Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you write a novel, a novel

is told from a certain point of view.

A certain voice is telling you the novel.

Without that, it's not a novel.

It's not a story.

Because stories-- they originate on street corners.

People say, man, did you hear what happened

with Joe and his prize pig?

And I want to know about Joe and his prize pig.

And so they tell me the story.

Well, who's telling me the story?

Pete is telling me this story, and I'm listening to the story.

You have to decide who's telling your story, who's

telling your novel.

And that's a narrative voice.

There's all kinds of narrative voices,

and there are all kinds of subsets of narrative voices.

There's the first-person narrative,

where there is a living human being telling you

the story that happened in her experience,

from her eyes and ears and mind.

There's the second person narrative, which is hardly

ever used in novels, often used in how-to books and poetry,

which is, somebody is saying, you walk into the door.

You pick up the hat from the floor.

You see the blood on the floor.

It makes you telling the story, but I'm telling you

that you're telling the story.

It doesn't work very well in fiction.

Then there's the third-person narrative.

That's a person who's sitting on the shoulder

of a character, who sees everything

that that character sees.

They're not that character, so they

don't have the emotional responses

that the character has.

But they see it, and they explain it.

And every once in a, while they have a little insight into what

that person is thinking.

Third-person narrative's very good because it feels

objective, which is good for it--

we're seeing things happen, and we can make our own minds about

how they feel--

but also because it's from more than one point of view.

A third-person narrative can--

I can be talking to you, and then you leave the room,

and my narrator jumps off my shoulder and jumps

onto your shoulder and follows you to another room.

So I can see it from many different points of view,

if I'm writing a novel with very many different characters who

are very different kinds of characters,

and I need to see what they're experiencing.

And then there's the universal narrator,

which can be translated to God, and God knows everything.

God knows what Joe is doing and what Joe is thinking

and what Sarah over here is doing

and thinking about him talking.

He also knows about the flies that

are buzzing around the top of one of their heads,

and also, there's a fish swimming around

in an underground lake on Mars somewhere.

This character knows everything.

It seems like a great way to write a novel,

because then you can tell them everything you want,

but it's not very convincing unless your voice is very,

very, very, very sophisticated.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I chose first-person narrative for Easy,

because it felt good to me.

It felt like, being inside Easy's life,

I was inside the life of a whole community, because he in a way

represents that community.

It worked.

And he does the main thing that a first-person narrator

has to do.

If you're going to write a first-person narrator

that someone's going to read a 300- or 400-pages book about,

that narrator has to be interesting.

You have to care about him, wonder about him,

like the way he says things, like the way he gets brave,

like the way he gets scared, like the way

he responds to other people.

He's that guy that you want to hear tell the story, not

the guy that when he starts talking,

you walk out of the room.

I felt I could do that with Easy, and so I did.

And it worked pretty well.

Now, that's very interesting because I later

wrote up a series of stories about a guy named

Socrates Fortlow.

And the whole story is-- every story

that I wrote about him was from his point of view.

But I used a third-person narrator,

because he's a very taciturn, sullen kind of guy.

And if you only wrote from his point of view,

it would be a really dark--

dull, even-- kind of writing.

But a third person brightens it up because it's more objective,

and other people play roles in it

that I could use to make it more interesting.

And I have to add that you will go out,

and you will find books that are first-person narrative,

but it's a different person for each chapter.

That's another way to do it, and that's perfectly fine.

You might read "Moby Dick," that starts out, "Call me Ishmael."

Sounds like a first-person narrative to me.

But by the end of "Moby Dick," we're in the mind of Ahab.

So he changes narration all through the writing,

and it works.

So if you tell me, well, Walter, you

told me I can only do a first-person

narrative, a third-person narrative, but look,

I could do anything?

And I say, yes, you can do anything.

But you have to be able to do it.

So I'm starting you on something a little simpler.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Dialogue in a novel is so, so important,

because it allows you some leeway.

For instance, if you have a first-person narrative,

and we're only hearing from you, we

may not understand you completely,

because you have a certain view of yourself,

but you could be wrong about some things.

But if all of a sudden, somebody comes in,

and they start talking to you or about you,

then we have another way of seeing you.

Even if you're hearing it, we're hearing that person talk,

and they're talking different, sounding different,

saying different things, not agreeing

with stuff that you're saying.

And then that can bring a question into the story.

Dialogue is also interesting because novels

are about people, or at least living beings who transform.

And so to hear people talk brings us

deeper and deeper into the human element of the novel.

Dialogue is also interesting because people

talk differently.

If you have a PhD from Harvard in English literature,

you're going to talk one kind of way.

If you dropped out of school in the second grade

and live in the underbelly of the Bowery,

you're going to have a whole different way of talking.

And that's musical, especially if you have the Harvard

guy and the underbelly girl talking

to each other in these completely different dialects.

That's symphonic.

That's kind of wonderful.

Dialogue, connected with dialect,

gives us all kinds of information

that are really, really wonderful.

And you can begin to play with it.

For instance if you have a first-person narrative, and--

let's say Easy is talking to Mouse,

and Easy says, well, I told you not to do this.

And he says, no, man, you didn't tell me not to do it.

You just said, don't do it like that.

And it becomes wordplay.

It becomes light.

It becomes funny.

There's all kinds of things that you

can do with dialogue-- and not only dialogue.

With street signs, newspaper articles,

movies playing on television.

There's all kinds of different ways

to bring information inside a narrative voice, which

may be different than the one that you

need for this particular piece of information.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So here's a small example of dialogue

as I configured it in "Devil in a Blue Dress."

"'Nice friends you got,' I said, as I studied his place.

'They're like you, Easy.

Whenever I need a little manpower, I give them a call.

There's a whole army of men who'll do specialized work

for the right price.'

'The little guy Chinese?'

Albright shrugged.

'No one knows.

He was raised in an orphanage in Jersey City.

drink?' 'Sure.'

'One of the benefits of working for yourself--

always have a bottle on the table.

Everybody else, even the presidents

of these big companies, got the booze in the bottom drawer.

But I keep it right out in plain sight.

You want to drink it?

That's fine with me.

You don't like it?

Door's right there behind you.'

While he talked, he poured two shots into glasses

that he had taken from a desk drawer."

Once you get deeply involved in writing a novel,

everything comes together.

You split it up at some point.

You say story, you say plot, you say characters,

you say character development, you say dialogue,

you say dialect.

And that's all wonderful.

But they're not separate.

They're all working together.

The only dialogue is going to come from characters.

This is a character who has a very specific view

of the world.

And this is a world that Easy Rawlins is entering.

Dewitt Albright, even though he's

an evil guy, a terrible guy--

he's the guy that Easy wants to be.

Easy wants to be working for himself.

Easy wants his bottle on the table.

And this guy explains it to him.

Easy says, is that guy Chinese?

I don't know.

He was raised in New Jersey, in an orphanage.

He's something.

The idea is, you're explaining a character while that character

is explaining his world.

So you're doing two things with the dialogue.

You're telling us all the stuff about him

and who he is and about the world that he lives in

and that he believes he lives in,

and, you'll find out later on, the kind of character

that Easy actually wants to become, just not maybe so evil.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Dialogue is the song of your characters.

It is the response to the story of your novel.

It is very often the moment of revelation in plot.

Dialogue is the firmament on which the novel stands.

And if you use it correctly, if you use it in a proper way,

you're going to understand who people are

and what they're doing by what they're saying.

And that sounds very complex.

It's not a thing that you come through immediately.

Slowly, draft after draft, dialogue

alters to become the basket to hold your story.