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Meredith Sue Willis

Author and Teacher

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Prose Narrative Online

 Children's novel Redwall                          Two photos of the late Tillie Olsen

A Four Session Writing Class January 2008
Session III

Tuesday January 22, 2008 – Session Three goes up
Monday, January 28, 2008 Midnight– SessionThree homework due

Session I
Session II
Session IV

WELCOME to the third session of Prose Narrative Online! I remind you again that there are several exercises to try here and one Main Exercise. You are always, of course, welcome to send in other material you are writing or several of the short assignments in place of the Main Exercise. You may send up to 1200 words a week, which is comparable to 4 or 5 double spaced typed pages. Send your writing to me for comment at MeredithSueWillis@gmail.com by midnight on Monday, January 28, 2008.

We’ve touched on various terms that are important to prose narrative as well as the all-important use of senses in describing people and places (setting). We’ve talked about process and product as well as some of the characteristics of memoir and fiction. Today, we’ll work with two more elements of good prose narrative– physical action and dialogue. These elements are part of dramatizing and showing rather than simply telling. Sometimes telling is the most efficient way to get something across (“I crossed the street” is probably preferable to “I extended my left foot and hit the heel down, and as the rest of my foot was coming in contact with the pavement, I began to lift my right one...”). Much of the reason, however, that we read and write prose narrative is to explore and share specific experiences. You can describe Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes as the story of a very poor family, but that comes nowhere near having the impact of reading the actual dramatized incidents in the book.

One of the great issues of prose narrative is knowing exactly when and how much to dramatize and when to summarize. The famous phrase is “show don’t tell,” but I generally prefer “dramatize.” Which parts of the story am I, the writer, going to relive as if I were experiencing it now? Which parts will I describe fully– the weather, the exact words the people said, the expressions on their faces, the gestures their hands made– in hat endlessly rich complexity around us?

In the process of writing, a detailed re-experiencing of an incident may also give added insight or bring up more details. It can be an essential part of the process of uncovering material that you might not remember. It’s a method of reliving a moment, or, in the case of fiction, creating the moment in a way that you feel you are living it. Often, once you’ve dramatized it for yourself, you can go back and, with a little revision and editing, figure out how to recreate it for your reader, in what order the parts should be told, what to build up to, what not to leave out– and what isn’t necessary.

 

 

Physical Action

WRITE:  You or a character quietly watch another person do some action. Maybe you are a child watching your father fix a broken radio, or maybe you’re waiting to have your hair cut and watching the hairdresser work on the customer ahead of you. Write a detailed description of the actions of the person at work. Notice each thing their hands do. Try to reconstruct it in more detail than you might ordinarily write.

Here's a sample from a literary novel of an old woman with bad table manners:

At the end of the table, my grandmother eats. No one watches her do this. They are repelled by it. To cover her noise they keep up a counterpoint of conversation across the table. I have to glance at her. She sits, her old eyes close to her plate, tearing at her turkey, stuffing it into her mouth with her fork. She is a savage, hungry child, self-comforting, self-pleasing, who has been hungry in a creek-side cabin forgotten by us all, eating sow-belly and cornpone when they could get it, the father away at war. The child she feeds so urgently was born in 1861. Now, taking a pickle from the Waterford glass in front of her, remembering that there is someone else, she leans over, her face covered with turkey grease, and presents it to her great-grandson, who takes it and squeezes it in his hand.

                                     -- Mary Lee Settle, The Clam Shell

 

Also, take a look at this poem about a person at work: Old Florist. The poem has some nice internal rhymes and repetitions.

 

WRITE:  Again write about an action, but this time focus on larger movements: observe an athlete running or going in for a lay up.

Here’s a battle scene from a children’s action novel:

....Cluny plucked the blazing torch from Killconey's grasp. He flung it at the face of the oncoming warrior. Matthias deflected it with his shield in a cascade of sparks and went after the horde leader. To gain a brief respite, Cluny pushed Killconey into Matthias. The ferret grappled vainly but was cloven in two with one swift stroke. Matthias stepped over the slain ferret, whirling his sword expertly as he pursued Cluny. Ignoring his unprotected back, Matthias failed to see Fangburn stealing up behind him. The rat raise his cutlass in both claws....
                        — Brian Jacques, Redwall, Avon Books (New York, 1990), p. 342-343

WRITE: Write another detailed physical action, this time in the first person: “I knew I was late and I started to run. I could feel my heels banging on the sidewalk...”

Take a look at a few more samples on writing with physical action online at http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/materials.html#physicalaction .

 

 

Dialogue

At least as important as action for dramatizing your narrative is to write well-observed dialogue. Memoirs, too, by convention, include quoted dialogue, even if the writer may not remember exactly each word that is said. Dialogue is unique in prose narrative in being closer to the thing it imitates (conversation) than any other element. In real life, a person's appearance is an impression you get in a single glance, and you then observe the details over time. The description of an action such as, say, a sword thrust is much slower than an actual sword thrust and is often described by simile or metaphor (“His blade slashed upward like a streak of lightning...”). But conversations, in real life as in prose narrative, are made of words. The words of a dialogue can even be read aloud in something close to real time. Thus dialogue comes as close as prose narrative ever does to an identity between the written words and what they represent. The pacing of dialogue creates a special bond to the real world as well as the excitement of people in action facing one another as they do on a stage. Dialogue is where the drama is. It can do many things at once. Characters show what's on their minds and what they're made of. They may lay out some background facts the reader needs. They show their personalities and they reveal their conflicts.

WRITE: A dialogue with a conflict in it. If you’re working on a project, try to write something that would fit into the project.

Here’s a sample dialogue with a conflict by a wonderful writer who died very recently, Tillie Olsen. Notice how, short as it is, it includes action, almost all the senses, a setting, how things were said, even a brief interior monologue:

.....No one greeted him at the gate -- the dark walls of the kitchen enclosed him like a smothering grave. Anna did not raise her head. In the other room the baby kept squalling and squalling and Ben was piping an out-of-tune song to quiet her. There was a sour smell of wet diapers and burned pots in the air.
     "Dinner ready?" he asked heavily.
     "No, not yet."
     Silence. Not a word from either.
     "Say, can't you stop that damn brat's squallin? A guy wants a little rest once in a while."
     No answer.
     "Aw, this kitchen stinks. I'm going out on the porch. And shut that brat up, she's driving me nuts, you hear?"
     You hear, he reiterated to himself, stumbling down the steps, you hear, you hear. Driving me nuts.

                                             -- Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio

 

WRITE: Have two people discuss an inanimate object. Even though they’re talking about this thing (article of clothing? A head of cabbage?) there is a subtext– that is to say, they are REALLY talking about something else, maybe about in their relationship. What do they say? What are they really saying?

MAIN EXERCISE:  This is in two parts.

     One: Write down as rapidly as you can just the words said from a conversation between two people in your narrative. This might be a memory of something that happened between you some other important person in your life, or between two characters in fiction. Write rapidly, to get down as much as you can of the words that were said. Focus on the words that will appear within the quotes.

     Two: Go back and slow down time and add material before and between and after the words the people said. Include how things were said, tones of voice, the gestures the people used, maybe a little setting, maybe what they were wearing, maybe even what someone was thinking. The object in doing this in two steps is to concentrate first on the “real time” of the words as if you were overhearing them right now, and then to slow down time and observe all the details.

Good luck with your dialogue– we’ll work some more with scene and dialogue next session.

                                                              Meredith Sue Willis

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