Michael Jaime-Becerra
THIS EXERCISE MIGHT BE DONE BY JUST ONE PERSON, BUT it can be more productive with two people trading found conversations with one another. To complete it you must go to an area where people are talking freely on their cell phones: a coffee shop, the mall, the line at the grocery store. You are looking for a conversation with a bit of substance to it—not just “Hi! How are you?” Instead, you want something where you can detect an edge of some sort, perhaps the sneaky furthering of some agenda. I happen to teach at a university, so such edgy conversations aren't hard to find. (Hint for college students: your commons area can be a gold mine!) Obviously this edge will vary, but it's nonetheless essential; the edge is the conflict, and without a sense of it the exercise will flop.
A tape recorder can be handy here, though, depending on the site, you might be able to use shorthand. (Hint: it's easier to write in a notebook in a coffee shop; it's tough to power walk through the Montebello Town Center in pursuit of your subject, scribbling on a clipboard the entire way.) Once you've found a juicy conversation, the goal becomes writing everything down verbatim, precisely as it is said to the other person on the telephone. Include all the pauses, the umms, and the likes. (While the days of the Valley Girl are long over, like still tends to be, like, common around here.) Also take note of any mannerisms that your speaker—let's call her “Subject A”—exhibits as she speaks. Does she stomp around? Does she look disinterestedly at the things in her purse? Does she seem to mimic the voice of the person speaking to her? You should try to have enough for an eventual page or maybe a page and a half of typed material.
Go home and transcribe the one-sided dialogue as you would for a scene in a story, starting a new paragraph for each new statement:
“I don't know what you want to eat.”
“No, really, I don't know.”
“Uh, if I knew I would tell you.”
With this raw material on the page, you should find that a sense of character has started to emerge, both for the speaker and for the unseen person on the other end of the line. Their personalities, their characters, will be suggested by the way the conversation goes. If after five minutes someone is yelling into her cell phone about hating sushi, odds are that sushi is the least of that person's immediate worries.
At any rate, the goal is to imagine this real-life person in a room with another imagined person, who will provide the second half of the conversation. Where you place them is up to you. What the other imagined person says is also up to you, so long as it follows the template set up by Subject A.
“I don't know what you want to eat,” he said.
“You don't?” she asked.
“Really?” “If I knew I'd tell you.”
“If you were paying attention, then I wouldn't have to tell you.”
At this point you might modify the umms and the likes if they don't seem germane to the scene taking shape (odds are that they won't).
The conversation should also begin to take on some more fictional qualities. You might add some description, maybe a flash of interiority.
“I don't know what you want to eat,” he said.
“You don't?” she asked. She twisted her napkin into a tight white ball. “Really?”
He tried to recall what she'd said but came up empty. “If I knew I'd tell you.”
“If you were paying attention, then I wouldn't have to tell you.”
Combining the real with the imagined can be a quick way to illustrate that dialogue in fiction does not have to be the same as that in real life. This can be a tough principle to accept, particularly for the enthusiastic novice. Nevertheless, to have a productive conversation on the page, the writer will have to trim away the odds and ends. I've found that comparing the original transcribed material to the finished draft of the exercise drives this point home.
It may seem ironic that I'm advocating this idea, since I'm probably the last person in southern California who doesn't own a cellular phone. But with so much information floating around out there, we might as well put some of it to productive use.