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.
Context: January 1996, Amsterdam. Eddie and Caitlin live together. Guy is Eddie’s Dutch friend who has come for a meal. It’s the first time Caitlin has met Guy.
Guy sniffs at the wine, slurps a mouthful and lets it linger before swallowing. ‘Good. Where did you buy this?’
‘Went to France last month,’ Eddie tells him. ‘Picked up a few cases on the way back.’
‘It is not so far across Belgium.’
‘He went to Brittany,’ Caitlin says.
‘I’ve some people there – the mother’s lot,’ Eddie explains. ‘They hang out in Roscoff. It’s about as far as you can go. Must be a thousand kilometres. Takes a couple of days. I sleep in the Transit.’
‘You are French then?’ Guy’s eyebrows knit.
‘Only the half of me. The rest is Irish.’
‘And Caitlin is an Irish name, I think?’ Guy nods at her.
‘My mother’s Irish. She was Eddie’s father’s step sister in actual fact. Dad’s English though. He used to say he could trace his ancestors back to the Anglo Saxons. I don’t know how. He never proved it.’
‘They were a bunch of bastards!’ Eddie waves his fork at them as though he might stab one or the other. ‘They ethnically cleansed the original Britons, you know. The Celts. Drove them into Wales and Cornwall. And Brittany.’
Guy’s mouth stops chewing for a moment. Resumes. Reminds Caitlin of a cow with cud. ‘But I think the Vikings and Normans came afterwards to Britain.’ He removes his spectacles and points a leg of them at Eddie’s face. ‘Each invader is the enemy until the next one comes. Then the oppressor becomes the oppressed.’
‘That’s true!’ Caitlin congratulates him for his logic. ‘Anyway, none of us chooses where we’re born or who our forefathers were.’
‘This is an excellent point.’ Guy congratulates her back. ‘I think Cait is more pragmatic than you, Eddie.’ He dips his eyebrows and grins demonically.
The expression is so unexpected and silly that a giggle bursts out of her.
This is the end of a flash fiction story: Doug is getting out of prison early, and asks his girlfriend, Ellie, if she wants him back. He cites the old song, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” Ellie is ready to go buy all the yellow ribbon in town, when Doug’s friend Phil rings the doorbell.
“You should be happy for your friend. You two would do anything for each other—look how much you’ve done around here while he was gone…”
“You think I helped you out because of Doug? I did it for you, Ellie. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I finally got up the courage to tell you I love you. You’re too good for a loser like Doug. You have class. I want you to leave him and let me take care of you. I would never put you through what he has…”
“Stop right there. Don’t say another word. I love Doug and I want him back. He’s changed. I know it. Gather up the tools you left in the shed. Then leave. I have to get ready for work now. This conversation is over.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Ellie. I can’t let you do this.”
“Just go away, Phil. Don’t argue. I’m not changing my mind. Let go, dammit! Leave me alone!”
“Don’t worry, Ellie. You’ll never see me again.”
The next afternoon, Doug was chatting with the bus driver. “This is usually a quiet neighborhood,” the driver said, “but I heard on the news this morning there was a murder near here last night — murder-suicide, actually. Some guy strangled a woman, then shot himself. People are going crazy, man. All this violence!”
“Yeah, it’s an epidemic, all right. Hey, there’s the place, up ahead on the right. I told my girlfriend to tie a yellow ribbon on the tree out front, and I can see something yellow up there. It looks like it came loose. What the…?”
The bus stopped at the driveway and they could see the yellow ribbon draped across the porch, with the words on it “Police Line – Do Not Cross.”
Context: Allison, the narrator, has learned that her across-the-street neighbors are Josh, an American who married into Slavic royalty, and his eight-year-old daughter Charlotte, who will eventually be queen. Allison is a widow (her husband was killed in a mass shooting) and Josh and his wife are separated. This takes place after an impromptu picnic on Allison’s front stoop.
It doesn’t surprise me that he returns, sitting back down on the steps, close but not too close.
“Thanks for being normal,” he says.
“Some people would say ‘what, her normal?’ but I know what you mean.”
“So how much digging did you do?”
“I liked your TED talk. How come it’s not mentioned on your Wikipedia page?”
Josh’s eyes shadow. “Reasons,” he says finally. “To paraphrase a song, it’s hard out here for a prince.”
“Six years is a long time to be separated,” I venture.
“I know, but again, reasons.”
“Yours?”
Josh shrugs. “Some, maybe. But I meant what I said. I had a good time and Char had a blast.”
“I thought you said she was shy.”
“Normally she is, except when she’s around familiar people. I don’t know why she took to you so quickly but I’m glad.” I think I see him color a little. “Char kept asking if you were my girlfriend. I told her she’s too young to be my pimp.”
“Oh, my God, did you really say that to her?”
“Well, couched in more appropriate terms.” He turns to me. “But you’re a girl, and I think we can be friends, so technically …”
He trails off, and we both smile.
“Technically,” I echo softly. “I could live with that. Besides …” I trail off myself, then bolster my nerve. “I’m not nearly ready for anything.”
“I’m not either.” Josh gets to his feet, then gives me a cheeky wink. “So let’s stay technical then.”
I can’t stop the blush. “See you later, technical.”
THE GIRL WITHOUT A NAME. A novel, 75,000 words now completed.
CONTEXT. A sixteen year old girl (with all the normal problems of teenage years). Her parents (mother especially cold-hearted). This is the evening they tell her she was adopted (a bolt out of the blue for her). It changes her life forever.
(This extract is from near the beginning)
A snail could have overtaken me on my journey home from school and the black cloud that followed me became darker as soon as my street loomed. Usually when mum heard the door unlock she would rush into the hallway. “You took your time didn’t you!” Her words were always the same as was my shrug.
However this was the day things changed. An empty hallway greeted me and the sound of the radio blaring from the kitchen was a new departure. As I entered the kitchen my mum actually smiled at me. This immediately put me on the back foot.
“School good today?” she asked.
It would have been impossible for my eyes to stretch wider. “Okay.”
“Have you got much homework to do?”
Where on earth was this leading and why she was she being friendly all of a sudden. She turned and opened the fridge. “Here you are.” She held out a can of coke.”
Taking the can I quickly made for the door, mumbling thanks into my jumper.
“Emma” Her loud voice stopped me in my tracks. “We’re going to have dinner altogether tonight for a change, and afterwards your dad and I want to talk to you.”
What could I say? No was not the answer she wanted to hear.
It was difficult to concentrate on my homework because once dad got home from work the arguing started. My dad hardly ever showed emotion beyond fatigue, but tonight it was different.
“It’s no good, Mary. It’s your idea, so you’ll have to tell her.” This was my dad speaking, well actually he was shouting, and I could hear him upstairs in my bedroom.
“She’ll never understand. She’ll hate us.”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know her. She has a steely side.”
Suzi Holland A few lines of dialogue from “LA VENUS DORADA” an adventure Novel that takes Madelina on a quest into the Anza Borrego Desert with a map to a legendary gold stash.
Madelina placed her elbows on the desk, palms to her cheeks, “Yes?”
“Yes, he said clearing his throat, I have in my possession a Latin American painting of some value. I’m a collector and after perusing this impressive gallery you might be in a position to evaluate it. I presume you are the proprietor of this gallery?”
“I am, sir, Can you give me the artist’s name and the title of the work?”
He reached between her elbows and plucked up her Mont Blanc pen. She watched when he turned her journal around with his left hand that had no sign of a ring and jotted down the title whilst complimented her gallery aloud in perfect Spanish, “Tu galería es magnífica.”
He then spun the book back toward her.
“Your Spanish is superb,” she smiled.
His face lit up, and he leaned in and placed his right hand on top of hers across the desk,
“Thank you, I’ve spent a good deal of time in Mexico, so yes, I’m fluent. And you senorita?”
Her black eyes flashed. She ached because she hadn’t been to the Yucatan to visit her mother in months. But that was none of his business.
“si señor, mi familia es de Oaxaca”
He raised his hand as if to shake hers,
“David Livingstone.”
His pseudo-parody amused Madelina because it held such an absurd connection to his attire.
He can’t be for real.
“Same spelling as the Doctor Livingstone, famous for discovering the sources of the Nile?”
His hand felt rough when she slid her manicured fingers through his,
“Madelina Montoya” she flushed, still holding his fingers.
THE INHERITANCE OF CRUELTY is a novel exploring why good people do very bad things. The novel is in three parts covering the sixties, the eighties and the present day. Will and Jim were best of friends but over the years betrayed each other and friendship has turned, in Jim’s case, to a passion for revenge.
The way Jim said ‘We’ll both be dead soon’ bothered him.
They wandered up the edge of the creek. More memories than hopes.
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said again, about Jim’s case stuffed under the spray dodger at the front of the dinghy, ‘No crime down here. We all look out for each other.’
‘Let’s not be too long. Stuff in there I wouldn’t want to lose.’
‘Like what?’ said Will with the hint of a challenge. ‘Clothes are all you need. Got waterproofs for you. Stuff gets broken on a boat, or slides over the side. Gets wet. Gets dropped. Nothing valuable?’
‘Kit.’ said Jim. ‘Gear I thought might be handy, like binoculars.’
‘I’d never take you for a twitcher. I expect they’re 8×42. No bloody use on a boat.’
Jim laughed.
‘There,’ Jim pointed. ‘A sandpiper running along the edge of the water and up there on Pasco’s roof, is a herring gull. Make a tasty pie.’
‘Only if you’re desperate, they’re carrion. Eat anything. Rats on wings. Taste awful and poison you if you’re not careful. A bundle of feathers. They look bulky, but inside, they’re not as big as a chicken, let alone a turkey. You’d need to kill quite a few for dinner. Bastards shit all over my boat.’
‘IRONMASTER’ is a novel set in Tudor England. Katherine of Aragon’s last child is an enigma – the King is not her father. Edward Lyon’s daughter has a gift with horses, and she’s lethal with her rapier. As the prodigy matures, she’ll eclipse her father, becoming The Ironmaster, but her secret is waiting to explode.
Here’s P.2 of the first part:
She sighed, straightening fingers stiff from daily toil at the Manor, then wringing sustenance from nearly nothing. Worry etched her face with lines beyond her years.
“Pottage again. We’ve nothing else. There’s no money left for ale – you can bring water from the river, but boil it before you drink.”
“We work long hours, six days a week, you slave in the manor kitchen; still we can hardly afford to eat,” said Edward.
“We pay the monks for your education, then there’s church tithes. Sir Joshua increased the price of charcoal, but without it and his iron ore, we can’t make iron.”
“The price he pays for our bolts and hinges is not enough. I’ve seen them in Guildford market; more than double we get. That can’t be right. Bigley’s merchants profit from our labour more than we.”
“Too many ironmakers, that’s what’s wrong,” said his mother, brushing the pervasive dust towards the door. “Competition, their methods better than ours. Your father wants to send your brother, James, to learn from the Cistercians at Rievaulx. Father Clement at the priory says they are the most advanced English ironworks, and he knows the Abbott.
“I wish I could go.”
“Your father needs you here, unless -” She paused the sweeping. They’d seen his father and James trudging back, their shoulders slumped.
“Bigley is not interested in our deed,” said Alex Lyon. “You showed us, Edward, what our solicitor, Uncle William, found. The estate Bigley claims, south of the Surrey boundary, is common land. Sir Joshua insists his title to the property was gifted to his ancestor by The Conqueror.”
“Did you see the title?” asked Edward. He knew, and probably Bigley too that they might guess the meaning of boundary lines on a plan, but they couldn’t read the words.
Oops: Abbot with one t.
THE LAST HOUSE OF ANNIE SMITH (first draft), Tamsin Stanford
Context: protagonist Beth has just been sentenced to community service for a second drink-driving offence and has lost her job as a result. She comes clean to her best mate, Tilly, whose brother was killed by a drink driver 15 years earlier.
*****
When Tilly finally spoke, her voice was full of emotion.
“I don’t need to tell you what I think of people who drink and drive. You’re also old enough to know that when you get seriously pissed, you’ll still be ‘over’ the next morning.”
“I know, I know, I know,” Beth said. “I keep telling myself I’m an idiot.”
“So what are you going to do?” Tilly asked.
Beth shrugged. “I was hoping you could help me work that out. I don’t know how I can do community service and work enough hours to pay the mortgage. And that’s assuming I can find someone to hire me.”
“You could Google ‘how to get a job with a criminal record’.”
“Ha ha. I’m serious, Tilly.”
“The way I see it, you have a couple of options: number one, stay in Melbourne, organise half-day sessions each fortnight and look for freelance work.”
“I like that idea but I don’t know if I can pick and choose my hours like that. And if it’s not easy to get to, I definitely can’t afford taxis.”
Tilly smiled. “I’m sure there’s plenty of graffiti in the centre of Melbourne!”
“Don’t even joke, please,” said Beth. “That’s my worst nightmare. Along with roadside garbage collection or scraping up roadkill. Anything other than sitting at a desk, really.”
“OK, option two: rent out your house and move in with your Mum for a few months. You can still work freelance but she might hire you in the café.”
Move to Mildura. Move in with her mother.
“Actually there is a third option: move in with your sister and become her cleaner, babysitter and cook. I’m sure she’d pay you minimum wage!”
Beth had to laugh. “If I did that, my next conviction would be for murder!”
Context: Ida has recently lost her hand and had a vicious go at her best friend as a result of which she has locked herself away in her room. She set her maid outside her door to stop people from entering but her lover, who is also her military General, has come to see her and got past her maid.
Extract:
The door clicked shut and a momentary silence fell over the room. Why was he here?
“If you’ve come to lecture me then you are too late,” she said. “I’ve already had enough lectures for the day.”
It wasn’t true. She hadn’t had any. Agatha had come yesterday and given her an earful. She had told her ‘This is not how a young woman behaves…’, and ‘You should know better than to be so vulgar in public…’, that she had ‘…been raised to be more tactful’. They were nothing new, but coming from the woman who was more of a surrogate grandmother made them sting just as much as if Agatha had taken Ida over her knee and smacked her.
“That is not the reason I came,” he said. “Though all I will say on the matter is while Vastian was clearly not thinking when he opened his mouth, your outburst was inappropriate.”
Her fingernails dug deeper into the wood of the chair.
“No, the reason I came is to tell you, in case you didn’t know, he’s gone.”
There was a tightening in her chest. She did know. Aidric did not need to elaborate. She had woken early that morning and gone to her balcony for air. From there she saw Vass leave on his horse, its saddle bags heavily laden.
“I know,” she said.
“He’ll be back.”
“I doubt it.”
Vass had only done what any sensible person would do if their friend had treated them in such a way.
“Of course he’ll come back. Friendships don’t end because of one argument.”
No, she guessed they didn’t. Before this all began she hadn’t really had any friendships outside her two older brothers. Her childhood had been isolating. Still this felt more final, worse than an argument.