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.