Writing dialog

May 22, 2013

First, a clarification:  Some people blog every day, and it is widely recommended that bloggers do so at least once a week.  I must confess that I find once a month challenging.  Twitter gets maybe one a week from me, so....  At any rate, I am sure those who follow or visit this blog have other sources of entertainment.

This blog is also a break from the build-up I have tried to give to the publication of The Chinese Spymaster, expected this summer.   This blog does continue on the theme of a writer's education.  I found in writing (translating and selecting)  The Battle of Chibi that there were many passages that included dialog and thought it odd that some translations minimized this.  At any rate, to coincide with the appearance of a (slightly) revised version of "Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away, a Play," my translation and adaptation of Lao She's Teahouse, I offer this blog on writing dialog.  Following is the "proof" of the cover from Createspace:

First, dialog should not, in my view, mean that the rules of good grammar and spelling are suspended.  Some authors seem to believe that this leads to inauthentic language.  I think the true challenge in writing dialog is to write to the highest standards of correctness one can within the limits of credibility.   The original Mandarin of Teahouse was, one is informed, an accurate rendering of Peking dialect.  I have no idea how to convey that in English and therefore chose to write the dialog as "standard English" with a few exclamations--"wah" and "ai-ya"--that I hope act as sign-posts that the play does not take place, say, in Kansas.  

I hasten to add that I would not wish to change a single syllable of Faulkner or Twain or Joyce, but my own modest thought about this is that there is entirely too much bad "dialect," that it is best left to experts, and that it is actually easier to write standard English.

As much as possible, dialog also enables the writer to show rather than to tell.  This is not always the case as even in real life we gossip and exchange news in indirect speech.  Friends get together and discuss, for example, the passing of some custom, practice, or of some other friend.  But generally dialog enables the writer to show people arguing and quarreling as opposed to telling us about it.  For writers, it is generally accepted that this is a good thing. 

Dramatic dialog has the added requirement that it carries on at a good pace.  Those who write plays and have watched them performed cringe at moments of "dead air."  Often such moments can be covered up by more or less antic stage "business."  But it is best that the dialog be crisply written (and that the actors remember their lines).

Like all writing, dialog should contribute to some point of the story whether this is the development of a character, the detailing of a plot element or the depiction of some action.  Fellow writers who have difficulty with dialog are encouraged to try writing or adapting a play to get the appropriate workout. 

(Details on purchasing the new revised version of "Heaven is High" may be found under the appropriate tab of this blog.)

Why and how I came to write a spy novel

For the past year I have been working on a spy novel that I hope will be published this July or August; I'd like to share with fellow authors the reasons why.  It represents a change of genre--from translations or re-creations of traditional Chinese works to "espionage novels."  There are two reasons:  I like reading such novels and I wanted to find out if I could write one.

Almost at the very beginning of this exercise several ideas came to mind that have mostly been incorporated although not in the manner they had presented themselves.  One of these, for instance, is the idea that the spy agency of one country might reach out to that of another .... But in addition to jotting these ideas down, I decided also to read or re-read spy novels to determine what I liked and what I would try to avoid.

It became very clear that the ideological issues that were so  strongly felt by, say Helen McInnes, was not a working model for me.  I do not consider the Iron Curtain relevant any longer or that democracy is locked in battle against communist or anarchist alternatives.  Clearly, the leaders of many countries do not believe that historical inevitability will lead all countries to adopt a form of liberal democracy; the "Whig interpretation of history" is almost peculiarly Anglo-Saxon and the "Idea of Progress" is something that has a different ending envisioned by different cultures and civilizations.  I do not believe that the civilized minds of the world in the near future will all turn out to be varieties of "Westernized Oriental Gentlemen." 

Super-spies too, from Bond t0 Bourne, failed to impress me as suitable for anything other than escapist literature.  They may make for good movies but not for good books, I decided.  I could imagine well-trained agents who might perform as world class athletes, but did not want to write fantasies involving genetically enhanced or modified men and women saving the world from evil mutations.  (I prefer to feed my fantasies with science fiction.)  Too, I found myself offended by the school yard morality--he hit me first--that makes up  the subtext of a great many pulp spy thrillers although vengeance has, I recognize, ancient roots.

It was impossible not to consider the work of John Le Carre; I think I have read at least once nearly every book he has published.  But I confess to finding the world of espionage as he sees it somewhat eccentric; he concentrates almost exclusively on the inner monologues of the main character(s) who often distrust themselves not to mention their lack of faith in their colleagues.  In the movie version of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" for instance, Smiley is seen to be thinking far more than he is speaking (in itself, not necessarily a bad thing).  There is much to learn from Le Carre about writing and about spy-craft, but I wanted to write a spy novel involving the Chinese intelligence agency and the Chinese are not much given to introspection, except as acts of political self-criticism.

There are very good spy novels set in or involving the agencies of the People's Republic that have been published recently.  Though literate and filled with much well-researched details, they struck me as overly clever just as sometimes gymnasts become physical contortionists.  I did not find any to serve as a model or inspiration for The Chinese Spymaster.  This will I hope be the first in a series and so I have given it the working title of Operation Kashgar.   I have chosen to ignore the usual spy novel themes of revenge and betrayal; instead there will be geopolitical considerations given the political restlessness in Central Asia and China's long "Inner Asian" borders.

Look for it about a month after the summer solstice.

   

How and Why The Battle of Chibi was written

March 9, 2013

Lao She, author of Tea House

About ten years ago, I complained to a group of friends that I found reading the Romance of the Three Kingdoms   boring.  I had thought it would fill a gap in my education and had sought out the latest and greatest English translation.  One of my friends, a Japanese, protested that this was her father's favorite book, that many Japanese have read several translations of this Chinese classic even as younger generations knew it chiefly from manga or computer games.

Two or three years later,  overtaken by retirement, I undertook to study Mandarin.  I soon found the usual exercises in the usual text books quite dull and decided to take on some "real stuff."  Lao She's Tea House (茶館), written in the Beijing vernacular (although the author was a Manchu) lured me with its deceptively simple language; the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I thought, could not be all that much more difficult.


I hasten to add that I would never have progressed to this stage without the remarkable software developed by Pleco (link) that combines access to several Chinese-English dictionaries with recognition of Chinese graphs as they are handwritten on the touch screen of a personal digital assistant.  Even so, the Romance is 120 chapters and over a thousand pages long (in English).  Further, although the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history dates from 220 to 280 A.D., the Romance actually starts with the fall of the Han Dynasty (around 180 A.D.); by chapter 50, it is still preoccupied with the battle of Chibi that took place in 208 A.D.

A friend who is better versed in East Asian history explained that this Battle was pivotal to the character of the Three Kingdoms as it ensured that China would not be united during this period due to the stand-off among the three contenders for leadership.  This gave me pause and the excuse to bring some "unity" to the project.  The result is the selection and translation of 23 chapters ending before the Three Kingdoms period actually begins.  I also eliminated names that were not associated with a speech or an any action.  This would, as I envisioned it, mitigate the "shaggy dog" character of the classic to a novel that contained enough action, debate and stratagem as well as instances of heroism and stupidity that have made the Romance what it is--the best introduction to classical Chinese thought.  

I did not try to create a novel with anything like Aristotelian unity of form or action, only a story with a beginning, middle and end with my translation following the original fairly closely.  The Chinese text contained much dramatic dialog that I tried to reproduce.  It contained much poetry which I initially avoided (as I do not think there is a single poetic bone in my body) until I chanced upon Archie Barnes' brilliant book, Chinese Through Poetry published posthumously in 2007.  Working through this book gave me the courage to attempt the translation of the poetry I felt was essential for The Battle of Chibi; it also boosted my spirit through the final stages of writing.

This is a story I have told a few times in different ways, in response to those who were kind enough to ask about the making of this book; how a writer comes to write a book.  For the record, this is how and why I came to select from the Romance and translate what became The Battle of Chibi (link).

MICHENER'S CARAVANS

Published in 1963 and set in 1946-7 (before the Partition of India), this book reminds us what a great investigator and thoughtful writer Michener was. The story itself is outmoded and Michener does not show great insight into the psychology of his characters. But one wonders if anyone in "exceptional" America read it when Charlie Wilson went to arm the Taliban against the Soviet supported regime, when soldiers were sent after 9/11 only to remain there for more than a dozen years. 

The author described Kabul as resembling Palestine in Jesus' day, of death by stoning, of an eye for an eye and a life for a life, of the fate of the country to be determined--whenever Afghanistan might be left to itself--by the struggle between the many bearded men led by mullahs from the hills and the few young experts with degrees from Oxford, Sorbonne or MIT, the former making up 99.99 percent of the country. 

"We are a brigand society and we murder our rulers," says one of the characters. There are indeed striking descriptions of a violent and very different society that has very likely not changed much except that the munitions have multiplied, the mullahs reinforced with money and ideology from an even more fundamentalist source, and the young experts very likely all killed, corrupted or disenchanted. It is a quiet book and does not address itself to the political issues. It muses on the fact that the Afghans look so much like the Jews and thought of themselves as one of the "lost tribes"; they rejoiced equally when the Germans proclaimed them the First Aryans.

Michener's story also gives prominence to wanderers who traded goods (perhaps stolen) and made annual migrations with their goats and camels between the Oxus (now in Turkmenistan) and Jhelum (now in Pakistan), a trek of two thousand miles.  Were they Povindahs? Kochis? Whatever, they were the gypsies of Central Asia.  The author tells of the Desert of Death that lies between Iran and Afghanistan and of the mysterious City at the border. The heat and absence of humidity of the desert were such that the Helmand River flows into the desert and simply disappears.  

The most ambitious among the Afghans in this book wants to build a dam and transform the desert gradually into farmland.  He even explores the ancient karez tunnels that were sunk deep into the ground to bring up water; such tunnels may have had Persian origins and are to be found all the way from Iran and Pakistan through Afghanistan to the desert town of Turpan in Western China.  Some years ago, I read a whole bunch of books on the Silk Road as if in a trance.  The romantic caravan trails they described, I learn now from Michener, crossed at Kabul.

RED SORGHUM

This is a bold, brash, bawdy and brilliant work. Purporting to be a family chronicle that the narrator obtains from a 92 year old woman from his family village, it tells of his brave, lusty and larger than life grandparents and their turbulent existence carving out a life in the midst of a northern Chinese region infested with bandits, opium smokers and gamblers, and invaded by the Japanese. There are horrific scenes of brutality: second grandma (thereon hangs another tale) and young auntie were raped and mutilated, Uncle Arhat was skinned alive before being dismembered, Grandpa himself murdered Grandma's newly-wed husband and father-in-law (you simply have to read this book).

The author paints his scenes in vivid language: the red sorghum of the title itself refers to the hardy grain that shimmered in fields like a "sea of blood"; dancing, it "reeked of glory; cold and graceful, it promised enchantment; passionate and loving, it was tumultuous." The narrator felt a pang on a return visit, finding the fields planted with a hybrid variety of sorghum that never seemed to ripen (guaranteed to cause constipation); he was haunted by "a nagging sense of our species' regression."

Though Grandma died in the main battle told, that of the Black Water River with several bands of Chinese ill-coordinated against the Japanese, she was the heroine--lovely as foot-binding had reduced her feet to three inch "lotuses" so that when she walked, "her body swayed like a willow in the wind," and as opium-smoking short of addiction had given her "the complexion of a peach, a sunny disposition and a clear mind." She died unafraid but unwillingly; unafraid of the eighteen levels of Hell that everyone knew about but unwilling to let go of life.

The novel covers much more--a digression into the marauding packs of dogs almost has the dogs taking on the voice of the narrator; a survivor of the war who lives on into the middle of the 20th century, Old Eighteen Stabs Geng who lived despite those wounds because of the magical ministrations of a silver fox, succumbs to starvation when his pension is held up by a petty bureaucrat.

Should the author have put more energy into decrying such evil? This reviewer will not judge, only saying this--that it would have been criminal not to have written this book or to have published it. Yes, the story line is not chronologically straightforward and often jerks like the handheld videocams of journalists embedded in some war. So what? The Nobel was well earned.

For some context, I read Red Sorghum just after reading Anchee Min's Empress Orchid about which I wrote (in a review posted on Amazon.com):

This novel about the last Empress Dowager of China as a young concubine in the late Qing dynasty is smoothly told.  She pays attention to palace politics and learns about the wider world though her eunuchs, the emperor she serves and his half brother.  When she bears the Emperor a son, she is elevated to the position of Empress, only she has to share that position as there is already one. But never mind, it happens to be her best friend among occupants of the harem. 

Orchid must also face down and defeat the dying Emperor's most powerful advisor.  (One does not learn why he chose to make an enemy of her.)  China's humiliation at the hands of the barbarians penetrates into the harem somehow and Orchid chooses to support the uncle of her son the next Emperor.  Throughout the book, the prose is smooth and chaste, bloodless, even when people died.  An interesting read.

As Maureen Dowd complained after an editorial colleague at the New York Times won the Nobel Prize (for Economics) this is hardly a fair comparison.  It is not.  Some people love Goya's paintings, especially those he did of Spanish royalty.  There is an air, a style about them.  But it is difficult to pay heed when there is a Guernica in the same room. 

BOOKS--print or digital

The website TEACHINGDEGREE.ORG (attribution link), from which the graphics of this blog have been obtained, is clear about this.  There are more and more e-readers out there:

The shopping frenzy of the last few weeks--perhaps it continues--must surely have driven that point home.  But there is good news; this does not spell the end of real books.  

As it turns out, those who own an e-reader are likely to read more, even of books in print form.

For those who care that we do not slouch our way into illiteracy, this is a good thing.  In addition there some circumstances, if one thinks about it, in which one form of books work better than others:

Reading with a child, for example, is best done with a book in print, while the great convenience of having many books in a small thin device makes travelling with a whole library best done with an e-Reader.  (In any case, illustrated children's books test the current limits of e-publication.)



However one looks at it, this holiday season--here's to Books!

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a Review

November 30, 2012

"You ought to read The German Ideology" says Madame Michel, one of the two voices in this rich, beguiling novel, thereby almost giving herself away. For she has chosen to remain disguised as what she thinks of herself--or as what she thinks the world takes her for, a 54 year old concierge dressed in a "white nuptial meringue [undergarment] buried beneath a lugubrious black pinafore," who only "gets through her everyday life thanks to her ignorance of any alternatives." We are therefore treated to her spasms of fear, palpitations of being outed as the intellectual that she is (despite the fact that she only went to school from five to twelve); she is overwhelmed by the huge chasm of class/social distinction between the concierge and the occupants/owners of the apartments in this venerable building.

The other voice belongs to Paloma, a hyper-intelligent 12 year old who lives in fear of showing her freakish intelligence--that's how her classmates and family would treat it, or so she fears. She therefore hides it by reading everything her friend (who is second in the class) and carefully imitating the latter's work: French as "words in coherent strings, correctly spelled"; Math as the "mechanical reproduction of operations devoid of meaning"; history as "a list of events joined by logical connections"--all to "dumb down" the appearance of her true intelligence.

Each of the two voices take turns, more or less, to beguile us with considerations beyond the ordinary, of the sort if not common or familiar, one would hope is at least recognizable to those belonging to that which baccalaureate exercises frequently describe as the "community of educated men and women." Paloma's revelations are revealed as journal entries (in a sans serif font) while Madame Michel's (Renee) are only sometimes referred to as journal entries. One such memorable occasion is when she compares her journal writing to the hypnotic, unconscious rhythm of mowing grass: "The lines become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will."

Both voices therefore hide their light under the proverbial bushel; they are wabi, Japanese for an understated form of beauty, of "refinement masked by rusticity." They each recognize in the other the radiance of intelligence. Paloma, while speaking of the concierge in her journal, cries out: "I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone." The novel shows how they each eventually make their own way towards the light.

Along the way, guarded and repressed as they are, they reveal flashes of gnomic insight. Paloma speaks of grammar as "an end not simply a means ... pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language." Madame Michel makes breathtakingly short work of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations: Introduction to Phenomenology--a "ridiculous little book...[born of] hard-core autism." Chancing on Paloma's older sister's thesis on William of Ockham's Potentia Dei Absoluta, she concludes that academia has not always chosen wisely or well between "elevating thought" and "the self-reproduction of a sterile elite." Stunned by a still life by Pieter Claesz, even though it is only a copy, she declares she would without hesitation "trade the entire Italian Quattrocento [Fra Angelico? Donatello? Leonardo?]" for Dutch still life.

Not to make this review overlong, let it be said that there are passages of great tenderness and humor, as well as more gentle disquisitions on philosophical issues of moment. Madame Michel has found the library and it allowed her to expand her horizons; the VCR and the DVD have transported her senses. She is friends with pre-1910 Russian literature, movies from Yasujiro Ozu's cinematic equivalents of Pieter Claesz to the Blade Runner and the Terminator, music from Mozart (whose "Confutatis" appears at a most startling point) to Eminem; she reflects on the difference between doors that swing open and those that slide.

You ought to read this book!