Susan Rivers's Blog

Almost everyone is familiar with O’Henry’s classic short story, The Gift of the Magi, published in 1905. This is the story of a young married couple who have little money. With Christmas approaching, Della, the wife, hopes to buy her husband, Jim, a new watch chain for the gold pocket-watch he inherited from his father. However, after shopping all day she can find nothing that she can afford. At the end of the day on Christmas Eve, she has an idea. Della goes to a hairdresser and sells her long, thick locks for twenty dollars. She uses the money to buy her husband a platinum watch chain. Jim arrives home from work on Christmas Eve, and is shocked to see that Della is completely shorn. He shows her what he has bought her that day as a Christmas gift: a pair of expensive ivory combs to hold up her beautiful hair. Struggling not to cry, Della presents him with the watch chain, explaining that she sold her hair in order to afford this gift. Jim is then forced to show her that he no longer has his watch. He sold it in order to buy the combs.

This story fascinates me for how much power is packed in its simplicity. The story’s plot, and indeed its larger theme, revolve around and are evoked by this pair of specific objects: the watch chain and the hair combs. Individually, Della and Jim value two things: she is proud of her lustrous hair, and he treasures his gold watch. By sacrificing these objects with the intention of pleasing their beloved, they reveal a more valuable – indeed, priceless – commodity which they already possess. It is their love for each other.

The importance of intentionally placed objects in fiction cannot be underestimated. In certain genre forms of storytelling which borrow from myths, like fantasy, horror, or science fiction, “magical” objects loom large. Think of Superman’s kryptonite, or the ring Bilbo Baggins gives to Frodo, sending him and his fellow hobbits on their long, dangerous mission to Rivendell.

In realistic literary fiction, however, objects rarely possess magical powers. Instead, they sometimes function as receptacles of meaning and significance. They serve as symbols. When used in this way, I tend to think of these items as “sacred” objects, not in the religious sense but as something “dedicated or devoted to a single use, purpose or person.”

I refer fairly often to Melville’s MOBY DICK when writing about fiction, because it has so many teachable elements. It is also the first novel I think of when citing the effective use of sacred objects. Of course, the Pequod itself functions as a powerful symbol of the American republic. The whaling ship hosts a crazily diverse world of men drawn from the four corners of the world for the sake of profit and adventure, men whose destiny is tied to the reckless will of their leader, Captain Ahab. It is a ship that trades in death: butchering and boiling untold numbers of whales on the blood-drenched decks while it sails inexorably towards its own destruction.

But I am thinking of a more personal object that resonates deeply within the story, one that both foretells the novel’s end and conveys the novel’s message, symbolically. This is the casket-canoe built by the ship’s carpenter for the indigenous harpooner, Queequeg, when he falls ill with fever and believes he will die. As soon as the coffin is completed and Queequeg lies in it for the first time, he begins to feel his health returning. At one point in the voyage when the ship loses its life-preserver, along with one of its sailors, Queequeg offers his coffin as a replacement. The carpenter resists out of superstitious horror: “Sailing about with a graveyard-tray!” he objects. But since Ahab is in a frenzy to capture and kill Moby Dick, there is no time to fashion an alternative. The coffin is nailed shut, caulked, covered in pitch to make it watertight and hung from the stern to replace the missing life-buoy.

The irony of this is lost on no one, especially not the reader, and not when Ahab himself calls our attention to it, crying: “Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further?”

It does. Only thirty pages later the novel concludes with the sinking of the Pequod by the white whale. Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick leads to his annihilation and his crew’s, with the drowning of all souls, save one. Ishmael, the narrator, is left clinging to wreckage after the ship is sucked down in a vortex of destruction, and watches as Queequeg’s coffin, torn loose from its tether, shoots to the surface of the sea. “Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night,” the sailor floats alone on the vast Pacific before being rescued by a passing ship. The message is clear: Ishmael’s name in Hebrew means “God listens.” As the sole witness to these terrible events, surviving atop his dead friend’s casket, Ishmael is enjoined to set down the story of Ahab’s disastrous, monomaniacal ambition, and of how it has led to the Pequod’s fatal reckoning with Moby Dick.

I think I must have been subconsciously holding Queequeg’s coffin in my mind when I wrote THE SECOND MRS. HOCKADAY, my novel set in upstate South Carolina during the second half of the Civil War (Algonquin 2017). The most important sacred object in the novel is the copy of DAVID COPPERFIELD which falls into the protagonist’s hands, and which young Placidia Hockaday converts into a diary, in this period of severe paper shortages in the south, by writing on the blank backs of the illustrations. The diary plays a key part in reconciling Placidia Hockaday with her husband after he returns to the farm from an officer’s prison in 1865, and exerts powerful, transformative influence on her adult son in the following generation.

However, Dickens’ novel does not borrow from Melville’s masterpiece. The sacred object I employed to convey the legacy handed down at Holland Creek from one woman to the next is the sewing box that belonged to Placidia’s predecessor, the first Mrs. Hockaday, who has died of typhoid fever prior to the novel’s start and has left her infant son to be raised by her husband, Gryffth. (The internet is the researcher’s friend: I discovered in searching auction sites online that antebellum-era sewing boxes were larger than more modern ones, and often personalized by the owner in some way that displayed her mastery as a seamstress, as well as, in Janet Hockaday’s case, her piety.)

Placidia discovers the sewing box by accident while managing their farm in Gryffth’s absence. When she later testifies at the inquest into the death of the child she conceived in her husband’s absence, and who died shortly after being born, she says, “I was too ill to leave my bed but I requested that the baby be wrapped in a piece of my knitting and interred in the sewing box that belonged to the first Mrs. Hockaday, as I could not bear for him to go into the next life unaccompanied by any mementoes of loving attachment in this one.”

In this way, the ebony-wood box with the Bible verse stitched into the lid carries more than the remains of an unlucky and illegitimate infant. It also serves to connect these two women who never met but who loved the same man and nurtured the same child; it tangibly symbolizes their sacrifices in a war-torn world.

In thinking of your favorite novels, can you pick out sacred or magical objects that play important roles in the story? If you take a closer look, you will likely discover that these objects are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to conveying that all-important message.

Think of the novel Cold Mountain. Think of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ve also been ruminating lately about Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, the novel by Nobel prize-winning Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, which I just finished reading. What do these fictional works have in common? In all of them, the settings are so critically important that they become characters in their own right.

Setting is not just geography, of course. It’s also the specific time period designated by the author, a time that is explicitly stated or else implied, as well as the social, political or cultural construct that comes with the territory. But where setting is of primary importance, we feel, as readers, that the characters’ behaviors are influenced by these environs in key ways, and that their actions can be traced to elements in the setting that shape them, or even move them forward, as the Mississippi River does for Huck Finn.

Consider the deep woods and remote “plateau” in Poland on the border with the Czech Republic where Tarcyck’s novel is set. These forests seem to offer refuge for the protagonist, Janina Duszejko, a sixty-ish astrologer, William Blake enthusiast and some-time English teacher who dwells in a run-down cottage from which she caretakes the summer homes of weathy Poles. It is also a setting that represents much danger and death, for the forest is menaced by a tribe of hunters who slaughter wild animals indiscriminately, raise foxes for their fur under inhumane conditions, and who have killed Janina’s pet dogs for sport. It’s only in retrospect, after the unfolding of a series of mysterious deaths in the woods, that we understand what was going on inside Janina’s outwardly ordinary self, and realize that the clues to the mystery were there in plain sight, in descriptions of the landscape. As the protagonist tells us: “Before the war, our settlement was called Luftzug, meaning ‘current of air’… it’s always windy here, as waves of air come pouring across the mountains… in winter the wind becomes violent and shrill, howling in the chimneys.” Under the forests’ influence, Janina finds herself howling in the face of authorities indifferent to the atrocities committed against animals by the murdered men, and feels forced to take matters into her own hands. The setting of the novel serves as a Paradise Lost, for the main character as well as – by extension – for the rest of us.

Over the last couple of years since the Second Mrs. Hockaday was published, I’ve been writing a novel set in a cotton mill town in upstate South Carolina early in the twentieth century. This was the boom-time for most southern milltowns, when the economic malaise of the post-Civil War-era south was being dispelled by an industrial revolution, with textile manufacturing providing the bounce-back. With power to run the mills free for the taking in the form of fast-falling rivers traversing the Appalachian uplands, and with labor, in the form of poor whites barely subsisting on tenant farms or eking out livings in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains, acquired cheaply, many opportunistic northerners came south to build cotton mills. They were joined by land-owning southerners who merely shifted the plantation system off the land and into the mills, and who were now empowered to exploit the labor of poor whites rather than enslaved African-Americans.

The concept of a company town captured my imagination because it is a strange, profit-based and therefore inorganic construct: the town is created by the mill owner for one reason, and that is to house workers who are obligated to work in his factory. In that sense, the community is created to support the business, rather than businesses supporting the community, as it is for most towns that develop naturally.

While there are many accounts preserved in written or oral histories of mill workers who thrived in their particular mill towns, and who recalled close relations with neighbors and many good times shared despite the low wages and typically difficult living and working conditions, mill towns could be harsh places to live. The individual’s behavior was regulated by mill management, whose representatives in the community reported on who was getting drunk on their time off, fighting, leading a ‘wayward' life, or otherwise breaking community rules. Breaking these rules could lead to expulsion, which was a severe sentence if one’s entire family worked in the mill and depended on the collective wages earned there to survive.

In one true account I researched, a mill worker suffered a heart attack on his day off, leaving his wife a widow with several small children to feed. A couple of days after getting the bad news, she was visited by the mill supervisor who gave her his condolences and then offered to drive her children to the orphanage. In southern mill towns, houses were assigned to families based on the number of able-bodied persons employed in the mill. As the supervisor explained to the widow, with her children too young to work, the house was needed for more productive tenants.

In upstate South Carolina, there are many former mill towns that have either decayed, disappeared, or have diminished over time, the massive factories at their centers shuttered or demolished. The withdrawal of owners began en masse as the industry retreated from the region during the 1960s, seventies and eighties, seeking better profit margins overseas or closing down altogether.

The mill town I used as a model for Troublefield, the fictional town in my story, is largely based on a town in the upstate I first stumbled on several years ago. Grafton* (not the actual name) is a virtual ghost town at this point, ruined cat-slide homes huddled on the damp, north-facing slope of the steep canyon that rises above the Pacolet River. Only about one in four of the homes appear to be occupied; there are some whose porches are so heaped with old furniture and debris that it is impossible to tell if they house living inhabitants.

Two red-brick mills once stood beside the shoals at different bends in the river, both rebuilt after the flood of 1903 which swept portions of them downstream, but pulled down permanently in the 21st century. A portion of the mill tower remains at Grafton #2, and the river still roars over the mill dam in the rainy season, giving the observer a vague sense of how the factory and the town might have once appeared in 1912, when 4,000 people lived and toiled here, working six days a week for twelve hours a day, at wages rarely topping four dollars a day for skilled work. At Grafton #2 they tended looms, stripped cards, and ran sides in the spinning room through the deafening clatter of machines and the stifling air, thick with cotton dust.

There is a palpable sense of desolation in this river canyon, now. Almost no one was about on the winter's day of my first exploration of Grafton. On the steps of one crumbling house perched high above the river-road, a pajama-clad girl sat dangling her bare feet over the abyss, absorbed in the image on her smart-phone. At the tiny post office where I pulled in to read my maps, an elderly woman passed my car clutching her pocketbook and went into the building. A few minutes later, no more enlightened about my route, I looked up to see the woman stationed at the post office window, regarding me with deep suspicion. It felt as if, in seeking Grafton out, I had driven off the map and out of time, as if the community existed in a bubble, set apart from change or progress and resisting intrusion from outsiders.

I used this sense of dead-ended isolation in my novel, writing at the opening of the story that “Tomahawk County, South Carolina, is shaped like a cat’s head if the cat is strung upside-down from the tree. In the cat’s right ear, in the deep folds and creases, is where the Pattaqua River runs through, and in the deepest bend of the Pattaqua’s canyon is where the Troublefield Cotton Mill once stood.” My protagonist, Calla Stout, is a spinner at the mill who longs to leave Troublefield and start a business of her own. She’s clear that it must be “In a town on the way to somewhere else. Troublefield don’t suit because it ain’t on the way to anywhere. Folks only end up here if they’re born here, they marry someone who was born here, or they come to work here. And I don’t want a boarding house, like Bonnie Abernathy’s got. Those men ain’t going nowhere – just to the mill and back again.”

All of the characters whose lives intersect with Calla’s have private objectives, along with failings that they are not always willing to admit. But their most formidable adversary may be the town of Troublefield itself. In pursuit of their goals, each one of them, including Calla, must contend with an environment that works to bend them to its own purpose, and will not easily relinquish its control.

In all the fiction-writing workshops I've taught I've tried to make the point to my students that what happens in their stories, the plot events that take place and the crises or challenges that arise, are never as important as what happens between the principal characters. Over a century ago Henry James made the argument to would-be novelists that the ‘story’ of a novel should not be an entity distinct from ‘character’-- that everything arising from the conflicts and desires of those characters should shape and generate the story's unfolding in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald, generations later, stated that “Character is plot.”

This is easier said than done, of course. (And it doesn't apply to commercial or genre fiction in quite the same way, whose readers generally expect stories to be "plot-driven.") But James explained that he didn't expect these characters, along with their plots, to spring full-blown from the writer's brain like Athena sprang from the head of Zeus. Instead, in an essay he wrote in 1884, he advised the novice author to open his consciousness and spread it wide, ignoring fashionable pedantry of the time which discouraged would-be writers from tackling any subjects outside their social class or customary way of life (the "write-what-you-know" school of thought championed by Hemingway and adhered to, with maddening persistence, by writing teachers everywhere).

Instead, James wrote: “It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience… (But) what kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete, it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue… Therefore, if I should say to a novice, “Write from experience and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful to immediately add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

Being a writer who misses nothing is advice I have taken to heart very literally. I never go out of the house without tucking a paper notebook and pencil into a pocket (the smaller the notebook the better, as then if it is lost you have not lost so much). In them I record images, overheard conversations, stray details, observations -- anything I hear or see or smell that has some kind of potency, or authenticity, to it. Many of these notes have found their way into my formal writings, especially through the construction of characters. Here's the latest incident I recorded, a character as yet in search of a story:

"Middle-aged man with stiff leg, wearing shirt with his name stitched over pocket, picking up a number of prescriptions for his wife at small drugstore in G___ -- the copay amount is nearly $150. He tells the pharmacist as he pays: "If I'd let her mama run me off all those years ago I'd have a bit of cash by now."

I'm not sure why this moment appealed, but from long experience with the processes of my own imagination I assume it's because there is both character AND conflict/plot suggested in this short scenario. It is a little fly suspended in my spider web.

In January of 1895, Henry James was at a reception hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop told the writer a disturbing anecdote concerning a country-house with which both men were familiar. James jotted down the following notes in his book immediately after hearing the story: “…young children (indefinite number and no age) left to the care of servants in an old country house, then the death, presumably, of the parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree.”

Sound familiar? It should. Three years later, James’ goosebump-inducing novella, The Turn of the Screw, was published, and ghost stories were never the same. That was one juicy fly.

I will wrap up this series about the five purposes of dialogue in fiction with the last, and in some ways, the most elusive element of story-telling: exposition. How an author controls the sharing of information crucial to the reader's experience of the story and his or her understanding of the characters' roles in that story is critical.

Sometimes exposition can be directly expressed in dialogue, but in my opinion, the mark of a seasoned writer is one who is confident enough to use exposition sparingly, sprinkling it lightly into the mix as one seasons a stew, and not throwing handfuls of information at the reader that call attention through the artificiality of their delivery. (Like when the climax in a mystery novel, the key scene between the sleuth and the murderer, bogs down in a surfeit of exposition about who-did-what-when, or even worse, an explication of railroad timetables. At that point, all the air is let out of the scene, and, ultimately, the mystery. If you're a fan of the mystery genre, you recognize the kind of 'Big Scene Fail' I'm talking about…)

Here's a key point to keep in mind about exposition: some details about your principal characters might never be known, and that will be all right. Where they grew up, who was their first grade teacher, how many siblings do they have, what was their first job? Given the story being told, only a few key facts about the characters' lives might be relevant. And other facts, the characters may intentionally be concealing.

The rest can be inferred by your reader. Less is more when it comes to exposition, especially when it is conveyed in dialogue. Allow me to demonstrate how NOT to use exposition: "Oh Cedric, it's a beautiful autumn day in 1885 and I'm so glad we're seeing Paris for the first time as a couple"… "Yes Geraldine, it's too bad my father disowned me on the eve of our wedding but once I find a back-room card-game we'll soon have enough money to stay at the Ritz for our honeymoon."

Instead of turning your characters into mouthpieces for the story, let exposition take a backseat to what's happening between characters, working essential information into dialogue as seems natural for the events and the people involved. In other words, let much of the exposition come out in sub-text, the meaning and attitudes conveyed by means of implication. (See my earlier post on Sub-text for a fuller exploration of this important dialogue tool.)

An example of how this is done expertly in a modern novel is Hilary Jordan's masterwork, Mudbound, which was made into a film for Netflix in 2017. This exploration of racial difficulties set against the impoverished landscape of the Mississippi Delta in the post-WWII era is told in multiple first-person narratives. The dialogue is freighted with the emotional stances each narrator maintains in a particular relationship, with most of these relationships being fragile and problematic.

In one scene in the novel, a white land appraiser turned farmer, Henry McAllan, is forced to go to the house of his tenants, the Jacksons, and persuade Hap's wife Florence to come back with him to his own home. His two daughters have come down with whooping cough, which often killed children in the days before a vaccine was discovered (this is 1946 or '47). His wife Laura, who didn't want to leave Memphis and come down to the delta to be a farmer's wife, is furious with Henry and terrified that her children will die if they aren't treated by a proper doctor. On his way to town to fetch the physician, however, Henry discovers that the bridge has been washed out by a storm, and he's forced to turn around.

Remembering that Florence Jackson is a midwife and treats some of the African-Americans in the community with folk medicine, he drives in desperation to the Jackson's house. The dialogue that follows, told through Henry's point-of-view, teaches us some important aspects of the situation between the inhabitants of this troubled world: Henry, although new to farming, believes wholly in his superiority as the landowner and as a white man, but he is forced to adjust this estimation when confronted with Florence's own considerable pride and her commitment to her own children. The relationship is complicated by the fact that Henry needs Florence badly, and can offer her very little. It is not an easy conversation they share. Both are compelled to be circumspect: Henry because his pride will not allow him to plead for assistance from a black woman, and Florence, because in resisting McAllan it would be reckless for her to risk insulting him. As they engage with one another, we witness the balance of power shifting on the farm.

When Henry knocks on their door, Florence answers it and tells him that Hap is out in the mule shed. Henry says:

"Actually, I came to see you. My little girls, they’re three and five, they've taken sick with whooping cough. I can't get to town because the bridge is washed out, and my wife…"
"When they start the whooping?"
"This afternoon."
She shook her head. "They still catching then. I can give you some remedies to take em but I can't go with you."
"I'll pay you," I said.
"I wouldn't be able to come home for three or four days at least. And then who gone look after my own family, and my mothers?"
I'm asking you," I said.

This exchange is followed by Henry's 1st-person account of his uncomfortable awareness, as he "locked eyes with her," of Florence's powerful will and spirit, "a deep-running fierceness that was almost warrior-like." He sees Florence's daughter standing behind her in the kitchen, and notices that the girl is watching them, waiting "like I was, for her mother's answer."

"I got to ask Hap," Florence said finally.
The girl ducked her head…and I knew that Florence was lying. The decision was hers to make, not Hap's, and she'd just made it.
"Please," I said. "My wife is afraid."
… If she said no, I wouldn't ask her again. I wouldn't stoop to beg a ni***r for help. If she said no --
All right then," she said. "wait here while I get my things."

(Jordan, p. 80-81)

Isn't that strong? And effective? Go easy with the exposition in your dialogue, being guided by what's essential, and avoiding extraneous information. Your reader will be glad you did.


Jordan, Hillary. Mudbound. Chapel Hill, North Carolina.Algonquin Books, 2008.

Mary Cox, a woman born on a hardscrabble farm in Sylva, NC, early in the 20th century, led a hard life. She fled her mother's dysfunctional family when she was young and came down from Appalachia to live with her father and stepmother in Spartanburg, SC, where they worked in a textile mill. Mary married and quickly regretted it, but divorce was illegal in South Carolina until 1949, so she moved through a series of three "husbands" before settling with a man she called 'Babe.'

Babe had a job at the time they met, but once they were married he drank more than he worked, and Mary had to drum up income for the pair of them any way she could, including raising chickens. One day she took some of her egg money and went into town with Babe in order to get a permanent wave done on her hair. On the way home, however, Babe's three grown children blocked the road, one of them brandishing a shotgun. They ordered her to get out of the wagon and lie in the road. Mary relates that she did what she was told, at which point the oldest son Lloyd put his foot on her neck to hold her down while his sister Ola "cut every inch of hair off my head, down to my scalp, with sheep shears, saying Babe hadn't never bought no hair-curlin' for their mammy and from now on I better look out."

This hair-raising tale is one of many oral histories set down by WPA workers when they roamed the south in the thirties interviewing the rural poor. In fact, I found the story and words of Mary Cox in a bound collection of WPA oral history out-takes when I went searching for voices of poor white women who lived in upstate South Carolina early in the 20th century, and Mary's voice jumped out as one deserving of special notice.

Not only was her life story compelling and darkly funny, but her unique way of expressing herself spoke volumes. The distinctive double negative commonly used by working class southerners ("Babe hadn't never bought no"…), the dropping of the "g" sound on words ending with "ing" ("hair-curlin") and the use of the pronoun "Mammy" for "mother" conjured a young woman who was the full-blown product of her class, her region, and her time. Mary's voice was preserved long past her death in the obscure profile I unearthed in the Kennedy Room's archives at the Spartanburg County Public Library, and I like to think it was given new life in influencing the voice of the fictional white southern woman, Calla Stout, who is my protagonist in the book that will be published next.

In crafting dialogue for this novel, especially dialogue between Calla and members of her troubled family, I had to find a way to create a shared vocabulary that was based in authentic experience but which allowed me some freedom to innovate. This could only be accomplished once I'd immersed myself in the relevant primary sources: oral histories, interviews, letters from state archives, first-person accounts from mill town dwellers and chain gang prisoners, notes on spoken phrases I heard from living descendants of farmers and factory workers in the area, and so on. I continue to revise these voices and their language, seeking to make them as truthful as possible while maintaining their effectiveness in advancing the objectives of the individual characters.

Here's a sample of dialogue from TROUBLEFIELD (soon to be published by Algonquin), from a conversation Calla has with her brother Tennyson, a volatile man who's just been released after eight months on the county chain gang for disemboweling a fellow millworker in a knife fight.

Seeing in his eyes what he'd been through in the last eight months, along with the proud look that promised he could handle that and eight months more without batting an eye, I got the balks. "Tell me how you been," I said when I could find my voice at last, and when he answered with the same old joke that had been our daddy's, "I been better but it cost me more," he laughed but I couldn't even smile.
"Your husband know you're here?" he asked, and added, before I had a chance to speak, "Right enough. He sent you, didn't he."
"I'd have you to the house, Tennyson. If I could."
Tennyson sighed, turning his back on me as he joined the pipe to the stove and fitted the other end to the length sticking out the chimney.
"Ain't a problem for me. I like Abernathy's. Her rules make sense, leastways."
"And you're making the rent all right?"
He nodded, plucking a screw from his mouth and twisting it into the joint. "Got work. Got a place to stay. That oughter keep me off the chain gang."
I winced. "Don't you miss us?"
He looked at me, but then turned away, swallowing hard. "Maude ever ask about me?"
"Sure she does. About when she's going to see you again." The thought came to me that we'd missed him for Thanksgiving dinner, thinking he was still in the camp out on Copperhead Hill. Where had he gone that day? Who would have been willing to take him in? Maybe that's why Juanita Reid took the gingerbread from me without so much as a "thank you."
"She's missed you. And she misses Dolphie. Wilbanks' friend. He got married a few weeks back."
"That McCready toff?"
I nodded. "He can't come 'round Dunnet Head no more."
Tennyson made a snorting sound. "I reckon not. It's just as well Maudie finds out what those stand-up-collar folks are like. She's not going to learn that from her ma."
"Don't start in on my husband, Tennyson. We been down that road already." To my surprise, the smug look on my brother's face melted away.
"The truth is, I don't have no chicken to pick with that lawyer-man of yours," he told me. "He's does for you and Maudie, which is more than Jimmy Goforth cared to do. More than I did, as your brother. I still believe you're owed better, but we got to do our best with what we're handed, don't we."
I bit my tongue when he said that, because I'd been this close to telling him about States Rights Ramseur and how I was thinking more and more that I might run off with the undertaker who found all my living parts so pleasing.
"I been thinking about what you told me in the courtroom," he went on. He was studying me now, to see if I remembered it. "Do you --"
"I told you not to be the mule."
He nodded, a tiny smile pulling at the edges of his mouth. His hair fell unevenly over his ears -- it looked as if they'd barbered him in camp with a dull handsaw. "That's right. I was too lobber-headed to hear it that day. But I hear it now. Always have had a powerful anger inside me. In the cage-wagon out at Copperhead I studied on how that temper might could do me some good, if I could only get a holt of it. I'm hurting for a plan. Otherwise I'm going to end up like Peckerwood Pennington, digging my grave with every day I spend in the back end of bad luck."
"What's the plan, then?" I asked. "What should you be doing different?"
He shook his head, easing the jointed pipe into the top of the dirty stove. "I'm not sure," he said. "I might just lay it to God, this time. Wait for a sign."
* * *
Out on the stoop I looked up and down the line before stepping down. Tennyson stood on the porch behind me, using a rag to clean the grease out of his fingernails. It troubled me that I'd made him feel low-class, showing up out of the blue at a run-down three-room, watching him fit dirty stovepipe together. It had been a bad idea to dress up. "Where's that mean dog gone to?" I asked. "I don't want to get bit."
Now he laughed again, but in a harsh way, like he'd just as soon spit. "Where do you expect him to go? This is home. The family who bolted out of here ahead of the rent left a pan of liver mush to spoil on the stove and that hound locked out in the yard." He shook his head. I tried to make some mealy-mouthed excuse for the tenants, like "those who have never known kindness..." but he cut me off. "Would you do that? Truly? Not even give the liver to your dog before you tied him to a tree and moved on?"
He didn't expect an answer to this, so I made none. I said, "Look after yourself, Brother," and walked home to Dunnet Head.

When reading fiction I'm often struck by the pronounced difference between an author who understands how RELATIONSHIPS control and define dialogue, and an author who is less aware of this.

The skilled author, for instance, understands that people who know one another very well, such as lovers, conspirators, work colleagues, old married people, members of the same family or best friends, don't need to share facts that are held in common (these facts are called 'exposition'). What they do share is a manner of communicating that has been developed over time and contact through shared experiences or shared feeling.

It may be very fully, positively developed, with the exchange of feelings and intentions intuited on certain levels and with understanding complete, or it may be well developed but in a negative manner, a manner that typically has forced one person to adjust over time for the toxic characteristics of the other in order to have any meaningful communication at all. The latter relationship will rely less on shared intuition than on shared history and will involve varying amounts of guilt, antipathy, recriminations, and the like.

Whether the characters engaged in dialogue know one another well or not, the skilled author will also be conscious of and will make it clear to the reader which person holds emotional control in the relationship. By "EMOTIONAL CONTROL" we mean: who has the power? The leverage? Who has information the other one doesn't have? Who may be withholding something that the other one wants or needs? It's critical that the writer understands this component of control when crafting the relationship in order to provide dynamic movement to the scenes within a novel, the mechanical plot-generator of action v. reaction that we discussed in the previous blog post (The Trigger and the Heap).

In my opinion, the talent and skill of a particular writer can be measured by his or her ability to delineate the small relationships a primary character has with secondary ones. The fact that these relationships may occupy less "floor space" than the major relationships in no way excuses them from being less believable, and may in fact allow for insights just as breathtaking as those offered in the dialogues between key characters.

Consider how this is done in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. The title character in the novel is a strange, prickly, repressed, and not very likable middle-aged woman. And yet in this novel-in-stories she emerges as somehow admirable because of how fearlessly she "owns" who she is, and in the process of being Olive she emerges as remarkably funny and relatable.

Because so many of her interactions with people are characterized by few words, much must be conveyed in her laconic lines, especially when the interaction is emotionally intense or highly charged. I love a particular, concentrated section of dialogue between Olive and a fellow teacher at the junior high school in her small Maine town. We learn that when she was 44 Olive found herself "swept off her feet" by the 53 year old Jim Casey when he began giving her a ride to school every day. They have never kissed or been intimate; have never even touched, and yet an understanding -- a powerful mutual attraction -- has grown palpable between them. One day when the two of them are eating their lunches in Jim's office he says:

"If I asked you to leave with me, would you do it?
"Yes," she said.
He watched her as he ate the apple he always had for lunch, nothing else. "You would go home tonight and ask Henry?"
"Yes," she said. It was like planning a murder.
"Perhaps it's a good thing I haven't asked you."
"Yes."
(Strout)

Nothing more needs to be said at this point. Olive's feelings are crystal clear, and because of this, she holds emotional control. In a tricky way, however, she lets Jim know in this exchange that she is GIVING control to him. She lets Jim Casey know that she is willing, without a doubt, and now HE must decide if they will be bold together and follow their hearts, if they will abandon their jobs, families (he has a "shoe full of children") and homes for each other and run away to start new lives.

Instead, a few days later, her husband Henry breaks the news to Olive that Jim drove his car into a tree and is not expected to survive. He dies the next day.

"I don't believe it," she kept saying to Henry. "What happened?" (Strout)

But she knows what happened, and so do we, because of the dialogue Strout crafted between them. Jim wasn't as resolute as Olive. He wasn't brave. Instead of making a choice between staying with his wife, his children, and his job at the school or eloping with Olive, he chose death, which is no choice at all. It was simply his way of NOT MAKING the choice Olive offered to him. Olive is furious with Jim for disappointing her -- for turning out to be so ordinary in his indecisiveness. Not brave at all.

And all of this human drama is accomplished with a spartan economy of dialogue: the best kind.


Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. New York, Random House, 2008.

PURPOSES OF DIALOGUE, #2: Action v. Reaction

In a previous blog entry, I spoke about the five basic purposes of dialogue in fiction: To illustrate INTENTION, to facilitate ACTION v. REACTION, to illustrate RELATIONSHIPS, to show character VOICE, and to provide EXPOSITION. I explained the importance of Intentions, especially through sub-text. Related to intentions is the second purpose of dialogue, which I'll talk about now: showing ACTION V. REACTION between characters. The mechanism of ACTION v. REACTION (no response is still a reaction), creates a progressive dynamic in your story. This dynamic provides tension/conflict and illuminates the obstacles to characters' goals/intentions

To understand how the mechanism of Action v. Reaction functions to tell your fictional story, I borrow from a theory propounded by David Ball, a theater teacher and director. This theory is also called "the trigger and the heap." (As in Shooter, and Shot Dead).

David Ball is a dramaturge and director who wrote a book about dramatic text analysis called Backwards & Forwards. He claims that a well-made play can be analyzed as one would do a machine, with moving parts. A dramatic story begins with an Action (trigger) that results in a Reaction (heap). The heap then becomes the trigger for a new action, and so on.

This is basically the same model that Aristotle crafted 2500 years ago, with a well-made tragedy consisting of cause & effect happening over and over: a causal chain of events. (In Greek tragedy, as well as in formal debate, the word "agon" identified the key conflict taking place between the principals: the terms "protagonist" and "antagonist" draw upon that Latin root.)

The same principal applies to fiction. Of course, drama is limited: in plays or films this mechanism of action v. reaction can only be demonstrated through dialogue or action, whereas fiction writers may use description as well. However, dialogue iss till the "sweet spot" for dramatic moments in fiction, conveying feelings and intentions with powerful pathos.

We started this discourse on The Purposes of Dialogue by using Anna Karenina as our example of dramatic fiction, so let's stay with it. In Tolstoy's novel, Anna and her pursuer, Count Vronsky, have embarked on a passionate affair which must be kept secret, for Anna risks being disgraced and potentially losing her young son if her husband were to find out. She can hide her feelings at some level, but when she and Karenina attend a horse race where Vronsky and members of his regiment are racing their horses, disaster strikes. Vronsky rides his horse so aggressively (big symbolism there) that he causes the mare to stumble and fall, throwing him and breaking her back. From her seat in the stands Anna sees her lover thrown to the ground and moans out loud, then collapses with weeping, revealing her involvement with Vronsky to her husband and to all her acquaintances.

Vronsky's action -- mishandling the mare until she breaks -- is the trigger, causing Anna's disastrous reaction -- freaking out when she thinks he might be injured --(heap). Her reaction then becomes the trigger for Karenina's reaction, which is to be sufficiently mortified and alarmed by his wife's public display of concern for another man to scold her in the carriage on the way home, "you have behaved improperly, and I would wish it not to occur again." Anna barely hears him because she is intensely worried about her lover (heap). She is so distracted and dismayed that she responds to her husband with brutal honesty (trigger), telling him "I hear you, but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress; I can't bear you…"

Reading this, the reader hears, in those words, that Anna has sealed her own doom. If only she'd waited until they were home and she could withdraw long enough to compose herself! -- we think, coming to the end of this chapter. But it is not to be. She REACTED reflexively, emotionally, to Karenina's triggering words. And so the die is cast for Anna.

In the previous blog entry, I spoke about the five basic purposes of dialogue in fiction: To illustrate INTENTION (illuminating character goals, sometimes directly expressed but otherwise through sub-text); to allow ACTION v. REACTION, creating a progressive dynamic in your story; to illustrate RELATIONSHIPS, answering the question of Emotional Control -- who has it and why?; to provide VOICE (illuminating character origins & background, attitudes, state-of-mind); and to provide EXPOSITION.

Using the example of Chapter 30 in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I explored the author's use of highly literal expressions of intention on the part of the principal male character, Count Vronsky, soon to be Anna's partner in her adulterous affair. But in the scene that follows, Chapter 31, intentions are NOT expressed in a literal manner through dialogue. Instead, this awkward scene on the St. Petersburg railway platform establishing the love-triangle becomes a study in the superlative art of using non-literal dialogue, or SUBTEXT, to generate tension and move the action forward. Sub text can create irony -- a character means one thing but says another, often the opposite of what he/she is feeling -- or can reveal intense relationships that are masked by intentionally mundane or subdued exchanges.

Both types of subtext apply in this scene, where Anna is greeted home by her husband, the pompous civil servant Karenina, while the man who wants to be her lover, Count Vronksy, is pretending to have followed his mother home from Moscow when he is actually pursuing Anna. There's sexual tension here, rivalry, guilt on the part of Anna, because she flirted with Vronsky in Moscow, and NONE of this is expressed verbally in their very formal dialogue.

To start it off, Vronsky barges into the reunion of husband and wife on the station platform, ignoring the husband and presuming a relationship with the wife by asking Anna, "Have you passed a good night?" He asks this knowing that Anna has not slept a wink because she has been thinking about him, and about their intimate conversation a few hours ago when they stepped out of the train on the snowbound stop-over. As people say now, it's a "dog-whistle," a message to Anna only she can hear, revealing the growing intensity of his feeling for her.

She responds by saying "Thank you, very good," however, Tolstoy tells us that her face looks weary when she says this, belying her statement that's she's "good." In fact, she's a mess!

Anna then has no choice but to introduce Vronsky to her husband Alexey, who is already put off by Vronsky's presumptuous manner, his good looks and his military swagger, no less than his aristocratic title, and stresses his dislike by speaking trite pleasantries expressed so coldly that Vronsky cannot fail to take the hint that he is not wanted. Karenina asks him "You're back from leave, I suppose?" but as Tolstoy writes: "without waiting for a reply, he (Karenina) turned to his wife in a jesting tone: 'Well, were a great many tears shed at parting?' By addressing his wife like this, he gave Vronsky to understand that he wished to be left alone, and, turning slightly towards him, he touched his hat; but Vronsky turned to Anna… 'I hope I may have the honor of calling on you,' he said. Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced with his weary eyes at Vronsky. 'Delighted, he said coldly."

Brrrr! You've been dissed, soldier boy!

As you can see, in some situations, the effect of using dialogue that employs subtext, meaning the opposite of what is felt, ('Delighted'), or forcing the characters to sublimate powerful or conflicted emotions through the utterance of mundane small talk ('I'm very good, thank you,) creates rising tension and spurs the reader to read on while investing in these characters and their plight. Good sub-text can elevate dialogue to the point where it has multiple, nuanced messages for the reader/listener, and advances the story -- narrative -- significantly.

In the previous blog entry I described the five main purposes of dialogue in fiction, as I see them and practice them when writing. I'd like to focus on how important the first purpose, INTENTIONS, is to dialogue between characters. Stanislavski, the great Russian director, Chekhov-collaborator, and head of the Moscow Art Theater, called these intentions the character's "task." Actors often call them "motivations" (as in, "What’s my motivation in this scene?) and others call them character "objectives." Whatever you call them, a character's got to have them, and there have got to be obstacles to these objectives. or you don't have plot and you don't have drama.

When writing a critical scene between fictional characters, WHAT they are saying to each other is generally less important than WHY they are saying it. What are they hoping to achieve? What is their objective? (WHAT follows WHY). INTENTIONS are what you want to start with, building them into your character's actions/reactions, relationships, voice.

Take a look at two consecutive scenes in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Chapters 30 & 31. Keep in mind that the 3rd person omniscient narrator used here means that the author has full rein to get inside all the character's heads and hearts singly, or simultaneously, and Tolstoy alters his viewpoint-character as he wishes. A first-person narrator wouldn't have that kind of flexibility, so unless the intentions of another character are made very clear in the dialogue, or unless your 1st-person narrator is extremely sensitive to sub-text, the subliminal meaning behind spoken words (and most of them are!) you might not have such a comprehensive range of intentions laid out for the reader. That's why dialogue is so important.

In the first scene, Chapter 30, two passengers on a train traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg step out of their cars on to a rural station platform in the midst of a snowstorm. One is the title character, Anna. Anna is on her way home to her husband and young son following an extended stay in Moscow, where she was mediating marital problems between her brother and his wife. While in the city, she attended a ball as chaperone for her young cousin, Kitty, and became disastrously attracted to Kitty's suitor, Count Vronsky, a soldier and aristocrat. She cut her visit short as soon as she realized that this feeling she has for Vronsky is more than a harmless flirtation. After all, Anna has a lot more to lose than Vronsky, who is single, rich, and experienced in love affairs. A dalliance with a married woman would only enhance his reputation among his male friends, while even a whisper of such behavior would ruin Anna.

However, Vronsky's attraction to Anna runs deeper than he's accustomed to, and unbeknownst to Anna, in Moscow he impulsively boards the train carrying her back to St. Petersburg. Now, without planning it, both of them step out of the train at a fuel stop in the middle of nowhere while the snowstorm rages: the swirling, frozen isolation of the environment perfectly mirroring the emotional intensity they feel seeing each other on the platform, as if their need for each other drew them out of the warm familiarity of their rail cars and into a howling abyss where they exist completely cut off from the world, existing only for each other.

As Anna is about to go back into the train, Vronsky speaks to her, and after a few essential pleasantries, he comes right to the point. In this scene, the only sub-text is Anna's. Vronksy speaks from his heart: WHAT he says is closely aligned to WHY he's saying it. Anna asks him, "What are you coming for?" and he answers "What am I coming for? You know that I have come to be where you are. I can't help it."

She is too flustered to respond coherently, rattled by how direct he is being, and she is honestly confused by what she's feeling in response. In trying to express this, she manages to say "It's wrong what you say, and I beg you, if you're a good man, to forget what you've said, as I forget it." (As if!) He responds by saying, "Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget."

The die is cast! There's no going back now, for either one of them. Vronsky has acted, and now Anna reacts, falling in love with a man she barely knows and, as a married woman and mother, is forbidden to know better.

In the next scene, Chapter 31, things change dramatically in terms of dialogue, because Anna is met by her husband in St. Petersburg and Vronsky barges into the reunion of husband and wife on the station platform. This awkward three-way exchange is necessarily conducted entirely in sub-text, and is a masterpiece of sublimation and verbal irony. In the next post, I'll address how Tolstoy crafts the dialogue in this scene.

I'm just returned from a writers conference where I led a workshop called "'You Talking To Me?' Why Less Really Does Mean More When It Comes to Dialogue."

I'd been meaning to put my ideas about dialogue in a coherent form for some time, and the 90 minute class provided exactly the right opportunity. In boiling down dialogue's essential place in fiction, I was surprised to see how many of the same rules apply to dialogue in prose that I used as a playwright, writing scripts. As I see it, then, there are five essential purposes for dialogue:

1) To illustrate INTENTION (illuminating character goals, sometimes directly expressed but otherwise through sub-text)

2) To allow ACTION v. REACTION (no response is still a reaction), which creates a progressive dynamic in your story. This dynamic provides tension/conflict and illuminates the obstacles to characters' goals/intentions

3) To illustrate RELATIONSHIPS. Answers the question of Emotional Control -- who has it and why? (Conflict, intentions)

4) To provide VOICE (illuminating character origins & background, attitudes, state-of-mind)

5) To provide EXPOSITION (illuminates essential plot information… but exposition must be used sparingly!)

I'll talk about each one of these purposes in detail beginning with the next blog post. Stay tuned!