Fictive Dialogues from Playwright Point of View (X)

 

by Laura Lai/Uncategorized

 

On the 20^th of February 2010, ‘The Guardian’ published an article containing valuable advice from consecrated writers of different genres. To construct my creative writing exercise for this ‘Writing Break Blog’ I used some of the advice to build this personalized fictive dialogue from a playwright point of view.

Rose Tremain:

1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Exploring new areas and researching new topics with which the writer may not be very familiar is a great experience. Still, I wouldn’t overrule the idea of writing about what one knows either. I’m not thinking of politics, but other people specialized in other fields can use their storytelling talent to craft great stories that can enlighten, entertain or contribute to the public debate on that issue, be it political, environmental, or medical given these pandemic times.

2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers' memoirs out there already.)

OK! OK! You caught me! I confess! I confess it all! I have different writing projects in my mind because I enjoy different writing experiences, but none of them concern any autobiography. At least not yet! J

3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Indeed, the first draft is seldom satisfactory. It also depends on the writing style. Those of us who first write several drafts in our heads before we decide to sit and write the last draft in mind may be close to the final version. Although many – if not all – are perfectionists about writing, there is a moment when we know that that is the most we could do. And we have to leave it to the public and readers’ scrutiny. I took the course on rhetoric at Harvard because I wanted to improve my writing and the lines with more written art. After that, there is nothing I can add more.

4 […] When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

To ‘dream the idea into being’… how beautifully formulated!

5 In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Some writers don’t. Some others do. The genre conventions already set the ending: this protagonist will be rewarded, this will be punished, etc. But it doesn’t set the way. For one of my plays, I had to break the time unity convention in order for the final act to be more enjoyable and for each of the protagonists to get to a certain endpoint that matches the story.

6 Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

7 If you're writing historical fiction, don't have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.

In sketches, it works well to use real characters. It can also be fun. Hopefully, the real characters have the sense of humor, too. To me, the vocabulary is important – not to be offensive. For example, on May 12^th, 2019 I posted on this Writing Break Blog a dialogue in which the protagonists were the US President Donald Trump, and the currently former EU President of the Council, Donald Tusk. Inspired by a speech given by the latter I wrote this dialogue to have a laugh about the ‘ridiculosity’ of the situation. I used real characters without using offending vocabulary or bad words and it turned into ‘A Dialogue of Two Donalds’ that can be read here. Some other times, it was the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the opposition party leader, Jeremy Corbyn that inspired the dialogue you can read here. Because of political decisions many people cannot find jobs, those who have must pay more taxes, etc. There is lots of bitterness around politics and political decisions, so why not laugh a bit about it?!

Political parodies stretch topics to limits. In the ‘Saturday Night Show’ we’ve seen Alec Baldwin interpreting the real character, Donald Trump, for years; equally, Jim Carrey plays greatly Joe Biden. In order to be fun and to have audiences to this show – that might be somebody’s business and must make a profit – elements are exaggerated. But this is what we know, what’s fun, and what we laugh about. 

8 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

Thank you for mentioning the cinema! I already feel better. J

Sarah Waters:

1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .

I love writing sketches and enjoy reading drama. Therefore, I used to read drama analytically trying to guess the technique behind it. But the guessing (even if done right) doesn't help with the confidence. The writing courses do. After the course on Drama Writing at Oxford, where students learn about writing devices applicable to different mediums, I wrote my first long dialogue like a journey that goes on tens of pages and follows a structure. Indeed, the cinema is just another medium, next to theater, radio, and TV. No, I have never written any script (so far!), but when it comes to writing, and as I know myself enjoying different writing adventures, I never say ‘never.’

2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .

It seems that there is a general agreement on cutting as much as possible. And I also share this view that ‘less is more’ and ‘simple is more elegant.' By ‘be business-like' I understand to be professional because otherwise, my perception of 'business-like' is arrogance, even applicable to those who may run a small neighborhood business (e.g. cafeteria, bakery, etc.) - but it also depends on countries and cultures. I don't understand the arrogance because we, the customers, make them businessmen buying their products. There’re exceptions, too: Melania Trump – I understand she’s in business, but I’ve never perceived her as being arrogant; Bill Gates on whose Microsoft Word I’m writing this blog; and there are others. The same with public servants, especially the supra-national ones (e.g. Brussels). I've never understood their arrogance because it's we, the people, who pay them - most of the time, to do nothing. From my observation, in general, in business, the bigger the business, the less arrogant the owner is. In public service, in general, is the other way around: the higher the public servant, the more arrogant and the less approachable by the people who pay them to occupy that high position. There are always exceptions. Good luck finding them! :-)

Yes, sometimes a writer can start with chapter two or act two. I had this impression once, but if I leave it there it might be for a reason: be it structure, rounding-up my story, etc. In terms of plays and movies, I always get to the end of them and never leave them after the first ten minutes. I’m convinced they go somewhere. It is usually so. And I want to see where the story or the argument goes.

3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

For most of us, writing doesn’t pay anything (or very little) and we have to pay the publishing house, too – no, I still didn’t find a sponsor for my book in German. Only best-seller writers can actually live from their writing, the other writers have a job to pay for their living expenses. That’s why my plans to relocate abroad – to have a job that pays, better living conditions, and a different culture that can be even more inspiring. As for the number of words people write per day and that some people put on Social Media quite constantly… I look at it as a personal thing, a detail of a writer’s writing process, I never understood why we all shall know about it and so frequently.

4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.

You’re perfectly right! I’ve heard myself maaany people saying that writing is some sort of therapy. Writing can help organize an avalanche of thoughts – I did that after I left the Ph.D. program – that may later serve as material for another story or will stay as a memoir. I never understood where this idea of writing as therapy comes from. And as you well assume, I fully disagree because writers aren't some lunatics who instead of going to a shrink, they write. This is completely wrong! 

Writing is a skill that requires talent dubbed by years of practice, patience, and observation to combine story with plot and dialogue, following a structure and respecting as much as possible the genre conventions. We do that empty-handed, but with words. To draft over and over, to cut and substitute over and over, etc. is more nerve-wracking for writers than therapy. And for those of us who write in a foreign language, this is more challenging, not therapy. And when there are difficulties to sell your books because there are so many talented writers out there, the writer just starts writing another book because it likes to write – what therapy? Why is writing and not car racing therapy? Maybe the driver runs away from some thoughts with so much speed? J

5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .

6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .

7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life (…).

I would frame this series of advice next to ‘cut like mad’ and be professional with your writing and your characters. The single-issue drama puts more accent on the topic than on the characters, but I don’t want to neglect them. I’m giving them as much consideration as the topic’s unfolding allows. I learned practically the difficulties to work with many characters than with just a few, but sometimes the topic requires it. For example, a play on Brexit has as many protagonists as stars are on the European Union’s flag – twelve. That was challenging. It was more interesting from the topic point of view to make them come from different countries and not necessarily from member countries. What I’m trying to say is that the topic and the genre conventions already draw the story in big lines.

8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

Absolutely! The pace is crucial for the overall journey and for dialogue. Reading out loud can be very helpful when cutting what is redundant when checking the rhythm of dialogue and having a good idea about the overall pace of the writing.

9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . (…) Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

What I understand is that writing may be a cause of these problems rather than therapy for them. The therapy when you’re stuck would be to take a break, walk and do other things that may be inspiring to write a better draft or even come up with a better writing idea. It’s the first time I hear about a ‘patron saint of writers’ – I’m glad to hear about it. I’m a believer in God. I’m Christian Orthodox. We also have saints but more classical ones: St. Mary, St. Peter, St. John, etc.

10 Talent trumps all … For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.

The authors of classical literature (and music) that we read and reread (listen and re-listen), over and over, have never heard of marketing campaigns or promotions on Social Media. J They only had talent. Lots! J (To Be Continued)