Toby Litt's Blog, page 9

Writing and Shit – part 22 – Ignoring Dialogue

Patience Events this Week

I don’t usually post about readings, but as I am doing *three* this week – and they’re standing in for a Patience launch party – I thought I’d let you know:

Monday 2nd December, I am reading with a load of exciting new writers as part of MIRLive at the Harrison Pub, near King’s Cross, event starts at 7.30pm.

Wednesday 4th December, Galley Beggar Press are taking over Vout-o-Reenee’s Yellow Book Salon, near Tower Bridge. Event starts at 7pm.

Satruday 7th December, I’m taking part in a Spotlight on Indie Publishers reading, with fellow Galley Beggar authors Preti Taneja, Alex Pheby and Paul Ewen at the Barbour Room, Sage Gateshead. Event starts at 7.30pm. Looks like it might be returns only.

Would be great if you could make it to any of these.

Writing and Shit – part 21 – Hiding Dialogue

HIDING DIALOGUE

The English playwright Harold Pinter was famous for his dialogue. This is what he had to say about the reaction to his work:

We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: ‘Failure of communication’… and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming. To enter into someone else’s life is too frightening. To disclose to others the poverty within us is too fearsome a possibility.

But it’s an earlier line from this essay that catches the belief underlying Hiding dialogue:

One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

He said this in an essay called “Writing for the Theatre” in The Complete Works, Volume 1.

I’m sure you’ve seen already that this is a much less macho kind of dialogue. If Winning dialogue was Hollywood, Hiding is indie movies. It is more subtle, more indirect, less obviously exciting.

Exercise: Write a dialogue, under one of your three new pseudonyms, where two people are having a conversation but one of them is trying to conceal something – something they’ve done – from the other.

Explanation: These two people don’t have to be a man and a woman. They can be anything you like.

It will be more interesting if you didn’t make the thing being concealed an affair or ‘Where were you last night?’

Seven minutes.

Again, how did that feel? Did you prefer it to the Winning dialogue? Or did it seem a bit weaker? Did the dialogue tend to gain energy as it went along, or to lose it? Do you feel the reader has learned more about the two characters, through one of them attempting to hide rather than attempting to win?

As I said at the start of this bit, the different models of dialogue should intermix and overlap. A successful attempt to hide within a dialogue can count as a win. If someone is in disguise, and doesn’t want to show the extent of their true power, they may deliberately lose. These are some possible complexities – I’m sure you can think of more.

What lies beneath Hiding dialogue is the belief that all human speech is ultimately about Fear.

Exercise: Think for a moment about what the last of the three models of dialogue I’m suggesting might be? The one we’ll be looking at next week.

If Winning is based on Power, and Hiding on Fear, what might another great human motive be?

To put it another way, when you listen in on real conversations, you often hear challenge, argument and oneupmanship. You also often hear evasion, agreement and cliché. What other kinds of conversation do you often hear?

How about the kind of conversation where it’s clear that, although two people are talking, neither of them is really listening to the other?

My third model of dialogue is – for next week.

Patience Stuff

Around the publication of Patience, I’ve written and posted a few scattered things that link up in lots of sneaky ways – so I’m doing an ICYMI blog.

First thing was my blog here explaining the whole thing, and why the book is so important to me.
The fuller story of writing the novel, I covered in a lecture. A secret lecture. You can also watch or listen to this.
Then there’s a playlist I put together for Galley Beggars Press of what I was listening to, whilst writing the book. (It’s on Spotify.)
There’s a Beatles song included in the Galley Beggars playlist, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and I’ve wanted to write about what they mean to me for a long time – and to say something adequate about Paul McCartney, after being snarky elsewhere.
And more recently, a collection of the words of – I suppose – inspiration that I kept in mind, so that I didn’t stray from writing the book as intensely as I could.
Also, which was really enjoyable, I put together a Top Ten for the Guardian of Great Escapes.
And I did a podcast for Galley Beggars, about doing nothing – about a Buddhist form of doing nothing. (It’s on Stitcher as well as Soundcloud.)
For full disclosure, I’ve posted a couple of videos of me writing Patience – at Hawthornden Castle. (This I have never done before.)
I did a blog containing the sketchbook I kept during that snowy time. And the photographs I took.
So far, I’ve done a couple of interviews about the book. One with Leigh Chambers of Cambridge 105 Radio, and another with Stella Klein of MIR Online.
There have been some outstanding reviews of Patience, among them Houman Barekat’s for the Guardian and Jude Cook’s for the TLS.
Best of all has been the response of the first readers – either via email or twitter. Thank you to anyone who has been in touch.

On Doing Nothing

(This is the written version of the podcast I did for my publisher, Galley Beggar Press. If you’d rather listen to it, you can do so on Soundcloud or Stitcher.)

Could you just sit still for half an hour. Just that. Sit still, without distraction or interruption? For thirty minutes. No phone, no screen, no music, no voices. Could you?

And if you did just sit still, and do nothing, what do you think it would be like inside you? Do you think you’d be calm about the doing-nothing, or do you think, as is often the case with me, you would start to be overtaken by an anguish of impatience to do something, do anything? Scratch, jump up and scream. All of your head, every part of your body, would it be calm and silent in the doing-nothing or would it be filled with the rage to crack a joke, rejoin life?

I’m going to talk for a little while about sitting still, doing nothing.

First, I need to tell you a bit about how and why I started to do this doing-nothing. And that’s because I ended up being the particular kind of Buddhist I am – which is a Soto Zen Buddhist, in the lineage of a Japanese monk called Dōgen – which is the kind of Buddhist who, generally, just sits still.

Soto Zen Buddhism is a very minimal non-religion. It’s a practice. Following it (if you can even say that) means as often as I’m able, usually once a day, I do something called zazen – which is meditating, of a particular kind. Zazen translates roughly from Japanese as just sitting. Half an hour a day of zazen is my aim, and I meet it about 50% of the time. I just sit, facing a wall or, in my work room, the bottom half of a green baize noticeboard.

Why do I do this? Why do I waste my time doing nothing, producing nothing? This is hard to answer – I’m not sure myself. But the most direct way of putting it is that I agree with the Buddha. Or at least, I agree with what I’ve come to know about what he said, though translations, from Sanskrit into English. More exactly, I’ve come to agree with what the Buddha is said to have said about human suffering. I think it is the most practical, and possibly the wisest thing anyone has said on the subject – the subject of humans, as well as the subject of suffering.

Before I talk about the Buddha and all that milarkey, I’d like to explain a little of how I came to this agreement with what he said. I didn’t start out in a Buddhist family – very far from it.

My father had no religious faith, and did nothing like meditation – unless driving up and down the M1 and M6 for hours and days at a time, listening Jimmy Stewart on Radio 2, put him into something like a trance. My father has always been fairly brutal about an afterlife. ‘When I’m gone, just shove me in a box, have done with it’ – that kind of statement came up regularly during my boyhood. Suffering was something a man dealt with manfully, by ignoring it or saying bugger and hitting something inanimate.

My mother’s religious faith was always a mystery to me. She loved choral music in the Anglican tradition. As a girl growing up in Hereford, she sang in the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. I still have her score for Handel’s Messiah. Then, later on, she sang in the choir at St Albans’ Cathedral – St Albans, where she met and fell in love with my Dad. They were married only twelve weeks later – in a church. However, although I think my mother was secretly a bit mystical, I don’t think she believed in God. When she was on her deathbed, in a hospice, no longer able to speak, hardly able to swallow, one of the nurses came in and asked if she’d like to see the vicar. Somehow, with a wry grimace and a flicking-off-a-fly gesture of her thin fingers, my mother made it perfectly clear she had absolutely no need for him or his buzzing sort. Everyone in the room laughed. This was probably the last joke my mother ever made. After this, she soon stopped communicating. I’m going to have to return to her deathbed a bit later on – in reference to just sitting, doing nothing.

After meeting in St Albans, my parents moved to Ampthill, Bedfordshire. This was so they could run an antiques shop in Dunstable Street. I spent my first five years living in the small flat above the shop. We stayed in Ampthill during the 1970s and ‘80s. Ampthill is a village – much larger now than it used to be. It centres on a crossroads, with a weather-vane-topped clock tower in the middle.

There are two big parks, The Furze and Ampthill Park, very different places, one a scrubby heath, the other an elegant country park, and there were plenty of other green spots, some of which are still accessible. And so I found Ampthill a wonderful place, whilst I was into climbing trees and playing war games in the semi-wild; once I’d got into bands, and the idea of girls, the idea of having a girlfriend and not being lonely as only a Cocteau Twins fan can be lonely, I found Ampthill a crappy place. I couldn’t talk about Keats’s poetry with a tree. Ampthill was boring. Also, I wasn’t really all that safe in Ampthill. I went to state schools until I was eleven years-old, then a single private school until I was seventeen. This change from Alameda School to Bedford Modern School meant, in the eyes of the kids I’d been playing football with a few weeks before, that I’d suddenly become ‘posh’. This in turn meant that if I was spotted on the streets of Ampthill I might be shouted at or roughed up.

All this is really to say that after starting at Bedford Modern School, I spent a lot of time in my bedroom; either there or at my friend Luke’s house. Luke had been my best friend since I was four. We both went to Russell Primary School – although I’m told we first met in the bakery on Dunstable Street, within sight of the antiques shop my father and mother owned and ran, and above which I lived with my two younger sisters. Me and Luke had climbed a lot of trees and won a lot of actionous battles together.

Luke was a genius – at least, that’s how he seemed to me. I admired and adored him. He came up with the best ideas for games. Later on, he played piano. He wrote poems and songs. He read books I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of – Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, for example. And among the ones I borrowed and read were Lobsang Rampa’s books – The Third Eye, The Saffron Robe and You, Forever. These detailed the life and training of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and were full of saffron robes and astral travel, tsampa and flags flying above the Potala in Lhasa. I found out a little later that they were bogus – not written by a Tibetan lama at all, but by an English plumber.

Luke’s productivity – the boxes of poems on narrow-lined A4 paper, the concept albums recorded directly onto C90 cassettes – became greater the closer his parents got to divorce. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, Luke took up TM, Transcendental Meditation. He learned this from someone, a guru I suppose, based in Milton Keynes. Luke’s mother must have driven him to and from the meditation sessions. He learned something called Mindful Breathing which, today, has taken over the corporate world as ‘mindfulness’. It’s a very simple thing to do; you’ve probably tried it. You sit as comfortably as you can, and pay close, gentle attention to your in-breaths and out-breaths. You count them in groups of ten. With Luke, I and my other friends would sit, sticks of Spiritual Sky incense spreading layers of smoke out across his tidy attic room.

Cut to, years later. I was in Edinburgh for the Book Festival, now in my thirties. I’d started writing, like Luke did, and has stuck to it until it became just about everything. At this time I was putting together the stories that made up the book called I play the drums in a band called okay. From story to story, the main character, Clap, becomes a practising Buddhist. I decided to go to a ‘taster session’ – I think it was called that – run by the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. We sat on squishy saffron-coloured zafu cushions, on oblong mats; a Buddhist nun took us through a basic form of meditation; a small brass bell was rung when the time was up. I expected it all to be quite new and strange, but it was pretty much exactly what Luke had brought back from Milton Keynes to Ampthill twenty years earlier. It was familiar. It was what I’d done when I’d done what I called ‘meditating’ during the years in-between.

After this, a little embarrassed, I bought a mat and a zafu.

We’re now coming up to the point I described in my book Wrestliana, which Galley Beggar published last year.

The Totleigh Barton centre in Devon is a medium-sized white farmhouse that once belonged to the poet Ted Hughes.

I was there in the summer of 2005 with the novelist Ali Smith, teaching a residential creative writing course for the Arvon Foundation…

Both Ali and I had novels that had been entered for that year’s Booker Prize. Hers was called Hotel World, mine was called Ghost Story. We also shared the same publisher and the same editor.

I had tried to prevent myself going too often to the computer in the centre’s office, and checking the Booker website, to see if the longlist had been announced. I had wanted to avoid knowing when the announcement would be made – I knew it was imminent.

One morning, halfway through the week, Ali (who hadn’t been going to the centre’s office at all) got a phone call, then another phone call, then another. I knew this because, at Totleigh Barton, there is only one small patch of grass within which you could get a phone signal – and that patch was right outside the converted goose shed in which I dormed. Ali was on the phone all morning. My phone did not ring.

When I checked the website, Hotel World was longlisted, Ghost Story wasn’t.

For the rest of the week, Ali was extraordinary. She didn’t tell the Arvon students of her listing. She commiserated with me in a way I found genuinely consoling.

On the morning she spoke on the phone to everyone congratulating her, I was fiercely jealous. I was burning with resentment.

So, I went for a walk.

I’d been to Totleigh Barton before, and I knew there was a longish hike down high-hedged country lanes that took you round in a big circuit.

It was what I needed. I set off.

The day was blue sky gorgeous. I tried to let it cheer me up, but I just became angrier and angrier. I was a failure. My efforts to write the novel had been a waste. If I couldn’t even get longlisted – and it was a long longlist – what was the point? Ghost Story was just as good as Hotel World, wasn’t it? Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I was rubbish, and no one had told me. Perhaps I should give up writing. But Ghost Story wasn’t a bad book. Round and round, the same thoughts.

I knew that this was an important moment. I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a better book than Ghost Story – so this might have been my last chance to win a big literary prize and become one of those writers who seem, for a while, to be everywhere, to be the writer everyone should read. And who, for the rest of their writing lives, can be reasonably certain of being published and making a living and having a house that doesn’t need a lot of fixing.

I felt shit.

I kept walking.

And then, fairly desperately, I remembered what are known as the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths…

I knew about the first Truth, which said that suffering was inevitable, and the second Truth, that explained how suffering arose – that suffering comes from not getting what you want.

I was so jealous of Ali, one of the people I like best in the world, and so angry that my own book – that I – hadn’t been recognised, that I was suffering an extraordinary amount of pain.

Unnecessary pain.

I looked at the green hedgerows and kept walking. Everything around me looked wonderful. It was a fantastic day. I was healthy. My family was safe.

Not a word of my book or Ali’s book was different than it had been before.

Why was I angry? What exactly did I want? Wasn’t I, right then, the clearest possible example of suffering through wanting something intangible?

I had allowed myself to become attached to something non-existent, and now I was suffering not because of anything I’d lost but because of not having gained this non-existent thing.

Being longlisted would have been good for my writing career, but I doubted it would have boosted me as much as not being longlisted was killing me.

I decided to accept I wasn’t going to be a winner. Not just in this case, with this prize, but possibly, probably, with every prize from now on.

It would be too much to say that I came back from that walk a Buddhist. But I had wrestled with myself. And the only thing that had given me any purchase was an idea of the Buddha’s.

I thought his Truths might have some truth in them.

I always felt this section of the book was a bit truncated, and isolated. The Buddhist thing isn’t really mentioned afterwards. If anyone was curious about whether I’d followed through on my insight, they wouldn’t really have got an answer.

Both after and before this moment – you can call it an epiphany if you like – I read a number of books on Buddhism and more specifically Zen Buddhism. I hated the idea of spiritual shopping. I wasn’t looking to curate a bespoke set of religious practices. Whatever it was, I should go to it, rather than expect it to come to me. The two most important books, as I think they are to a lot of Zen Buddhists, were Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handbook of Buddhist Meditation by Chögyam Trungpa. With both, I found bits of them very annoying, and slightly evasive or vague, but I read and re-read them. By now I must have read the Suzuki book five or six times. What they both emphasized, and what I was eventually convinced by, was that the point of zazen – of the sitting still – was not to try to gain anything. It wasn’t about achieving enlightenment, or finding peace of mind, or better core strength, or better sleep. The purpose of zazen was zazen.

The Buddha’s Four Noble Truths, as summarised in Damien Keown’s Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction, are these:

(1) life is suffering. (2) suffering is caused by craving. (3) suffering can have an end, and (4) there is a path which leads to the end of suffering.

I wasn’t sure that all life was suffering. Some of my life seem to have been fairly pleasant, and without a downside. But I knew for certain that a lot of my suffering was caused by craving – fame, praise, money, love.

And so I started to find these so-called ‘truths’ convincing, undeniable. Other religions acknowledge suffering, but then divert you into attending places of worship and deepening your faith through being public about it. Buddhism, by contrast, gave a practical inner method for dealing with the arising of suffering. It didn’t require attendance anywhere, or a profession of faith. It didn’t require any metaphysical beliefs.

My suffering during the Arvon week had been exacerbated by a purely artificial desire. I couldn’t do anything about it – until I found that I could.

I was ridiculous in my own eyes.

After that week, I was what you might call a back bedroom Buddist. I did the zazen, read the books. But eventually, I wanted to make some form of contact with other people doing the same thing – people who might have reached the same point. One of the Buddhist chants goes:

I take refuge in the Buddha

I take refuge in the Dharma

I take refuge in the Sangha

The Dharma is another word for the way, the following of whatever it is. The Sangha is the Buddhist community. I had no community – I had my Buddha statue, my mat and my zafu.

I was already fairly sure that the kind of Buddhism that accorded most closely with the Four Noble Truths, as I understood them, was Soto Zen Buddhism. This isn’t anything pure. The Buddha lived near what is, in the present day, Varanasi, in the North of India. His teaching then passed through China, where it became Chan Buddhism, and then Japan, where that was changed to Zen. The version I had picked up on was the export version that reached America in the 1950s, influenced the Beat Writers, and then became popular again in the 1970s and ‘80s. Both Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and The Path is the Goal take the form of transcribed talks to American students of zen. They’re occasionally punctuated by lines like:

Well, there’s a difference between sitting and “hanging out” in the American idiom. The term hanging out means something like “grooving on your own scene.”

First, in looking for the sangha, I went along to the Jamyang Buddhist Centre, near Elephant and Castle. The event was a talk by an American nun. There was a very large gold statue of the Buddha, and an altar of saffron and gold. But throughout her talk, the nun went on about gains – gains from practise, gains of calm and happiness. I realised I didn’t need to make a choice, I had already decided. I wasn’t engaged in spiritual shopping, because I was already sold on one very specific, non-goal oriented version of Buddhism. No gains. If you’re after gains, you’re in the wrong place.

(2) Suffering is caused by craving

It seemed very clear to me that craving for peace of mind was a craving like any other. You could say this was a good thing, if it prompted you to do zazen, but it was still a wish for gain. And that wish – either when fulfilled or thwarted – returned you to craving again, to more suffering. Only a form of Buddhism that promised nothing would fit with these words, the second of the Four Noble Truths. As far as I could see, if you sit down to meditate in hopes of achieving enlightenment, then you’re about as far from enlightenment as you could possibly be.

This may seem a bit Jesuitical. It brings a person to a difficult point. You must not desire not to desire not to desire, etcetera – something like that. What simplifies things is the practice. You do the sitting, you do the doing-nothing. And, at moments, completely unpredictably, you fall into something I can only describe as enlightenment. It goes, though.

I am not saying that I’m enlightened, as if that’s a permanent state of smug spiritual achievement. I’ve just come to conclude what was obvious even in the titles of the first books I read. Zen Mind is Beginner’s Mind, and The Path is the Goal.

Shunryu Suzuki said,

The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not thing about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything.

That’s page 49 of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

When you’ve spent many years distorting yourself into as many grotesque postures of originality as possible, it is an abrupt, sobering thing to realise someone was a lot more right than you will ever be – by being simple and obvious. You do have to go to it, whatever it is, rather than expecting it to come to you, or for you to be able to invent it from scratch. What I went to was this – an impure Buddhism, beginning with a curious encounter with the bogus texts of Lobsang Rampa, the second-hand mindful breathing of Transcendental Meditation, then through words that had travelled through India, China, Japan and America before reaching England. The dojo I attend has its administrative head in France.

I’m not saying that if you yourself are doing meditation in hopes of achieving or practising mindfulness, you’re not doing something actively bad. However, I am made uneasy when I hear people talking about the benefits they feel from learning meditation. They talk about it as if it were eating muesli or going to the gym. What this means is that these people will judge each session of mindfulness, as if it could be successful or unsuccessful, as if it might give them value-added or not, as if it might contribute to their general state of wellness.

I agree with an American Buddhist nun, Gesshin Claire Greenwood, who said,

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Zen doesn’t pacify me, or make me politically neutral, or stop me saying fuck. I hate Donald Trump. I am disgusted by Boris Johnson. But I know Donald Trump is a transitory phenomenon, however appalling. And I know Boris Johnson is suffering, and is not good at dealing with his suffering – except by making other people suffer. ‘The cruelty is the point.’

Zazen allows me to see the insane pressures I put on myself: to be productive in every waking moment, to improve who I am, to deserve more love, to defer death.

I am left alone with my own impatience – and quite frequently, it terrifies me. The desire to scratch, jump up and scream, crack a joke, rejoin life.

I’m sure I’ve said some of this wrong. I’m sure I’ll disagree with some of what I’ve said here, in a few years’ time.

If all this sounds pointless or silly to you, if it seems pretentious or a waste of time, then you clearly shouldn’t be a Buddhist. Or perhaps a proper Buddhist would say, infuriatingly, you’re not yet ready to be a Buddhist.

I’ve said that zazen isn’t about gain. But that doesn’t mean I feel I’ve gained nothing from it. On the contrary, without zazen I don’t think I’d have been capable of writing Patience. Not only does the first image of the book, the white wall Elliott is sitting, facing, looking at, originate from zazen, but the whole attitude of receptivity, of seeing what’s there and then seeing more – I wouldn’t have been capable of accepting something so simple a decade ago. I wouldn’t have trusted it to hold the reader’s attention. I’d have wanted to show off a lot more – to do my little dance, seeking approval. That’s not to say Elliott is an accidental Buddhist. No, he’s full of desires – for sensual experience, for freedom, for friendship. But he does know about suffering, and facing suffering through sitting. He has no choice.

I said that I’d go back to my mother’s deathbed – not that I really want to, of course; these were the worst days of my life. But they contained one of the few times where I felt I did the right thing. Here’s why –

My mother was perhaps ten days from death. I know this because her bed was still alongside the wall, rather than moved to the middle of the room, as it was later. She was on a normal mattress, not that inflatable thing that was soon to make an endless wheeze. She had stopped eating but had yet to stop drinking. She was small, getting smaller, and she was exhausted. Cancer of the womb was pulling her into herself, like a black hole. I went to visit, just me. It was afternoon; grey light. There was snow on the ground outside but if she lived for a couple more weeks, it would be spring, and daffodils. When I arrived I could tell she was too tired to talk, so I didn’t talk. She knew I was there, but I didn’t hold her hand. I had the chair near to the top end of the bed, where her bald head was, and I closed my eyes and just sat. I was a bit worried someone would come in, one of the nurses, but after a while I forgot that, and was able to just sit. I think my mother dozed, knowing her son there. I was there and she was there and I didn’t ask if there was anything I could do for her or burden her with telling her I loved her, again. I think – from what I’ve seen – that, that declaration, is very exhausting for someone edging into death. They have to return in order to reciprocate. So I just sat. And when I got up to go, the light now dark grey, not intending to wake her – though thinking it might be the last time I’d see her – she said, weakly but clearly, ‘You’re very understanding.’

In this case, doing nothing was better than all the somethings I could have done. Or so I felt.

I feel it’s also true at other times.

 

 

 

—

 

A Leonard Cohen Song

On the occasion the release of his latest long-playing record, ‘Thanks for the Dance’, here’s a song of thanks for Leonard Cohen.

 

A Singer Sang a Song

 

To you, far off but sailing near,

to you, so close you disappear,

and you, whose distance is unclear –

            a singer did not get you wrong,

                        a singer sang your very song,

                                    a singer sang your song.

 

To you, who chose to choose your face,

to you, who grew a carapace,

and you, stealing another’s grace –

          a singer did not get you wrong,

                        a singer sang your very song,

                                    a singer sang your song.

 

A singer backed your alibis

            and bought into your schemes,

a singer credited your lies,

            anatomised your dreams,

a singer gathered every word

            and made of them a song,

and then he chuckled as he heard

            you start to sing along –

 

to you, who narrowed into bone,

to you, who fought to be alone,

and you, whose chair became a throne –

      a singer did not get you wrong,

                        a singer sang your very song,

                                    a singer sang your song.

 

 

 

Writing and Shit – part 20 – Winning dialogue

BACK TO THOSE THREE MODELS OF DIALOGUE

I am going to give you three models of dialogue, to help you think about what’s going on when people speak to each other on the page.

(If you’ve read the Starting to Write – Lesson 4: Writing better dialogue, you’ll have seen a version of what follows. You can skip it, but this is expanded, and probably worth going through again.)

None of these three models is being presented as The Best. And really good dialogue tends to treat the three as a mixing desk, bringing up one whilst dialling back another.

Mr But: Three? Only three? Surely there are many more kinds of dialogue?

There are some, and I will talk about them after I’ve done the three. But I think that alternatives are limited – you can use them, for a while, but if you try to keep going with them you’ll find they become boring.

WINNING DIALOGUE

 “When two men say ‘Hello’ on the street, one of them loses.”

I used to think this quote came from the hypermacho American writer Norman Mailer. For years, I used it, then someone helped me track it down online. What Mailer said had the same meaning but was less quotable. He said:

If anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H. Somewhere in Hemingway is the hard mind of a small-town boy, the kind of boy who knows you have a real cigar only when you are the biggest man in town, because to be just one of the big men in town is tiring, much too tiring. You inspire hatred, and what is worse than hatred, a wave of cross-talk in everyone around you. You are considered important by some and put down by others, and every time you meet a new man, the battle is on.

This is in the book Advertisements for Myself.

This model of dialogue is the one you will most commonly come across in screenwriting manuals. In its laziest form, it will come down to this: If your scene isn’t happening, increase the level of conflict between the characters.

I FEEL THE NEED, THE NEED FOR SPEED

If you go to blockbuster movies, you will come across a lot of Winning dialogue. Characters who have only just met, and who seem to have no reason for not getting along, will almost immediately become extremely angry with one another. Shouting will occur, finger pointing, physical threats, as each tries to win the exchange and get the other to do what they want.

Hollywood wishes it to be known that it understands power. Hollywood does understand, better than anywhere else, a certain kind of power – and it has exported the way this power talks to itself. It has colonized.

There is no doubt this method of writing dialogue works within a macho, straightahead, straight world. (I choose my words precisely.)

The idea behind Winning dialogue is that, in every human encounter, but – more importantly for you – in every fictional scene, there is an outcome. Someone finishes up as top dog. The winner has maintained their status or increased their hold on power. The loser may have lost many things – lost self-respect, lost the respect of others, lost face.

Exercise: Write a dialogue, apparently about general stuff, between two men which both men are desperately trying to win.

Explanation: I’d like you to write a dialogue in which two men – this time through I’d like it to be men  – are having a discussion of a seemingly neutral subject. Through discussing the subject, they each try to win the exchange. The subject is not the main issue between them (the main issue is, always, who is top dog). But the two men stick to the supposed subject, never getting down to their real issues.

The main rule of this exercise is that it must always escalate. Neither man can ever say anything conciliatory. Every bit of speech must be a deliberate attempt to win or to increase the stakes.

You should push this as far as you can go. I am not going to tell you where to stop. Make it extreme, and energetic, because that way you will learn more.

Seven minutes. Off you go.

 

How did that feel? Is it a kind of dialogue you’ve done before? Is it, in fact, a kind of dialogue you do all the time? Or is it the kind of dialogue you hate and try to avoid reading, let alone writing?

Just make a few mental notes. Or ones on the page, if you feel like it.

What lies beneath Winning dialogue is the belief that all human speech is ultimately to do with power.

Exercise: Do you agree? Are we all incredibly competitive, even when we’re doing ourselves down? What picture of how people are does Winning dialogue suggest?

Next week, I’ll move on to my second model of dialogue.

Writing and Shit – part 19 – Everything is dialogue

EVERYTHING IS DIALOGUE

I don’t just mean two people in a book talking, and it being received in written down form.

By ‘Everything is dialogue’, I mean that if your writing has the sense of different voices intruding on one another – not always monologuing, not always singing in the same key – it will gain a new energy and sense of space. Your prose need not always agree with itself.

If you look up ‘dialogue’ in the dictionary, you can come away with a vaguer idea than the one you probably have right now.

By dialogue I mean, the stuff on the page in a story that usually appears between inverted commas, single or double.

Literary Aside. Some writers, from James Joyce onwards, have favoured a single dash, indented, on the left side of the page, to indicate speech. This is a fine way of doing dialogue, but is more likely to confuse the reader if you’re unsure about what you’re doing.

Aside. Italics are for amateurs. If you put your dialogue not only in inverted commas but italics, you will look insecure – you’re doubling up what you do to indicate speech. Not necessary. Similarly, if you do all your dialogue without inverted commas but by using italicization, you make it impossible for you to use italics elsewhere in the story, to suggest emphasis or words in a foreign language or to give the title of a book or film.

I’ll say a little later on about funky and unfunky texts. Italics tend to funk up a text but to no good end.

CLUNK

A lot of dialogue is clunky. Writers who are wonderful with description can be awful as soon as they need to get a person to order a cup of coffee.

It is possible to write without dialogue, but this will tend to create gapless writing. (Avoid gapless writing unless you’re on top of gappy writing.)

DEFINITELY NOT YOU

Exercise: Make up a pseudonym for a writer who definitely isn’t you. Not you at all. Make up a pseudonym for a really bad writer. A writer who definitely isn’t you. Nowhere near.

Definition: By pseudonym I mean a pen name, or more accurately a disguise on the page.

Explanation: I’d like you to take the pressure off yourself. You don’t always have to be you, you don’t always have to try your very best, and you certainly don’t always have to stand alongside what you’ve written, pointing at it, and saying, This is mine – I take full responsibility for it.

Be assured, as soon as you have finished this exercise, you can rip up the page or delete the file. No-one need ever read the words you’re about – as your pseudonym – to write.

The pseudonym you choose needs to be made up – you can’t just pick Dan Brown – and it needs to sound like it belongs to a bad writer who does a particularly bad kind of writing.

Mr But: What do you mean by bad writing? You can’t go around saying stuff like that without qualifying it.

Answer: In this case I mean only ‘Writing that you think is bad.’ If you think non-genre writing, the sort that wins prestigious literary prizes, is bad writing, then make your pseudonym fit for that. If you think Warhammer books are bad, make up a Warhammer pseudonym.

Exercise: At the top of a blank page, write the words THIS PIECE OF DIALOGUE IS BY… and then your pseudonym.

Exercise continued: At the bottom of the same page, sign with your pseudonym’s signature. With a flourish.

Exercise concluded: Now, on this page, that is no longer owned by you, I would like you – as your pseudonym – to write dialogue that is definitely bad in as many ways as you can think of.  Try to make it the the worst dialogue the world has ever seen.

Seven minutes.

Notes: You should write this dialogue as you would in a story or a novel, not just as unattributed lines of speech, or as play dialogue with names down the left margin followed by colons and what those people say.

There’s no need to go wild and describe the pattern on the wallpaper of the room they’re in, or the clouds in they sky above them, but a little bit of scene setting as part of the dialogue might be useful

Bear in mind that a response does not always have to be verbal – it could be good to say ‘He shrugged’ or ‘She said nothing.’

YOU’VE JOURNEYED THROUGH THE WORST, AND FINISHED

Wasn’t that fun? I hope that was fun – and I hope, once you got going, you found it easy. Certainly, and this is where you can learn something important – certainly, I guess, you found it easier than if I had done the following:

Asked you to write at the top of the page THIS PIECE OF DIALOGUE IS BY and then your name. Had I told you to sign, with your own signature, at the bottom of the page. And most of all, insisted that – after you had finished with the exercise – you immediately took the page and showed it to another person. One you respect. With the words, ‘I’ve just written this. I think it’s really good. Tell me what you think. Honestly.’

All of these conditions would have made doing the exercise harder, wouldn’t they? All of them would have made it more self-conscious and less fun.

But all these conditions are as nothing when compared to the overall aim.

Imagine how difficult, how impossible the exercise would have been if instead of asking you to write the worst dialogue the world has ever seen I had, seriously, with no humour, asked you – here and now – to write the best dialogue the world has ever seen.

Yet all of these conditions are the conditions that most writers impose upon themselves.

Each of the things I asked you to do stands for something that can make writing more difficult.

Owning it, showing it and straining at every moment to make it the best you possibly can possibly.

I would like you to stop doing all these things.

None of your writing is owned until you choose to own it, and you only choose to own it when you choose to show it as yours.

Until then, the purpose of the writing is not to be as good as your writing can possibly be but to be the best step you can take, at every stage, towards you becoming a better writer.

Sometimes, whisper it, this will involve writing deliberately badly – or deliberately worse than you otherwise could.

Story-start. Think back. Did your story end when you began to think of it as yours, or began to think of the moment someone else might read it or comment upon it, or begin to think it wasn’t as good as some other piece of writing you remembered you’d written in the past or imagined yourself writing in future.

Stop it – owning, showing, and striving.

From now on your aim isn’t to write as well as you can but to write with energy. I would guess that your deliberately bad dialogue has more energy than any of the dialogue in your story-start. (Does you story-start have dialogue?)

Let the writing do the writing.

Before we move on from this, to look for closely at dialogue, I’d like you to do something that isn’t really an exercise, but something both more serious and more silly than that. I’d like you to write down three pseudonyms for writers you think might be good writers.

All these three possible writers are now there for you to use, in future. You can write as one or alternately as all of them for the rest of the exercises in this book, or secretly for the rest of your writing life.

That’s all until next time.

Writing and Shit – part 18 – Breaking your statues into two pieces

ALL BY YOURSELF

One of the biggest faults in stories by less experienced writers is that they are about extremely isolated people – people who start off by being isolated and don’t end up making much contact with others.

This is not, in itself, a bad idea. There have been many wonderful stories about people without friends or allies. However, there have been many thousands more unfinished, in-the-shit stories about people whose lives are so inward that it is very difficult for anything around them to turn into a story.

A typical mistake for a learning writer to make is to write about someone who is essentially an isolated version of themselves. You could call this a Me v. The World story, or a Righteous Story. The central person is the only person we meet whose views come anywhere close to a. the truth of the situation and b. the views of the writer.

Particularly if the Righteous Story is told from a first person viewpoint, it can be extremely monotonous and risks being extremely boring.

Why? Because there’s no essential drama. There is nothing out of place. The central person is right and the world is wrong, that is all. No change or movement can occur. One wrong location the person visits is much like another. It can be pretty, or well-described, but it’s equally uninvolving. The person in the right has no particular place to go. They just speak of their situation.

As with the Routine Day story, if this kind of monologue is to be readable, the event has to be in the language itself.

Literary aside 1: The novels of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) often are entirely made up of furious monologues by Thomas Bernhard-like men, who get extremely angry at the state of their lives but do very little about it beyond getting amusingly angry. As example would be Wittgenstein’s Nephew. What happens in a Thomas Bernhard novel is an explosion of entertainingly furious language. A plot summary of what happens in any of them would be pointless. Thomas Bernhard is a writer’s writer. If you’d like to see his influence at good work, read Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

Literary aside 2: Examples of successful novels with extremely isolated people at their centre would be Richard Matheson I am Legend; Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat; J.G.Ballard, Concrete Island; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things; Rupert Thomson, The Insult; Daniel Quinn, Ishmael; Laline Paul, The Bees; Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark; Gilbert Adair, A Closed Book; Ian McEwan, Nutshell; Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea; Paul Sayer, The Comforts of Madness; Pincher Martin; The Man who Folded Himself; David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress; Charles Willeford, Cockfighter; Ann McCaffrey, The Ship Who Sang; Hubert Selby Jnr, The Room; Carson McCullers The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

BUT ENOUGH OF THAT

My suggestion here is that, for the moment, you make it an absolute rule not to have a central person whose views are your own and who is proved, by the events of the story, to be completely in the right.

Mouthpieces are dead, storywise. If they are right, and the action they are involved in proves them so, then they have no reason to change.

If they are right going into paragraph one, there is nothing for them to develop towards – they are statues erected to your own moral impeccability. You may try to move them around within a story, but it will be like shifting statues around on a stage to try to make a play – to the audience, they will appear heavy, mute, unamusing, ridiculous.

Avoid statues. Every person in a story should be capable of change. If they are not not capable of changing their attitude, then at least they should be capable of changing from alive to dead. Statues cannot die.

 NOT ONE PERSON, NOT ALONE

One of the simplest ways of bringing a statue to life is to break it in two, to see how the two halves relate to one another.

Instead of writing Me vs the World, have your story centre around two people, people who are very different to one another, and whose approach to any particular problem is likely to be very different.

By doing this, what will you create?

A gap.

LAUREL AND HARDY

How the action progresses, in your two person story, will now depend upon dialogue and action, not monologue and decision.

Exercise: You are going to write about the same basic situation, but do it twice. The situation is this. Someone is being chased by a group of things that want to harm them. They come round a corner, run down a narrow alley and find themselves confronted by a high wall. The things can be heard getting closer. What does the someone do?

In the first version of the story, the someone is an isolated person, they are also the narrator of the action. This version begins, ‘I ran round the corner and down the narrow alley.’ It continues from there, for a page.

In the second version, the someone is two people who have only just met. They are still working out who is top dog. Also, this version is narrated in the third person. It begins with the names of both characters, ‘So-and-so and Thingy ran round the corner and down the narrow alley.’ It goes one from there for a page, or two, if you feel like it. No need to get to the end.

Quite possibly, you’re the kind of writer who could never see themselves writing anything as crass as a chase sequence. This solution to the statue problem would work just as well for a couple paying a trip to the supermarket to buy soap powder, or for two children trying to decide what game to play.

Look back at your story-start. Is one of the reasons it broke down that it happens to an isolated central person, very similar to yourself, who doesn’t need to change and who only interacts with less important people?

Be honest – have you written a person or erected a statue? Is what happens decided by people doing and speaking or by one person thinking and thinking some more.

One of the easiest ways to make your stories easier to complete, to get them out of the shit, is to stop allowing them to be anything like monologues.

For a while, at least, as an experiment, I’d like you to take the attitude that –

‘EVERYTHING IS DIALOGUE’

‘Not it’s not.’

‘Well, let’s see…’

Writing and Shit – part 17 – Controlling versus disempowering