People will talk
People will talk. Just try to stop them. Characters too, although we have much more control over our characters. I hear writers relate how their characters have taken control, breaking their leashes and running loose through the story. Well, it can happen if you let it, but a writer can control characters anytime he wishes. Be like the dog whisperer; take charge.
Try writing a short scene in which the character dashes wildly down a dark alley and runs into fill-in-the-blank-here-it’s-your-scene. Write down the unpleasant sounds of the scene in the alley, then wait for your character to come crawling back to you, licking his wounds and promising to behave.
On the other hand, we need to give our characters freedom to explore, to grow and change, and, along the way, freedom to speak. Let them talk, not to the writer, but to each other. It’s called dialogue. We take it for granted in fiction, just as we take talking and language for granted in our daily lives, but where would be without it?
Can we tell a story without dialogue? We’ve seen mimes do it on stage. We’ve read stories without dialogue, although there is always a voice, the voice of the narrator. In Woody Allen’s “Viva Vargas: Excerpts from the Diary of a Revolutionary,” Allen’s narrator is a college student who has joined a rebel camp. The diary excerpts contain not a line of dialogue; the narrator’s voice carries the story.
I usually encourage my characters to speak, but a recent short story, inspired by “Viva Vargas,” attempts to ride along on the voice of the narrator. Jack Fielding, poet-in-residence on an odd pirate ship sailing the Sea of Cortez in 1848, keeps a log that chronicles his days on board the Inquisitor.
I travelled a long way for this story, to the Pacific coast of Mexico, north into the Sea of Cortez, and down the coast of Baja California. To prepare I read Steinbeck and others, and I watched film of large brown pelicans performing their high dives into the sea. I brought back from my trip the following: a hundred photos of pelicans, cormorants, gulls, frigate birds, and great blue herons; a new appreciation for the romance of Mexico, which expresses itself in the warmth of its music, the passion of its religion, and the taste of its cerveza and tequila; and a new short story about a woman pirate.
As I watched pelicans diving for the catch of the day, the characters of my story began to take shape, beginning with Fanny the Captain, whose big red hair was inspired by a fiery Baja sunset near Loreto. There soon followed a painter named Charlie Parker, a mandolin playing songwriter named Billy Turner, four scientists, two real pirates named Bald Curly and Big Tiny, a foul-mouthed parrot, and a runaway iguana.
Bald Curly, who got his name because another sailor on the Inquisitor was also named Curly and actually had hair on his head, is the first character to insist on speaking in the story. He protests that Lizzy’s choice for a motto on the ship’s pirate flag—Green and Mean (she’s a 19th century environmentalist who also wants to save the whales)—is not a proper motto for a pirate ship. He prefers Black and Cruel. I found myself using direct quotations for Bald Curly’s protest, to hear him snarling, revealing his gold tooth, and ending his speech with “What are we, pretend pirates?”
The other character who wanted to speak was Jack, the narrator. I decided that, because he was involved in a romantic triangle with Fanny and Charlie, Jack needed to speak directly to the other main characters, and especially to have a dialogue scene with Charlie. Charlie Parker, under Fanny’s orders, is painting a portrait of Jack one day on deck when Jack sees a large brown pelican diving into the sea.
He points this out to Charlie, whose eyes take on a wild look as he talks about being like the pelican, going straight for the object of desire. This scene, of course, stirs the romantic pot and soon brings the story to its rather sensational conclusion.
So dialogue had its day. At the end of the story, however, I return to the mind of the narrator, showing Jack alone on the deck with his thoughts, watching the Baja sunset blaze away, then the last color fading in the west, as Jack stretches his arms out to the heavens and surrenders. “Do with me what you will,” he whispers into the dark unknown. Above all this, of course, the writer nods his approval, as if to say, “Good boy. Good Jack. Good character.”
Tags: Dialogue, Short Story, Woody Allen
