Sometimes I wonder if everything I notice turns to writing thoughts. As an example, one of the local bus companies has a number of cartoon
adverts on the back of their buses trying to persuade people to use
public transport.
Most of these ads have a myth at the top and use a male and female
couple in different conversations. As I wait for my bus a few of these adverts have caught my attention from a writing perspective. Here’s one of them:
Myth: Posh people don’t travel on public transport.
Male: People with names like mine don’t travel on the bus.’
Female: Oh poor you, Rupert.’
I don't know any men called Rupert, so I can't ask them if they've ever travelled by bus, but we do often make assumptions about people without knowing them well. In this post I wrote about selecting names for characters
and the associations names may have for us.
A few weeks ago I spoke to a group of people about some aspects of writing, and I was asked whether I tried to select unusual names. The answer isn't straightforward. Sometimes a character arrives with exactly the right name, and on other occasions it can take a long time to come up with the perfect name for them. A few characters have been particularly troublesome and have ended up having their name changed several times - thank goodness for Find and Replace.
The protagonist of my current novel is Anna King, and in one scene she recalls it was easy to learn how to write her name at school as she only had five letters to master, half the number of her best friend, Corinne Jamieson.
Here is another of those bus adverts.
Male: How can we make the people on the North Shore realise it’s
hip to travel on the bus.
Female: Don’t use the word hip for one thing.
Just as names give us an image of a person, so the words or phrases they use can have the same effect and help to deepen the reader’s image. For example, the character of Evelyn in Still
Death is an older lady, and when I read my first draft, I realised I'd given her a speech tick where she called most people ‘dear’. I hope I used it enough to orient the reader it was
her, but not enough to irritate.
Fitz (a minor character in Lives Interrupted) is Irish, and
one of the speech ticks I’d noticed while in Ireland was the use of the word
‘yous’ when talking about either an individual or a group. Again I tried to use
it judiciously so it wasn’t on every line, but used at least once in a scene
where he was involved.
There’s nothing quite like listening to real conversation
and picking up on people’s favourite words and phrases, especially when they're given an individual twist.
At the moment I'm back working in the city in one of the high-rise office blocks. High-rise in Auckland isn't as tall as many other cities, and usually equates to around thirty floors. I'm on a floor halfway up with a great view of the harbour. The building is close to St. Matthews church, and from my window I look out at the top of the tower.
You get a different perspective of the city from that height, and I guess when the church was built in the first few years of the 1900s it would have been one of the tallest buildings in the city. Now, the church is dwarfed by many of the bland office blocks.
The only constant is change, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but change nevertheless.
Language is another of those things that is constantly evolving. Flicking through an Enid Blyton book recently, I was reminded of frocks and sixpences, and a world that no longer existed even when I first marvelled at the Faraway Tree and wanted to go on adventures with the Famous Five.
Text talk and abbreviations seem to be a totally different language, but I remember comments my parents made about my teenage-self and friends and our conversation, and then I think of some of my favourite Shakespeare quotations. It's the same language, but very different.
As I walked into a small shop a few days ago, I overheard part of a conversation between the store owner and a person at the counter. The customer asked about someone they were thinking of employing.
The owner hesitated for the briefest of moments before giving a pleasant, but non-committal response.
The hesitation said everything. The polite words spoken without any enthusiasm merely confirmed my initial reaction. I wouldn't employ the person they were discussing.
As I came out of the shop I thought about that exchange as a writer.
Dialogue is vital in writing. It should do at least one of the following things:
- Advance the plot
- Deepen understanding of the character
- Create or advance conflict and suspense.
Silence, or a pause that
is slightly longer than it should, can often tell us far more than
conversation. Why is the character silent? Is it because they don't have
an answer, or because they don't want to tell what they know?
Is it a comfortable silence, or does the person act awkwardly and out of character? Does another character rush to fill the silence with chatter? What questions would go unanswered, or be answered ambiguously or untruthfully?
Silence can also heighten tension, especially when it's obvious one character knows something, but isn't telling. Does the reader know the answer, or are they being kept in the dark as well?
If used
well, silence can do the same job as dialogue in expanding plot,
deepening character and creating suspense or questions.
Subtext is the content hidden under dialogue, and is a good way to show the relationship between characters. For example, Sally and Jane have had a disagreement at work. They sit at adjacent desks, but have been working silently since the disagreement. Then Jane says she is going to buy coffee and a muffin from the cafe along the road, and asks Sally if she would like anything. Neither mentions the disagreement, but the offer of coffee and a muffin is subtext for an apology, or at least a request to forget the disagreement. Subtext is often used between people who know each other well, although a group of people may use it to laugh at someone outside of their group.
Another way that dialogue can keep the reader guessing is by using an unreliable narrator. I recently finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, and without giving away too much of the plot, as you read further into the book you begin to realise that what you are being told is not necessarily the whole truth.
A narrator may be unreliable because they are deliberately misleading you, or it could be because they don't fully understand the situation. An excellent example of this is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime by Mark Haddon. The narrator is fifteen-year old Christopher Boone, who has behavioral difficulties. Because of this and his age, there are scenes which he doesn't understand, but which the reader does.
Christopher gets into trouble because he doesn't understand other people, or subtext. An example of the type of subtext he wouldn't get is, 'Can you open the window?' To Christopher this is a question about his abilities, but we know he is being asked to open the window.
Using an unreliable narrator isn't something you can decide to do halfway through a manuscript, at least not without a lot of rewriting, but it makes for an interesting read when used well.
