Sleeve-tugging talk
18 May 2011 05:52 AM Categories: Writing prompts | On writing
I’m almost done with Stephen King’s book On Writing, a quick and useful read. In it, he talks about the importance of making dialogue real, how it’s one of the things in the writer’s toolbox, and then he names some writers who aren’t too good at it (but are published: there’s hope!). Perhaps writers who are shy and quiet and don’t get out much (to listen to strangers, to talk to them) are not going to be good at writing dialogue that feels real. I’m doomed.
Here is a typical bit of dialogue from my day.
“Mom?”
Do I respond to him, to the shouts from the back of the house? I continue to cut watermelon into quarters, just the way he likes it.
“Mom?”
He'll have to come to me if he wants my attention. I put the watermelon on a plate and wet a corner of a napkin for ease of face- and finger-wiping.
“MOM!”
Officially irritated, I grab the plate and stomp it to the back room, petulant, a child myself. “What?”
“I want you back here with me.” Depending on mood and hunger level, this line can be delivered with faux tears or real ones or just a kind of excited calmness.
Do you really want to read on? I bore myself with this stuff, with the everyday nothings that add up to years of fetching and watching and picking up. Still, there are moments of beauty. When my husband is out of town, my son and I talk more. He’s almost six and still fascinated by what school and the world was like when his dad and I were kids. We’ve had evenings where I get to recreate the ancient world of the 1970s, when Nana was way too young and way too angry and I was a chatty thing who had to write out “I will not talk in the Delaware Art Museum” for my teacher one hundred times on thick-lined paper after a too-loud field trip.
These are conversations, though I would find them difficult to reproduce as dialogue, impossible to do in ten or twelve minutes because I don’t have an ear for the essential.
I’ve told him about Lillian, though I didn’t tell him her name, the woman who ran the Montessori school I briefly attended in first grade who didn’t give me a trophy when I did the number two times tables in front of the school – not because I didn’t get them right (I did), but because I was clearly adding and had not memorized them. I told him about the first day of first grade at the public school when my mother called the police because I didn’t get home on time. I'd gone with a new friend who locked me out of her house and then laughed at me as I begged to use her phone to call my mom.
We talked about school buses and the songs I'd sing on them. I added a contemporary flair to the discussion by bringing up a YouTube video of Queen singing "We Will Rock You."
This is it, this is it people, this is my life, and it’s lovely and lucky and all I can think about at the moment, my husband due back late tonight after four days away and maybe my brain will be free soon and I’ll come up with something brilliant and fictional that takes place on a faraway island with lots of sex, the smoothing together of body parts and there will be a theft and drug deals and the woman kills her adversary in the end.
From the prompt "Give us the dialogue."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. This week nothing is really flowing from my fingertips. I've doctored this one a bit.
Image: The boy drawing on a restaurant menu, Sunday.
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