The beauty of Big Time – and a dialogue request
I was going to talk dialogue this week, only then I noticed the date. The last Friday of August, a tipping point for the year. The last golden breath of summer. The last week of vacation, before:
- Return to school
- Blackberry collecting
- Apple scrumping
- Hello again to socks
- Hedges gather little jewels of purple and red (haws, sloes, damsons, crabapples, all of which are abundant near me)
- Tints of yellow in the leaves
- The long poles of cow parsley have dried out
I live rurally in the fine county of Oxford and – if you have the misfortune to live anywhere else at all – my experience of late summer and early autumn will be different from yours. So, I don’t know, if you live in Australia, you probably associate this season with even more massive spiders than usual, yellow dust storms that last a month, the croc vs kangaroo Olympics, and the chatter of wallabies high up in the eucalyptuses. (Disclosure: I have never been to Australia, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got the country nailed.)
Now we’re talking about time this week, but first a little announcement:
Dialogue
We’ll talk about dialogue next week, and we’ll do that via your own submissions.
Give me some chunks of dialogue to examine next week. Here are the rules:
- Drop your offerings into the comments below this post.
- Max 300 words per submission, please.
- One submission per person.
- Make sure you give us a line or two of explanation first off, so we can understand the context of your scene.
- Don’t email me anything. If it ain’t on Townhouse, I ain’t looking at it.
- If you pop anything in the comments below, I’m gonna assume you’re OK me RIPPING YOUR WORK APART MERCILESSLY IN PUBLIC. If you’re not, then keep your tin hat on and your head below that sandbag parapet.
- Specifically, your work and my comments on it may appear in an email to a lot of people, here on Townhouse and potentially one day in a book. If you don’t want that happen, then please see above in relation to tin hats and parapets.
I only pick work that I basically like, though, so if I pick your work, you’re doing OK.
Okiedoke …
Now back to time:
Movies struggle with Big Time. They can do day to day stuff easily. We see a character going to bed. We see them eating a croissant and drinking coffee. The audience easily conjectures that this is the morning after. Boof.
But Big Time? For movies, that’s hard. The old Hitchcock era movies used to handle those things by pages flipping off a wall calendar, shots of the changing seasons. (Wind! The universal signal of autumn. Snow! The universal signal of winter. And so on.)
Now all that’s a bit crass, a bit heavy. These days, movie makers attempt something slicker, even if it’s just a caption at the bottom of the screen or a speeded-up, CGI of the wind-snow-crocuses model of passing time.
You, a novelist, don’t have the same problem. If you want to tell the reader it was two years later, you can just say “Two years passed.” That’s simple, clean narration. It doesn’t have that CGI, calendar flying clunkiness. No one will resent your simple captioning.
But time offers so much more. It’s not a problem to be dealt with, but a dimension to be embraced. Think of it like place, a silent character, a huge extra richness in your broth.
Here are some examples of how you can use it – but there are a million more. Think of these examples as mere appetite prompters.
Cold Time
Changes in weather is a technique so obvious, it could come close to a flipping calendar in terms of crassness. But it really doesn’t have to be like that. The novel of mine that made most use of the weather was Love Story, with Murders. There, I carefully seeded the earlier chunks of the book with hints of chill and forecasts of something much colder on the way.
Then, before the cold had actually arrived, my character was fussing around with giant red snow shovels and the like, but in a context where those things felt odd and out of place.
Then – the snow arrived. Canadian levels of snow and cold in a country that doesn’t normally get much of either. The snow wrought huge changes in the landscape, but also in Fiona’s life.
Alone in a remote cottage with inadequate provisions, she is forced to adapt her diet:
Make tea. There’s nothing herbal here, so I make do with a regular tea-bag. No milk either, so just brew a pint of hot, black tea in a huge pottery mug. Contrary to my usual habit, I add sugar, to take away the taste of the metallic mountain water, the strongly tannined tea. It tastes like sweetened bog-water, but is nevertheless somehow welcome. A comfort against the cold.
That’s not strictly about either weather or time, and yet it is both. By compelling us to register change, we notice both the cold and the time. And those changes register not just in feelings-of-being-chilly and making-of-log-fires, but also in unexpected ways – earthenware cups and sweet, tannined tea. Time and the cold become multidimensional: they disrupt habits, force giant earthenware cups into our hands, change the taste of tea.
And then, of course, time and the story proceed.
Fiona almost dies in the cold. And then the snow melts, and she encounters her normal landscape, post-snow with its dirty urban water and gritted streets.
Because the changes of weather were viscerally felt by the character herself, the timescape in the book also registered acutely. And the felt passage of time is so close to the actual experience of story, the reader ends up having a deeper experience than they otherwise would. It’s kind of magical, but it definitely happens.
Big Time
My Lieutenant’s Lover began a love story in St Petersburg in 1917 – separated the characters for a quarter of a century – then brought them together again in post-War Berlin.
Any love story needs to achieve the ache of longing, and there are probably more subtle techniques than the one I used. But dropping two world wars, one revolution, plenty of gulag, and a thousand miles of separation between the two characters certainly did the trick. A character only had to glance back over that past – a sentence, two sentences – for the reader to feel the scale of the loss and the longing.
And all those little markers of age – an attractive seventeen-year-old girl turning into a middle-aged Red Army sergeant – made that weight of time present on every page
Also, my choice of time and place meant that the physical world always reflected the passage of time. The Berlin of my love story was a place of rubble. The factory that had once belonged to my male protagonist was so completely bombed out that virtually nothing remained. A youth using its slim remaining shelter christened it the Nichtsfabrik, the Nothing Factory.
That book with its huge, tragic timescape, just felt big to a reader. It wasn’t (by my standards) massively long, but the love story took on an epic quality simply by virtue of the passing years – and the weight with which the readers felt those years.
Precise Time
One of my books, some time back, was struggling in its near-to-final draft. Everything that needed to be there was there. The story had no fundamental problems, but it didn’t yet have the iron hardness of something ready to print.
A couple of things fixed that book. One was just hard editing. Literally, an edit that looked for and deleted spare words, eliminated unwanted sentences. My character’s voice is always taut, even if my writing’s only at 95%. But that extra 5% brought that tautness to a line of constant tension. A glittering brightness.
But the other thing was: nailing the timeline. Figuring out if the gap between Event A and Event B was four days or five days and being explicit about it. The surprising thing about correcting that timeline was that I’d unconsciously been avoiding proper description, because I knew I was blurry about time. So if my character was out and about in central Cardiff, and I didn’t know what day of the week it was, I’d pull back from really describing the streets. A Wednesday quietness? Or a Saturday bustle? The hubbub of a rugby match at the Millennium Stadium? Or pensioners enjoying a discounted Thursday morning haircut?
The precision of timing didn’t just help my readers sort timings through in their heads. More important, it helped me. That last twist of the lens helped achieve that final, defining focus.
That book turned out a good ’un in the end.
***
That’s it from me. The blackberries are early this year, but not sweet. I think we need a day or two of sunshine. Which, oh my merry non-British friends, is something you can completely and utterly rely on in the fine county of Oxford.
Don’t forget I want to see your dialogue snippets. Chuck em below. Follow them thar rules above.
Thanks Keith.
MG Contemporary. Persephone (11) and Gwyn (6) have been home alone and frightened for two days since their mother overdosed on pills and their father rushed her to the emergency room. It’s early morning, and Dad has just returned:
“Dad!” I shouted, and threw myself at him head-first, almost toppling his motorcycle. Gwyn ran out after me, bare feet, underwear, and all.
Dad flinched as I threw my arms around his waist, then gave me a stiff, one-armed hug of his own. “Hey kid,” he said simply.
“Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” Gwyn exclaimed, glomming onto the hug behind me. “Did you bring us any presents?”
It was a tacky question. “How’s Mom?” I asked.
“She’s good,” he said, twisting his key from the ignition. “She’s resting.”
“When will she come home?” I asked.
Dad extracted himself from my hug to climb off his motorcycle. Gwyn latched onto him as he stepped free.
“Not for a little while,” he said. “The doctor is keeping her a few more days.”
“Can we visit her?” I said.
“Does she have a cast?” Gwyn asked.
I shot her a glare. “Why would Mom have a cast?”
She ignored my look. “So we can sign it. People get casts in hospitals.”
Dad let our argument wash over him.
“Girls,” he said, “I need to crash. I haven’t slept much. Let’s talk more later.” He pulled himself completely free of us and entered the house. We followed.
“No presents?” Gwyn demanded.
“Is everything okay?” I asked at the same time.
“Later,” Dad said wearily. He crossed the room, only pausing to drop his jacket and helmet on the floor.
“Presents!” Gwyn whined. I shushed her. We listened to Dad’s heavy tread moving up the stairs. I sat down on the couch, deflated.
“Oh, Persephone?” Dad called down from the floor above. “I forgot to tell you –”
My spirits rose. “Yeah Dad?”
“Can you move the motorcycle inside? It might rain.” The bedroom door closed and locked behind him. With that, Dad was gone again.
I hope this doesn’t post twice! My first attempt at posting anything and I don’t think it worked, so trying again. This is from my first murder mystery, Hot Desking, set in a white collar office. Final edits are in process now. Helen and Sacha are work friends. Helen worked late and left something on Sacha’s desk. He returned, drunk, and surprised Helen in his office. She learns that he has been secretly sleeping under his desk.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Helen put her hands on his arms, steadied him.
“It’s all gone. And I don’t even know why.”
“Shh. It’s going to be okay.” Helen rubbed his arms. “Let me get you home. I’ll call a cab.”
“No need.” Sacha stepped back and dropped the document and empty wine bottle to the floor where it rolled on the carpet. He wiped his eyes with his shirt sleeve. His face was set with concentration as he turned to the cabinet in his office. Helen watched as he took out a thin mattress, unrolled it and loosened the valve.
“What are you doing?”
“Making my bed.” He kicked his chair away and placed the mattress under his desk. “You’re in my bedroom and I need to go to sleep. Gotta get up early.”
Sacha pulled out a sleeping bag and pillow and arranged them over the mattress. He stood and unbuttoned his shirt.
“You’re going to sleep here?”
“I sleep here every night. Almost a year now.”
“What? Why? Why on earth?”
“Only two ways to pay off debt. Make more money or cut your expenses. I cut mine to nothing. No mortgage, no car, no nothing.” Sacha threw his shirt in a desk drawer, unbuckled his belt and stripped to his underwear.
“I put my pay cheque to my debt.” He saw another bottle of wine, not quite empty, in the drawer and grabbed it. He unscrewed the top, downed what was left then gagged. “Jesus, gone to vinegar.” He braced an arm against his desk then folded himself onto his sleeping bag clutching the empty bottle to his chest. “Oh boy. Shouldn’t have drunk that.”
Hello Harry,
I hope this is not too long.
He lifted his eyes to meet Katia’s once more and hesitantly spoke, “Katia, would you give life another chance? Would you….grant me…another chance? To start anew?”
Her lips quivered, making both him and Fyodor look at her expectantly.
“What about your partner?”
Amadu grinned at Katia and pestered to ease the ongoing tension between them.
“Females, Fyodor, my son, let me give you a piece of valuable advice, a female will never tolerate you talking about another if she is interested in you. She can forget everything, your sufferings, but still focuses on this other woman.”
Katia freed her hands from Amadu’s grip and hit him on his forearm mockingly, making him laugh wholeheartedly while Fyodor groaned.
Amadu took back her hands in his.
“I was joking. Fyodor, a woman as beautiful as your mother, will never think of doing wrong to another. And a woman who does not love you will never be concerned if there is someone else in your life, for she wants for you to make a decision that will make you happy. Katia, my partner, her name was Lisa, and she was just my colleague. Know this is not easy for me to talk about,” Amadu sighed.
“Hey, you don’t have to, Amadu. It’s not that I don’t trust you. But I want you to make a decision. Why would you want me back after all that my father did to you?” Katia comforted Amadu.
Raising his voice at Katia belittling herself, he clarified the matter, “Katia, don’t you ever blame yourself for the wrongdoings of your father, alright. Listen to me, you came here for me when everyone else betrayed me. You proved your love to me once more. If there is anyone else to be blamed, then it’s me for not trying harder. I could have reached you as well once my life here was settled. But I didn’t, thinking you were better off without me. Katia, after I came here, I never forgot you. But coming back in your life would have meant more sufferings for you. At that time, I was gaining quite an attention by the hospital faculty where I was working. Lisa Johnson was my colleague. And all I can say is that she never loved me. She lured me into having all of my hard-earned money transferred to her name. I was weak. I had lost you. You were my everything. I was incomplete without you. So without thinking twice, I obliged to her greed. But when everything came crumbling down on me, she left. Like every other person in my life, she backed out. I still remember her words of rejection. I became a disgrace, a shame, and an insult to her and the profession.”
A tear rolled down Amadu’s cheek that Katia was quick to wipe. She placed her fingers tenderly underneath his chin and lifted his gaze to meet hers. He leaned under her hold closing his eyes. Stifling back her own tears, she told him that she believed him.
“Amadu, you don’t have to do this to yourself. Here is no one who needs to validate your justification. It’s your son and me, and we don’t need for you to prove your words to us.”
“Yes dad, please don’t hurt yourself.”
“No, I’m not hurting myself. In fact, by sharing this with the two of you, I feel like I’m sharing my burden. Let me pour my heart to you.”
I’m a first time writer and this is an extract from my first ever book.
I trudged absent-mindedly to my office, still in shock from what Damien said, and sank into my chair. Glancing at the clock, I reckoned that I had only twenty minutes left before I meet the retail owner so I did the next important thing. Call Maddie.
She had to also be on her break too so I knew she would answer on the first thing and fortunately, she did.
“What’s up Raelyn?” Her cheery voice echoed through the line.
“Well, I just had a weird chat with Damien,” I began and started fiddling with the hem of my grey blazer.
“What? Did he propose or something?” She guessed and I chuckled quietly.
Imagine that.
“No no, none of that but he said he… missed me,” I revealed at last and there was silence on the other end.
“Are you sure Rae, you didn’t hear it wrong?” She asked and I recalled the moment. He did say that I couldn’t have imagined it.
“I’m sure Maddy, I- I thought after breaking up with him he would hate me but I don’t know anymore and if his parents find out, they’ll probably do something and I’ve just found out that someone’s trying to get Damien fired and this is all just messed up!” I rambled on and let out a frustrated breath after finishing my rant. Tears were starting to brim at the edge of my eyes and I balled my fist tightly to try not to cry.
“Woah Raelyn, slow down. Maybe we should meet or something? Text me after you’re finished and we’ll set something and remember to take deep breaths and focus on one thing at a time or else you’ll know what will happen. You’re still taking the tablets right?”
“Yeah, I am” I mumbled even though I hadn’t been using them for almost a month now. I hated the way they made me feel.
“Talk to your doctor too probably and sorry, I have to go now but we’ll talk later ok?” She added before ending the call.
“Bye then” I whispered and stared at my lap dismally. I was also trying to avoid meeting my doctor too.
Well Harry, seeing as you’ve dived into an Australian vibe – Spiders an all (we have rather large harmless and lovable spiders here called Huntsmen)…
My piece ‘Artifice’
‘Careful! A massive spider. Just there on the register! Watch it!’
‘Is that everything? You know the 200 pack aluminium screws are on special.’
‘Shit. It’s moving. I can kill it. Do you want me to kill it? I’ll kill it.’
‘Depends what you’re building though. The steel ones are fine for everyday projects.’
‘What can I use? To hit it. You got something there?’
‘A decking perhaps? Stainless steel – good choice for decks.’
‘I might be able to reach…just step back a bit. Oh..oh..it’s moving again!’
‘And copper’s best for coastal areas – doesn’t corrode. It’s an artifice you know.’
‘If you just shift… Sorry, what?’
‘Fear of spiders and stuff. We’re mimics of other people’s fear; it’s not real fear though. It’s not based on anything.’
‘Ummm…I think you’ll find spiders freak a lot of people out. And…they’re dangerous. Well, some of them are. I guess…a few of them anyway…two at least…that I can think of.’
‘Are you pre-drilling holes at all? You might need drill bits. It’s a Huntsman. They come in when it’s wet. They stalk their prey at night when we’re asleep.’
‘Oh God. Are you serious?’
‘And maybe some bolts? Well, they’re not hunting us. If you think about it, that’s actually impossible. They eat insects and they dine out on cockroaches. They’re like little hairy after-hours cleaners. At no cost of course.’
‘Just the cost of my sanity. The thought of them crawling all around the house while I’m asleep…Uhhh. Do they ever…?’
‘Actually, they’re quite scared of us, but with some gentle handling…see…you just position your hand here…and here – behind them…and… coax them forward onto your hand. There. See?’
‘Careful! Careful! It might run up your arm.’
‘It might. If I stay still, she probably won’t move. Would you like to hold her?’
‘I’m fine. Thanks. Really. Can I swap these screws if they’re not quite right?’
This is from the first chapter of my middle grade novel “The Magic Beach Hut”. Jake and his family have decided to check out of their ghastly guest house after only one night. (Spoiler alert, the holiday gets much better after this.):
Dad rang the bell nervously. We waited for what seemed like ages, then he rang it again. Mrs Macaroon appeared immediately.
“Don’t be so impatient,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” muttered Dad, looking at his feet. “We’d, erm, like to check out please.”
“You’re booked in until Saturday,” Mrs Macaroon barked.
“Yes I know, I’m sorry but, erm, something came up.”
“I’ll have to charge you a supplement,” she said. “I can’t let that room to anyone else this week now.”
“Oh, of course,” said Dad.
“So that comes to one hundred and forty pounds and fifty seven pence.”
“What?” exclaimed Dad. “We’ve only been here one night! Sixty pounds a night the brochure said.”
“There’s the early cancellation charge,” said Mrs Macaroon indignantly. “There’s the towel hire, you used FOUR towels!” She said this as if it were a serious crime.
“But surely use of towels is included,” said Dad.
“They don’t launder themselves,” the old lady huffed. “Then there’s the excess paper use.”
“Now I really have no idea what you are talking about,” said Dad.
“You used FOURTEEN sheets of toilet paper,” said Mrs Macaroon with that same indignation. “And of course breakfast.”
“Breakfast is definitely included in the sixty pounds,” Dad said confidently. “It’s very clear in your brochure. ‘Bed and breakfast’ it says.”
“It doesn’t say you can have ketchup AND brown sauce,” said Mrs Macaroon, and she pointed a bony finger at me accusingly. I shuddered and took a small step backwards.
The setting is a girls’ boarding school in England during the interwar period. Someone has been stealing things from one of the pupils, Sophie Harris. Sophie resolves to tell her teacher about it.
‘Miss Harris,’ she says. Her eyes are large and dark. Her hair is a nut-brown cap. ‘Is something the matter?’
My mouth feels stiff and dry but I force it to move. ‘Something’s been taken from my room.’
A slight crease appears between her eyes. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ I wait for her to say more but she doesn’t.
‘A bottle of perfume,’ I say. ‘And before that an enamel badge. There were two of them, a pair of white cats, one with a pink bowtie and one with a blue bowtie, but the blue one has gone. And also my umbrella. Pale grey with flowers on, with a pink handle.’ I don’t tell her about the lipstick, even though it was expensive and new, because we aren’t supposed to have lipstick.
‘How terrible.’ She looks genuinely pained. ‘You must be most upset.’
‘Yes.’ I picture my mother choosing the perfume and carefully wrapping it in paper and placing it under the Christmas tree, and my chest tightens. I keep expecting Mrs King to sit down, to invite me to do the same, but she goes on standing. My eyes wander to a framed photograph on the dresser, a picture of a man in uniform that I realise must be Mr King, and for a moment I forget what I am about to say because Mr King looks just like Father. The expression on his face, the way he stands, even the way his hair has been parted.
‘Do you have any idea who might have taken your things?’
‘Yes,’ I say quietly. The sky has filmed over and the flecks of water on the glass look like pins. ‘I saw someone coming out of my room. Yesterday.’ I look Mrs King in the eyes.
This scene focuses on a conversation between two inpatients in a mental health hospital.
I didn’t know what to say and blurted out the first thing that came to my mind, jokingly asking,
‘Do you ever feel like you’re a deranged caterpillar forbidden to turn into a butterfly, condemned to wallow in the misery of knowing that the one thing you cherish and need from life just isn’t there?’
Amy shook her head, noting, albeit endearingly,
‘You’re weird. Cute, but weird. And yeah, I agree with your freakishly bizarre metaphor given our current existence is pretty much that of a partly dead larva. But I feel more like being in one of those cult zombie movies from the ‘60s, you know, ‘Night of the Living Dead?’ We’re terrified, sitting in an abandoned farmhouse and the zombies surrounding us are rabidly gorging on the living.’
Laughing, I replied,
‘Your zombie anecdote is much odder than my freakishly bizarre metaphor.’
Again, Amy shook her head, proclaiming,
‘No, it isn’t. And anyway, mine is an allegory, not an anecdote.’
I answered, unabashedly,
‘Allegory? Nah., It was merely anecdotal.’
She replied, not being able to suppress a smile,
‘It wasn’t a fucking anecdote. It was a legitimate allegory.’
I was absorbed in the conversation and spoke, sarcastically,
‘Well. Ok. But where’s the allegory part? Please explain.’
Amy answered,
‘The allegorical device uses zombies to depict normal people in the outside world, feasting on the remains of each other’s critical thinking ability. The farmhouse represents the hospital. It’s the inpatients overarching self-awareness that we aren’t zombies keeping us safe and alive. We’re the normal ones. Right? So, that’s an allegory.’
Somewhat convinced, I resolved to keep the joke going,
‘We need a dictionary. At the most, that’s another freakishly bizarre metaphor.’
Adriana Hirtescu
Joseph is an army veteran who got out recently and is now doing a diving course in his vacation in Mexico. Andrea, the diving instructor asks a few standard questions to get to know her student.
‘ How is your fitness level’ asks Andrea for starters.
‘I think as good as can be expected. I got out of the army recently, after a 6 years contract’ replies Joseph.
‘Well I think that makes you more than qualified for the course, then’ says Andrea with a touch of surprise in her voice. ‘How old were you when you got into the army’ asks Andreea next.
‘I was only eighteen then, I’m twenty seven now’ comes Joseph’s swift answer.
‘Wow, that was rather early, what made you choose the army at that age?’ continues Andrea on her line of questiong to asses her student’s mental capacity and structure of judgement.
‘There are good benefits like money and free education, plus the experience, training and discipline that comes with it and can build up a person’s character’ comes again Joseph’s smart answer.
‘Or could be the experience and the hazards that ruins a person’s life’ clearly Andreea is not very convinced army is the best choice for a young man.
‘Well, it can go both ways, it could go really wrong, or you could be one of the lucky few that makes it and has a great few experiences to share or a story to tell’ Joseph is confident in his choice being the best at that time.
‘Why did you do only 6 years then?’ insists Andreea on the same subject.
‘6 years is enough, I did my fair share of army service and duty, I wanted to move on to other things’ replies Joseph calm and reassuring.