Don't Speak

For a brief period in my life, I got somewhat serious about playing chess.  I bought and studied books on the game, joined a local club, and even played in a few tournaments.  I never got great--it could be argued, with some justification, that I never even got good.  But I got better than I was when I started, and I enjoyed the process tremendously.  Eventually, I came to a point where I felt like I had to focus my time and energy on either chess or writing, and for me the choice was an easy one.  

While I don't study chess rigorously any longer, I still play the game recreationally, and it influences the way I see and think about the world in some respects.  For example: every move in a game of chess has a gain and a cost.  Move your knight to a new square, and you've gained an attack on enemy pieces that were previously safe.  On the other hand, you've endangered pieces or squares your knight was defending.  This may seem like a rather obvious observation, but it's a useful way of thinking about choices.  What am I going to gain, and what do I have the potential to lose?

A friend who coached me in the game--and who happens to be one of the top-ranked players in the state--told me something when I was starting out that has stuck with me as a particularly valuable lesson: "You're going to lose a thousand games before you win one that means anything."  Anybody can luck into a win if your opponent makes a blunder or simply isn't paying attention, but a win like that isn't significant.  It's a fluke.  The only way to truly get better at the game, and to win games that feel significant, is to play people better than you are and get your brains kicked in, time after time after time.  Failure is built into the process.

This has fairly obvious parallels with writing.  We tell beginning writers that they can expect to get drawers full of rejections (or rather, these days, email folders full of rejections) before they get an acceptance.  Every successful writer I've ever talked with recalls the months and years of toiling away without ever seeing their name in print.  As in chess, it's learning from failure that makes this experience essential.  If you're serious about the craft, you use rejections to figure out what works and what doesn't.  You build on your strengths, and find ways to minimize your weaknesses.  (If you're not serious about the craft, like one member of a long-ago writing group convinced she was the next Toni Morrison, you threaten to sue the editors who had the temerity to reject your divinely inspired prose, never mind that it jumps between first and third person twenty-seven times for no reason.)

If you're determined, and lucky, you'll eventually reach the stage where you're getting acceptances on a regular basis.  Once you reach that stage, how do you keep growing?  What's the writing equivalent of continuing to challenge players better than you?

You find ways to challenge yourself.

I love writing dialogue.  It's one of the most fun parts of writing crime fiction, maybe in part because most of the writers I came up idolizing (Robert B. Parker, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, etc.) were themselves masters of the craft.  I don't pretend to be on their level, but I like to think I have a certain ability to turn a memorable line or convey information through dialogue in a painless way.

(On reflection, it's interesting that there's such a strong connection between crime writing and dialogue, going all the way back to "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."  Are there science fiction or horror writers who are especially admired for the ways their characters speak?)

So last month I set myself a challenge to do something I'd never done before: write a story without dialogue.  In the attempt, I drifted into using a collective narrative voice, something else I hadn't done before.  The story is structured as a shared flashback, using description and narration, but no dialogue, to revisit a tragedy that happened to a group of people decades earlier.

The thing is, I failed.  Near the end of the story, the villain has two lines of spoken dialogue.  I wrestled with this for a couple of days, but in the end I just felt like I needed to "hear" that voice, almost as a counterpoint to the way the rest of the story is structured.  A better writer probably could have found a way to stick to the original mission, but then a better writer probably wouldn't need to set themselves such hoops to jump through.

Is the story successful?  I like it, but in this game that doesn't count for much.  We'll see what the editor thinks.  Either way, I feel like I learned something, simply by forcing myself to frame a story in a way I never had before.  It's something I'll try again, though not immediately.

Have you written stories without dialogue, or set yourself similar challenges?  What did you learn by doing so?