Disjointed phrases, convoluted transitions, all the hesitations and stutters and backflips found in a real interaction.

Split, Croatia 2016

If you transcribe a conversation, you’ll most likely discover some unusual sentences. Disjointed phrases, convoluted transitions, all the hesitations and stutters and backflips found in a real interaction. What you won’t discover, however, are sentences that resemble a character’s speech in good fiction. Quotes in a novel must resemble speech, but can’t be too close to actual speech—as a transcript of actual speech on the page looks curiously unreal.

A similar dichotomy comes with the dictum for conversational writing. Yes, good writing is conversational, and certainly closer to conversational than technical, but words on the page aren’t sounds in the air, and there’s a distinction. This leaves us with good writing, once again, resembling a conversation without quite being a faithful representation of a real conversation.

The somewhat mysterious trick is to create the appearance of reality, or a portrayal of reality, while avoiding a reproduction of reality—as that will always feel a bit insubstantial, a tad strange, almost occupying an uncanny valley of narrative. Just remember that a story which feels real is always at a slight angle to reality.

These thoughts came to me while I discussed an Alice Munro story earlier this week. A story that’s colloquial in some ways, yet still erudite and incisive and cinematic. Essentially, Munro’s paragraphs are filled with plain, humdrum sentences, but the narrative doesn’t follow the trajectory of a barroom story. The reader finds a neighborly voice telling a professor’s story, which is a rather intriguing cocktail of ingredients.

I wrote more about Munro in a previous Desk Notes, which describes her technique in more detail.

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