The Language of Fiction: A Writer’s Stylebook

Exercises

231 Exercises The best way to master a subject is not merely to read about it (easy for me to say, after I’ve just asked you to read about it for 230-plus pages), but also to practice it. So to help you put into use some of the rules and conventions we’ve examined, I’ve included the following exercises, which are organized based on the concepts we tried to master—or at least to understand—in the various chapters or groups of chapters. 1. Making Verb Tense Decisions (Chapter 1) Find a passage from a novel or story that you particularly admire, then rewrite that passage by changing its primary verb tense. You might change a work written in the past tense to the present (“It is the best of times, it is the worst of times . . .”) or one written in the present to the past (“A screaming came across the sky . . .”). What is lost by changing the fundamental verb tense? Is anything gained? How is the effect on the reader’s experience going to be different? 2. Punctuating and Presenting Dialogue (Chapters 2 and 3) A. Find a dialogue exchange in a play or screenplay and convert it into fiction using the standard double quotation mark convention. As you do this, you’ll have to make decisions about how to translate the stage directions into dialogue tags or supplements. For some clues as to how this works, it can help to look at a play that has been turned into a story by its author, such as Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles,” which Glaspell rewrote in story form as “A Jury of Her Peers.” B. Write a scene with more than two characters in which no dialogue tags are used. Try to make it clear who is speaking without resorting to forced or unnatural usage of characters’ names. Keep it going for as long as you can—it will be a challenge to get past the first page. 232 | E x e r cises 3. Representing Non-standard Speech (Chapter 4) A. One of the real difficulties of portraying accents is that most of us are only personally familiar with one or two of them. When we think about the speech of Cajuns, or nineteenth-century aristocrats, or Gloucester fishermen , we probably rely on the portraits we’ve seen in film or on television, which are prone to stereotype. Therefore, the best way to try out representations of accents is to listen to the ones you hear every day. No matter where you live, the people around you will likely have some eccentricity of speech that is particular to your area. Begin to analyze the speech of people you know in terms of its sound, grammar, syntax, volume, tone—take notes if you have to (this may confuse your friends, but we must suffer for our art). Then, write a lengthy dialogue that seeks to capture, with any of the three styles mentioned in chapter 4, how the people of your region speak. B. Choose a method of speaking that does not have to do with accent, but instead with some other condition or situation that changes a person’s voice—in chapter 4, I discussed speech impediments and drunkenness, but there are many other things that affect how we speak (age, social class, emotional state, etc.). Write a dialogue that does not overtly refer to this condition/situation, but that makes it clear one of the participants speaks in a non-standard way. Try to represent this manner of speaking without using stereotype or exaggeration. 4. Dealing with the Past Perfect Tense (Chapter 6) Begin writing a scene that uses the simple past as its primary verb tense, then transition into a flashback (the flashback part should be fairly lengthy). You should use the past perfect tense for transitioning purposes, but at some point in the flashback, abandon the past perfect and narrate the rest of it using the simple past tense. The goal is to stop using “had” and “had been” at some point, but to not do it so early in the scene that the reader will be distracted or confused. Use the example from John Casey’s Spartina as a model (p. 67). E x e r cises | 233 5. Mastering Pronouns (Chapter 7) A. In the following sentences, fill in the blank with “who” or “whom” or “whoever” or “whomever...