The last couple of days, we’ve thought about what it means to be boring. I think that’s important, because after all, none of us want to be boring, and sometimes a negative example is as important as the positive. (Though, after having gone to thirty years of academic and professional conferences where speaker after speaker doesn’t learn from having been bored themselves all those years before, maybe we DO need to be more overt.)
I’ve put forth the idea that one of the core ways of being boring is to speak without checking in with the listener, just pouring out stuff without concern to their interest or engagement. We can also be boring in the opposite manner, by being bland and taciturn and giving our listeners nothing to grab hold of. We see both of those flaws in writers. “It was a nice day” is boring. “It was 83° Fahrenheit at 10:34 am, roughly 74% relative humidity with southwesterly winds at 8 mph, cloud cover increasing but broken…” is boring, too, unless you’re a pilot.
The opposite of being bored is being engaged. I’m going to go back to Gurevitch’s characterization from yesterday of the components of dialogue, which requires speaking, listening, and responding. And that’s a tough requirement for the writer, because we have no idea who’s listening, can’t actively check in on their engagement and calibrate our ideas to their interest. It’s an inherently distant relationship. So what does it mean for a writer to be engaging?
I have a couple of practices that I think help, having to do with two different but concurrent dialogues. The first, and the most important, is the dialogue I’m engaged in with my characters. I’m constantly, actively listening to them, considering the ways that they’ll respond to the circumstances I’ve launched. Considering who else might come along and change things up, because of their own interests and their own habits and patterns. Considering how the two of them (and later, the three of them, or four, or six) speak and listen to and respond to one another. Whenever I want my characters to do something, I’m going to write poorly, because I’m short-circuiting their interests and their agency. It’s no longer a dialogue, it’s a sales pitch, in which I’m moving them toward my goals.
So as a reader, you’re overhearing a meaningful dialogue among (mostly) intelligent people. There’s always something fun about eavesdropping, right? But then again, a little bit of that can go a long way. Even the most interesting conversation wouldn’t hold our attention for hours if we weren’t included somehow. And that’s the role of the second of the concurrent dialogue, which is hosted by the story’s narrator.
I use that word “hosted” deliberately here, because I think that the narrator plays the same role as a good bartender or waiter or party host—to build connections. Specifically, narration in a story is a constant attentiveness to the distance between what the characters know and what the readers probably know, gradually introducing readers into a greater depth of understanding of the community they’ve entered.
I came across Ray Oldenberg’s The Great Good Place shortly after it was published in 1989, and although he never intended this purpose, the book has shaped me as a writer. His argument (he’s a sociologist by training) is that community is built by voluntary gathering, and that the first two places of our lives, home and work, have to be augmented by third places of collective engagement. He uses for his subtitle examples such as “Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts.” A book is a similar kind of a hangout—it’s a place independent of our own into which we wander, and ideally want to return to. But whether it’s a bar or a book, when we first stumble across the threshold, we know nothing. It’s the role of the narrator to welcome a reader into the world of the story, to help us make sense of the strangeness we’ve encountered and gradually to help it feel native.
Some hosts do that directly: “Come over here! There’s someone I want you to meet!” Some hosts do that indirectly, the bartender who sees a new patron listening to a bickering conversation and says (to the new client, but for all to hear) “If these guys couldn’t complain, they’d have nothin’ to talk about at all.” By so doing, he further cements his relationship of affectionate banter with the regulars, and becomes the translator and the first friend of the newcomer. The tone that our narrator uses marks the personality of the place, or what writers call the voice of the work.
So the narration of the book becomes the reader’s first friend, the guide who’ll make the rest of the tale both intelligible and welcoming. And the narrator also checks in on all the relationships between the regulars, to make sure they’re engaged as well.
Come on in. We’ll have a great time.
Herb Childress 