Listening to Your Characters

 

Listening to Your Characters

 

When I’m stuck and have no idea where my work in progress is going, I take my character and decide on someone else they should talk to, and I lock them in a room and tell them to have at it. And, at least on good days, they do.

 

Dialogue is something I’ve always enjoyed writing. I would love to be a poetic writer, someone whose descriptions are beautiful, who makes you see the river or the mountain or the crumbling façade of the building. I can struggle with it, and occasionally something comes through. But I feel much more comfortable with dialogue.

 

In my most recent book, a novel for adults called Off to Join the Circus, my characters range in age from almost 13 to 80, and I had to be sure that the dialogue was age-appropriate. I needed to listen to the various characters to hear what it was that they wanted to say—and how they wanted to say it. Would a teenager really say that? Would an 80-year-old use that particular word?

 

Another manuscript I’m working on is set in 1952, so I had to listen to my characters—and read various novels set in that time period—to figure out exactly how these characters would express themselves. When did this particular slang become popular? Was that word in use by the early ‘50s?

 

So as I continued to contemplate writing and listening, I decided to look up the thoughts of some famous writers.

 

Ernest Hemingway had this to say: “When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.”

 

James Baldwin had a different take: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

 

Moving further afield, the actress and writer Emma Thompson said this: “Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.”

Which of course gets back to the heart of it. Someone isn’t listening. Family problems result. And that’s what makes for good fiction.

 

--Deborah Kalb