To Dialogue or Not to Dialogue (or The Full Truth vs. Making It Interesting)

We’re at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend – a ragtag group of Phoenix-area authors who belong to a Meetup I organize: Phoenix Publishing & Book Promotion. Seems a good time to write about writing.

My last post touched on my recent foray back onto a college campus – and into the classroom for a writers’ workshop. My goal for the weekend was to study writing, perhaps for the first time in a formal capacity since I completed my undergrad degree in nonfiction writing a long, long time ago. The courses I focused on were related to fiction, as I’ve been struggling to complete a novel for quite a number of years. The instructor’s comment that caught me the most off-guard, however, came in a session about the newish trend of flash-memoir. Flash memoir is generally limited to 1,000 words or less and “…strives to combine the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction.”

The comment that gave me pause was the assertion that every word of a memoir must be true, including all dialogue. Memoir differs from biography in that it is limited to a particular event, period, or other contained segment of the writer’s life. This blog, while not flash, is no doubt an exercise in memoir writing – my sweet spot as a degreed nonfiction writer. However, I’ll tell you right here that although my memory is pretty good, it’s not photographic. That includes the dialogue I have included (and will continue to include). Perhaps the majority of the dialogue I’ve incorporated into this blog (maybe not the conversation with Ernesto, as reported in my previous post) has been cobbled together from memory – so it captures the gist, as opposed to the actual words spoken by the parties described in said posts.

While I understand the thinking behind the theory, I disagree with this instructor that a memoirist should include only the actual words as they were spoken, because that would essentially leave all memoir without any dialogue at all. In other words: BORING. My husband asked (almost word for word), “What – do they expect you to have carried a tape recorder around with you for your whole life, supposing one day you would write a book?”

While lyrical, highly descriptive writing that paints a vivid word picture is important and nice to read, dialogue is what brings a story to life. It’s the dramatic device through which the author conveys each character’s thoughts and feelings. To simply paraphrase – or hint at what might have been said – seems, in my opinion, to water down the entire message. And if you don’t remember the dialogue word for word enough to include it, doesn’t that make every memory suspect?

There must be some fine line between wandering off into the realm of make-believe – a la James Frey with A Million Little Pieces – and toeing a strict, “precisely as they said it or not at all” policy for dialogue in a memoir.

Would be quite interested to hear your thoughts – especially you, Kathy, as you are perhaps one of the most quoted people in these posts! Please post in the comment section below.

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NOTE: For those who are interested, here’s a really good piece by one author about using dialogue in memoir. Here are another writer’s comments. This post takes a more objective look at both sides of the argument. Just to be clear, my search term was “dialogue in memoir,” so I was not attempting to stack the deck. If you want a crash course in memoir writing, I highly recommend this post, which contains links to many teaching articles and resources.

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Laura Orsini is an author, speaker, and consultant who coaches other authors to make and market exceptional books that change the world for the better. She is birthmother to Eric, who is finishing college in Boston this summer. Their adoption has been open for the better part of Eric’s life. She continues to toy with the idea that these posts will one day become a book. In the meantime, you can learn about her novel in progress, Stan Finds Himself on the Other Side of the World.

Back to School (Temporarily) at 50

I recently attended a writers’ conference at Arizona State University. First time back on campus in many years, at least as a student. And I was most definitely a student for those couple days – commuting, parking, backpack, lunch at the student union, the whole enchilada. I was wandering around looking for a specific building, trying to appear nonchalant about it – apparently without much success, as one young man pulled his earbuds out and asked me if I was lost. Thoughtful kid to even notice, let alone take the time to help out a stranger who could easily have been his mom. “Why – do I look lost?” I asked him.

He grinned and nodded. “Yeah, kinda.” Then he proceeded to walk me in the direction of the building I was seeking. We chatted a bit on the way. His name is Ernesto and he’s from a tiny town called Rio Rico, not far from the U.S./Mexcio border. I mentioned that I’d gone to the University of Arizona, ASU’s arch-rival. He feigned upset and pretended to walk away. Then he told me he’d started at UA – makes sense, as it’s a lot closer to his hometown than ASU. But he didn’t like it. Felt it was cliquish and uninviting. A hard place to blend in and make friends. I told him that was funny to hear, as I’d thought the same thing about ASU back 30-some years ago when I was considering applying to schools.

At any rate, he’d transferred to the big city college at the start of this school year, and hasn’t looked back. The sheer size of the Phoenix area still overwhelms him, but he likes the campus, the town of Tempe where ASU is located, and the people much better. I say good for him for knowing his own mind. Reminded me a bit of Eric’s comments that so impressed me during that one dinner we shared with his family back in December:

He’s in his senior year at Northeastern University in Boston, majoring in environmental/civil engineering. At the one family dinner we shared with him, Eric explained a bit about his process for choosing Northeastern. He and his dad had gone to tour a number of schools in Boston, and Eric found himself paying particular attention to the demeanor of the students on the various campuses. Immediately he rejected a couple of schools, simply because none of the students looked even remotely happy. That’s a pretty significant level of awareness for an 18-year-old. And I couldn’t have been happier or prouder to hear him describe this thoughtfulness.

So chatting with this kid, Ernesto, of course reminded me of Eric. I rather suspect that my son would be the one to pull out his earbuds to help a lady the age of his birthmom find her way around campus. He’s charming and considerate that way. I was also just reminded of him in general, being on that campus again. While I never attended ASU as an undergrad, I did take part in a summer program for smart kids back in high school – that’s where I met my amazing friend Jane. There’s a reason they segment school into various age groupings. We might have been in a gifted program, but we were still a bunch of high school kids, running amok on a college campus. So you might not be surprised to hear that one of the things that delighted us that first summer was going up to the roof of the Modern Languages building and making a game of trying to peg the people below with Skittles. I never liked the taste of those candies – but I still chuckle at times when they come up in conversation.

I did grow up and move on to become a real undergrad. I look back now and wish I’d taken a lot more advantage of the speakers and concerts and general-interest programs that were offered on the campus. The good news is that our new house is pretty close to ASU, so we still have the opportunity to do those things. Although, the attitude and demeanor of college campuses across the country seems to have changed so much since I was in school.

When I was at the UA, mall preachers would hold signs and shout at anyone who’d listen. Now, they are confined to a tiny corner – and I suspect their speech is closely monitored. I had several teachers I despised for various reasons (mostly opinions with which I disagreed) – today on certain campuses, I could file a grievance that might actually affect their pay and status and even tenure prospects. A-list comedians are opting out of stops on college campuses because the PC Thought Police are wringing every last ounce of fun out of comedy. Thoughtful commentators are being labeled as extremists, as the actual extremists – uninformed students – shout them off the stage. The campus protests of the ’60s were before my time, but I suspect from the videos I’ve seen and what I’ve read that people were at least allowed to air their perspectives – even if it was through a megaphone or while bike-locked to a chain-link fence.

So things are different now.

And I really have become my father. I was making my way to the student union for lunch, when I suddenly heard the rumblings of something that sounded like a cat being murdered. Turns out, whoever determines the tunes that get played in the breezeway in front of the student union has what my professional guitarist husband would call comically juvenile musical taste. It was thumping, bumping, ear-splitting EDM (electronic dance music) – and no one even seemed to notice. The 19- and 20-year-olds carried on their conversations, shouting to be heard, but without flinching or batting an eye.

I also noticed something I’d never seen before that made me feel old: skateboard lock racks.

Then I headed to the library. Some things have stayed somewhat the same. Though many technology options abound that didn’t exist when I was in school, it’s still a quiet place where studious kids seem to congregate. One cool thing was the school’s prominent encouragement toward sustainability and recycling all across campus, including a large sign painted above the photocopier in the library lobby. (I do, however, take exception to the encouragement to print anywhere.)

The kiddo is getting ready to finish up his college career this summer and make his way out into the wide, wide world. I imagine that one day, as he looks back to his university days when his 7-year-old cousin Parker is a college senior, things will have changed even more. As well they should – it’s the only constant in life.

The Challenge of Naming a Baby

I was recently visiting with my friend Sunil, whom I’ve previously mentioned as my relationship guru. He’s a brilliant, thoughtful, calm, soulful person who has been a mentor and teacher to me in many realms, relationships chief among them. I suspect that if I’d known him back when I was dating Tony, my son’s birthfather, I might have been guided to leave sooner. But, as my husband and I were discussing this morning, it was all the steps and missteps of our pasts that led us to where we are today.

Everyone who knows Sunil was shocked to hear that he’d suffered a severe stroke back in November. He’s coming around, but still has a long road ahead of him toward a significant recovery. The good news is that his mind is still sharp, and we were able to have a nice chat. We spent a lot of time catching up, as it had been some years since we’d last connected.

Sunil asked about Eric, and I was proud to give him an update. Then, rather out of nowhere, he asked me if I had chosen Eric’s name. The short answer is no.

Although we’ve had a nearly picture-perfect adoption experience, there were some challenges. The first major one surrounded the name of this as yet unborn little boy. I was open to hearing the name Kathy and Bruce wanted to use, until they said Eric. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I had a visceral negative response to the name. For one thing, I’d gone to school with a guy named Eric who was tall, blond, and one of the biggest goofballs I’d ever met. He got drunk at a Halloween party where he was dressed like Zoro – and the whole Zoro thing followed him through the rest of his school days. I just looked him up on Facebook and he’s become an immigration attorney – seems like a pretty solid guy. But back in high school, he was just odd. I didn’t want to think of my kid in relation to this eccentric guy every time I heard the name.

The other part was the sense that the name Eric belonged to a blond-haired, blue-eyed person. I have dark hair and a medium to olive complexion. Though Tony was platinum blond as a kid and my father had blue eyes, it never occurred to me that our son would inherit all the recessive genes. Our kid did, in fact, turn out to be tall, blond, and blue-eyed. The name his parents had chosen for him was a perfect fit – even though I was resistant to it for quite some time.

I counteroffered with the name Thomas. The only problem was that Kathy’s brother is Thomas and, as our social worker Mary explained it, Bruce wasn’t too excited about their kid having his brother-in-law’s name. If their son was going to have a family name, it should be his father’s – but no one really wanted to name the new baby Bruce, so we had to come up with another option.

Perhaps the strangest part in the whole naming process was the fact that Tony wanted no part of it. When I asked for his input, his answer was, “He’s their kid – let them name him whatever they want to.”

I remember Mary trying to reassure me that it was a good thing that Kathy and Bruce were still so sold on Eric as the name for this kid. Apparently, had either of their first babies been a boy, they’d have named that child Eric. As Mary saw it, the fact that they still wanted to use that name was proof that they were already embracing this adopted child as their own. I wasn’t buying any of it.

My next choice – and the name I actually put on the birth certificate – was Christian. And I referred to my son and thought of him as Christian for probably the first 5 or 6 years of his life. Kathy and Bruce didn’t really care for that name at all. They asked their daughter, Jill, her opinion about the name she liked for her baby-brother-to-be; her answer was Christopher. Close to Christian, and still a no-go for the Stanfields. A couple years later, I ran the name Christian through a website that purported to analyze the vibration of the sound of any name. Christian, allegedly, has a very weak vibration, while Eric is strong and commanding. Hmmm…

As it turns out, Kathy and Bruce met me part way, and included Christian as his second middle name. So our son has the WASPiest sounding name on the planet: Eric Thomas Christian Stanfield. It did not escape me (nor, presumably, him) that the first three initials comprise etc.

Corina and Jane honored my decision to call my son by the name I’d given him. I think my parents were just a bit confused about what his actual name was – but they tried. Somewhere along the way, however, it occurred to me that Eric was the only name our son had ever known, so for me to insist on calling him something else was not honoring who he was. So on a dime, I shifted. Cori, Jane, and my parents followed suit.

I don’t know if there’s anything to that name vibration thing, but I’m sure that in the long run, Eric suits him much better than Thomas or Christian would have.

The Stuff of Life

My husband and I moved into our new home a little over a month ago. Because the floors weren’t finished when we moved in, we’ve had to take our time unpacking – making it more of a room-to-room effort than a whole-house project. It’s interesting to look at the things we’ve acquired and moved, apartment to apartment and house to house. We have items from our childhoods, both our parents, John’s grandparents, my sister and her first and second husbands – along with the things we have personally added to our now rather sizable collection of stuff.

I was reminded a few months ago how personal a collection of stuff really is. I was on my way home from a book festival, my SUV full of all of my “important” book festival supplies: tables, chairs, table cloths, stands, wood crates, books, bookmarks, lights, pens, etc. Stopped at a traffic light, I noticed a man next to me who was hauling his own cart full of stuff – as homeless people in the Phoenix area (and probably other places) are sometimes inclined to do. It occurred to me as I watched him attempt to maneuver his over-full shopping cart that although I might think the things in that cart are just a pile of junk, to that man, they may be the world. Who’s to say what has value to someone? Chances are he might have found my books – the most personally valuable of the possessions I was hauling that day – unimportant, perhaps worthless.

We found out recently that Eric is going to be an uncle. His sister Jill and her husband are expecting a little one in August. Now that they are just about full-time empty nesters (Eric will graduate from college in May), Kathy has alluded to the fact that she and Bruce might be thinking about downsizing and moving closer to their daughter and new grandbaby. She told me that when they first began talking about this eventual possibility a handful of years ago, she was worried that Eric would resist the idea because the home where they live now is the only house he’s ever lived in. He was fine with the plan; it was Jill who was a bit upset. “You can’t sell the house where we grew up!”

But it’s what we do: we move through the cycles of life – and often that includes physically moving house, as the Brits say.

The thing is that with downsizing comes the sorting of a lifetime’s worth of things. Much of my stuff stayed in my folks’ garage until we finally moved my mom into a nursing home and sold her house – then those inevitable decisions could no longer be postponed. Presumably some of the things that would need to be sorted at Kathy and Bruce’s house are Eric’s, and he will have to make those same decisions about what to keep and what to sell or give away. Little League trophies, books, photos, sports equipment. It all mattered once upon a time, but does it still?

When I moved back to Phoenix from New Jersey, I brought only what I could transport in my Volkswagen Passat and the car carrier on top of it – namely, my dog Moondanz, my cat Gracie, my Mac, a couple of boxes of photos, and my clothes. The rest of it went into storage. I was temping and money was tight when I first arrived, so I within a few months, I didn’t pay my storage bill. All those things that had been too precious to get rid of at the time of the move were impounded – and gone. The vintage chalkboard Eric’s birthfather had bought for me at the indoor swapmeet down along the 1/9 (now a multiplex movie theatre). The very cool totem pole I’d bought during the six weeks I temped in Washington, D.C. for a white collar defense attorney with a Napoleon complex. Boxes and boxes of books (remember how valuable I mentioned they were to me?) and scads of craft supplies and completed crafts. All of it likely won in an auction by someone who might have gone on to star in the A&E series, “Storage Wars.”

At the end of the day, most of it is really just stuff. You often hear the question, If there were a fire or flood and you could save only one or two items, what would they be? After my husband and our pets, the only really important thing to me is my laptop (more specifically, the contents of said laptop) – but having paid a lot of money to restore it following a recent crash, I’m getting much better about automatically backing up all of my files, so even the things on the laptop are already recoverable.

Life itself is what’s precious. The things we collect while we live it just make it a bit more comfortable in the process.

What Were You Reading/Watching/Listening to on 24 February 1995?

Turns out that, historically, nothing much of interest was happening on February 24, 1995. The date changed my world – and that of Kathy, Bruce, Jill, and many other people whose lives Eric has brightened – but it was a fairly ho-hum day, otherwise.

According to the website TakeMeBack.to, here’s a brief snapshot of that day in history:

It was a Friday.
Bill Clinton was President of the United States.
“Famous” people born that day include Brittany Raymond and Rachel Levin. (I do not know who either of them is. I googled both, and I still do not know who they are or understand why they are labeled “famous” by TakeMeBack.to.)
NY Times front page headlines that day: “CARTER RECEIVED COOLY IN HAITI,” “BALANCED BUDGET NEARS 67 VOTES NEEDED IN SENATE,” “Giuliani Seeks To Sell 3 Hospitals And Shrink Public Health System,” “Clinton, in Talk to Canadians, Opposes Quebec Separation,” “Announcing for President: Old News, but Still News,” “Dow Finally Breaks the 4,000 Barrier,” “Ex-Florio Aide Pleads Guilty in Kickback Scheme,” “The Hidden Question: Beyond the Northern Ireland Framework, What Do People in Ulster Want?” (Ah … the good old days.)
Popular movies showing at the time: Shallow Grave (not a horror fan, so missed this one); Billy Madison (not much of an Adam Sandler fan, so I probably didn’t see this one, either); The Quick and the Dead (caught it on cable many years later); In the Mouth of Madness (more horror, so no); Before Sunrise (the first and best in the trilogy – I loved this movie!)
Most popular TV show: ER. (According to tvaholics.blogspot.com, the U.S. received only four broadcast networks up until December 1994. Then, in January 1995, WB and UPN debuted with limited schedules, so Eric was literally born at the start of the expansion of TV beyond the three to four channels all of knew till that point. I didn’t realize how recent a phenomenon cable was until uncovering that nugget in my research for this post.)
#1 song on the U.S. pop music chart: Madonna’s “Take a Bow” (I don’t believe I have ever heard this song.)
Top magazines: Entertainment Weekly announced its 5^th anniversary collectors’ issue; Fidel Castro was on the cover of Time; Czech model Daniela Pestova graced the cover of the 1995 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue
Top books: Sisters, by Sharon J. Wohlmuth; Accident, by Danielle Steel; Eyes of a Child, by Richard North Patterson; The Death of Common Sense, by Philip K. Howard (I’ve never read any of them.)

Seriously, not a thrilling day. Kind of like when Tony and I saw a taping of the David Letterman Show (right after he made the move from NBC to CBS) and the guests were Mike Lupica and Adam Sandler. Really? No Rod Stewart, who’d appeared the day before, or Johnny Cash, who was on the following week?

A couple of events that occurred during my pregnancy do stand out, though. The first was the infamous OJ Simpson car chase. I had just found out I was pregnant and was holed up in my apartment, hiding from the world. I remember the room being very dark as I watched – inexplicably hypnotized – while the news covered this non-chase “chase.” I was talking to my husband just last night about how I believe that the OJ trial was the beginning of our descent into news as entertainment – and the lowering of the bar for journalists as truth tellers in lieu of them behaving as performers.

Another thing that happened, more personal to Tony and me because we were both big baseball fans, was that the unheard of occurred: the World Series was cancelled that year because of a protracted strike by the players. The strike began in August 1994 and went through to Opening Day of the 1995 season, making it the longest work stoppage in MLB history. We stayed fans – but many people did not. It was thanks only to the 1998 homerun record chase between known steroid users Mark Maguire and Sammy Sosa that baseball ever came back – and even today, it’s considered boring by people who are unaccustomed to a game at any slower a pace than the crazy cuts of a contemporary action movie.

Kathy asked me when I was pregnant with Eric if there was anything, specific, I wanted them to be sure to do with him or teach him. I told her that I wanted her to make sure he noticed the moon. It’s hard to put into words my lifelong fascination with the moon. When I was a little girl, my dad used to refer to the super-waxing or waning moon, when it appears as just a sliver, as the fingernail moon, as in the part you clip off when you trim your nails. I still think of that when I see a tiny crescent moon. And across the years, I would occasionally look up at the moon, wondering – perhaps hoping – whether Eric might be seeing the same exact moon from his corner of the world. We’ve never discussed it – but it would be interesting to ask him whether that was ever a thing for him.

The other thing I mentioned in answer to her question was that it would mean a lot to us if Eric played baseball. Not that we wanted them to force him into it, but that he just be given the opportunity to try it out. I remember being perplexed by Kathy’s response: “We’ll be sure he plays Little League Soccer.” Um … two different sports not remotely similar.

As it turns out, he did play baseball AND soccer – and wasn’t really a fan of either. His sports turned out to be hockey, cross country, and golf. Guess not everything is inherited, eh?

It was kind of interesting to go back and look at the events of the day for February 24, 1995. Might even be interested to try it for my own birthdate. I’m willing to bet things were even more sedate in May 1967.

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