It’s Good to Talk: Why Dialogue is Fundamental

The reasons why humans developed complex speech are still contested, but as a writer it doesn’t really matter if it’s due to a uniquely shaped hyoid bone, a descended larynx or the FOXP2 gene. What matters is that the brain of ‘the speaking animal’ is hard-wired to respond to speech.
 Humans have been talking to one another for anywhere between 70,000 and 200,000 years, which really isn’t that long, evolutionarily speaking. But it’s still a lot longer than the 5,000 years or so that we’ve been writing things down.
 It took another couple thousand years before the Iliad, originally an oral epic told by wandering bards, was written down circa 750 BCE. And then – sticking with the Western canon – it was another few hundred years before Greek tragedy and comedy tiptoed onto the stage.
 About 1,500 years after that, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, with which she effectively invented the novel form; although in The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody argues that the ‘ancient novel’ first appeared a thousand years earlier, in Greece and Rome, courtesy of – among others – Xenophon, Chariton and Petronius.
 Either way, the novel has been around for a long time, but nowhere as long as we’ve been talking to one another. And there’s a very good chance that this is why, as Elmore Leonard says, no one ever skips dialogue. It also goes a long way towards explaining the visceral immediacy of the theatrical experience, and why cinema is the most lucrative art form in history.
 It also suggests that as writers, as novelists, we should be trying to tell our stories through dialogue as much as is practicably possible. That’s not to say we’re shoe-horning in casual chats for the sake of breaking up the prose; it means that we’re progressing the story and developing our characters in their own words.
 Why is direct speech more valuable than reported speech? Because, just as we’re hard-wired to respond to speech, we’re also predisposed to believe people when they speak. To quote Tony Davies, from his book Humanism:

“If, as was often said, man is the speaking animal, then we exist most fully not in the intimate interiority of private thought and feeling but in the communality of linguistic exchange. ‘Language most shows a man,’ wrote Ben Jonson, in a vivid phrase borrowed from the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives: ‘Speak, that I may see thee.’ […] The human being is fashioned and defined in language, and belongs inseparably, in its public and private aspects alike, to the medium of discourse.”

The Big Why

The essentials of a good story are who, what, where, when and why. The who is your character(s), the what is the plot, the where / when your setting, and the why is by some distance the most important aspect. This is because the why is not only your character’s guiding motive (wanting to escape a marriage / planet, say, or commit / investigate a murder) and their psychology (the unique thinking that has brought them to this crucial juncture), but the reason you’re telling the story.
 As a species in general, but especially as readers, we are obsessed with why. That’s probably because, as a species, we’ve successfully answered the questions of who we are, and what we are, our where and when. The why, however, will likely remain unanswerable.
 But even if the implicit promise of some ultimate revelation is the most important element of storytelling, a good story is the Buddhist principle of pratītyasamutpāda in action. Pratītyasamutpāda is the principle of dependent arising, or dependent co-arising, where all phenomena – physical, mental, psychological – arise in dependence on multiple causes and conditions. Nothing, the principle tells us, exists on its own or forever; everything is related and interlinked with everything else.
 Most stories foreground character; good writers understand that character and plot are essentially a Möbius strip; the setting goes a long way to defining a character, either because she belongs there or because she finds herself in opposition to the world around her (or both); and the why – the character’s motivation, and that of the author – will shape the character, the plot and the setting.
 That sounds like a lot to juggle all at once. The good news is that you don’t need to know the why starting out. As often as not, the whole point of your writing the story is to discover the why.

The Blank Page and the Dizziness of Freedom

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard said, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’ Normally I’d disagree; for me, anxiety is more of a response to the claustrophobia that comes with a dearth of options. But if you’re starting a new book, as I am, then Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety makes sense.
 The dazzle of the blank page can certainly be disorientating. There are too many options and no wrong answers; the whole world is available for inspiration; and just as there is no wrong way to tell your story, there are myriad ways in which you might start. Who are your characters? How do they speak? Who is telling their story, and why? Why is it being told now, in this way?
 Too many options can cause writer’s block just as surely as too few. Visualise it and it makes sense: a host of ideas, all struggling to emerge at once, can very easily create a mental bottleneck.
 And the danger there is that, in our rush to say something – anything, just to feel like we’re not wasting this precious time we’ve eked out for writing – we can fall back on the tried and tested. Echoing another writer’s style or phrasing, repeating clichés, allowing ourselves to slip back into those well-worn grooves that are the deadly enemy of good writing.
 At times like these, it’s worth remembering that we have been told all our lives how to behave. That we are conditioned to seek out the rules so as not to break them, to ask for permission to proceed. We are socialised, and perhaps even hard-wired, to act according to the accepted conventions, to fit in, to adapt to the prevailing wisdoms.
 The problem there, of course, is that this all runs contrary to the writing of interesting fiction.
 I’m not saying that good fiction requires the breaking of every rule, or a wilful disregard for every single literary convention. What I’m saying is that the blank page is both a challenge and an opportunity, and that every interesting writer implicitly understands what Laurel Thatcher Ulrich made explicit: that well-behaved women seldom make history.

Setting: If You Build It, They Will Come

A story can take place across a span of galaxies or it can take place at the bottom of a well. Every story, unless it’s an especially experimental tale, has to take place in some kind of physical environment – we need to give the characters somewhere to stand (or, if it’s taking place in space, or underwater, float).
 In some cases, the setting may be crucial to the story; this is why, for example, world-building is considered an integral part of the sci-fi author’s skill-set. In other cases, the setting may not be as important to a story as its characters and plot, but we still need to afford it the attention to detail that will persuade the reader that they have stepped into what John Gardner calls the ‘vivid, continuous dream’.
 If you’re a writer like me, you simply won’t be able to start a story without having a very clear idea of where it takes place. In fact, it’s frequently happened that I had no idea for a story, nor any plan for writing one, until a setting presented itself. In a way, it’s the equivalent of a bare stage when the curtains are pulled back, and we know that the actors will soon appear. Once I feel the dart of recognition – that this place, this very particular place, would be a wonderful setting for a story – then I know it’s only a matter of time before the characters will start strolling into place. If you build it, they will come …
 Oddly enough, the initial setting, the one that provides the inspiration, isn’t necessarily where the story takes place. I first got the idea for The Lammisters while we were on holidays in Donegal, visiting an old stately home where the Anglo-Irish owner would host Hollywood stars from the 1920s. It seemed to me the ideal spot for a PG Wodehouse kind of novel; but for the purpose of the story, I needed, as it began, for Young Archie, the foolish third son, to travel to Los Angeles to encounter some Hollywood stars. And so the story opens on the terrace of Musso’s in Los Angeles; but Young Archie and I both enjoyed our brief sojourn in Los Angeles so much that we never made it back to Donegal, and the whole novel played out in Hollywood.
 But that initial setting gave the story a kind of palimpsest quality. Its physical environment and its history, its economics and its culture, set the tone for who Young Archie was, and what he needed to escape, and what he wanted to achieve. It was as if that setting underpinned the story’s immediate setting of Hollywood in the Silent Era, invisible but informing Archie’s motives and aspirations.
 Setting isn’t just about giving your characters a place to stand. Setting is what your characters emerge from, where they’ve evolved, the place they learned to speak and think, where their loves and hates and prejudices were formed. If you’re prepared to look and listen – to observe, as Joyce Carol Oates says, with reverence – then your setting will tell you more about your characters than you realise you know.

The Tyranny of Perfection

Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds recently, I was reminded of an Intro I wrote for Knock and Enter, a book I edited during my stint as Writer-in-Residence with UNESCO / Dublin City Libraries. To wit:

I’ve always thought that an octopus would make for an ideal Editor, with its eight arms and a complex nervous system that consists of one main brain and eight mini-brains that operate each arm independently.
 Of course, most writers would likely also wish that their editors were octopuses, given that octopodes possess three hearts, one of which might be given over to compassion for those who toil at the coalface creating the imperishable prose which the editor, having nothing better to do, then proceeds to blithely deface with his or her ‘suggestions’ and ‘advice’.
 Happily, whilst all octopuses are venomous, only the blue-ringed octopus is actually deadly to humans. And while the business of writing can feel like a tiresome chore – planning and writing and editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and then rewriting some more – it very rarely proves fatal.

 Writing advice is hedged about with clichés (‘Write what you know’; ‘Read, read, read,’ etc.) but some clichés have their kernel of truth, and none more so than ‘Writing is re-writing’ – and if you’re a writer who doesn’t like the idea of reworking your stuff, then you’re in for a long, hard uphill slog.
 There are very good reasons, of course, why new writers might resist the idea of re-writing. Whether it’s schoolwork or sport, or life itself, we’re socialised from a very young age to get it right first time (‘Do you want it quick or do you want it good? Both, you say? I see.’) and to view mistakes as some kind of personal failing. And we’re all time-poor these days; if we can only get it right at the first attempt, think of all the time we can save.
 Except getting ‘it’ right – when ‘it’ is the creation of a whole new world peopled with complex characters – is virtually impossible. Even if you’ve plotted your story out before you begin, even if you know exactly who your characters are and will become, there’s simply too much to get exactly right at exactly the right time.
 This might sound like something of a downer; in fact, it’s one of the great opportunities that writing offers. In life, we have no choice but to stumble ever onwards, tripping over our mistakes and fixing them on the hoof (or ignoring them and hoping no one notices); in writing (or re-writing, rather) we get to go back in and fix it until we’re happy (happy-ish).
 Accepting that you’re not going to get it right first time might come as something of a blow to the old ego, but it does allow for an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to get it not quite right; to make and acknowledge mistakes; to allow yourself, for the purpose of this draft at least, to be less than perfect (‘Perfect is the enemy of good’).
 We can waste a lot of our energy in worrying about getting it immediately right, turning what should be a positive (creativity, imagination) into a negative (the grinding, Sisyphean pursuit of perfection). But perfection can wait. Instead, take a deep breath, open yourself up to the inevitability of temporary failure, and allow yourself the delicious freedom (dare we call it fun?) of getting it wrong for now.