The Hidden Machinery

I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the road,

Loose as the wind, as large as store.

Shall I be still in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn

To let me blood, and not restore

What I have lost with cordial fruit?

—GEORGE HERBERT,
“The Collar”

GEORGE HERBERT PUBLISHED “The Collar” in 1633, in a collection called The Temple. Nearly four hundred years later it is still impossible to read the poem without hearing the urgency of that first-person voice clamoring at the doors of heaven. We don’t have to be religious to enter into the speaker’s feeling of being uniquely ill done by, unfairly constrained by a higher power—a deity, a parent, an employer, a partner—and of railing against that power. Along with his slightly older fellow cleric John Donne, author of the equally clamorous “The Sun Rising,” Herbert is a superb example of a poet whose quasi-conversational voice speaks to us down the centuries.

Our closest contemporary cousins to these poems are the opinionated, voice-driven narratives of such writers as Sandra Cisneros, Marlon James, Daniel Orozco, Jim Shepherd, and Joy Williams. In their stories, I would suggest, the first-person voice often acts as a substitute for scenes. Someone is talking to us, seizing us by the shoulders, as opposed to calmly narrating a story to the wider world. Such stories tend to have fewer scenes—or sometimes none at all—and we do not miss them. As with Herbert and Donne, urgency carries the day. But setting aside these assertive first-person narrators, most stories and novels require scenes, those moments when events occur more or less in real time and we overhear remarks spoken by, and among, the characters. I would go as far as to say that many of the most revelatory and heartbreaking moments in fiction are played out in scenes. Dialogue is the jewel in the fiction writer’s crown, and a jewel ought to shine with particular luster.

By dialogue I do not mean only the actual words spoken by the characters but all the surrounding details that bring those words to life and help to convey their meaning, both overt and covert: where and when the characters are talking, their gestures and expressions, the pauses, the interruptions, and—when we have a close-third or first-person narrator—the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist. Reading the dialogue of playwrights, who use none of these strategies directly, reminds us of how much information is conveyed obliquely in even the most straightforward conversation. Here is Tom Stoppard in an early play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour:

ALEX: I have a complaint.

DOCTOR (opening file): Yes, I know—pathological development of the personality with paranoid delusions.

ALEX: No, there’s nothing the matter with me.

DOCTOR (closing file): There you are, you see.

ALEX: My complaint is about the man in my cell.

DOCTOR: Ward.

ALEX: He thinks he has an orchestra.

DOCTOR: Yes, he has an identity problem. I forget his name.

ALEX: His behaviour is aggressive.

DOCTOR: He complains about you, too. Apparently you cough during the diminuendos.

ALEX: Is there anything you can do?

DOCTOR: Certainly. (produces a red pill box from the drawer) Suck one of these every four hours.

Of course we would get a good deal more out of this conversation from seeing actors perform it. Their intonations and their actions, combined with the set and the lighting, perhaps even sound effects, would all influence how we heard and understood the bare words. And the words are written with that in mind. Stoppard is aspiring to a certain rhythm, a certain tone. Could we take these exchanges verbatim and flesh them out to make a satisfying scene in a story? I suspect not. Even if we were to add in a point of view, gestures, setting, etc., the back-and-forth could easily seem simplistic. The doctor’s quip about the patient with an identity problem might come across as trite rather than witty. And the heightened, almost surreal quality of the conversation, with its numerous misunderstandings, would strain credulity in a realistic story. The same is true in the other direction, turning a story into a play. Even a story with as much dialogue as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”—so often cited as an example of the dramatic point of view—relies crucially on descriptions of the setting to convey shifts in the characters’ thoughts and feelings.

We grow up writing narration, description, and summary in essays and letters, but we seldom have occasion to write dialogue until we turn to fiction. Still, why should it be so hard? Talking is one of our basic human activities; most of us take part in many conversations each day. Aren’t these daily exchanges practice for, and a kind of informal research into, the art of dialogue? If the answer were an unequivocal yes, then by the age of twenty-five we would all be writing masterful scenes.

The first and most obvious thing to say is that just as a playwright’s dialogue doesn’t have the same effect in fiction, neither does a transcription of the exchanges we participate in and overhear. This is particularly surprising when you consider that one of the main things that readers demand of dialogue is that the characters talk in a lifelike or “natural” fashion. But what do they mean by “lifelike”? In our everyday conversations we repeat ourselves, qualify ourselves, fail to finish our sentences, digress, interrupt, start over; we repeatedly fail to use the best possible words in the best possible order. Crises, good or bad, joyful or sorrowful, tend to make us even less eloquent. A transcription of a conversation reveals all of these problems, and more. We would close most books after a few pages if the characters rambled on as we do in daily life. When one stops to look closely at the dialogue in a classic story like, say, Ha Jin’s “My Best Soldier,” or Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one discovers a kind of fictional English that has much more to do with the conventions of fiction than with our normal conversations. Characters, by and large, are succinct, eloquent, witty, intelligent, relevant, and they accomplish all these unnatural things while pretending to speak naturally. Dialogue is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—often pretending to be woolly and vague, actually all teeth and meaning. Even characters who are seemingly irrelevant or repetitive are carefully controlled, as Katherine Mansfield demonstrates in this scene from her marvelous story “The Daughters of the Late Colonel.” The daughters, Josephine and Constantia, have brought their nephew Cyril to talk to their elderly father:

“Well,” said Grandfather Pinner, beginning to thump, “what have you got to tell me?”

What had he, what had he got to tell him? Cyril felt himself smiling like a perfect imbecile. The room was stifling, too.

But Aunt Josephine came to his rescue. She cried brightly, “Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues, father dear.”

“Eh?” said Grandfather Pinner, curving his hand like a purple meringue shell over one ear.

Josephine repeated, “Cyril says his father is still very fond of meringues.”

“Can’t hear,” said old Colonel Pinner. And he waved Josephine away with his stick, then pointed with his stick to Cyril. “Tell me what she’s trying to say,” he said.

(My God!) “Must I?” said Cyril. Blushing and staring at Aunt Josephine.

“Do, dear,” she smiled. “It will please him so much.”

The scene makes perfect use of Colonel Pinner’s gestures and of Cyril’s thoughts and feelings. Many of the spoken sentences could have been taken from life, but in their concision and in the careful use of repetition, they are far from lifelike. The whole has been crafted into a little comic masterpiece.

Perhaps Mansfield overheard a conversation about meringues. Certainly, for most fiction writers, eavesdropping is an essential vice. One day last year I arrived in class to find my students discussing how, and whether, to whiten one’s teeth. I scribbled down their conversation; this was just what I needed for one of my characters. But while eavesdropping can be very helpful—we catch a line here, a phrase there—most extended dialogue in fiction cannot, as I already remarked, be taken directly from life. It resembles more closely what we wish we’d said rather than what we actually do say. The French have an expression: la pensée d’escalier—literally “the thought on the stairs”—which means those brilliant retorts that come to us only as we descend the stairs after leaving a dinner party. Our characters are the ones who get to utter these belated thoughts.

How we write dialogue is partly a matter of convention; so too is how we read it. Both readers and writers, for instance, have come to accept that a first-person narrator can tell a story in a very different voice from that in which she or he addresses other characters. In James Joyce’s “Araby,” for example, we have a very eloquent narrator. “North Richmond Street, being blind,” he tells us, “was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground.” But when he finally speaks to the girl he’s interested in, he can only stammer out a few phrases. The narrators of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and ZZ Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” are in the same tradition: very articulate when talking to us; surly and often tongue-tied when talking to anyone else. That readers willingly accept this apparent contradiction demonstrates, I think, not only the power of convention in fiction but also the degree to which we all suffer from la pensée d’escalier. We know from intimate experience that someone who can barely string two words together can have an eloquent inner voice. Authors, knowing this, typically do not bother to explain the gap between narration and conversation; they trust the reader to understand. But there are first-person narratives in which there is almost no gap. Huck Finn addresses the reader and his fellow characters in the same rich combination of vernacular and dialect. More recently, in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha the Irish writer Roddy Doyle achieves a striking effect by having ten-year-old Paddy narrate and talk in almost the same voice:

I did my eccer in braille. It took ages, being careful not to rip the page with the needle. There were all little dots on the kitchen table when I was finished. I showed the braille to my da.

—What’s this?

—Braille. Blind people’s writing.

He closed his eyes and felt the bumps on the page.

—What does it say? he asked.

—It’s my English homework, I told him.—Fifteen lines about your favourite pet.

—Is the teacher blind?

—No. I was just doing it. I did it properly as well.

Doyle risks Paddy coming across as simplistic, even childish, by largely ignoring the convention that would allow him to talk like a ten-year-old and narrate like a thirty-five-year-old. The result is an apparently artless novel that is entirely artful.

Another requirement of the natural-seeming quality is that dialogue should not sound expository, unless overexplaining is clearly a character trait. We do not want characters saying, “Darling, now that our children despite numerous setbacks are safely at university and you’ve been promoted to deputy manager of a small suburban shop, it’s time to finally visit Ontario and see the house where Alice Munro lives.” Such speeches make us feel that the author is putting words into the mouths of the characters, using them to give essential information, rather than letting them speak for themselves. Which is not to say that a character cannot convincingly announce an obvious fact: “Mum, I’m eighteen.” “Richard, you’re always late.”

But if all dialogue does is appear natural, then its artifice is wasted. Good dialogue serves the story. It must reveal the characters in ways that the narration cannot and advance the plot while, ideally, not appearing too flagrant in either mission. And it must deepen the psychic life of the story. We should sense the tectonic plates shifting beneath the spoken words. There is text, and there is subtext. Too much dialogue without subtext can quickly become tedious.

Beyond all that dialogue can accomplish in terms of characterization and plot, its mere presence on the page creates space and energy. Readers of fiction sometimes get discouraged when faced with dense paragraph after dense paragraph. Rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was struck by what short shrift Gabriel García Márquez gives dialogue. Many of his paragraphs are longer than a page; most of his scenes are less than fifteen lines. He tells and tells and tells and such dialogue as does occur is often embedded in a paragraph. In less masterful hands this could easily overwhelm the reader, but, such is the amazing fertility of García Márquez’s imagination and the luster of his prose, that we read raptly. What will happen next to the town of Macondo and the Buendía family?

Very few novels, however, can get away with this much telling. But very few can be told entirely in scenes. When people in workshops shout, “Show don’t tell,” they are clamoring for the energy that dialogue brings, but that energy comes in part from the contrast between telling and showing. In any story with more than one scene a rhythm gradually emerges as the prose alternates between scene and narration, a rhythm that the author will often break or disrupt at the crucial moment. In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Mansfield goes back and forth between scene and narration until the last pages of the story, when, to devastating effect, she gives the crucial exposition: how the daughters’ early loss of their mother, combined with their narrow social circle, has limited their lives; how there never were any men to marry. We know, as we read the last paragraphs, that Constantia and Josephine will only ever be daughters and sisters.

The choice of when to give the exposition, the background story, is often a complicated one. (In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald kept trying to find a place to reveal Gatsby’s past, finally settling on chapter seven.) Most authors are also choosing on almost every page whether to present material dramatically, in a scene, or in narration. There are no rules for how to make these decisions—we make them story by story, chapter by chapter—but consider the following. I can write a scene in which Lucy and Tabitha are walking through the woods, trying to find a vernal pond:

“You copied my chemistry homework,” said Lucy, nonchalantly.

“No, I didn’t.” Tabitha stabbed a clump of grass with her stick. “Anyway what makes you think you’re Marie Curie?”

“I’m not interested in being Curie. All that mud. I want to be Alexander Fleming. He was Scottish and he discovered penicillin. Do you think we should whiten our teeth this summer?”

Or I can write:

Walking in the woods, searching for the vernal pond, Lucy and Tabitha bickered about whether they wished they’d discovered radium or penicillin.

Which is better depends on which story I am trying to tell. Scenes slow time down; narration speeds it up. Some writers generate their material only through writing scenes; they might need to compose two pages of the girls bickering in order to craft one elegant sentence of summary. Sometimes only in revision, as we begin to grasp the larger meaning of the work, can we decide what should be compressed into narration and what should be expanded into scene.

And, as in other areas of life, size makes a difference. One way we direct our readers’ attention is by how we use the space of the story. Showing Lucy and Tabitha arguing for two pages suggests that something more is at stake than copying homework, and that we are learning something new about the characters—why else go on at such length? Which is not to say that bigger is necessarily better. Sometimes, to paraphrase Isaac Babel, one piercing sentence can nail the reader’s heart more effectively than a scene of several pages.

So while we may go back and forth in various drafts, moving material into scene or into narration, the two are not interchangeable. Narration compresses information. Dialogue can allow us to convey information—emotional or psychological—of which neither the characters nor the narrator is fully aware. Dialogue is not only showing as opposed to telling, it is also showing what cannot be told. In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” Mansfield shows, in scene after scene, the childlike nature of the two sisters; only gradually do we learn that they are in their forties. At no point does she summarize or diagnose them. The reader comes to empathize with Constantia and Josephine in a way that no one around them does.

But if dialogue typically can be strengthened by details of setting, gestures, and various interruptions, these can also be a liability:

“Would you like some salad?” Richard asked Veronica. He had grown up with iceberg lettuce that looked as if it had never seen the sun and only as an adult discovered the many possibilities of leafy vegetables. His current favorite was rocket, bitter and peppery with a zigzaggy leaf that made you want to add your own tooth marks but if you had asked him last spring he would have ardently defended radicchio, which his mother claimed had been discovered by a gardener at the Vatican . . .

Properly handled, this kind of digression can be illuminating and pleasurable. But if done at too great length, or too frequently, it runs the risk that we will have forgotten all about Richard’s not very interesting question before Veronica answers. Or such is usually the case. In Nicholson Baker’s short novel The Mezzanine the narrator’s digressions and ruminations, as he makes his way from the lobby to the mezzanine, become the novel.

At the other extreme we have the kind of dialogue that resembles a volley at Wimbledon: a page of one- or two-line exchanges with almost no stage directions, attributions, or interruptions:

“What were you doing to the dog?” John said.

“Nothing,” said Lena.

“I saw you tug his ears.”

“There was a leaf caught in his fur.”

“What kind of leaf?”

“What do you mean ‘what kind of leaf?’

A brown leaf. A dead leaf. Who cares?”

“The vet said Alfie was in perfect health.”

“Until he dropped dead in a ditch. Is that your definition of perfect health?”

This kind of dialogue moves very quickly. George Higgins uses it to masterful effect in his classic thriller The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The risk with these volleys, however, is that readers may miss the shifts in meaning and the subtext. The pauses, the spaces between speeches, slow a scene down in a way that enables us to grasp what is happening at a deeper level, to follow the emotional swerves of the characters. In stories written in the first person or the close third, these pauses often include the narrator’s thoughts. Here are Elliot and his wife, Grace, in Robert Stone’s story “Helping”:

She came into the kitchen and sat down at the table to take off her boots. Her lean, freckled face was flushed with the cold, but her eyes looked weary. “I wish you’d put those skis down in the barn,” she told him. “You never use them.”

“I always like to think,” Elliot said, “that I’ll start the morning off skiing.”

“Well, you never do,” she said. “How long have you been home?”

“Practically just walked in,” he said. Her pointing out that he no longer skied in the morning enraged him. “I stopped at the Conway Library to get the new Oxford Classical World. Candace ordered it.”

Her look grew troubled. She had caught something in his voice. With dread and bitter satisfaction, Elliot watched his wife detect the smell of whiskey.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

Let’s get it over with, he thought. Let’s have the song and dance.

Note how Stone uses Elliot’s thoughts to let us know the chasm between what he says—“I stopped at the Conway Library”—and what he feels—“enraged.” And in the last few lines the description of Elliot’s feelings also allows Grace to detect the smell of whiskey.

This is a good moment to point out that another way in which dialogue can seem unnatural, or expository, is when a character reveals too much. I admit I am biased on this topic. I come from a culture that believes that talking about one’s feelings is bad form—my father, after nearly dying of pneumonia one Christmas, wrote to me that he had been a little under the weather—but in daily life people are often reluctant to reveal their deepest feelings for all kinds of reasons: shame, timidity, fear of not being heard, fear of being heard. In Elliot’s exchange with Grace, what husband and wife don’t say, or can’t say, or won’t say, is a powerful aspect of what is being communicated.

Part of the pleasure of George Herbert’s “The Collar” is the colloquial passion with which the narrator addresses his deity. In writing dialogue we are always choosing not just what our characters say, but how they say it. Hush. Please be quiet. Shut the hell up. Keep it down. Silence. Put a sock in it. May I kindly have your attention.

Each of these remarks conveys the same basic information but conveys it in a distinct way. Clearly the speakers and/or the situations are different—a woman might say hush to her child and shut the hell up to her husband—and the connotations vary. We’d be surprised, perhaps pleasantly, if a Denis Johnson character said, “Hush,” or if one of Alice Munro’s country widows said, “Put a sock in it.” As we start to write dialogue we establish the level of diction for each character. Is a character going to use high diction, or low, or some mixture of the two? Is an eight-year-old going to say “preposterous”? In my novel Criminals I had a private rule that no two characters could use the same swear words.

And here we often find ourselves caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of wanting to create strong, original characters and worrying about the reader’s expectations. We make our character say something interesting and insightful and suddenly the reader is insisting that a supermarket cashier in Chattanooga would never use the word “authenticate,” or that a Maine fisherman would never quote Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” The writer is trying to transcend stereotypes; the reader is clinging to them. One of the barriers to writing sparkling, inventive dialogue is that unhelpful workshop response: she/he would never say that. The workshop may well be right, but it is worth fighting for our characters’ best lines. Before settling for more pedestrian dialogue, we can try to deepen our characters. Yes, most fishermen don’t care for the Romantic poets, but this one does. His great-aunt took him on a tour of the Lake District when he was twelve.

I mentioned the rhythm created by alternating between scene and narration, but dialogue also has an internal rhythm. Many writers write scenes of almost the same length, in almost the same way, irrespective of the story, the situation, or the particular characters. Everyone makes two-line speeches or four-line speeches, or whatever that author’s favorite unit of speech may be. The same goes for the attributions, interruptions, and gestures. Everyone answers, or pauses, or folds their arms. A crucial respect in which we can improve our dialogue is by figuring out our particular pattern and seeing whether we can usefully alter, or expand, it. We would not want all characters to speak at such robust length as Philip Roth’s do in The Human Stain—many of the speeches are a dozen lines or more—but it is good to know that our characters could hold forth if the need arose. Or, alternatively, be succinct.

Another of my private rules for writing dialogue, one I stole from Ford Maddox Ford, is that characters should not always answer each other, or should answer in unexpected ways:

“Your petunias are looking grand, Mrs. Ashton,” I said, waving my umbrella toward her exuberant window boxes.

“I notice your granddaughter hasn’t stopped in this month,” she said. “Nor last either.”

Following this rule too strictly can lead to exasperatingly surreal exchanges, but in real life people often fail to respond directly to questions and comments. Having characters answer each other too precisely can become predictable and expository. Which in turn deadens a scene.

So far I have been describing dialogue in which the spoken words are reported verbatim, but an essential, and very useful, kind of dialogue is indirect speech. There are many occasions when the reader should not be subjected to every word a character utters. Julia began to explain rocket science. James launched into an account of his nephew’s performance in the school play. Indirect speech allows the writer to summarize in a powerful fashion that still suggests the spoken words. The choice between quoting and summarizing is not necessarily a binary one:

My mother never had a good word to say about nature. On the balmiest of May evenings, after a long, hard winter, when the five of us gathered on the bridge to watch my brother fish, she would remark that she had heard that buttercups emit a dangerous gas. “And lilacs,” she went on, warming to her subject, “can be fatal to people who are lactose intolerant.”

Here I’m combining indirect speech—we don’t want to hear the mother talk at length—with a brief glimpse of her conversation.

Which brings me to what I call the “mini-scene”: a moment of dialogue, or a quotation, in the middle of a narrative passage. Alice Munro and William Trevor are both masters of this. Here, for example, is Trevor in his great story “The Ballroom of Romance”:

But on Saturday nights Bridie forgot the scotch grass and the soil. In different dresses she cycled to the dance-hall, encouraged to make the journey by her father. “Doesn’t it do you good, girl,” he’d say, as though he imagined she begrudged herself the pleasure. “Why wouldn’t you enjoy yourself?” She’d cook him his tea and then he’d settle down with the wireless, or maybe a Wild West novel.

The father’s actual words—his warmth and good humor—give us a much more vivid sense of his character, and of his relationship with Bridie, than if we simply read that he encouraged her.

Manners, good and bad, play a crucial part in dialogue. An editor of one of my early novels complained that all my characters—nice British people—kept offering each other cups of tea. In daily life politeness is a virtue. We want people to ask after each other’s health, to say please and thank you, to comment on the weather. But on the page politeness can quickly become boring. Rudeness, or at the very least terseness, is sometimes essential. Let good manners be implied. Once it is established that a character is mannerly you don’t need to show that in every exchange. On the other hand, a rude character suddenly being polite, or a polite character lapsing into rudeness, can be very interesting.

Telephone manners represent a special challenge for the contemporary writer. Conversations, in life and in fiction, frequently occur on the phone, and we can (usually) see only one character:

Wilfred counted to the third ring and then picked up his phone. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice. “It’s Vanessa.”

“Vanessa. I haven’t heard from you in ages. How are you?”

“I’m all right. I had a cold last week but I’m better now. How are you?”

“I’m great. Really good. Thank you. What’s up?”

“Not a lot. I just thought I’d call. I saw Madeleine last night.”

Without a sense of subtext, this quickly grows tedious, and several such conversations, with the ritual exchanges of identity and greetings, can bring a story to a standstill. Once again, I would argue that rudeness, or implied politeness, has its place. Just as we often omit the humdrum details of our characters’ journeys, so too we can omit the preliminaries that pave the way to the substance of their conversations.

There is one last aspect of dialogue that I want to address. In my opening paragraphs I offered the traditional claim that readers respond to dialogue because it is a chance to hear the characters speak for themselves. I think this is true, but I also think that, over and above all the requirements of character and story, dialogue, in some ineffable way, is deeply rooted in the author’s narrative voice. This is one of the several reasons why it is hard to imagine transposing even a single line of dialogue from, say, Elizabeth Bowen to Graham Greene, or from Julia Alvarez to Junot Díaz.

What this relationship between narrative voice and dialogue is, and how it works, is something I have seldom seen discussed, and most of the writers with whom I have broached the topic seem unaware of the degree to which their voices inform those of their characters. Certainly most readers are oblivious to this secret connection and notice it only in the case of such extreme examples as, say, Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” Richard Brautigan’s “1/3, 1/3, 1/3,” or Grace Paley’s “Faith in a Tree.” But if you line up pages of scene and narration by half a dozen of your favorite writers I think you’ll begin to see how the two are linked. Deborah Eisenberg’s “Some Other, Better Otto” is a wonderful example of an unusually graceful connection between dialogue and narrative voice:

Who was too good for whom? It often came down to a show of force. When Corinne had called a week or so earlier about Thanksgiving, Otto, addled by alarm, said, “We’re having people ourselves, I’m afraid.”

Corinne’s silence was like a mirror, flashing his tiny, harmless lie back to him in huge magnification, all covered with sticky hairs and microbes.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Please try,” Corinne said. The phrase had the unassailable authority of a road sign appearing suddenly around the bend: FALLING ROCK. “Otto, the children are growing up.”

As with Elliot in “Helping,” the discrepancy between what Otto thinks and feels and what he actually says to his sister makes these ordinary remarks glitter with meaning and becomes part of both the plot and the theme of the story. Meanwhile the wit of the close-third person prepares us for the eloquence that Otto demonstrates in other conversations. The story as a whole reveals not just Otto’s but also Eisenberg’s unique sensibility.

Perhaps this relationship between dialogue and narrative voice is so intimate, so particular to each writer, that it cannot be examined as an element of craft. Perhaps we should take refuge in Keats’s Negative Capability—that desirable state of mind that allows a person to embrace “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”—and let the rest be silence. But for all my Scottish reticence, I think there is a little further to go. Marilynne Robinson offers some guidance in this complicated terrain. In her teaching and her conversation, Robinson often refers to the question of consciousness for characters, narrators, and authors. My intuition is that the secret connection between dialogue and narration has to do with making our work more fully conscious, and with inhabiting that consciousness at the deepest level. One of the triumphs of Hilary Mantel’s recent novel Wolf Hall is her ability to suggest, in both dialogue and narration, how people thought and spoke in the sixteenth century. The two voices work together to reveal a single consciousness.

So yes, our characters do speak for themselves, they do have lives of their own, but those lives are lived in the worlds we create, past, present, and future. Our task as fiction writers is to hone our voices, both in narration and dialogue, so that our characters speak more truly as themselves and, at the same time, speak more truly as inhabitants of those worlds.