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Francine ProseReading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Dialogue”
Prose notes that when it comes to creating dialogue, new writers are often given debatable pieces of advice. She herself grew up with the maxim that the speech in texts should not sound like real dialogue, because real dialogue is mundane. However, her observations of life have led her to believe that real dialogue is seldom mundane, even when talking of everyday matters. When people talk in real life, they try to impress each other, to present facts in a particular way, or to express and hide their many feelings at the same time. Real dialogue between people is thus filled with fascinating declarations and elisions and should inspire any writer.
A good bit of advice that new writers should largely follow is to not use dialogue as exposition. Middling writing often features exposition masked as conversation, such as a character telling another: “As you know, I’m an insurance investigator. I’m twenty-six years old” (61). Unlike this example, dialogue can be an extremely useful narrative tool. It can inject life in a story and tell the reader unexpected bits of information about characters and their situations. Prose analyzes the work of 20th-century English writer Henry Green as an illustrative example of the great use of dialogue. Green’s novel Loving (1945) is about the lives of household workers on an estate in Ireland during World War II. One of the prominent plot points is that pantry boy Albert is in love with the housemaid, Edith, while Edith and Raunce, the butler, are in love with each other. Prose compares scenes of dialogue between Albert and Edith with scenes between Edith and Raunce to show how differently Edith talks with the two men. Prose shares this snippet of a conversation between Albert and Edith: “‘I got a sister over at home,’ he said low. ‘What’s that?’ she asked careless. ‘I can’t hear you with the sea’” (166). Then she follows by sharing this dialogue with Raunce: “‘It’s logical dear that’s what. You see I thought to get my old mother over out of the bombers.’ ‘And quite right too,’ she answered prompt” (177). While Edith is distracted as Albert speaks, she is attentive toward Raunce.
Dialogue can thus convey reams of subtext even through what the characters do not say. Additionally, it can illuminate tensions because of race, class, gender, and politics that exist between characters. In contemporary American writer Scott Spencer’s novel A Ship Made of Paper (2003), the manner in which the character Daniel nonchalantly mentions Iris, a married woman they know, alerts Daniel’s girlfriend, Kate, to his attraction to Iris. Later, when the two couples get together for dinner, the dialogue between them manifests hidden agendas, unsaid feelings, as well as racial microaggressions (Daniel and Kate are white, while Iris and her husband, Hampton, are Black). Additionally, the dialogue foreshadows many of the later developments in the novel.
Prose notes that well-written dialogue often uncannily seems to echo not only plot points but also themes and the atmosphere of the text. Australian novelist Christina Stead’s masterpiece of family drama The Man Who Loved Children (1940) is a case in point. In the novel, the larger-than-life patriarch, Sam, and his wife, Henny, are both given to long rambling monologues. Sam uses his rants as a performance to charm his many children, while Henny’s rambles are a reflection of her dark moods. Both parents touch on inappropriate themes like murder and suicide before their children. Prose notes how the boundary-crossing dialogue foreshadows, and even causes, the catastrophic events at the end of the novel.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Details”
Prose recalls a true story that reiterated for her the particular significance of details in a narrative. A friend of hers was teaching a workshop on true-life stories, in which participants were encouraged to tell the stories of their lives. On the first day of class, a woman told the moving story of how she lost her leg to childhood cancer and ultimately went on to become a world-class skiing champion. In the next session, a former investment banker who had quit finance after making millions told the class a very graphic and aggressive account of his sex life with his wife. The teacher was stunned but nonetheless praised the former banker for his well-told story. However, many of the students found the story problematic. In the next session, the skiing champion volunteered to speak again. She confessed that the story of how she lost her leg had been a fabrication. She had actually lost her leg because of a festering cat bite, which her parents neglected. Though the story was outrageous, the class believed her since she had added details such as her father mistaking the smell from her gangrenous leg as the smell of tofu, which he hated and her mother loved. The woman then told the class the cat story was a lie. Everyone in the class accepted her stunt with humor, except for the man who had told the sex story. He was outraged by the lie and left the workshop immediately.
Prose feels the incident highlights the power of fiction, positing that the man grew so angry because his confessional account was upstaged by the woman’s lie. In turn, the woman’s fiction was powerful because of its well-placed details. Details allow a reader to suspend their disbelief and go along with the story that the writer is telling them. Even a surreal story like Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), for example, rings true because of the way Kafka populates the protagonist’s world with tiny, well-placed details. In the story, Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes transformed into a giant insect on his back in his bed. From his helpless vantage position, he describes his room, including a wall on which he has hung a magazine picture of an attractive woman dressed in fur. According to Prose:
[T]he magazine picture of the lady in furs is exactly what, we imagine, a traveling salesman might choose to brighten up his bachelor’s bedroom […] And believing in this picture, we begin to believe in Samsa and in the possibility that he could turn into a bug (217).
Chekov was known to fill his journals with minute observations of life. Some—not most—of these details would make their way into his stories. Chekov believed in observation, but more than that, he believed in using a single, well-placed, and specific detail to bring fiction to life. In his letters, Chekov notes that a detail such as it being a moonlit night is general, but one like “a little glowing starpoint flashed from the neck of a broken bottle” at night is specific and powerful. Good fiction uses details specifically and thoughtfully. Flannery O’Connor tends to use details about the extraordinary, like a character’s hideous half-purple, half-green hat, to enrich her stories. British novelist Elizabeth Bowen in The House in Paris (1935) uses details about mundane objects, such as a child’s stuffed monkey, to animate the text. Prose observes that, regardless, details are so powerful not only because they are the building blocks of a story but also because they provide clues to the subconscious and to a particular moment in history.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Gesture”
Prose defines a gesture as a small, often unconscious, physical action or word choice that reveals something important in a story. Careless writing is filled with cliché gestures, such as a character clenching their fist to signal nervousness. Another poor writing choice is to use gestures as “markers,” or relief between lines of dialogue: “‘Hello,’ she said, reaching for a cigarette.’” However, a meaningful gesture is one that is unexpected and narratively significant. In American writer ZZ Packer’s short story “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (2003), a conversation between a psychiatrist and a student makes the psychiatrist so nervous he starts fishing for a cigarette in his pockets. Before he can light the cigarette, the student initiates the following exchange: “‘You can’t smoke in here.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, and slipped the cigarette back into the packet. He smiled, widening his eyes brightly. ‘Don’t ever start’” (231). Prose suggests the series of gestures around the cigarettes reveal the power struggle between the student and the doctor. The student seems to be gaining the upper hand on the psychiatrist until the psychiatrist flips the power dynamic at the last minute. Meaningfully used, unique and specific gestures can illuminate not just individual characters, but class, gender, race, and other power dynamics. In 19th-century Russian novelist Teo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection (1900), a society woman conscious of her appearance keeps turning her head away from an unflattering beam of light. The singular gesture reveals her anxiety about aging and the pressure women feel at all times about their appearance.
The unique storytelling strength of a gesture is that it coveys meaning in isolation, unlike dialogue. Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” (1922) describes the protagonist, a bereaved father reminded of his son’s death, plucking a fly out of ink in solitude, watching the fly shrug off the ink, then immersing the fly again. He repeats the action, marveling at the fly’s resilience, till the fly finally dies. The cruel, solitary series of the protagonist’s gestures reveal his state of anger and inner turmoil better, Prose argues, than any dialogue could have. That said, Prose notes that as effective a tool as a gesture may be, sometime even great writers use it poorly. Famous 19th-century British novelist Charles Dickens, for instance, frequently uses gestures, like a recurrent twitch, as a character’s hallmark to help readers remember the character. So how does a writer learn to use a gesture well?
Prose suggests firstly examining gestures in one’s own writing. If a gesture is not illuminating or narratively necessary, it should be cut out. Secondly, observing other people is a great way to collect telling, unusual gestures, such as someone at a bus stop, reflexively fingering the fat in their midsection.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
While in the previous two chapters Prose used several 19th-century classics as examples of great writing, this section is notable for her use of contemporary literature, especially in the chapters dealing with dialogue (Chapter 7) and gesture (Chapter 8). Her choice to reference more contemporary works for these chapters, she explains, is because these chapters deal with signs—that is, both conversations and gestures signify something. To best understand signs, the reader must be able to place signs in context and be receptive to their range of cultural associations. For instance, the significance of a man meeting a strange woman without his hat may not be immediately clear to a reader unfamiliar with the norms of 18th-century England. Prose therefore chooses works featuring contemporary signs, so she can assume a basic understanding among her readers and go onto offer a more layered analysis of dialogues and gestures. Significantly, she also quotes from a work of popular fiction in this section, namely English author John Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy (1986), which she uses as an example of how to use dialogue to further plot.
In Chapter 7, Prose continues Debunking Myths About Rules of Writing by debunking writing advice about avoiding dialogue that sounds like “actual speech” (159). Because real speech involves many pauses, repetitions, and gibberish monosyllabic expressions—like umms and uhhs—certain writing teachers suggest writing dialogue that improves and refines speech. Prose, in contrast, believes that this is a poor rule. Instead, she suggests that writers utilize the pauses and circumlocutions of real dialogue to infuse rich meaning in their texts. The pauses, repetitions, and elisions of human conversations are not errors, but a complex system of revelations and occlusions. The skilled fiction writer picks up on this quality of human conversations and uses it to their benefit. In debunking this bit of advice, Prose returns to her broader mantra that getting caught up in prescriptions can often inhibit one’s writing.
Another, subtler question that guides these chapters is how to make fiction believable. Continuing to draw on Reading as a Tool to Learn Creative Writing, Prose cannily shows how too much detail, literal dialogue, and cliched gestures actually defeat their intended purpose. They weigh the narrative down and destroy the suspension of disbelief that makes a reader invest in a story while fully aware stories are fictions. Again, hyper-realism, such as using brand names, is shown to be counterintuitive to emotional realism. In contrast, through close and discerning reading of other texts in this section, Prose shows that fiction is best made believable through economy and precision of dialogue, detail, and gesture. The quote from Chekov’s journals she references in this context is illuminating:
You understand it at once when I say, ‘The man sat on the grass.’ You understand it because it is clear and makes no demands on the attention. On the other hand it is not easily understood if I write, ‘A tall, narrow-chested, middle-sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass, already trampled by pedestrians, sat silently, shyly, and timidly looked about him’ (222).
Too many, unnecessary details can make a work seem artificial, the opposite effect a writer attempting hyper-realism wants.
Prose illustrates her thesis about the importance of details in a good story with the anecdote about the former investment banker and the one-legged skier. The banker’s confessional, almost pornographic, story about his sex life is technically good and elicits a reaction from the class. It draws its power from its shock value and its simulation of the truth. That much is understandable. However, Prose puts forth another question for the reader. Why does the banker feel so angry with the skier when she reveals that her story about the cat and her neglectful parents was false? Prose argues that the banker feels the woman is mocking him, upstaging his graphic story with one of her own, but that is likely only part of the reason he was upset. The banker is also angry because he came to a workshop about telling true-life stories, and the woman held the class in rapture with a story that was not true. Note the words that Prose uses to describe the former banker’s reaction: “He rose to his feet and said they’d been had, tricked, hoodwinked—and frankly he didn’t like it. Furthermore, he said that my friend—the workshop leader—was nothing but a bad actor” (216). “Tricked,” “hoodwinked,” and “bad actor” all imply a sense of having been lied to; the banker was partially outraged that a made-up story could be made to sound so true. Prose draws on the anecdote, however, to illustrate how details make fiction believable, which is effective. The skier’s story was outrageous, but the oddness and specificness of the details made the story seem authentic.
The irony is that to make a story believable, details and dialogue need not always be realistic in the traditional sense. In another observation on the use of effective dialogue in fiction, Prose studies certain passages that make no attempt toward realistic dialogue, advancing her reliance on The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature. One of these passages is from Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, in which the adults of the novel often rant at their children via long monologues that may seem unrealistic. Prose points out that while monologues should indeed be used sparingly in writing, in the right place, they can signify a character raving to a captive audience. Perhaps, that is why, Prose notes humorously, “there are several notable literary examples of people ranting to children” (210).
The discussion on gestures (Chapter 9) offers students of writing helpful details about using non-verbal and physical language to build a story’s subtext, themes, and character. Prose’s inclusion of the gesture is unusual because it is a literary element that writing guides tend to neglect in favor of plot and dialogue. Prose argues, however, that paying attention to the gesture is important because it is also one of the most poorly used conventions:
[W]riters cover pages with familiar reactions (her heart pounded, he wrung his hands) to familiar situations. But unless what the character does is unexpected or unusual, or truly important to the narrative, the reader will assume that response without having to be told (229).
Through close reading, writers can grow alert to their own stock use of gestures and weed them out carefully. Prose offers that properly used gestures are like windows opening to let the reader see something new in a character or dynamic. The motif that powerful words, sentences, dialogue, paragraph, and gesture can reveal something new altogether in a narrative recurs throughout Reading Like a Writer, situated within the theme of The Importance of Studying the Great Works of Literature. Prose herself often uses metaphors of illumination in describing the power of good writing, expanding on Babel’s flash of lightning achieved by meaningful shifts in paragraph. For example, in her analysis of Mansfield’s “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Prose observes, “in just two words—the story dazzles us with a flash of harsh sunlight that reveals the age of the “old tabbies” (28).
