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.
Oooh, looks like I am late to the party. But, here goes my bit of dialog for you, Harry, to tear and rip into. Now, mind you, don’t let Jack the Ripper down.
This is a scene from my short story, THE RUNAWAY BOOK. In this scene, Casey, a ten-year-old girl is trying to stop her mother from entering a bookstore. Why? Well, Casey doesn’t like them.
Here you go:
“Casey,” warned her mother, Elaine, “You don’t have to make such a big fuss.”
Casey pursed her lips left and right. She had to make a fuss. It was the tippy-top, top-top, absolute importance to make a big fuss. “You can get any book you want on Amazon.”
Elaine heaved a sigh, “Not the same.”
“Hnnnn-eeeeee-eeee,” Casey whined, sounding like a car that refused to start.
Another sigh escaped Elaine, “Nothing beats holding a real book in your hands. It’s something no e-book can replicate. That feeling. That smell.”
“Urgh,” Casey rolled her eyes.
————————————–
Yes, short. But, that my dear Master of Jericho Writers is my dialog for you to dismember and rip asunder. Now, Jack the Ripper proud.
Trangression
Context: This is from a short story – an allegory – about Aidan and Ella who work as gardeners at Edenwood, a stately home. In this extract, Ella is approached by Sam, a new gardener who has recently returned to England from Down Under.
Extract:
He stood quite close watching her as she scattered the carrot seeds and then he said, ‘How much do you get paid?’
Just like that, no preamble. It wasn’t a question you asked someone you didn’t know very well. Maybe that’s what came of living in Australia for a few years. Australians were direct, weren’t they? They didn’t beat about the bush, just got straight to the point.
‘Well, how much?’
She paused. His eyes glinted. He was hard to resist.
‘Two hundred and forty pounds.’ And then for the avoidance of any doubt, she added, ‘A week.’
‘And how old are you?’
This was getting personal. Her cheeks were lighting up. She felt like a ripe strawberry.
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Thirty-nine hour week?’
‘Yeah. Without overtime.’
‘You realise that’s well below the minimum wage, don’t you?’
‘I get a bonus at Christmas. We all do.’
‘That doesn’t count. They’re breaking the law. And this is skilled work. You’re trained, qualified, I assume. A pretty good horticulturalist, from what I’ve seen.’
He’d only been there a week. How could he possibly know if she was any good? She raked over the seeds and wished he’d shut up.
‘Someone like you should be earning much more than two hundred and forty miserable quid.’
‘Money’s not everything.’
‘Oh, come on. You’re being screwed. You’re underselling yourself. Do you have any idea how much this company makes?’
‘They’re a family.’
‘They’re a business. They make a mint out of this place. The summer visitors, the restaurant, the shop, the holiday cottages, hiring the place out to film companies. And all this is just a sideline to their serious businesses. They own half the county and great swathes of Birmingham and property in London too. And then there are the overseas interests…’
4 am: John Kite, private investigator, comes out of a building he’s been searching to find a car he doesn’t recognise. Its headlights switch on, blinding him, as he makes to escape a woman he knows ( Rochelle) gets out of the car. She claims to be a PI, too, but Kite doesn’t know if he can trust her. As they talk, Kite is shot at from a nearby building. They take cover behind a Land Rover.
‘Why are you here?’ I said.
‘Rescuing you by the look of it.’
‘The gunman’s not with you, then?’
Rochelle’s head whipped round. ‘Shut up with the stupid remarks or I won’t get you out of this.’
‘Get me out of this? You helped to get me into it. Lighting me up like I was the star turn on stage.’
‘I wanted to attract your attention, that’s all.’
‘Why not just hoot or something?’
‘I didn’t want to wake the neighbours.’
‘Jesus.’
I wondered if Rochelle was always annoying. Even in life and death situations. Then I felt a touch on my arm.
‘I thought about what you said. About the PR place being so secretive. Like it’s a front. I’m sure you’re right.’
‘You’re agreeing with me?’ I said. ‘You’re on my side? Not chasing me on behalf of Sage?’
‘Yeah, well don’t go on about it or I might change my mind.’
There had been no shots for a couple of minutes. We both peered cautiously round the Land Rover in the direction of the gunman.
‘Do you think he’s got a night-vision scope?’ Rochelle whispered.
‘Certainly.’
‘Then putting my headlights on would’ve screwed it up. That’s why his shot went wide. So I think I could have saved you. So you could say thanks.’
I was so surprised I said nothing. Rochelle kept surprising me.
‘If we can get to my car, I can get us out.’
‘What’s your plan?’
‘I’ll drive.’
‘What else?’
‘I’ll drive fast.’
‘That all?’
‘Do you want to sit in this gutter all night? We crawl up behind these parked cars until we’ve got beyond where mine is and out of the light. Then we make a dash. Key’s in the ignition. My door’s open, yours isn’t.’
From: The Art of Danger [Amazon] Stuart Doughty
Set up: YA fantasy, set in a world where magic still exists. POV character, Cale, is a soldier about to be hanged for disobeying an order to kill children. The king arrives with his retinue, stops the hanging and wants to question Cale. Here, King Harad has just asked Cale what happened to his face (he was beaten up by a guard). Read on…
The unexpected question makes me smile, cracking the wound further open. Here I am, scum of the earth, discussing a split lip with the King of Casalonia.
‘I annoyed somebody, sire.’ I wipe the blood from my chin with bound wrists.
Harad looks unimpressed. ‘You seem to have a talent for annoying people. My son, for one.’
‘Your son’s an arse.’ The words are out before I can stop myself. Feck.
Harad goes very still. His eyes bulge and his face darkens, danger-deep.
The guards close in behind me, ready to strike me down at the king’s signal.
I clear my throat. ‘I’m sorry, sire. I shouldn’ta said that. I wasn’t thinking straight.’ I might be a dead man, but I have a chance to save my men.
King Harad leans forward. ‘My son is an arse. Is that your considered opinion?’
‘Considered may be too strong a word.’ I glance back. My men stand rigid in the gallows chokehold.
Harad smiles, though it’s the kind of smile a wolf might give a chicken before supper. ‘I’ll blame your slip on near-strangulation. Tell me what happened, soldier. I want your side of the story.’
‘I disobeyed orders. My fault, not my men’s. Please. Let them go.’
‘Tell. Me. What. Happened.’
I force down my shoulders, my pride, and my temper. ‘We did our job, sire. We killed all the raiders who’d hidden in the village, but the cavalry held us for insubordination.’
Harad watches me as I speak. Sharp eyes rove over my face, observing and assessing. ‘Go on.’
‘Braden’s men rode down the villagers. Killed whoever they caught.’ My voice is as stark as my memories. ‘Mothers. Babies. Tiny children.’
The little girl I saved from the flames still haunts me. I hope she escaped. I fear she didn’t.
Context – This is from a ‘past’ section of my novel where my MC Sam is 13. She is at a NYE party hosted in a big house in the village. The adults are all downstairs. Sam is upstairs with her friend Naomi, a little drunk on smuggled in vodka. Word count: 221
‘How far have you been with a boy, Sam?’ Naomi piped up from the bed.
‘As far as Chipping Sodbury,’ I said, which was my way to tell her to sod off. Although the hand had been high up, further than wherever Chipping Sodbury was. I felt like Naomi or anyone could see my thigh glowing like a beacon under the dressing table, white hot, like I’d been branded.
Naomi didn’t get it. ‘Who was that with then? I’ve never heard of that place.’
‘No.’ I muttered, ‘I haven’t been anywhere. I was just being stupid.’
‘What? So you haven’t even snogged anyone?’
‘Of course I have. You know I’ve kissed someone!’
‘Yeah, but just that time at that disco. Where everyone was kissing everyone. It doesn’t really count, does it? It’s not like anyone really chose to, y’know, be with each other? That’s what you said, remember?’
There was a long pause, where neither of us spoke. I sneaked a glance at Naomi’s crumpled body in the mirror. Her face was turned up to the ceiling, the rest of her head half disappeared in the covers.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’ve been further. Tonight.’
She sat up, her mouth opening. I readied myself for the assault, already regretting the small point I’d scored, already preparing to backpedal and laugh it off.
Hilary and Prue once shared a flat when they were in their twenties, now, fifty years later, after desertion by their husbands, they are back sharing a tiny flat in a village where they had once enjoyed prosperous settled lives.
‘The magnolia got frosted,’ said Hilary.
Prue squinted at Hilary over her glasses, before turning her attention back to a large scrapbook laid out on the table by the window.
‘You shouldn’t keep stalking the people at The Dower House,’ said Prue leafing through the scrapbook, ‘you have to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t your house anymore.’
‘I don’t stalk, I was walking Bodkin.’
On cue Bodkin the labrador flopped arthritically onto Prue’s feet.
‘You are turning into the village weird woman.’
‘At least I’m not the village idiot; wasting what few years I have left, cutting out celebrity obituaries and glueing them into a some ghoulish scrapbook,’
‘It’s not ghoulish, it’s research.’
‘Research? For what in god’s name?’
‘My novel,’ said Prue scanning the obituary of a female writer born in the same year as her, who had published twelve novels and won a clutch of literary awards.
‘Your what? ‘ said Hilary, craning closer to the window to catch any action in the surgery car park next door, ‘Oh for God sake Prue.’
‘You are such a bully,’ said Prue screwing up the obituary, and chucking it in the metal waste bin, enjoying the little percussive noise it made.
‘I’m a realist’ said Hilary, ‘one of us has to be.’
‘You’ve always been jealous of my talent,’ Prue’s face was contorted into a challenge; eyebrows raised, jaw set, teeth lightly clenched, but it was wasted; Hilary’s attention was elsewhere, trying to identify the car that was slowly backing into the car park.
‘Do you actually know how long it is?’
‘It’s not about being published, you know very well, I write because I have to.’
‘Face it Prue,’ Hilary sighed theatrically, ‘your first novel was published in 1981 and then sank, like a diver with lead boots.To cheer you up, your agent told you to write another one. That, dear girl, was thirty-eight years ago, I think the deadline has by now, expired.’
1987: Katherine Angelis is on a roots trip to Prague which her parents and grandparents fled after the 1948 Communist coup. She is hosted by Jarek Macháček, whose sister, a 1968 exile, is a friend of her family in New York. (NB: Departures from standard English in Jarek’s speech are deliberate.)
Jarek stops, turns to Katherine. “Did your grandfather tell you about the White Mountain?”
“Of course. Catholic Hapsburg troops defeated the Protestants. In less than two hours. Then Czech nobles and burghers were executed.”
“He tell you how?” An edge in Jarek’s voice.
“No. No, he didn’t. How?”
“Not a pretty story.”
“Please tell me.”
“Heads cut… ‘Kat’, the one who cuts heads, in English it is…”
“Executioner?”
“Executioner… Maybe not good to tell this.”
“Just please say, Jarek.”
“Your grandparents tell you beautiful things about Prague, almost like a dream. Mid-summer Night’s Dream inspiring for artists, yes? Shakespeare. Mendelssohn.”
The edge in his voice is like a wall between them.
“But this is nightmare of Midsummer. Twenty-first June, sixteen twenty-one.”
“Jarek, my parents and grandparents endured the Nazi occupation. They were hounded by the Communists…”
“Excuse me.”
“I want to know. You have to tell me.”
“I am sorry. Of course I tell you.”
He gathers his thoughts. In the silence, she apologizes for her outburst. Is OK, he says.
“So…”
“Executioner. Executioner in black, helpers in black. Cut twenty-seven heads, you need helpers. Black cloth covers the façade of the Old Town Hall, platform in front. They make it like a stage. Twenty-seven coffins on the stage. Twenty-seven men, nobles, knights, burghers waiting in the Town Hall.”
“Walk down a ramp, one by one. Like a play. But admission free. Lasts four hours, longer than White Mountain. Many soldiers holding the crowd in, soldiers on horses and foot soldiers. No one can do anything, Just watch. Executioner uses up sword, needs new one. Three times needs new sword.
“Watch. You never forget. Never. Maybe you tell your children, grandchildren. Maybe not. Does not matter. They know.”
They know. The fear that Katherine has long felt in her mother.
Four Entomologists on a collecting trip to Kenya in 1978. The chief protagonist, Ben, has just stepped into a column of Safari Ants and has been badly bitten. Sonja has come to his aid.
“Stay still,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to get them out if you keep prancing about.”
“I’m sorry, but it bloody hurts.”
“They won’t let go. Yuck, they let themselves be ripped apart and still their heads stay attached.”
Caroline and Manfred turned up attracted by the commotion. They found it funny too, but they did help to extract the heads one by one.
“I knew it would only be a matter of time before he took his shorts off in front of you,” said Caroline.
“Oh, please,” I said, “this is an emergency.”
“I don’t mind dealing with the legs,” said Sonya, “just as long as they haven’t bitten you anywhere else. You’ll have to deal with that on your own.”
“I expect he normally does,” said Caroline.
“I’m never going to live this down, am I?” I said.
“Not likely.”
Manfred had been quiet until now, but he was obviously being less than successful in repressing his laughter.
“Et tu, Manfred?” I said.
“I’m afraid so,” he said, and then gave up trying to suppress anything.
“They all seemed to bite at once.”
“I think they send out a chemical signal when they’re under threat,” said Sonja.
“I think I did too,” I said.
“Quite possibly. You can put your shorts back on now.”
“Shake them first, just in case there are any more lurking in there.”
I did as she said, trying to pretend that I still had some shred of dignity left to preserve.
For the rest of the afternoon, Sonja kept looking at me and smirking. The others did too only not as much and it didn’t seem so hurtful coming from them.
August 1972.
This dialogue is a conversation between Deborah, an eleven year old girl, and Miss Hughes, an elderly resident of the care home where Deborah lives with her mother who is employed as a care assistant. This is the first occasion the two of them have met. Miss Hughes has established that up to now Deborah has largely read Enid Blyton books which she believes are too trivial. She has asked Deborah to take a copy of Jane Eyre from her bookshelf.
‘Don’t try and read it all at once. It is a step-up from what you are used to and you may find some of the language old-fashioned.’ said Miss Hughes
Deborah turned the pages of the paperback until she found Chapter One.
‘Are you intending to read it now?’
‘I thought that was what you meant. I was going to read it out loud to you.’
‘Oh, I see. I haven’t made myself clear. I want you to take it away and read, let’s say, the first three chapters. Then I would like you to come back and tell me your opinion. Think about the character of Jane Eyre and how she must feel about her situation. Find a paragraph that stands out to you. When you next visit you can read the paragraph out loud to me and explain to me why you have chosen it.’
‘Erm, Miss Hughes, is this like extra homework?’
‘The word extra suggests additional to that which you already have. Do you have homework today?’
‘No. I don’t start school until next week’
‘I though not otherwise you would be doing that instead of bringing my meal. Don’t you wish to be better educated? It hasn’t always been the case that young ladies were taught to read and write, you will learn a little of that from the book.’
‘I meant’, and here Deborah paused to consider the wisdom of her next words, ‘do I have to do it?’
‘Will I punish you if you choose not to? No. Would I be disappointed? Yes, but I’ve overcome worse things in my life. Will you feel as though you have missed an opportunity? Well, that is something only you can know.’
Bob Wandle, a British journalist, is in Malaysia investigating a suspicious death. He is sat under an umbrella among the foundations of an unbuilt house in a rain storm, opposite the victim’s property. Bob thinks he is being set up. A man has approached him in the rain.
‘You don’t see many Doc Martins in this neighbourhood.’
Bob looked up at the man. Fat rain fell into his eyes smudging what little vision he had.
‘Mind you, you don’t often see a bloke sat in a field holding a lightning rod in the middle of a downpour either.’
‘No,’ said Bob.
‘You’d be better off holding a 1-Iron,’ the man said. ‘Not even God can hit a 1-Iron.’
‘Right,’ said Bob.
‘It’s a joke,’ the man said. ‘Geez, you poms need to lighten up you really do.’
‘Right, sorry,’ said Bob.
The rain continued to assault the men.
‘So, I’m guessing you’re not waiting for the house to be built around you?’
The man wore white trainers, royal blue shorts and a yellow polo shirt. Probably not a hitman. That’s good, Bob thought. The rain had soaked the man’s clothes to the skin, but he acted as if he hadn’t noticed.
‘No, ah, I’m Bob Wandle. From London. I’m a journalist.’
‘A journo? Which rag?’
‘The Sentinel.’
‘Oh yeah? We used to get the Sentinel in Afghan. Kept it by the desert rose for spills.’
‘Desert rose?’
‘The pisser. A bit of plastic drain pipe buried in the ground for the blokes to piss in.’
‘Right.’
‘Just as much piss in the paper as on it, if I remember correctly.’
‘I see.’
The rain continued to lash down. The man waited. Bob wasn’t sure for what exactly so he said nothing.
‘Look Bob,’ the man said, ‘I love chatting and meeting new people, especially in the rain. It’s kinda romantic. But I’ve gotta ask. What the fuck are you doing in my yard?’
‘Oh, sorry, I was, er..’ He had no idea what he was going to say next. He was thankful when the man spoke instead.
‘Beer?’