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.
NOTE: 15 year old Jamie Fletcher has run away from his foster parent’s home and has slept the night on the verandah of a park pavilion which he shared with Charlie, an elderly homeless person. Jamie is starting to be controlled by an alternative character which has now developed into a speaking voice.
‘When did this other voice start?’
‘After I crashed the bike, before that it was just thoughts inside my head.’
‘How’s the chocolate bar?’
‘Er, it’s good, I suppose,’ I take another bite, even though I’ve still got some in my mouth, just to show I like it.
‘How’s life at home?’
Now I can’t speak, my mouth is too full, I chew fast and swallow as much as I can.
‘Er, OK, until the police came.’
‘About the bike?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s when you lied, about it being stolen?’
‘They’re coming back! Today, it’s today. That’s why I ran, we ran, he told me to run. We went into town, found this place. Janice’ll be worried. Why did I do it? It’s worse now that I’ve run away, I’ll be in big trouble.’
Now I’m standing. I want to run; where to? Which way? I turn around and around.
‘Stop it you sniveling idiot, you’re losing it; we need to go.’
‘Jamie, sit down,’ says Charlie, putting a hand on my shoulder.
Then it went black. I feel as if I’m floating – I feel something holding me, I struggle. Next thing I know I’m sitting on the bench.
‘Calm down Jamie, it’s OK, relax,’ it’s Charlie’s voice.
I stare at the trees. Charlie’s sitting next to me holding a cup of water.
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘You tried to hit me, or your other voice did. It spoke before you took a swing.’
I stare at his face. I see no cuts, no bruises, no swollen lip; just wisdom, knowledge and experience.
‘I missed then?’ I ask.
‘I stopped you. I had to grab you, pin your arms down, you struggled a bit.’
‘I feel tired.’
‘You need to go home and face up to what you’ve done.’
I played with the sand using my legs when I realized that someone was approaching me from behind. I was so sure it was father, that when a stranger showed up beside me, I couldn’t hide my disappointment.
But something was strange with that man, his attire, and the feeling he was giving me was………. “danger”. The same feeling that my brother once told me will encounter me.
He must have noticed because of a smirk formed on his lips. “Were you expecting someone else, love?”
That word…..”LOVE”……. I HATED IT! It was disgusting. He was suspicious of some of the other reasons. Why would he even talk to me, I didn’t know him. I looked him over from head to foot, taking in his appearance, remembering how many times father and brother told me not to talk to strangers.
The first thing I took notice of was how his brown eyes were about a few shades brighter than any I’d ever seen before. And then his black but casual attire. He was way taller than me, lean and well build body, reminded me of my beloved Advik but he was way much eye-catching then big brother.
That disgusting confident smirk didn’t leave his face even for a moment. If he kept on offending me like that I was pretty sure to punch his nose. So I looked away.
“Big mistake.”
But, he didn’t leave the sight of my face even for a moment and kept staring like a hawk. He then himself said after getting exhausted because of the awkward silence, ” Like what you see?”
I frowned, annoyed by his arrogance, “A bit full of yourself, aren’t you?” But didn’t meet his eyes, I kept looking at the horizon where the sun had almost set.
He stepped forward, closer to me, I gave him the scariest glare he would have ever seen.
” Whatever,” was his oh-so-brilliant comeback. With a pause, he said, “Don’t judge the book by it cover, “
I raised a brow at him, ” And I judged you as? ”
“Some kind of EVIL! Who will….” He said in a scary tone. And then grinned at me without completing the sentence.
I waited for him to say something or the other to knock away the thought that was running in my mind but unfortunately, he didn’t. So I let out the thought that was sprinting in and out. “Rape….” I smirked at him, the look on his face was beyond shock. “You think you can?” And that’s when he came back to senses and stared at me with coldness, I can’t say that look didn’t give me anxiety but I didn’t want to show him that the stare sends a shock straight down my spine. So the cleverest thing I did was, removed the packet on chewing gum from the back pocket and started chewing it, that calmed me down too.
He then struggled with his long frizzy hair which was about his shoulder level and tide them in a bun, all of this I watched only from the point side of my eye. I didn’t let the slit smirk on my face to fade away it was only the way to show him I was not afraid of him.
The following dialogue is from the novel, The Diary of Sacco and Vanzetti, qbout the famous Sacco-Vanzetti case that rocked Boston and the world from 1920 – ’27. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was an anarchist charged with murder. Lois Rantoul was a Boston Brahmin who volunteered to teach him English so he could defend himself in the courtroom.
“My name is Barto.”
“Of course it is. I like to play with peoples’ names. People I feel close to. You’re Bartoo and the guard is Chuckles,” she giggled.
I fail to see the humor in this. Perhaps its an example of Boston Brahmin silliness run amuck.
“What else did you and Virginia study, Bartoo.” She fished in her Italian bag for something.
“We discuss Shelley.”
“Percy Bysshe Shelley?”
“You know his poetry?”
“Do I know his poetry?! I practically sleep with his poetry and if he were alive today, I’d sleep with him. Which poem did you and Ginny discuss?”
“The Masque of Anarchy.”
“No, don’t tell me, Bartoo! That poem turns me into a wild woman. It makes me absolutely orgasmic! What’s the word for orgasm in Italian?”
I was a little afraid of the consequences, but I answered anyway, “Orgasmo.”
“Orgasmo! Oh my god, I love it. Mr. Vanzetti, you should be teaching me Italian!”
“Mrs Rantoul, I did not create the language.”
“Oh but you speak it so beautifully. I want to get inside that head of yours. Tell me your most cogent thoughts about The Masque of Anarchy!”
“Sorry, but the whole thing is a disaster. Yes, the words are beautiful, but the logic is all wrong. Now I see he was nothing but a fake and a charlatan. An upper class charlatan!”
She took my face in her hands. “You darling man, no one has ever challenged me on this poem. No one!. Beat me with your intellect, Bartoo. Beat me until I’m black and blue. Force me to look Shelley in the eye and say, ‘You Charlatan Percy Bysshe Shelley. You fake, you imposter, you degenerate, you whore monger! But I don’t think you can do it, Bartoo. Prove me wrong.”
From Order of the Raven (self-published):
In this scene, our trio, Connie (protagonist) who has just had a head injury treated by an unknown stranger, Gertrude Bell (yes, that Gertrude Bell), and a boy with amnesia, have come together at Gisborough Priory as a result of a strange, time-shifting fog, which has thrown each of them out of their respective times. They have just seen someone, who Bell, being the oldest and most experienced in exploration and adventure, has decided they must follow in order to work out how they will get home.
‘Bring the boy. I shall get Manāt. We’ll need to follow this stranger.’
‘Why?’
‘To ascertain our current situation, Connie. We do not know the year, season or whether we’ll soon be in our respective homes. Nor do we know if your erstwhile nursemaid is still roaming the woods. It’s time we took charge of the situation. Quickly, before we lose our opportunity to trail them.’ [Bell] strode off into the mist, tucking stray strands of hair under her floppy hat, her skirts swirling about her legs.
‘Where is she going?’ the boy asked, coming up beside Connie.
‘She’s gone to get her horse. She thinks there’s someone we need to follow. Come on.’ Connie set off across the courtyard.
‘It’s not Crispin Tocketts, is it?’
Connie turned. The boy was standing, half-hidden behind the cloister pillar, his eyes wide. She frowned at him. ‘Is that someone you go to school with?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Then who is he?’ Connie asked, concerned.
‘They said he was a cobbler.’
‘Ok,’ Connie said, uncertainly. She walked back toward the boy. He was shaking. ‘Why are you frightened of someone who was a cobbler?’
‘I’m not. I’m frightened of who Crispin Tocketts finds in the priory.’ The boy gulped.
‘Who does he find?’
‘Connie, we need to go.’ Bell had reappeared in the cloister entrance. In her hands were Manāt’s reins. The horse’s head was just visible behind her. ‘Our stranger is making toward the wood. Precisely where we met our young friend here. It’s too much a coincidence. We need to follow. Hurry.’
‘In a moment, he’s frightened,’ Connie said, not turning her head and not entirely agreeing with Bell’s summation of the situation. It could be entirely coincidental. She crouched down in front of the boy, ‘Who does he find?’
The boy gulped again. ‘He finds the Devil.’
(Malakai and Mihr work with a magical organization that hunts down magical criminals criminals. One criminal crossed into the wastelands (basically a tundra) so the duo got help from a local guide. Magic is a contagious disease that half of the population has.)
—————————-
“Well then what are ya? ‘Cause you sure ain’t healthy. Not if I gots to worry about catching whatever you two got.” Alfred huffs, lingering behind Malakai. His horse is an old thing, white with mottled brown and she has a third eye, right below her left eye. Fishing accident Alfred said when Malakai had inquired.
It says something that people have grown used to the magic that it’s thought of as normal if their pet does something extraordinary. Given, going by Alfred it only goes to animals. Not so much people. “Your horse also has the disease.” Mihr pipes up.
“Yeah, but she ain’t make me sign a form saying I’m gonna die from it. And I ain’t ever got sick from her and I’ve had her since the whole disease shit popped up.”
“How do we even know if we’re near the Nile?” Malakai asks.
“The strand animals are infected with has been proven to have some slight mutations that do not infect humans.” Mihr’s voice is lofty and self-important. As if he knows all the answers.
“See? Ain’t the same damn thing.” Alfred snorts, and a moment later he’s riding right next to Malakai as Mihr’s horse treks slowly behind them.
“So,” Malakai starts, eyeing the man and praying to any Godling that will listen that Mihr will drop it. “the Nile?”
“Fundamentally, it is the same thing.” Mihr likes to be a contrary ass and Malakai despises him. Even more than Ghost who still is, well. A ghost. Nonexistent. The wastelands seem untouched just like that alley, not a single trail outside of the hint of magic floating in the air.
Magic that is undoubtedly hours old and the wind picked it up and threw them off course.
“Are we at least near any of the frequent trails?” Malakai tries again.
Context: It’s 1956 and Jancis has returned to her childhood home in the Welsh/English hills to wait out the last month of her pregnancy. She is not married, and her religious half-brother has just arrived to see her, the first time they have met for three years.
‘Evan Griffiths came to see me last night. Told me what condition you were in. Said you were back to stay.’
‘‘I didn’t tell him I was here to stay. I didn’t say anything much to him apart from asking him to stop at Price’s. For all he knows, I might be packing the place up to sell.’
That stopped him. He’d been clenching and releasing his fists, and now they stilled, as if every part of him was listening. ‘Sell?’
‘Maybe. Who knows? It’s an option.’
‘Do you need money?’ He pointed at my stomach, and I took a step backwards as if he’d touched me. I was aware that my jacket had parted, that my nightdress was one from my new life, nylon and frilled and knee length. It was probably the first time Ivor had seen anything like it close up.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘But – selling?’
‘It’s my house.’
‘I’m well aware of that.’ His voice was pinched and tight.
‘You knew about the will. You always have.’
He said nothing.
‘Surely you hadn’t expected that she’d changed it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Her view was that you had Ravensrise and all the land, I’d have this. I thought you’d always agreed with that.’
‘And the cottages.’ His words forced out through almost closed teeth as if he had tried to capture them, to avoid their betrayal. ‘You got the cottages in the village too. Should have been one each. To be fair.’
‘I’ll give you one then.’
‘Don’t be childish.’
‘I’m not – which one do you want? Welsh Cottage or English Cottage? Pick a country.’
‘Sounds as if you need it more’n me.’
The range had expired in the night and I turned from him to begin laying a new fire. ‘Why have you come, Ivor?’
Context: When his father dies in 1829, Tom at age 12 is forced to go to work at Mr. Gardner’s shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland. His mentor is an old black laborer named George Roberts, who sailed under Thomas Boyle, a famous privateer captain, in the War of 1812.
___________________________
Tom caught up with Old George near the blacksmith shop. Pointing to his favorite ship, he asked, “What do you think about that one? Can you tell what she’s goin’ to be used for?”
“Well, let’s see,” the old man replied. “For sure she ain’t designed for privateerin’, or for the revenue service neither, since she’s too light to carry much in the way of guns. On t’other hand, aside from the light frames, her hull has pretty much the look of privateers they built here in the war, meanin’ she’ll be a fast sailer when she’s close-hauled, and go like greased lightnin’ on a beam reach.
“Her deck’s wide and there ain’t a lot of gear to trip over. Her rig is simple, so they want her to be handled by a small crew. Without a lot of top-hamper her masts’ll be hard to spot from a distance. In a pinch they can even strike the upper yards and topmasts, meanin’ she can hide anyplace they’s trees to get behind. I’d say they plan for her to be goin’ into places she shouldn’t, and runnin’ away from anybody that objects to her bein’ in those places.”
He paused to spit some tobacco juice and concluded, “That tells me she’ll be carryin’ contraband cargo or slaves — prob’ly slaves. You know, they tried usin’ left-over privateers as slavers at the end of the war, but fightin’ ships wasn’t designed for that job. Small hold, heavy frames, too expensive. But these ones is perfect.”
“Jehoshaphat,” Tom exclaimed. “They brung your folks as slaves, don’t it worry you to be workin’ on ships that’ll be used to go and bring more of ‘em?”
“It does some. But on t’other hand this be honest work, and I got a family to feed.”
From The Responsibility of the Optimist, a picaresque historical about a whistleblower agency in the first half of the 20th century.
A country estate in West Sussex. A wild goose chase tracking down a one-armed man feeding grass to a prize pig is resolved.
Plum took on a barrister’s voice; polite, friendly, but detached. “You said that a one-armed man was walking away from the piggery as you approached and that Lady X1V was eating grass when you got there. Is that right, Frederick?”
Piggie nodded vigorously.
“Is it possible that the one-armed man was walking by the piggery as opposed to walking away from it? ”
“He wasn’t jumping on a pogo stick, my dear chap, he was walking. Wonderful thing, the pogo stick,” Piggie told his stepson. “You must try it.”
“Is it possible,” Plum suggested, “that the one-armed man you saw walking by did not put grass in the piggery?”
“There was grass. There was a one-armed man.” Piggie shrugged as if the conclusion was obvious.
“Is it possible,” Plum said, now sounding like a barrister closing in for the kill, “that the fact there was grass in the piggery, and the fact that a one-armed man walked by at the same time you noticed said grass, could be a confluence of events that came together by virtue of your noticing them, as opposed to the former having been deposited by the latter?”
“Ha!” Piggie said. “You’re the writer chap!”
There was a discreet cough and everyone turned to see Seppings, the butler, standing behind them. “The Chancellor of the Exchequer is in the dining room, M’aam.”
“Excuse me?” Mary asked.
“He says the Chancellor of the Exchequer is in the dining room, Mary,” Piggie said.
Mary headed back to the house. “I am terminating the search for the grass offender, Frederick,” she said over her shoulder.
Piggie shouted, “Would you like to go for a pogo later, Bean? I’ve got two in case one breaks!”
From the Prologue of ‘The Light of Kautokeino’ (stage: first draft).
Context: December, on the vast Finnmark tundra in Northern Norway. Three ‘thugs’ have kidnapped and raped a well-known female PR professional to ‘shake her up’ and discourage her support of the local indigenous Sami population. They are about to leave her for dead.
This is from my novel, Whisper of the Lotus, and is a conversation on Skype between my protagonist, Charlotte, and her mother, who has been a challenge for a long time. Charlotte has finally plucked up the courage to confront her about a situation which happened in the past (the first voice is the mother):
‘Oh. It’s you. I just got up.’ she yawned widely. ‘What time is it?’
‘Three o’clock in the afternoon. It’s six hours later here, remember?’
Her mother ran a shaky hand through her long hair, eyes darting to a spot beyond the screen. ‘Is there a reason you’re calling at this unreasonable hour?’
Charlotte tugged on the elastic band on her wrist. She had to speak now, or she’d never find the courage. ‘Mum, I know.’
Her mother kept talking. ‘How come you’re not with Roxy or doing something with your new friends? I’m in a lot of pain with my wrist today. I think I—’
‘Mum, I said I know.’
‘Of course, you know. I sent you an email. Don’t you read?’ She inspected her nails then glanced toward a sound coming from the kitchen. ‘Can you call back later?’
With a rustle of papers, the woman sitting next to Charlotte stood up. Charlotte watched her leave, oddly comforted by a stranger occupying the same space. She took a deep breath, twisted her fingers through the rubber band and uttered a word she rarely said to her mother. ‘No.’
Her mother’s eyes widened. ‘No? Why not?’
Charlotte heard a man’s voice in the background. Her mother glanced away and fiddled with an earring. ‘That’s the plumber. Bloody tap froze again.’
A plumber? At nine o’clock on Saturday morning?
Charlotte leaned closer to the screen. She snapped the elastic band, leaving a red welt on her wrist. ‘Please listen to me, Mum. I said I know. About the letters.’