Scene and Dialogue

This week we're adding onto the reading a bit while also catching up a little, practicing dialogue and scene, with an eye for setting.

Because where the action is unfolding has something to say about the characters and sometimes what and how they're saying it.

Take Junot Diaz's Nilda, for example. Where in the world is this happening? What do we know about the larger place? What about the smaller places, where the scenes unfold? What comes to mind without returning to the text? For me it's the basement, the couch, the street, the pool. I think of the toxic creek near the landfill. It all provides subtext about class, and class is linked to race, and both have something to do with Rafa's cancer and the way it plays out. Gender and sexuality, especially hyper-masculine posturing, is also a major part of this story.

How characters talk and speak to each other often is at the heart of scenes, though it's somewhat limited and minimal in Nilda. However, it's efficient. Sometimes less is more and we can really draw a lot from very little in terms of what people say and how they say it.

This week, in your journal, keep writing observations, and consider drawing from Anne Lamott's Index Cards chapter how you keep track of moments, scenes, bits of dialogue you may want to remember and/or use later. My best friend is a playwright, so mastering dialogue and the way people speak has been central to his development as a writer. When he was starting out, he often wore head phones while riding the train and being in other public places, but without playing music. He attuned himself to other people's conversations and wrote bits of them down--without them knowing. This may sound a little creepy, but it's actually a wonderful exercise for writers in learning how people actually talk and how voices are different and speak to character. If you can, eavesdrop on a conversation going on around you and write it down in your journal.

Another exercise: do Anne Lamott's practice on p.66 in the Dialogue chapter of putting two people on an elevator who can't stand each other, who want nothing more than to avoid each other, and make the elevator stop. What happens? What do they say? What do they do?

Alternatively, put two people with a different conflict in a different place. This can be from your memory, or made up entirely, or some mash up of drawn from memory and made up. Write the scene, with dialogue. And make sure you're formatting dialogue correctly. Check the stories in Scribner for guidance, but generally speaking, dialogue is captured in quotes, and each new line of dialogue or speech from a character begins on a new line, indented, with an attribution. A different character's response will appear in its own quotation marks, on a new line, indented.

The scene, in a particular place (setting) you describe, with dialogue, between two or more distinct characters, is what you'll submit for workshop next week. Minimum 500 words.

Your reading assignment for next week is Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" from Scribner, and it's full of distinct scenes and dialogue that indicates character (especially for the mom--not the difference between her speaking in English and thinking in her native tongue), so watch out for that.