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.
Setup: Washington, DC, 50 years in the future. The world is beginning to enter a climate crisis. Following is the opening chapter of the story.
Constance Rydell entered the living room carrying two glasses of beer.
“You missed the announcement,” Jack Rydell said, turning his head around to look at her, but not rising from his recliner. “They’re saying that solar radiation is killing off certain bacteria. Like the bacteria in yeast they use to make bread.”
“People eat too much bread anyway.” She handed him a glass and took a sip from her own.
“It gets worse. You know what else the radiation threatens? The yeast that aids fermentation. Specifically, beer fermentation. Maybe we should stock up a few years’ supply.”
“What’s that you’re watching? Another program on climate change?”
“Not exactly, but it’s related. It’s an ad for the rejuvenation procedure the boy is pushing us into.”
“But you’re still reluctant to do it,” Constance said, looking over her husband’s shoulder at the program he was watching. “The appointment’s tomorrow, you know. Danny’s coming over at three. You’re running out of time to fuss about it.”
“Yeah, I know. Hell, if there’s no more beer, what’s the point of living another hundred years? Imagine how long that would feel like if we have to go through it straight.”
“Yep. It might force you to do something productive now and then.”
“Hey, I do productive things. I fixed the toaster, remember?”
“Oh, the one I replaced last summer?”
“Well, I didn’t tell you to run out and buy a new one, now, did I?”
“I guess I just decided not to give up eating toast for however many years it took you to stop procrastinating. I pictured our son tossing the broken toaster into the box with you, in case you finally got around to taking a look at it in the afterlife.”
“Huh. I think my grumpiness is rubbing off on you.”
“No surprise there, after fifty years of living with you. So what do you think? Would you have tried to do something about this climate thing if you’d known the future of beer was in jeopardy? Would you have joined a movement, maybe?”
“Nah. I’m not a joiner.”
“That’s for sure.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack twisted his body around in the chair to look at her more directly.
“Just an observation.”
“Three o’clock, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Wonderful.”
Lontano is a velyr, exiled from a hive-mind society with a few hundred others when they “caught” individuality. If velyr work hard, they can appear mostly human, albeit more like an adolescent than a grown-up. Lontano is talking with his boyfriend Tel, who’s half-velyr and half-human and was raised in Ireland. Tel’s just said the velyr remind him of “trees in November” which is a quote from Watership Down. The novel is in Lontano’s POV.
“Winter is here,” I remind him. “And I dislike it immensely.”
“Stands to reason. You lot were created for a hot planet, right? But that’s not what I meant.” His free hand slides from the small of my back to tug at my braid. “You velyr — you’re all tucked away in your colony, safe under the humans’ noses. But instead of being satisfied, you’re still wishing you were back on your own planet. You’ve not gotten over being homesick after all these centuries.”
I’m not sure this is true, but I admit that some of us may be dwelling in the past. “Wouldn’t you be homesick if you’d been ripped away from your birthplace?”
“Pssh. Da’s done that more times than I can count. We’ve lived in so many places — ”
“I meant away from Earth. Away from your own gravity so you can never walk normally. On a world with a hostile sun that will fry you if you go out unprotected. A world with dangerous temperature fluctuations — ”
“I get it, I get it. Earth’s not the best place for a velyr. But you need to get over it. Move on, as they say.”
“We’ve adjusted,” I protest. “We wear protective clothing, sunglasses, earplugs. We work hard to look human.”
Another laugh. “Or you think you look human.”
“None of our friends has noticed,” I remind him.
“They’ve noticed your six fingers, pal.”
“There are humans with six fingers. It’s not enough to prove I’m alien.”
Tel tugs my braid again. “They’d know if they lived with you for half a day.”
“This is why I’ve never lived with anyone who didn’t know.” I give my partner a smile and pull him close. “It’s nice having you know about us.”
This dialogue is from my work in progress “Rebellious Hearts(:A Shifter Beginning)”.My protagonist Charlie is still trying to deny the fact that she has survived being attacked by a “wear-wolf” only to become one her self. Mrs. Winters is a powerful Fae who has figured out what has happened and is trying to honor her promise to a friend to look after Charlie.
“Let me put a lunch basket together for you to take.”
Mrs. Winters was in the kitchen before I could even think to protest. My hunger returned with a vengeance, so I inhaled my food. She returned ten minutes later, with two large baskets of food. She set them on the table, handed my now empty plate to Jinny, who scurried off to the kitchen, and handed me a paper bag filled with something that smelled sweet and chocolaty.
“Please let me know if you need anything else. And know that I am here to help you when you are ready to accept your new reality.” She continued quickly over my protest. “I know you are still trying to convince yourself that nothing has changed. I did not mean to upset you, but Ari has asked me to look after you, and I intend to do so.”
“And I have no say in the matter?”
“I’m afraid not. You are now a part of a much larger, and far more dangerous world. Whether you accept it or not, is up to you.” She picked up the baskets and started towards the door. “I had Albart bring your horse from the livery, she is hitched to my buckboard. She is broke to drive, yes?”
“Yes.” I walked out the door to find Mrs. Winters had the baskets loaded into the buckboard, along with a barrel of water, a sack of flour, beans and coffee. My confusion must have been clear.
“Supplies for the men working on your home. I am sure they can hunt game to add to their meals.”
“Thank you for the buckboard and supplies. Please add them to my bill.”
She smiled at me. “Do not thank me. These things I offer to you freely, because I like Aiden and Jakob, and I think, I will like you too, in time.”
PS: title of the above story is “Second Chance.”
My protagonist Bridget is talking to her dead Grandfather who’s wake she attended yesterday. She thinks she is having an hallucination because of stress and he is trying to convince her that he is indeed there and that he needs her help.
She sat down again, he looked so real, apart from being slightly see through, and he sounded real so she said “OK Gramps, I’m listening”.
“So”, he began. “You know I died”
“Yes, I know you died”
“Well it seems there is a complication”
He suddenly looked over his shoulder and said “This needs to be handled delicately, so shut the fuck up will you and let me get on with it.”
Odd she thought, my delusion is having a delusion and talking to himself as well. She would laugh, but she didn’t think she would be able to stop. Next thing, white coats, ambulance and off to the padded room. All the time laughing.
Gramps was still having a conversation with himself when she suddenly remembered something he had said about having four ears. Why would he have four ears? She studied him. Moving her head left to right, nope only two ears where his ears should be.
“What are you looking at love?” he said. “Is it because I’m a bit transparent? Weird isn’t it?”
“Well yes,” she said. “Being transparent is very weird but I was looking for your other two ears”
“My what?”
“Your other two ears”
“Why would I have another two ears?” That makes no sense at all. When you die they don’t hand out extra body parts you know. Mind you, if they did I know a friend of mine from down the legion who could do with some help when he croaks. You know who I mean Little Will….”
She interrupted him. “Gramps you said that you had 4 ears all bloody day and night”
“No, I said I had those four in my ears all bloody day and night”
“Those four what?”
“Ah”, he said. “Now therein lies the rub”
This is the end of Ch1 of my current WIP set in 2086. The female narrator is 117 years old, but due to an anomaly, her body ceased ageing when she was in her early fifties.
Reluctantly, she has caved in to pressure from her last surviving child to look for a new partner to share life with before she ends up outliving everyone she’s close to. In this scene, she has gone speed-dating with her 35yr old great-grand-daughter Kasia.
“Hey grandma!” Kasia coos lasciviously. I spin round to see her beaming at me.
I smack her arm playfully.
“Call me that again in public, and I’ll put you across my knee. I don’t care if you are thirty-five.”
“Yeah yeah,” she says. “Well? Any prospective targets?”
“‘Targets’? What a word to use -”
“Oh alright then, ‘lovers’ -”
“Kasia! At my age I’m hardly looking -”
“What do you mean, ‘at my age’, huh? When did age become an issue for you?”
I look at her and sigh. “Yes, fair point.”
“So, answer my question: how did you do?”
We’re standing outside now; Kasia has her mobile in her hand and is pointing it at the podpark to summon ours to the pick-up point.
“Well that last one…”
“Yes?” Kasia urges me on.
“Okay, I liked him, we seemed to click.”
“That’s fantastic, grandma!”
“Stop it, you.”
“So are you gonna see him again?”
Our hoverpod glides up silently beside us.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.”
“Way to go!” Kasia says. We climb in and she leans forward to activate the ‘Home’ presets, before settling back beside me.
“You see? I told you this was a good idea! You just needed to persevere a bit, go a few times.” We accelerate forwards.
“Yes, yes, okay, you were right,” I concede, smiling despite the feelings that this conversation is stirring up.
“I’m proud of you,” she adds, looking me full in the face. Our shared understanding is silently exchanged. “It’s time, it really is.”
“Why? Because ‘none of us are getting any younger’?”
She shakes her head, but she’s smiling at me. “Oh, ‘the joke that never gets old’…”
We both laugh. But it’s really not a laughing matter at all.
Ewa is exploring a camel market and meets Abdullah
“Miss, the proper name is Dromedary.”
Unaware that he spoke English, I was startled.
“Sorry, Miss. I didn’t mean to scare you. When you said the word camel, I wanted to tell you the correct name of the beast.”
Smiling, I said, “No problem.”
“Actually,” he continued, “I call him Bakir. Be careful, Miss, he can be ornery.”
Then he made a slight bow saying, “I am Abdullah.”
“Ewa,” I replied
“You are American, I can tell.”
Laughing, I asked, “How is it that everyone seems to know I’m American before I speak?”
“It’s the way you walk, Miss Ewa. Americans, especially the men, use a lot of space when they move and walk like they own the air around them.”
“I suppose you are right.”
Suddenly Bakir gave a loud snort, perhaps of relief, and began to pee on his leg. The robust and pungent odor of camel breath and pee stank of sweat and desert heat.
“Abdullah, this is the first time I’ve been next to a camel. What I know about them comes from books, not experience.”
“Oh, Miss, a camel is a smart and lovable animal.”
“Lovable?”
“Yes, Miss. Camels have distinct personalities and facial characteristics. Bakir once saw another camel killed with a rifle. Now he cries every time he sees a long gun because he remembers his friend’s death and knows what the gun can do. I think of Bakir as a friend. I’m old now, but I still like to tell my family’s children all about the days when Bakir and I rode the desert. Of course, the stories were mostly true.”
I laughed, “Mostly, true?”
“Well, Miss, I like to think that a good story is mostly true.”
This is a heavily edited(!) extract from a short fantasy story called ‘Wolfwind’.
Averyl is living in Tesk, a small town far to the north, in the shadow of the Frostwall mountains, its wooden walls ringed by vast dark primeval forests. She is hiding a secret, living quietly and attracting as little attention as she can. Especially now. Unease is an inevitable part of winter for the inhabitants of Tesk, but this year unease is slowly turning into something more dangerous. The forests loom beyond the walls. Rumours are spreading of ghosts and shapelings in the town. People are looking askance at one another in the street, wondering. And those who are already outsiders find themselves the focus of a new and ugly interest.
One morning, in the chill dawn-light, soon after Averyl has woken tired and aching and inexplicably filled with the small, flat sadness that often follows some great joy, her father comes to her, gaunt and grim, sticky with blood and with a bone-deep wound in his flank.
*****
‘Why are you here?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Dreams. Madness. I grow old.’
‘True-dreaming?’
He nodded again, hands moving aimlessly.
‘Not madness, then.’ She could not meet his eyes. ‘I… have dreams, too.’
‘No. Not madness. Death. First ending. A challenge has been made.’
‘Who,’ she asked.
‘Vargulf.’
‘My brother?’ She made as if to trim the lamp, a half-move stopped as soon as started, nervous.
‘I barely beat him this time. Next time he’ll kill me.’
‘Why?’
He gave a bark of humourless laughter. ‘I grow old. The pack becomes restless. They see me weaken and Vargulf is strong. He says he has true-dreamed… perhaps he has. He is mad, daughter, with a terrible madness.’
‘Dangerous time for that. Cold and claustrophobia breeds madness among us humans too…’ She ignored his flash of scornful anger at ‘us humans’. ‘Animals have been killed. Wolves?’
‘No. Penned animals are easy hunting. Humans are talked of as prey. ‘
Averyl shivered. There were many humans. Wolfen were all too few. ‘What can I do? I have no place there. Here…’
‘Yes? Here?’
‘Here, at least, I’m whole.’
‘Are you?’ Ulfhedre’s voice was gentle, but the question cut her like a claw. ‘Come back, Averyl.’ He stared around at the furnishings of her room, contemptuous. ‘Leave these human things, these… makings!’
‘How can I? I am outcast. I am human.’
‘You say you have dreams? Something runs at night with the wolf-packs, daughter. Something that slips back over the walls of the town like a ghost in the dawn-light. Something that looks like a wolf, its coat the black of your hair, its eyes ice-clear like yours. True-dreaming. Or else no dream at all!’
‘No!’ she said, and wept, burying her face in her hands, the long fourth fingers folded over, hidden.
*******
When she looks up again her father has gone, leaving behind him only the faint smell of wolf and a scattering of pine-needles…
This excerpt is from my finished draft of When a Tree Escapes the Forest, a historical family saga set in 1960s Inner Mongolia, China. In this passage my protagonist, fourteen-year-old Fang is with her academic rival and unlikely friend, Baisong, who she begins meeting in secret after an encounter at school.
The workload piles up and Fang finds herself absolutely drowning, working day and night, and still slipping behind. She doesn’t see Baisong until the day of the Dragon Boat Festival.
They’re sitting on the bank of a stream when he says, “I wish things could stay this way, unchanged.”
“The way you say that makes it seem like things will change very soon.”
“My Ba believes so. There is talk in his workplace of Chairman Mao planning something.” He turns serious eyes on her. “There is also talk of him being relocated to another city.”
Fang can’t tell whether the pit in her stomach is sorrow or envy.
“I truly don’t want to leave, Fang.”
“You don’t appreciate how lucky you are.” The words flow out before she can stop them. Fang holds her breath and waits for him to lash back.
Instead, he smiles at her. “Do you know what’s so astonishing about you?”
“I haven’t slept in over forty-eight hours?”
“You remember in fourth grade when you stood up to those jerks, the ones who were bullying you and your sister?”
“Yes,” she says. “Not my fondest memory.”
“You marched right up to the leader, a boy twice your size, with nothing but your sheer courage. That was enough to scare them away forever because they suddenly realized you were not weak. You are like a firecracker: seemingly harmless until you are ignited and explode into something beautiful.”
She laughs. “You’re quite the poet for a scientist, Baisong.”
They look up at the night sky in silence, with all of their unspoken thoughts and feelings lingering wordlessly in the evening air.
Sylvia (protagonist) and her husband Giles are trying to get their adolescent son, Alex, to tell them why he’s skipping school and hanging around with older boys. Except that Giles isn’t Alex’s father, and neither he nor Alex know this.
‘Alex, look at me.’
Alex glanced up, a display of withering disdain on his face, then focused again on his bowl.
‘We’re going to talk about this whether you like it or not,’ said Giles.
Alex banged the spoon down and slouched back in his chair.
‘If there’s something troubling you, tell us. Mum and I – we’re worried about you.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘No, you’re not. You’ve been missing school and you’ve been drinking.’
Alex glared at Sylvia.
Giles persisted.
‘Who are you going out with when you disappear all the time?’
‘No-one. Just mates.’
‘Are they your school friends?’
Alex snorted.
‘Well, who then?’
‘Just mates. People I’ve met in town … you know.’
Sylvia grasped Alex’s wrist. ‘But we don’t know. That’s the problem.’
Alex shrugged, pulled his hand away.‘You wouldn’t like them. Not posh enough for you.’
‘Stop it, Alex,’ said Giles. ‘We’re very happy to meet any of your friends, whoever they are.’
‘Tough. They wouldn’t want to meet you.’
Sylvia interrupted.
‘Alex! Stop this insolence. It’s so unlike you. Something’s going on. Tell us right now what it is.’
He just smirked.
Sylvia changed tack. ‘Sweetheart, if you’re having difficulties at school, just tell us. We can help.’
A glimmer of uncertainty crossed Alex’s face – a look Sylvia had seen many times when he’d been little, when he’d wanted to tell her something but was scared she’d be angry. Why wouldn’t he speak to her now?
The uncertainty disappeared as fast as it had come, replaced by the angry snarl that too often contorted his face these days. Seeing Sandy’s gentle features represented by a sullen ugliness was more than Sylvia could bear. She turned away.
Alex stood up, his chair scraping on the floor before it tumbled over and crashed to the ground.
‘I’m going upstairs.’