by Kyra Scrimgeour
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="292"]
Eric Sasson, from NYC to Lighthouse, changing lives...[/caption]
At parties, I am the sort of person that stands completely alone in the middle of the room, quietly staining my lips with red wine. Eric Sasson is the sort of person that walks up to the silent ones like me and starts a conversation about genre bending and George Saunders that lasts for forty five minutes. This was precisely how I met him. Talking with the vivacious New Yorker was exactly the sort of break from the socially draining eavesdropping I’d been doing until that point at the Lit Fest opening party that I’d needed. He walked right up to me, set down his plate of pasta, and asked me if I was a student. I am, and by the end of our conversation I’d wished it wouldn’t have been rude to use my impressive note-taking skills to document every word he spoke and every book he mentioned. Thankfully, I had the pleasure of taking his class “Why Dialogue Matters” on Monday, where taking notes on what was said was far less strange.
Eric is very clearly an avid reader, and a talented one. I heard wonderful things about the intensive he taught on George Saunders—a friend of mine described the two-day class as “amazeballs.” I was excited to see that a major part of the dialogue class was studying excerpts from some of my favorite authors, including Saunders’ “Sea Oak.”
The class was structured around eleven guidelines for writing effective dialogue. Some of them were more dangerous to break than others: using correct punctuation, avoiding distracting synonyms for the word “said”, discarding outdated slang and stereotyping without purpose. All rules that seem obvious once you’ve talked about them, but before the class I’d not once considered the tragedy one of my pieces might face in two years if I decided to throw in an “amazeballs.” And I’ll definitely spend the rest of my writing career consistently destroying everything good and wholesome about comma placement so I’m always happy to review it.
My favorite part of “Why Dialogue Matters,” though, was reading excerpts of stories by all the writers I wish I could be and discussing when and where it’s the right choice to break the rules. This is where “Sea Oak” came in, as an example of when it’s perfectly okay for all the characters to have similar speech patterns. Another of Eric’s lessons for us was that described conflict—conflict relayed through dialogue—is not as effective and experienced conflict. And yet, Alice Munro’s “Free Radicals” is told almost entirely in dialogue, even the expository parts of the plot. David Foster Wallace does the same thing in “Little Expressionless Animals.”
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="234"]
Kyra Scrimgeour, writer and Lighthouse volunteer[/caption]
We also discussed the importance of leaving things out in dialogue. In class, Eric told us that “it’s when we leave things out, when we allow the reader to connect the dots, that we create a more gratifying experience.” Raymond Carver uses extremely direct dialogue in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” but balances it with indirect dialogue, with subtext. Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is a masterpiece of subtext.
The very last rule on Eric’s list of eleven encompassed everything we talked about while doing our readings: “rules are made to be broken.” He even went so far as to tell us that “as long as it’s executed well, there are no real rules.” That, I think, is the best advice I’ve ever gotten from any sort of artist. Learn the rules so that you can break them well. I knew from our first meeting that Eric had the rules of party conversation well mastered, but his class showed that he also has the rules of imaginary conversation mastered and I was honored to have been able to have him impart his wisdom on the subject to put into practice in my own writing.
---------------------------------------
Kyra Scrimgeour is a student at UC Denver and an indispensable Lighthouse volunteer.
Anyone else have dispatches from Lit Fest? e-mail [email protected]
