Fiction Writer's Workshop Read Online Free

point here isn't to teach you a way of speaking. That's not my purpose anywhere in this book. I'm trying to show you how to pick up on what makes for good dialogue within a story. I'm asking you to listen to the dialogues around you, the ones you've been tuning out for years, to see how they differ from what you expected.
    The art of private conversation is one you've spent a lifetime working on. You probably think you have a good handle on it. In stories, most conversation is private; that is, it's directed between characters who know something of each other, or expect to. The pace and rhythm of the dialogue is completely tied up in issues like character, setting, the level of tension and even the structure of the story. These are issues we'll be dealing with throughout this book; they're ones that you'll deal with as you write stories.
    But the principles of crowding and jotting still apply, no matter how well you think you know your family, your husband, your best friend, your favorite uncle. The danger comes most often when you start writing a dialogue thinking, I know exactly how this is going to go. No surprises for you generally means no surprises for the reader. If you aren't hearing your characters, you're treating them like furniture. Each dialogue has to create itself, even if it has jobs to do (like resolving a conflict or delivering some key slice of exposition).
    So listen at home too. Crowd and jot. Remember that you are part of a tissue of life within these private contexts. How do you greet each other? What catchphrases does your family, peer group, etc., favor? Are they private too, making sense only within the group? Or are they drawn from the outside world? Do you finish sentences for one another? Does one person become more talkative in groups? Less? Is one person shy and demure in public but foulmouthed once you're alone in the car? These are rhythms. They help you create character, and in the end, stories. Your family, your private life, your past—that's where you find them. You'd be a fool not to tap into these things.
    Again, I urge you to be self-conscious about it. Don't just lurk in the shadows with your ballpoint and your spiral. Challenge your own preconceptions. Surprise the people around you. Get a rise out of them. Confront them with language. Walk downstairs and greet everyone with, "Hi-ho!" Or whisper your responses to all questions. Or better yet, whisper the same word. Try something like "monkeys." Don't push it. Just see if they surprise you in return, or if they are threatened, or if they threaten to commit you. Then work your way out of it, got to your spiral and write down what they said and how they said it.
    Private lives are as important as public lives when it comes to the rhythms of dialogue. In both cases, the key to starting out is listening to break your own preconceptions of the way people speak, of the things they say and of the way they say it. Listen until you are surprised. Then listen some more. This time you'll be surprised sooner. And sooner still the next time. You'll find that stories are brushing past you in hallways, at the hot dog stand. Then you have to select. Then you have to pick and choose. That's another step, but for the writer, there are far worse fates than being swamped with ideas, being struck down by rhythms.
    EXERCISES
    1. Listen to yourself. Spend the day recording everything you say. In the order you say it. Scroll out the whole day, recording everything you say, in a line-by-line fashion. Try to grab every sound. Every utterance. Don't leave out the little things, such as "hi" and "how are you" and "fine." Just record. Don't worry about punctuation. Or contexts. Don't note where you were or what time of day it was. Don't skip lines to indicate time passing or direction of dialogue. Just record from the moment you get up until the moment you go to bed. Don't explain it to anyone; don't even reveal it to anyone. Steal a few moments here and there to