You either dialogue, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
So I got my ears pierced today. And apparently that’s a spectator sport.
Saw The Dark Knight. The hype is true.
I’ve been reading Hemingway lately (when I haven’t been wasting my entire afternoon on manga. I need to fix that problem; it’s such a drain.) I’m in the middle of Islands in the Stream, and I purchased The Sun Also Rises, which is one of my very favorite books. Hemingway writes simply, clearly, and beautifully (and as for Faulkner’s claim that Hemingway never sent a reader to the dictionary, well, it’s not true. He sent me. Métier, pronounced may-tyay. It means an area of expertise or a set of skills particular to a profession.) The thing I think people overlook about Hemingway is that for all of his fabled rugged, manly terseness, he communicates more in his dialogue than does anyone else I’ve read. Read the first five chapters of The Sun Also Rises - the characters are developed extraordinarily well through their inconsequential dialogue. Hemingway is the master of “show, not tell.”
And I’m not. I attempt to write short stories or novels (I’m good at poetry, but not everything can be communicated through poetry, so I try to be disciplined enough to write a decent short story. So far no luck.) - my dialogue is either anemically philosophical or composed of bizarre tangents, and in both cases sounds stilted and unnatural. Problem is, that’s mostly the kinds of dialogue I have with people (that and a mixture of internet memes, videogames, and manga nerdspeak, which I do not care to replicate.)
So why does Hemingway’s dialogue work so well? Re-skimming through The Sun Also Rises and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “Hills Like White Elephants”, I’d say it’s because Hemingway does not rely on it to communicate. The bitingly cynical protagonist of The Sun Also Rises tells us very directly what he thinks of the characters, and so the dialogue is freed from the necessity of telling us what the characters are like, and paradoxically is therefore freed to communicate so much more. Same goes for the shifting limited third-person of “Short Happy Life” - since we can see what each of the three main characters thinks, the dialogue doesn’t have to carry the story, and as a result is much more powerful. (Does this make any sense? I’m not sure.) As for “Hills Like White Elephants”, the entire plot is communicated through dialogue in a standoffish third-person. As a matter of fact, when we were supposed to rewrite a short story as a play in 11th-grade English, I chose this one, and almost no changes whatsoever were necessary. The dialogue is the same, inconsequential, obscure to the reader but clear to the characters, who of course already know what’s going on - but the story is still communicated. The plot isn’t very complicated, but neither are the plots of the others. The point is that Hemingway writes dialogue that is at once oblique and lucid, irrelevant and essential, and above all natural.
Perhaps that’s just part of the métier of the novelist, and maybe I’m just not a novelist.
And would you look at that - see what I mean about sloth? If something doesn’t come to me immediately, I want to give up. Well, not just yet.