Tag: Novels

Some Useful Information If You Plan to Set Your Novel in the Nineteen-Fifties

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When I was thirteen years old, I read Pride and Prejudice, which taught me a lot about writing in general, and especially about the value of small, period details in historical fiction. Not that Jane Austen wrote P&P as historical fiction, of course. As far as she was concerned, it was just regular fiction; and I personally like the way that means that she didn’t feel any need to describe every detail of what everybody wore. Some people love costume-descriptions, and there’s a lot of historical fiction that’s almost more historical than fiction that caters to those very people. Myself, I treasure the tiny, just-right particular, such as—in the case of Pride and Prejudice—the line “…the very shoe-roses for Netherfield were got by proxy…”

Apparently I’m not the only person whose attention was caught by this sentence. A quick Google-search (not possible when I was thirteen) reveals that not only is it widely known and quoted, but that there are websites whose specific purpose is to teach Jane Austen fans how to make shoe-roses. To get that information in my day, I had to spend a lot of time in used bookstores, poring through old books of housekeeping advice. I ended up buying a lot of these books, despite the fact that most were mildewed and I am allergic to mildew. (You can kill mildew in a microwave oven—try not to set the book on fire—but home microwaves are another thing that did not exist back in the Pleistocene, when I was thirteen.) I treasure the book in which I finally found an explicit definition of “shoe-roses” (it includes the advice that “if the shoes be very worn, make the roses large, to cover them”); but I have to admit that the jewel of my housekeeping-book collection is the one containing directions for doing something Jane Austen probably never even considered: gilding a live fish. Yes, gilding; and yes, live. The idea was that if you were giving a party, and if you had a fish-pond or bowl (and, presumably, if the fish in the bowl wasn’t already a goldfish), you could dazzle your guests by gussying the little fellow up with a few sheets of gold-leaf. Best line in the whole book: “The fish does not mind this.” I have never found a literary use for this nugget of information, but I’m working on it.

Anyway, what this is all leading up to is that for some reason that I cannot begin to imagine, the 1950s are hot. This means that people who weren’t actually there are suddenly writing books about the fifties, throwing in—willy-nilly in some cases—factoids of the Fifties Experience that, while true, are sometimes a little too obviously culled from history texts and fashion magazines.

Consider this: Does your house/wardrobe/menu resemble those in today’s fashion magazines? I thought not. So in case you’re thinking of writing something about the fifties, here are some particulars you can put in it, guaranteed genuine, to supply what we will call “corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”*

First and foremost, not everything in the fifties was from the fifties! The people who make movies are the worst for forgetting this. People mostly still drove forties cars; and due to the shortage of new cars during WWII, some of them drove thirties cars. A big shiny thing with lots of chrome and fins was rare enough to turn heads in a middle-class neighborhood. People’s houses were filled with forties stuff, too. If you think the ubiquitous aqua/burnt orange/grayish pink fifties color schemes looked good with an off-white naugahyde sofa—you’re right. The combination was pretty cool, actually. But imagine it instead with an overstuffed davenport—in a color somewhere between brown and purple—left over from 1946. For most people, that was the reality of 50s decorating.

What became the “walk-in closet” was often referred to as a “Hollywood closet” in the fifties, because unless you lived in Hollywood, the closet in your bedroom was small. Which was fine. You didn’t have many clothes to put in it anyway. Also, all shoes were uncomfortable until the day before they were totally worn out. My family was poor and I wore cheap shoes, but I have to assume from the speed with which rich people adopted lovely, soft, comfortable running shoes when they were finally invented that expensive shoes were stiff and caused blisters, too. Good line for a fifties party scene: “Jeepers, my feet are killing me!”

Big Brother, aka your neighbors, was watching. Big Brother gossiped, too.

Racism and sexism were pervasive. Throw in a joke about what bad drivers women are and if no one in your book challenges it—even though insurance companies knew women were better drivers than men, and charged them less for insurance—and you will have created a genuine fifties moment. Racist “humor” will also set an authentic tone, but by today’s standards, even the mildest will rightly be considered highly offensive. Risk it only in works of a particularly “gritty” nature.

In the fifties, if your mom was a terrible cook, you were screwed. Fast food was a very new concept, and resorted to only occasionally. Restaurants were expensive, and not child-friendly. If your mom was the kind to boil pork-chops and believed canned peas—also boiled—were good enough for anybody, you had no alternative but to eat boiled pork-chops and canned peas. (Don’t ask me how I know this.) Also in the fifties, lots of foods that didn’t belong there were made “interesting” by being suspended in lime jello. These foods included Vienna Sausages. Really.

Men had jobs. Women had children. And hobbies. Your average lower-middle-class house was filled with ugly ceramics, hideous needlepoint, or crocheted everything. On the other hand, toilet-paper rolls “disguised” by a crocheted lady in a flared skirt were better than a mom with that other fifties hobby, which was heavy drinking.

I lived through the fifties. I lived through the sixties. At no time in either decade did I ever hear one single adult admit to liking rock and roll music. Ever.

There you have it. Make what use of you will of these gems. Or, on the other hand, don’t. Write about the sixties, instead. Trust me: The sixties were better.

*W.S. Gilbert; The Mikado. I am a HUGE fan of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Yesterday’s Future

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After attempting a few books (well, first chapters of books, actually) about non-human races and societies, I’ve decided that genre’s not for me. I love writing for the chance it gives me to throw off the constraints of reality and flat-out make stuff up; but, as turns out, there are limits to just how unconstrained I want to be. After just a few pages of having to make everything up—the psychologies of the individual beings; the sociological parameters of their culture; the biology of my non-human creatures, and whether they had mommies and hearts and fingers and if they did, how many of each; and, most of all, whether any of it actually needed to be in the book—I was exhausted.

So I decided to go back to writing about humans again—not my very favorite species, but one with which I am at least somewhat familiar—and mess around with my projected book’s temporal setting instead. I decided I’d send my characters to live in one of those predicted futures that somehow never came, and see what they would do.

There are hundreds of these “futures” to choose from, of course. The one of my young years was mostly a post-nuclear moonscape in which the mutated remnants of humanity fought each other for scraps, but that would be depressing to write about. I decided instead to appropriate the “world of tomorrow” that giant corporations like GE and Ford were selling to the American public in the two decades after World War II. It’s consistent and well-documented; and it’s also the vision of the future that probably most influenced the generation just before mine; a generation whose values and beliefs—as I was recently sharply reminded—I have never understood.

—Also I picked Giant American Corporation Future because I thought it would be easy to research. All I’d have to do was watch a few of the many, many short films Corporate America produced to promote merchandise they did not yet manufacture* (!) and I’d be ready to go. I remember watching these films on rainy days at school in the 1960s, when my teachers, at least, thought the “tomorrow” they depicted, though delayed, might still on the way.

I think my personal favorite was the one in which, after making herself comfy in bed, a modestly night-gowned young lady pushed a button (everything was done by pushing a button) and the head of her bed slid through a suddenly-appearing portal in the wall, half-way out into the— The what? The back-yard? The alley the garbage-truck was going to trundle down early next morning? A void in the air twenty floors above Manhattan? The idea was that you could sleep breathing God’s fresh air; but did the engineers who conceived this marvel never hear of smog; stray cats; sleepwalkers? Despite unanswered questions like this one, I enjoyed the first half-dozen flickers (all except Wink Martindale as an astrophysicist, which I found highly unconvincing); and then I began to feel very sad. It wasn’t appliances these little movies were selling, it was a bill of goods.

The Future of these films was very, very clean; and all the wives (no women but wives appeared) were submissive and content. When not pushing buttons, they entertained the bridge club. Children were scrubbed and happy; all men were gainfully employed and played golf. Culture was entirely homogeneous—core values; music; fashion; everything. By the 1960s, a few African Americans had begun to appear in them, but any implied threat was neutralized by carefully pairing every black male with a black female. There were no Asians. Presumably they all lived in Asia. Hispanics lived in—Mexico City. Where there were nice golf-courses. Everything was peaceful (no nuclear moonscapes here, folks!); uniform; and, from my point of view, very boring.

And all this cultural homogeneity was made possible through the miracle of technology! According to the films, technology was going to solve everything. Every need was met, every disease cured by the push of a button. An automatic dishwasher would cure Mother’s restless striving to have something meaningful in her life; and technological Plenty meant that there would be enough of everything even for “Those People” (you know the ones); who would, under the influence of this Plenty, become happy, non-threatening replicas of “Us”. All of Middle America’s worst fears, in fact, would (according to the films produced by Corporate America) be met and conquered by technology. All without a shot being fired; and all, the films implied, by the year 1999.

My own generation was too despairing about the future (moonscape!), which was bad—but at least it means that we have been happily surprised all through our lives to find ourselves not only still not bombed to radioactive atoms, but living to grow old. In contrast, those members of the generation before mine who believed in Corporate America’s vision of the future have suffered disappointment after disappointment as knotty social problems were not, in fact, solved with better household appliances.

And if they passed their exaggerated hopes and outsized disappointments along to their children—and one assumes many did—it might explain a few things about recent history.

*(Whirlpool is still trying to predict the “Kitchen of the Future“, by the way.)

Welcome to My World That I Just Made Up

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I made up a new maxim. It is, “Those who don’t learn from the mistakes they make in picking what kind of book to write are condemned to keep writing the same kind of book.” It’s not very catchy, it’s grammatically a little obscure, and it probably won’t catch on generally; but I hope that pinning it up over my desk and looking at it every day will stop me from making another literary foray into applied sociology.

Like most writers, I think, one of the reasons I started writing stories in the first place is because I’m interested in human psychology. I try to figure out the answers to my questions about how people’s minds work by making up characters and moving them through the various life situations that constitute my plot. But outside of people, my greatest love is history, and I keep seeking insights into history by creating whole societies, and moving them through the various historical situations that constitute my plot. For me at least, this is really tough.

In my experience, it’s relatively easy to write an original—and yet believable—character, because individual personalities vary so much. Any being with opposable thumbs is plausibly human. Ever known a Heathcliff or a Cathy? Me neither—but I’m perfectly able to believe they might exist. And to write an original society is pretty easy, too—but not to make it convincingly stable, or lasting.

This is because societies are like dogs. Breeders can work hard and create animals as different as Great Danes and Chihuahuas; but let them relax their vigilance and in a few generations they find themselves with a bunch of very similar medium-sized, flop-eared, saber-tailed mutts. (–Nothing against mutts, by the way. Mutts are my favorite breed.)

Similarly, put a bunch of humans together, and however they initially conceive their society, eventually they evolve one that has similar rules; norms; authority groups; social, familial and religious structures and institutions; and exhibit the same degrees of cooperation and conflict as every other human society.

I won’t say that I’m a contrarian, but the fact that this homogenization is so general annoys me. So I keep writing fantasies in which the characters are human, but the societies they have evolved are different. Then I spend the whole book trying to figure out why, and how to keep them that way.

It’s hard work. I’m crazy to do it. One of the societies in Ant-lands was a bit on the utopian side, and what with all the extra research I had to do on how utopias are created (and why they never last long), the damn book took me at least an extra year to write. And now I’m writing about the first encounters between different societies, and researching how long, in general, it takes people to realize how superficial their differences, and how deep and innate their similarities are. Do you realize how many books have been written on this topic? And I have to read a bunch of them.

Hence the un-catchy little aphorism pinned up over my desk. If I read it daily and take it to heart, my next protagonist will be a loner, an outcast from all societies. –And not the kind of loner who goes around making friends with the little woodland creatures, either. It wouldn’t be an improvement for me to have to research woodland creatures.

NaNoWriMo: Fifty Thousand Words Containing an Infinity of Possibilities

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I have my own National Novel Writing Month project going this year—one just a little outside the official parameters of NaNoWriMo. I know. Shame on me. But I hope I can be forgiven for playing fast and loose with a few rules on the basis of the fact that I write novels every month of the year, not just in November.

Forgivable or not, instead of attempting a whole book this time, I’m allowing myself the treat of writing as many first chapters of books as add up to the requisite 50,000 words. I love writing (and reading) first chapters, and I’ve always resented the fact that under ordinary circumstances, I’m limited to just one at a time.

I love the way that, when I begin the first chapter of a new book, all the possibilities are still open. Oh, sure; I have an outline, and I know generally how the story is going to go. But nothing is certain until I actually write it down. Before I start typing, the protagonist can still be either fair or dark; rich or poor; wearing a crinoline or jeans or a space-suit. After that, over the sound of the keyboard clicking, I can hear doors slamming shut. By the end of chapter one, the protagonist is immutably tall, white, jeans-clad, and has three kids and a job from hell. What makes it even worse is that a lot of the former “choices” that I have now petrified into “facts” aren’t even things I care about. The job from hell is a plot-point, and I need it to be that way; but the jeans were an option. —Only now she’s wearing them and I can’t suddenly say they’re a cocktail-dress.

(Or at least, I can’t without some rewriting. Some things are worth rewriting, and when they are, I think I may brag that I do not shirk. I was well into my latest book when I realized that an immutable plot-point just had to mutate. Out of 148 pages of work, I was able to save exactly 36. But this—though necessary—was very painful; and I can’t imagine doing it for jeans.)

So to get back to NaNoWriMo, it’s a great thing in which everyone should definitely participate, and do so with a due regard for the rules. Except me. This year I’m breaking them. I’ve been hard at work for a long time, writing within increasingly restricted parameters, and now I’m going to let go and have some fun. The first chapters I write seem to vary an amazing amount from one to the next in length, but as nearly as I can calculate, 50,000 words works out to about six of them. Six whole new worlds, full of almost infinite possibilities, to play in for a month…

Or, since I’ve already finished the first one—five new worlds. Paradise!

And next year, I promise to play fair again.

NaNoWriMo

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It’s November again, National Novel Writing Month; the time when those who subscribe to the Holy Truth that anyone can write a novel must dust off the old keyboard, lay in a supply of snacks, and call me up in a state of either panic or despair (other states also acceptable) to ask me for a plot. Go ahead: Do it. You won’t be the first to call; you won’t be the last to call; and honestly, I don’t mind.

Not that I really understand why anybody would need help my help to come up with a plot. Plots are the easiest thing in the world. For starters, there are books full of them (the classic is Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations); and if the ones in the books are too bare-bones to stimulate your imagination—and some people have complained to me that they are—there’s always your own life and the lives of those around you to draw on for inspiration.

In fact, there’s everything around you to draw on for inspiration. I may have mentioned that as a child in school, I failed to learn much arithmetic. One reason for this was the distracting quality of so-called story problems. Set up a situation like, “Janie’s mother gave her seven apples. She gave Janie’s brother Ted nine apples,” and my mind was off and running. “Mother always gives me fewer apples than she gives Ted,” thought Janie resentfully. “It’s because he’s a boy. Mother says it’s a Man’s World, and I must just get used to it. Well, I’m not going to get used to it, Mother. Someday I’m going to take this Man’s World of yours and make it my oyster!” (I was big into food imagery as a child.) By the time that, in my mind, Janie had grown up, extracted herself from the stifling influences of both Mother and an unsuitable marriage, and become the rich and powerful founder and CEO of a company that produced women’s shoes that were somehow both stylish and comfortable, arithmetic period was over, and I wasn’t any closer to figuring out how many apples were left in the barrel for cousin Ann than I’d been in the first place.

So—trust me. If the reason you hesitate to participate in National Novel Writing Month is because you can’t think of a plot, you need hesitate no longer. That bad date? Novelize it. Setup: The protagonist’s life as it is before the date—happy, sad, boring, lonely; your choice. For convenience, make it your own life; or your own as you wish it were. Easy-peasy stuff. Just description. Rising action: He/She asks protagonist out! Yay! Or, not yay: you only said yes because your mother made you. (Extend this part, if necessary, by detailing some of the preparation for said date. For NaNoWriMo, you’re supposed to write at least 50,000 words.) Conflict: It’s the date from hell!/it’s paradise! Put in some stuff about that. S/he’s everything you ever wanted! S/he’s a crushing disappointment! S/he’s a psycho who locks you in a room and tortures you mercilessly. –Okay, that wouldn’t be my thing; but maybe it’s yours. I won’t judge you. Resolution: Happy—you’re right for each other. Sad—other. Grotesque—your tale emanates from the afterlife, where his/her tortures sent you. (Don’t ask me to read Grotesque.)

See? Nothing to it. Now just pick a setting—city; suburbia; seventh moon of Jupiter—and you’re ready to write.

Almost ready to write. You’ll also need some characters. Don’t ask me for any characters. Plot–yes. Setting–not my specialty, but okay. But not characters. Mine are all personal friends, and I won’t share.

Such is Life

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My family tree produces more than its share of nuts, but there are also some wonderful characters and stories there.  I use them sometimes; but really, there are just too many.  I could write for a whole long lifetime and never get around to using half the available material.

My paternal grandmother’s life alone would make a shelf of novels.  Born in Pomerania, she came to the US—alone—at fifteen to join an older sister and brother-in-law in Wisconsin.  They had a business there (what kind, I don’t know) and according to my grandmother, worked her like a slave.

Her brother-in-law took advantage of her in other ways, too.  When she was seventeen, my grandmother had a child by him.  Her sister was either indifferent to the state of affairs, or possibly even relieved to have someone to share the burden of her husband’s demands.  The sister adopted the child as her own, and the situation continued as before.

When my grandmother was pregnant by her brother-in-law for the second time, she ran away to Chicago and lost herself among the large numbers of Polish immigrants whose neighborhood was centered on the Polish Catholic Basilica of St. Hyacinth.  A local priest introduced her to Joseph, a more recent immigrant from the same small village my grandmother had come from.  Joe was lonely, and looking for a wife.  The couple were wed just as soon as the banns had been posted.

It wasn’t until after they were married that my grandmother revealed that she was already carrying another man’s child.  To her surprise, her new husband was undismayed.  Babies were always a blessing, he said.

A story with a happy ending—unless I chose to continue it.

The marriage was an unhappy one.  The hastily-wed couple were ill-suited to one another.  My grandfather frequently said that when “the old woman” was dead, he would dance on her grave; and when the time came, he would have, too—except that by then he was too old and too feeble to dance.  The couple had twelve children, but buried six of them; interestingly, the daughter who was technically not his own was always my grandfather’s favorite.  My father and his siblings grew up not knowing that their mother had ever lived in Wisconsin, far less that they had a half-sibling there—until the daughter of that sibling (my grandmother’s first grandchild) wrote one day, apparently in a fit of adolescent pique at her mother, to inform them.

Though Grandma had long since quarreled with, and left, the Catholic Church, the shame of what she had been told there was her “sin” in “submitting” (at fifteen!) to abuse by an older man in an unfamiliar country was as sharp as ever, and the family, suddenly confronted by this new information, was thrown into chaos.

In the midst of it, my grandmother had a stroke.  Her devout older children (her younger children—my father, for one—had followed their mother out of the church), kept the priest who came to administer Extreme Unction waiting in a hospital corridor until they were certain their mother was unconscious.

Three years later, my grandfather died.  He was buried—not immediately adjacent to his wife of fifty years, but with the tiny graves of two Joseph, Jr.’s intervening.

“To keep them from fighting,” my father told me.

 

Me & You & Mary Sue

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that how to write must be one of the most difficult things in the world to learn in a classroom setting.  —At least, I never learned anything about writing that way, and I went to school for many more years than the law actually requires, and took a lot of writing classes.  To their credit, quite a few of my writing teachers admitted this.  “The only way to learn to write is to do it,” they’d say.  And if they’d been more honest, they would have added, “But just in case some really pointed and brutal criticism of your efforts is also helpful, I’m going to give you a lot of that, too.”

This was bad while I was in school, since it amounted to me paying large amounts of money to hear my writing disparaged to my face; but it’s been great since I graduated.  Whereas I not only ceased to learn any more mathematics once I got out of the classroom, but actually forgot everything I ever knew including how to calculate a tip in a restaurant, my writing has gradually, steadily, improved.  In school, I wrote every day, and I have continued to write almost every day since; but I only do math when I have to.

People who generally prefer math—e.g., everybody I live and work with—tell me they want to improve their writing, too, but are stopped by the fact that, unlike with mathematics, there aren’t any books full of problems for them to practice on.  They would write, they tell me, if they only knew what to write about. They seem to view plots as analogous to equations, and want a page of them to solve.

There’s something in that viewpoint, I guess.

I admit that I don’t really understand why they can’t come up with as many plots as they want all by themselves, though.  As far as I’m concerned, plots are the easiest thing in the world.  When all I want is some practice writing, I just rewrite scenes from my life—a short-cut that provides me with not only a plot, but also a protagonist and a setting, all ready-made.  Then I can get straight into the much-harder work of describing them.

At first in retelling a story, I frequently succumbed to the temptation to turn myself into a species of Mary Sue*.  There’s nothing wrong with “improving” on reality a little, I guess; but I got bored with being a hero all the time, and now I actually appreciate how my occasional social ineptitude provides me with many excellent opportunities to portray humiliation (self-inflicted), and regret instead.  (Life supplies plenty of material for scenes of hurt and loss without any help from me.)

And it’s therapeutic, too.  I don’t know for sure, but I doubt I would ever say the same about working a partial differential equation.

*For any who don’t already know it, a Mary Sue (as defined by Wikipedia) is “an idealized and seemingly perfect fictional character, a young or low-rank person who saves the day through unrealistic abilities. Often this character is recognized as an author insert or wish-fulfillment.”  If you have written a novel in which the protagonist is just like you, only better in every way, you have written a Mary Sue.  Enjoy your work—but do not share it.  Especially do not share it with me.

Writing in the First Person

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I’m deep into writing another book—a sequel to Ant-Lands.  This is by popular request.  “Honey, write a sequel to Ant-Lands,” was a popular request of my husband’s.  I don’t usually read sequels myself, having formed an unfavorable opinion of them when I was six years old and wasted a week of my young life on the insipid Heidi Grows Up; but I feel like I owe my husband something for being my most faithful and supportive reader.  He once compared my work favorably to that of Joseph Conrad, his own preferred author, and though I don’t believe for a moment that he really thinks I’m in Conrad’s class, the memory of his heroic attempt to sound sincere when he said it is something I will always treasure.

Just to make a change from Ant-Lands, which was written in the third person, I’m writing the sequel in the first person.  I admit to feeling a certain hesitance about this—not because I don’t like writing in the first person (witness this blog), but because I’m haunted by a remark from a friend concerning the first-person point of view.

Her name was Julie, and Julie had given up reading a novel written in the first person because, she reported, it confused her.  She said, “The book kept saying, ‘I did this; and then I did that’; and I kept thinking, ‘no I didn’t!’”

Now, I have never had this problem.  In the same circumstances, if my brain says anything, it says, “Yeah, I totally did do that, and lots more!”; but are there many Julies out there?  By writing in the first person, am I taking a chance on limiting my future sales?

Julie and I are eager to hear from anyone who has more information on this important topic.

What Sculpture Taught Me about Writing Dialogue

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(Photo via Good Free Photos)

The town I live in goes in for public art in a big way, which is very nice except that the piece of public art nearest my home is a statue I don’t like.  Actually, it’s a statue I hate.  This statue is—unusually, these days—representational, and I like representational art.  I should like this statue.  Instead, it evokes an active loathing in my soul.

My daughter—who’s an artist—would probably tell me that this very loathing is the proof that, as a work of art, the statue is a success.  The principal function of art, she tells me, is to make people uncomfortable.  (I think that’s what she said.)  Whether that’s true or not, this statue that I hate has been useful to me.  It’s helped me to write better dialogue.

The statue is of a young woman who looks like she might be waiting for something.  I’ve always assumed she was waiting for a bus because a) the statue is positioned at a bus-stop; and b) she looks a little bored.  Not a lot bored; just a little.  It’s life-sized, which means the young woman is taller than I am because almost everybody is, and she’s dressed very casually in jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoodie with the hood down and resting on her shoulders.  A light breeze stirs her hair.  Her head is turned slightly to the side, and she stares down the road, watching passively for the bus, which on this particular route runs every hour, seven days a week, except on Christmas and New Year’s when the buses in this town don’t run at all.  Every detail of her face and clothing (her hands are concealed in her pockets) is absolutely correct and in perfect proportion.  Even the aglets on the ends of her shoelaces are visible.  She looks, in short, exactly like a slightly bored young woman of between 18 and, say, 25; casually dressed; who is waiting for a bus—and who has been dipped in bronze.

I’ve lived here for sixteen years, which means (if I’ve done the math right, and allowing for days off) that I’ve driven by the Statue I Don’t Like at least 4000 times on my way to work.  I’ve loathed it every time.  But sometime about viewing #2847, I realized why I didn’t like it; and that the statue had a lesson to teach.

I used to spend a lot of time trying to make characters in my books converse with each other in a way that I considered to be absolutely true-to-life.  Grammar, vocabulary, idiom—I wanted them all exactly those of real people.  Nobody popping off an “oh, very well” in my books, when nobody in real life has said “oh, very well” for a hundred years.  No siree.  And the dialogue I produced that way was the literary equivalent of Bronze Bus-Watcher.  Go to any bus-station and see her equivalent in the flesh; listen to the conversations going on around you and hear my characters’ dialogue.

So when it comes to statuary and dialogue, I conclude, true-to-life is overrated.  True-to-life is an undistinguished young woman rendered faithfully but soullessly in bronze.  Good dialogue—not the stuff I write; but I’m working on it—is Michelangelo’s David.  One hand is bigger than the other, and his eyes don’t track; but you certainly can’t go down to any old bus-stop and see him.

I’m working now on making dialogue that is untrue to life; but, I hope, more revelatory of my characters’ souls.  I’m big into baring souls.  Souls are more interesting to me than even plots—which is saying quite a lot.  This new way is hard for me; but I like it.  I can make my characters say anything I want them too now, even if it’s something nobody in “real life” ever has said, or would.

So far, they have never wanted to say, “Oh, very well.”

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