3.3 Talk with your message
Question…
How do you dialogue with nonfiction?
You don’t have characters to talk with, so what do you do?
That’s easy. You personify an element of your work and get it talking.
Here’s an example of the kind of dialogues I have with myself when what I’m writing about is dark and challenging…
Passage: Oy, I’m tired of this. We’re on our fifth draft and it’s not working. And you want to know why?
Rich: Yeh, sure, maybe, I think I do, but I’m not going to like hearing this am I?
Passage: Of course you’ll like it because I’m about to give you the answer you need.
Rich: Okay then, go for it.
Passage: You’re doing that thing you do. You’re holding yourself in check. Here you are writing about the death of hope and it’s freaky and scary and you want to protect your readers. You want to make it easy for them to deal with the death of hope.
Rich: OMG, you’re right I am doing that again. This is so frustrating.
Passage: Remember those books about fiction writing you’ve read? They say you can’t go easy on your hero. You have to be a sadist, you have to make him hurt. As you take him through the middle of the story, the second act, you have to make things worse and then worse and then worse still.
Rich: But I can’t do that to my readers. I can’t be sadistic toward them.
Passage: Wait, let me make myself clear, because I’m not saying that you should hurt your readers. Not at all. But your readers are going to have to hurt.
Rich: Well, I guess I know that’s true. I certainly hurt a lot, really a lot, when I took myself down to the bottom of the human operating system.
Passage: And you found blessings there. And now because of that personal work you’re on a mission to upgrade love, and you love this mission. And I know you, and I know you wouldn’t trade this for the world.
Rich: No, I wouldn’t.
Passage: So don’t cheat your readers.
Rich: Cheat them?!
Passage: If you don’t take them down to the bottom of the human psyche and the human OS, you can’t give them the blessings you found and that you want to give them. Of course they’re going to hurt, but you are not hurting them. Reality is hurting them.
You’re helping them take care of themselves in the midst of their hurting. And this is what you keep forgetting.
Rich: You’re right. I wish upgrading love was so much easier than it is.
Passage: I get that, but what matters most to you?
Rich: Nurturance.
Passage: So don’t withhold that from your readers. You have to tell the truth as you know it. And then help them deal with that truth.
Rich: Okay, so I’m going to go back to the beginning and rework you.
Passage: Thank you. Sticking with your truth is how you attract your readers. If you hedge on your truth, you get somebody else’s readers.
Rich: I really want my readers. I really do. Thank you!
Passage: And thank you for listening to me. I’m going to feel a lot better tonight when you’ve finished the rewrite.
Here’s another example where I’m stuck and need to get back in motion…
Story: I can feel you thinking about me.
Rich: Yes, true.
Story: But I don’t like what you’re thinking.
Rich: You’re reading my mind?
Story: I live in your mind, so of course I’m reading it.
Rich: Okay, tell me.
Story: You’re thinking about how to get rid of me.
Rich: Sorry, but yes.
Story: So talk to me and tell me the whole range of what you’re thinking and feeling.
Rich: I know it will make this chapter a hundred times better if I include you. But it’ll be so much easier to write if I don’t. So, there, that’s the conflict.
Story: Come on, that’s hardly all of it.
Rich: Okay, truth is, I don’t like how you end. You tell about the time, the only time I had an open conflict with my Grandmother Snowdon. And you make her look really bad and you end abruptly and that feels cold. I listen to you tell yourself and it feels like hit and run.
Story: Here’s the deal, there’s more to me than what you’ve gotten to so far.
Rich: There is?
Story: You bet. The most important part is missing.
Rich: Which is?
Story: Walk me through your relationship with me.
Rich: You were the only time I said something deeply true to my grandmother, and it was only a sentence, and it shocked her, and we never spoke about you again. We both buried you.
Story: I’m hearing that your version of me is unfinished.
Rich: Really?
Story: Come on, finish me.
Rich: But that’s all there was to it.
Story: No, you’ve kept me in your heart all these years. What’s that about?
Rich: I wanted things to be different between me and my grandmother.
Story: So maybe there’s a story about the story.
Rich: Oh, like my relationship to that very short but momentous conversation with my grandmother?
Story: Yes, and how it’s developed over the years, and how you wish you could have finished it.
Rich: Oh you think my wish is part of you?
Story: Yes, I claim it. I didn’t end when you stopped talking to your grandmother in that particular incident. You’ve gone on thinking about that moment and feeling it and wrestling with it for years.
Rich: Yes, I have.
Story: So what have you come to? Where are you at now?
Rich: I want to add an epilogue, which is my wish.
Story: And it is?
Rich: I wish my grandmother and I could have found a way to make a real connection, and sweet and loving. I wish we could have been allies against the oppression of our bleak Calvinist Church. I wish we could have been vulnerable together.
Story: And I feel like that’s not a separate story. I want to claim it as part of me. Is that okay?
Rich: Better than okay, I want you to claim it. I want that moment and what I’ve done with the memory of it to be one story. Those two parts belong together.
Story: Thank you.
Rich: You’ve very welcome, and thank you for pushing me to go deeper. Was that hard for you?
Story: No, I really wanted to do it. It was even kind of fun. I wasn’t about to suffer in silence. That’s what would have been hard.
Rich: Now that we’ve gotten here, I feel like celebrating.
So you can understand the value of dialoguing, here’s the story I was talking with. This is from my Asking book…
One Sunday afternoon when I was in eleventh grade and my grandmother was at our house for dinner, she took me up the half flight of stairs to the living room where we didn’t hang out except when company came. She had never taken me aside like this before. She sat me down on the grey couch, her face set, and without any warm-up, said, “Your friend John is going to hell and if you don’t stop being friends with him you’ll go to hell, too.”
John was indeed a friend, a good friend. Without thinking, I answered her back, “If God is sending John to hell, then he can send me there, too.”
(This where the story ended originally. But later I added…)
And just for a breath, in that lightning strike of truth, my soul was blazing. Then it went dark again. Neither my grandmother or I ever said a word to each other about this exchange through the rest of her life. I guess I couldn’t tolerate what I had seen, so I went back to being perfectly polite with her.
Why was my grandmother so dead set against John? I have no idea. He was a good and faithful Presbyterian. The only thing I can guess is that he was livelier than me and loved people a bit too much for her taste. Maybe that’s what triggered her alarm system, that his spirit of delight might rub off on me and then my family might not be enough for me anymore and I might leave them behind.
My grandmother shouldn’t have called the question of loyalty. I imagine it froze her marrow to hear me renounce eternal salvation and choose friendship over God.
I wish I could get a signed pass to go up and visit her for an afternoon in her severe heaven, a place which would certainly not be my idea of bliss. I’d sit across from her and say, “Grandmother, thank you for calling that question back then. I was such a lost kid, lost in pretense, but for that one moment of revelation, the two of us got to see down into my soul.
“It could have been a turning point for us if only we could have seized it. We couldn’t and didn’t, but I want you to know that here in my old age, I’ve become the person we saw that night and I’m at peace. And I wish I had known what challenge to give you so you could have opened into a revelation of your own, and then, talk about a miracle, maybe we could have found each other.”
Once you get into playing with passages, themes, paragraphs, chapters, images in your nonfiction writing, I’ll bet you’ll come up with lots of ways to start your dialogues, then take them deeper, and then deeper still.
