⚡Day 6. Something to talk about.
Conversation as story.
Stories happen when people interact. This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us turn real people into lively, complicated, compelling characters on the page. Yesterday focused on character sketches.
Today, we’re focusing on conversation, listening to what people say (and, sometimes, don’t say) and what we hear (and, sometimes, don’t hear), as in “The Thirty-Eighth Parallel” by Robert Yune and and “Address” by Sharla Yates.
PROMPT #6
Tell a story through conversation.
Start with a line of dialogue. You might try jumping in mid-conversation, rather than at the very beginning.
Who’s talking, and what do your readers need to know about this person or people to make sense of this conversation? How do these people and their circumstances or problems come to life through what they say? What parts of the conversation do you have to represent in dialogue, and what parts can you summarize or fast-forward through?
Write for 15-20 minutes.
Share: As much of the beginning of your story as it takes to get through four lines of dialogue.
For almost two decades, I was an investigator working for a public defenders firm that appealed Death Row cases in Oklahoma. I was tired. So one day I asked a young man on Death Row whose case we had managed to "win," meaning we got him Life Without Parole when he never killed anyone, he was just a stupid kid who held up a convenience store with his smarter friend (more money, better attorneys, no Death conviction) who shot the clerk while our client was in the backroom waving his gun at a witness, someone he went to high school with and since our client wasn't wearing a mask because it was all so last-minute, at least for him anyway, ID'ed our client who, when he heard the gunshot, ran out of the store. So I asked this young man with a borderline IQ, whose elementary school teacher said he worked so hard he managed to achieve above what he was actually capable of, in her opinion anyway, I asked was it worth it, to him, to end up with a new sentence where he would never in his lifetime leave prison.
And he said, "Yes."
“Kathy would say, ‘I bet I can eat this faster than you can and every time Janie would fall for it. She’d unwrap that Hershey bar and eat it as fast as she could.’”
Mom always stops here to laugh. I always feel dumb. Duped. No matter how old I am or the circumstances of the telling.
“Then, once Janie had nothing left, Kathy would slowly unwrap her Hershey bar and take small bites, chewing them so deliberately.” Mom imitates my sister delicately peeling the silver foil wrapper from the chocolate bar, taking little nibbles.
I picture myself: chocolate smeared mouth and fingers.
“And then Janie who had nothing left would just cry and cry.”
Tear-stained sticky face.
My sister was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes when she was six, so in this story because Kath is freely eating Hershey bars, not shoving them into her mouth to boost her blood sugar, we are probably five and three. I’m not sure I understand how Mom hears this story. She tells it most often with a drink in hand, a few neighbors or her husband’s family in the room—people who did not know me or my sister as children growing up in another state. She also tells it to my children, who are not especially fond of their Aunt Kathleen.
By the time my oldest son is a teenager and has heard this story too many times, he says, “And still Mom gave Aunt Kathleen one of her kidneys.”