The Art of Eavesdropping

You can’t ever completely know a place unless you’ve been raised there, but you can learn to act like a native if you spend enough hours observing a culture. Only the true natives will know there is something just a little off; maybe it’s the way you call your pocketbook a purse, or say that you’re stoked about that awesome art exhibit at the Met. Those of us from the West Coast think we “know” that New Yorkers are rude and that the city is unbearably loud. In three years of living on the East Coast I’ve never met a rude New Yorker. What I have met are genuine New Yorkers who say what they think without worrying about being politically correct. It’s such a welcome change from what I knew in San Francisco I want to wear it on a tee-shirt: I heart New Yorkers.

As loud as the city can be, it can also be unexpectedly peaceful and quiet—right in the middle of the bustle. Somehow, the collective din of traffic noises seems to fade and the individual sounds sharpen in a pleasant way. I can hear my own flats padding the pavement, the sizzle of kabobs on the streetcart grills, and the hum of conversations crackling around me like a party line. Listening to how other people talk is my favorite technique for honing my ear for dialect.

I’ve found that eavesdropping is invaluable for learning to write like people speak. I think that there are writers who are perfect at crafting believable dialogue, and some who are considered the best writers ever to have tapped a keyboard that are terrible at it. Nineteenth century English author Thomas Hardy had a flawless grasp of the colloquial. While Hardy (in my opinion the greatest of the Victorian English novelists) wrote believable and consistent dialogue for all of his characters, it’s in the language of the commoner where you can hear Hardy’s poetry. You can feel his love for the uneducated character, and his respect for the dialect that defines them. Contemporary writer Elizabeth Berg can write in any voice and it transports you to the kitchen table in Texas, or the tenement in Chicago, or under a porch with two whispering eleven-year-olds. I think Berg’s talent for creating realistic dialogue was helped by the fact that she was an “army brat” and raised around people from a myriad of backgrounds. This might be unsettling for a child, but great training for the budding writer. Berg has even written convincingly in the first person as a male character! The only Elizabeth Berg novel in which the dialogue sounds forced is in Dream When You’re Feeling Blue, a book set in Chicago in the nineteen-forties. I think this is because while Berg may know Chicagoans and may even know Chicagoans who experienced the culture there in the nineteen-forties, she is too young to have spent much time really listening to the conversations going on in that era. Does this mean that a writer shouldn’t write historical fiction unless they have access to a time machine? Of course not. I think that the old adage “write what you know” is the most misunderstood writing advice of all time. Writing what you know doesn’t mean that you can never write about being a parent until you have kids, or that you have to shelve that idea about a cat who wins the Westminster Kennel Show because you’ve never owned a cat or a dog. It just means that before you try to write about a subject, learn all you can about that subject—know it, as fully as you can know something without having experienced it firsthand. The best historical novels focus on unchanging human nature, and use slang and colloquialisms sparingly, like seasoning.

No doubt I’ll get lots of disagreement here, but I’ve always thought that one of the many maddening things about the writing of Ernest Hemingway is that all of his characters sound the same—male and female. Stephen King is a master in many areas, but his Southern characters always have a Mainer rhythm to their speech. I feel qualified to say that, since I grew up in a family of Southern transplants, hearing the Southern way in which they spoke and the Southern words they used. If I know what a Mainer accent sounds like at all it’s due to King’s dialogue, so that is a testament to how well he writes the voices he really knows.

When I get a good piece of dialogue I listen and make notes on the speaker. Sometimes I make notes while I’m listening, and sometimes it has to wait until I step out of line at Starbucks or out of a bathroom stall. I write the dialogue exactly the way the speaker says it, describe the people talking and the setting in which the conversation is taking place, and then file it for future use. The bit of dialogue needn’t be long, just telling. I want to be able to infer something about the speaker from his or her words, and then I can flesh out the rest. Those words often become the seeds of character. Below is a moment of dialogue I overheard a couple of weeks ago while I sat in a patch of quiet in Bryant Park, near the corner of 42nd in Manhattan. While my husband took our girls to ride the carousel, I fed my two-month-old and listened to the conversations ebbing and flowing around me in the unusually balmy November air. Eventually my ear singled out one in particular, coming from a table just to my left.

“Hey! I thought you was gone. I ain’t seen you all day.” A man wearing a dirty beanie and a brown jacket layered over what looks like all the clothes he owns calls out to another man in a similar costume.

“I was here,” the other man says. “I was here, then I went and took a nap. Nice day.”

“Yeeah, nice. Warm.”

The season’s first ice skaters are spinning and falling and timidly slip-walking in the rink. We’re sitting between the Empire State Building, blazing blue and white for those lucky Yankees, and the Chrysler Building, which has made the transition from sleek and modern to sophisticated antique so gracefully. The man in the beanie stands and holds out one of the wrought iron chairs for his friend, the way you would hold out a dining room chair for a guest before tea is served. Soon it will be night, and the inviting chairs will be chained up and the men beside me shooed out of the park like bothersome pigeons. But right now the seat is his to offer.