Writing Right with Dmitri: Talking the (Local) Talk
Created | Updated Feb 19, 2012
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: Telling the Telling Detail
Last week, if anybody was listening1, I was nattering on about being a Ferguson – a tour guide with local knowledge. Some of our h2g2ers are now, or have been, professional Fergusons, and know what it takes: savvy, patience, and the ability to spin a good yarn. Since we're talking about local interest all month, I thought I'd throw in another aspect of Fergusoning that's relevant to the Writer-Ferguson: imparting fun background details.
Visitors love to come back from their holidays with a bit of inside knowledge they can share, like that cool story Mala knows about the ghost in the National Trust property, or a fancy bit about the history of distilling the traveller can whip out when he's sharing a glass of whiskey with his guests.
'How in the world do you know that?'
'Oh,' modestly, 'just something I picked up on the Bushmills tour.'
If you don't think that sounds cool, you probably live in the UK or Ireland. Say something like that in North Carolina, and people will be way impressed with your globe-trotting.
Another way to impart cool inside knowledge in your fiction writing is to put it in the mouths of your characters. Not like this:
It was always the custom among the Northmen, that young princes should thus be put under the care of some trusty vassal, instead of being brought up at home, and one reason why the Centevilles had been chosen by Duke William was, that both Sir Eric and his mother spoke only the old Norwegian tongue, which he wished young Richard to understand well, whereas, in other parts of the Duchy, the Normans had forgotten their own tongue, and had taken up what was then called the Languéd'ouì, a language between German and Latin, which was the beginning of French.
On this day, Duke William himself was expected at Bayeux, to pay a visit to his son before setting out on a journey to settle the disputes between the Counts of Flanders and Montreuil, and this was the reason of Fru Astrida's great preparations. No sooner had she seen the haunch placed upon a spit, which a little boy was to turn before the fire, than she turned to dress something else, namely, the young Prince Richard himself, whom she led off to one of the upper rooms, and there he had full time to talk, while she, great lady though she was, herself combed smooth his long flowing curls, and fastened his short scarlet cloth tunic, which just reached to his knee, leaving his neck, arms, and legs bare. He begged hard to be allowed to wear a short, beautifully ornamented dagger at his belt, but this Fru Astrida would not allow. – Charlotte Yonge, The Little Duke.
Er...now what were we talking about? That bit about 'a language between German and Latin, which was the beginning of French', is particularly informative and satisfying.
It is also important to avoid doing stuff like this:
Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future
events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the
unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now,
for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on
that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret
testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The
incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us
punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand
the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space? – Criswell's opening lines in Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Ed Wood was the undisputed master. Don't try this at home. Stick to pithy lines like this:
Dr. Ed Wainwright: You can't drop an atom bomb on Chicago!
(The movie is called The Beginning of the End, and giant grasshoppers devour the Wrigley Building. Er, no, they don't. Small grasshoppers clamber around on a postcard of the Wrigley Building. Since I have a phobia about cicadas, I found this frightening.)
So how do we sneak in the local-interest facts without causing the audience to stop reading and turn on the Discovery Channel? How about letting the character learn something? That gets the reader invested in the process:
"He's a logy. Give him room accordin' to his strength," cried Dan. "I'll help ye."
"No, you won't," Harvey snapped, as he hung on to the line. "It's my first fish. Is – is it a whale?"
"Halibut, mebbe." Dan peered down into the water alongside, and flourished the big "muckle," ready for all chances. Something white and oval flickered and fluttered through the green. "I'll lay my wage an' share he's over a hundred. Are you so everlastin' anxious to land him alone?"
Harvey's knuckles were raw and bleeding where they had been banged against the gunwale; his face was purple-blue between excitement and exertion; he dripped with sweat, and was half-blinded from staring at the circling sunlit ripples about the swiftly moving line. The boys were tired long ere the halibut, who took charge of them and the dory for the next twenty minutes. But the big flat fish was gaffed and hauled in at last.
"Beginner's luck," said Dan, wiping his forehead. "He's all of a hundred."
Harvey looked at the huge gray-and-mottled creature with unspeakable pride. He had seen halibut many times on marble slabs ashore, but it had never occurred to him to ask how they came inland. Now he knew; and every inch of his body ached with fatigue. – Rudyard Kipling, Captains Courageous.
See? You got all excited about it, and you could almost smell that halibut. This sort of trick is worth pages of exposition, especially when you're in an unfamiliar place. Like, say, a fishing boat. Besides, you not only get the idea of how to do it in your head, but you're so busy pulling for the character to succeed that you completely forget to ask yourself, 'Is this on the test?'
Go ahead and sneak those factoids in. Is the mountain the tallest on the continent? Get a character to climb it (or fall off). Do the people in this town always use a certain slang? Work it into the dialogue. Are the wimples of the local nuns especially picturesque? Have fun describing one getting stuck in a revolving door.
Till next time, I'm off to investigate the internet (which, as you know, was invented by Al Gore sometime in the 1990s... My dad's school used to play football against his school, Sparta vs Carthage (Tennessee). Now, aren't you glad you know that?)
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