Dialogue

Dialogue

I've been thinking about dialogue, and wrote the craft essay for Portfolio 3 on it, but I think the dialogue in The Cat Story can be pushed a bit further, especially for the last scene. I found that I wanted to put in stories about Siglap, but didn't want it to seem like Kiat was suddenly the authority on Siglap. Mavis Gallant's stories, with their large interior spaces, both in terms of getting into the minds of characters as well as in terms of the space of places, made me look at my writing in a deeper way. She write like Alice Munro (what is it with the Canadian education system that produces writers like these), creating rich worlds within short stories and characters who feel and sound real.
I had wanted to attempt to write a novel for this MFA, but I think now, I want to learn how to write stories like Munro and Gallant. They seem to break all the rules of storytelling though, jumping from one POV to another, having sub-plots that lead to nowhere, but which contribute to the reader's broader understanding of the narrative (Munro), using adverbs, using 'said'. I think on some level I am hampered by how I was taught writing, and how I taught writing to primary school students. Describe how the said it, we always tell students. Did he say it sadly, happily? Show, we tell them. Don't tell. And yet, there is a place for telling, as there is a place for summarising speech and thought.

I like what Stephen King said about writing good dialogue -- that the key is really listening to how people speak. I teach English, I work in an English Language Institute. We talk about speech patterns and language all the time, to the point of self-censorship -- my colleagues correct each other's grammar errors on a daily, no hourly, basis. Surely, I know what good dialogue sounds like, in terms of good grammatical dialogue. What I think I need to do for my characters and for people I observe though, is to think of the interior world, the psychology, the motivation behind what they are saying, and what they are not saying.

Siglap and the Cat Story

I needed to write a story on Siglap for an anthology of place-based Singapore stories. My mother's family had spent a long time in Suglap. They had a wooden house in front of the sea, and my great-grandfather used to fish. Growing up, my mother had all sorts of stories about how it was like to live in a kampong.

Theirs was the biggest house in the kampong, with 2 garages (1 of which doubled up as a badminton court) and a billards room. They had a Malay driver, Mahmud, who drove the children to and from school and my grandfather to and from work. During the racial riots of the 1950s between the Malays and the Chinese,  he told the children to duck at the back, so that they would not be seen by the rioters.

For Portfolio 3, I wanted to revise the cat story, which has been hanging in the air for a year. The last revision, for Portfolio 2, was easily the most thorough edit. Yet I felt (as did my writing group) that I had taken the characters too far. Kiat was just meant to be a socially awkward closet gay, not a pedophile. Alison, just a girl harbouring a long-time crush, not a divorcee.

So I decided, for Portfolio 3, that I would combine both aims, and relocate Kiat to my mother's Siglap house. What if the house remained stubbornly, instead of being demolished when land reclamation started? What if Kiat had inherited it and used it for his storeroom of cats and clutter? What if Kiat remained a nice person, just a bit kooky, and the (albeit one-sided) sexual tension was brought back?

The Cat Story V 11 April was my attempt at doing that. I struggled with description quite a bit --- how do you describe an old house that you have never seen? I asked my mother to draw a picture of the house, and took a video of her describing the house. I had imagined that it would be dark, but she said it was light and airy. I had difficulty imagining how the fence looked like --- she said it was see-through, and people could sit on it --- so she dug out photos to show me exactly.