Original subtitles

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Bartleby, quick, I am waiting.

I heard a slow scrape of his chair legs

on the uncarpeted floor.

And soon he appeared standing at the entrance of his hermitage.

What is wanted, said he mildly.

The copies, the copies, said I hurriedly.

We're going to examine them there.

And I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate.

I would prefer not to, he said, and gently disappeared

behind the screen.

For a few moments, I was turned into a pillar of salt,

standing at the head of my seated column of cloaks.

standing at the head of my seated column of cloaks.

Recovering myself, I advanced towards the screen

and demanded the reason for such extraordinary conduct.

Why do you refuse?

I would prefer not to.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What is something unusual about them?

What is something unusual about them?

When Joyce introduces Leopold Bloom in "Ulysses,"

he starts with the sentence, "Mr. Leopold Bloom

age with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls."

The fact that he likes offal, that he likes tripe,

that he likes et cetera, all that,

you kind of almost immediately have a sense of him

because of what he eats, which is not usual,

because of what he eats, which is not usual,

certainly not to me.

I mean, I'm not a big fan of the inner organs

of beasts and fowls.

But I love it that he is.

You need to come up with some aspect of your character

that is idiosyncratic, that not everybody would share,

that is special to that character.

And start there.

Then you can broaden it into all sorts of things.

If there's a character with green hair, tell us that first.

I think in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits,"

I think in Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits,"

there's a character with green hair.

And she puts it right up front.

You're immediately intrigued.

When you begin a book, and the reader can sit there and think,

well the books that think, you want to intrigue them

so that they want the journey.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The decision between the first and third person

is really the question about whether you

is really the question about whether you

want to have your reader see your character from the outside

and only gradually penetrate to the deeper

layers of the character or whether you want your reader

to see the character from the inside, see them

as they see themselves, and then for your reader

to decide whether the way the character

presents himself or herself is truthful.

If you're using the first person, you're usually saying,

If you're using the first person, you're usually saying,

trust me, I'm your storyteller.

But if your storyteller is a liar,

then they're presenting themselves

in a way that is false.

And what you as the author can do

is begin to point the reader to see

the discrepancies between the way

in which the character is describing themselves

and how other people might see that character.

and how other people might see that character.

There can be parts of a book which are subjective,

written through the first person view of the character,

and others which are objective, which

come outside the character and look at it from outside.

You can have novels in which there's more than one

first person character and in which the different narrators

don't always see the story the same way.

There are some books which have, really, multiple narrators

William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" is like a relay race,

William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" is like a relay race,

where the narrator changes almost with every chapter.

And what that does in the end is to give you

almost a collective community view of the story.

So yeah, I would suggest experimenting with all this.

It's worth getting the hang of all these different things

because it gives you a toolbox.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Essentially, you have three ways of revealing character.

You can either reveal character through what they say.

If they say some terrible things,

then you know that kind of terrible person.

If you're writing another kind of book,

you can reveal character through interior monologue.

You can tell the reader what is going on

inside the character's head.

And the third thing is you can reveal character

through action, through what they do.

As in real life, sometimes in a book

there is a discrepancy between what people say

there is a discrepancy between what people say

and what they do.

When Ralph Ellison writes "Invisible Man,"

he's entirely inside his character.

And he sees the whole world from inside his character.

And so the way in which we learn the character

is through, as it were, his own self-portrait.

That's great.

I mean, I actually love that book.

And I think first person narration gives you

the gift of going inside, of writing from inside,

looking out.

looking out.

Hemingway is like this, where almost everything is revealed

through action, action and dialogue

because Hemingway uses a lot of dialogue.

It's almost all about what people are doing.

There's very little in Hemingway of people reflecting inwardly

about themselves.

It's all out there.

They're drinking.

They're going to bullfights.

They're having sex with each other.

They're misbehaving in various ways.

They're expressing anti-Semitic sentiments in some cases.

You judge them by what they say and what they do.

I think it's very interesting in third person narration

I think it's very interesting in third person narration

to create this tension between how people speak

about themselves and what they want and what they actually do.

Hypocrisy is one of the great things revealed

by that discrepancy, people who say one thing

and do another thing is often what

you would call a hypocrite.

In Moliere's play "Tartuffe," you

have the central character who speaks

in very holy, moral language, behaves in an absolutely

in very holy, moral language, behaves in an absolutely

creepy and dreadful way.

The entire play is about the discrepancy between the way

he portrays himself to the world and what he actually is.

"It is a science to stretch out the strings of conscience

in the service of diverse things and to rectify an evil action

with the purity of our intention.

Regarding these secrets, I shall instruct you.

You need only to allow me to conduct you.

You need only to allow me to conduct you.

Satisfy my desire and have no fear.

I'll assume the sin and leave your soul clear."

In the end, he's exposed for being a fraud.

So yeah, you got those three things.

And it's, again, a question of deciding, for your story, which

is the best way.

If, for example, in your story, you

don't want to give away a character's secrets right away,

don't want to give away a character's secrets right away,

if there are things you want to withhold from the reader

until a dramatic moment when you will reveal them,

then it's best to write the story in such a way

that the character is revealed through action.

If you want to write a novel of inner life, then sometimes

first person narrative is the best way to try that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The thing about dialogue is you have

The thing about dialogue is you have

to decide what dialogue is doing in the story.

There are stories which are almost

all dialogue, in which everything

about the characters and the events

is told through how people talk to each other.

And there are stories in which people speak very little,

but when they speak, it's very important.

So just to take those to extremes,

there's a wonderful story that Susan Sontag

wrote in the early days of the AIDS crisis.

It was a story called "The Way We Live Now."

It was a story called "The Way We Live Now."

And in the story, the central character who never appears

is somebody who obviously has got AIDS.

And the story is about this whole group

of people who know him, talking to each other.

And each of them talks to each other in a kind of circle.

And the space in the middle, the thing not said,

the thing not seen is the person the story

is about who's dying of AIDS.

is about who's dying of AIDS.

And there, dialogue is used to reveal a whole social problem.

In the early days of AIDS when there was a stigma about it,

people were obviously very afraid.

And all of that gets revealed through the way in which people

talk about the absent person.

How do you talk about somebody when they leave the room?

And there are other stories in which very little is said,

but what is said is incredibly significant.

In Herman Melville's story "Bartleby," just about the only

thing that Bartleby says is I prefer not to when

thing that Bartleby says is I prefer not to when

he's asked to do things.

He prefers not to.

And Melville in a way never tells us

why it is that he constantly refuses,

even when refusing to do things is actually

against his interest.

But it makes him this extraordinarily enigmatic

figure and kind of almost emblematic figure of refusing,

the person who says no.

And there, the enormously condensed use of dialogue,

And there, the enormously condensed use of dialogue,

almost to that single sentence, tells you a huge amount.

So again the question that you ask

yourself is, what is dialogue doing in my story.

If you're trying to write the kind of story which

wants to say to the reader, this is as real as I can make it,

this is a story which is like a slice of life,

if you're trying to write that kind of story,

then it's a good idea to try and make

then it's a good idea to try and make

the characters sound as they would sound in real life.

But if you're not trying to write a slice of life,

if you're trying to do something more highly invented,

then that doesn't matter so much.

If there's clearly a level of departure

from everyday reality, then the dialogue

can be a departure as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Spoken language has speech rhythms.

And you want to find the speech rhythm

And you want to find the speech rhythm

that best suits the character that you're creating.

Some characters are very articulate

and speak in long, flowing sentences.

Some characters speak in much shorter bursts, little staccato

bursts of sentences.

And so the way in which they speak

tells you quite a lot about them.

So that's something to think about when you're representing

how a character speaks.

how a character speaks.

One of the difficulties that I had in some of the books

that I've written which deal with South Asia

is that the characters would not realistically

be speaking English, they would be speaking other languages.

And yet I have to represent that speech in English.

So the question then is, how do you do that?

English speakers' idioms that can sound completely idiotic

coming out of their mouths.

So you have to create an idiom.

So you have to create an idiom.

You have to create what's called an idiolect, which

is a way for them to speak, for their speech

to be represented in English which indicates to the reader

that this is, if you like, a translation

from another language.

That's one of the hardest things,

I think, to do is to represent in one language

something that's actually being said in another language.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There are writers who take great pain

to make sure that their characters speak

as people would in real life.

If you read the short stories of Raymond Carver, for example,

his characters are predominantly working class, often very poor

indeed, often with problems of drink.

And he had an amazing ear for the accurate representation

And he had an amazing ear for the accurate representation

of the speech of people of that class and that time and place.

So in the case of Ray Carver, yes, I

think his characters speak as they would if they

were in the room with you.

In the case of other writers, no.

Writers develop conventions of speech.

If you read the great American novelist Don DeLillo--

I think maybe Don DeLillo may be, I think,

the greatest living American novelist.

All the characters speak in exactly the same way.

All the characters speak in exactly the same way.

All the characters have exactly the same tone of voice.

And that tone of voice is deliberately

flattened, unemotional.

It's quite clear that he's doing that on purpose,

that he's trying to create a world in which there

is very little affect.

The people's ability to emotionally communicate

with each other is withdrawn.

People speak in this very flat way.

People speak in this very flat way.

So in the case of DeLillo's characters,

no, I don't think people like that would speak

like that if you met them.

And in other people's work, writing can be very heightened.

So if we talk about, like, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison,

they're very influenced also by a kind of biblical tradition,

almost like Old Testament, almost

like sermons, given a kind of poetic heightening.

like sermons, given a kind of poetic heightening.

Again, yeah, people don't talk like that.

But you believe it because it comes out

of a tradition of speech which has to do with church

and with all kinds of elements which come from that culture.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Just as an exercise, try and write

a scene in which you don't say who's talking.

And show it to somebody.

And see if they can distinguish the characters,

And see if they can distinguish the characters,

even if the characters are just called

A, B, and C. See if somebody can say

who's talking at which moment.

If you've really understood how they each speak,

then the reader will know who's talking without your telling

them because only that character would speak like that,

and only this character would speak like this.

And it can be, for example, that one character speaks

And it can be, for example, that one character speaks

in a more didactic way, is always telling you what to do

and what they think and why you're wrong

and why you're right.

And another character might be more timid in the way

that they speak.

It's a craft skill.

And it's something you can polish

and you can get better at because it will help you.

Differentiation is what it's called.

If you could properly differentiate

If you could properly differentiate

the way in which each character acts, speaks, behaves,

then they exist on the page without you having

to spell it out all the time.

And so it's worth practicing differentiation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]