Having picked up angular speed, I encounter crashing off wooden banking with a convulsive dull, wooden thump. Propelling me further along through some gravelly grit, back on to the lumpen plastic green, replete with miniature protuberances not unlike mole hills. Scooting past, my nostrils tugged at by a sour acridity. With disgust I find myself hurtling through bird droppings. And suddenly the lights go out as a whirling windmill scoops me up in one of its sails. Arching up towards the sky, no quicker than the London Eye, but I dare not stare at the sun.

At the bottom of the downswing, the windmill expectorates me with an almost apologetic wheeze. I'm dribbling on, past insect husks and abandoned pollen pods, when all of a sudden I feel my abdomen drop from under me. Down a trapdoor in a wooden platform, I plummet through the porcelain walls of a narrow tube. Bruising and concussing as I am bounced from pillar to post.

Again I am ejected and hurled back into the light. But before I can catch breath, I sink down once again into a hole with a feeble splish. This time all motion is arrested. The walls of my confinement entirely enclosed. I can barely raise my breathing apparatus above the surface of the rank water. I appear to be ensconced in a tiny pothole. Before I can bemoan my fate, I am snatched up in long, slender fingers. Tips painted vermillion. It's her! With tender touch cupping me so gently. She holds me between the extreme margins of finger and thumb and wafts me through the air. The clinging droplets fly off me one by one and I can breathe again. She loves me, she loves me not. Triumph! The omens are ripe. She finishes drying me on a 'she loves me'. She has me in her heart after all.

She sets me down on some more of the bristly faux grass. She examines the foot of her cane. Averting my gaze from the imminent impact, I squint ahead of me to espy in the distance the form of a clown. Giant feet straddling the miniature sunken font in which I am to be baptised. Sinister smile on his paint-chipped wooden face. "I challenge you to land a hole in one between my legs" he seems to mouth. I feel the rush of air as the cane accelerates towards me...

Par for the course