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From the Reading Chair: What emojis tell us about good dialogue

As part of a new series on the nuts and bolts of writing, local editor and writing expert Laurel Cohn asks how the effect of emojis can be translated into a literary setting.

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Do you use emojis when you text? I tried for a bit; never quite got the hang of it. But recently I’ve been prompted to consider why a fat, pink heart may say more to us than the word ‘love’ or ‘xx’, and what this tells us about good dialogue. Emojis have become an accepted way to communicate a thought or emotion succinctly. While they often act as shorthand, they can also enhance and amplify the meaning of the written word. We use emojis because we recognise the power of an image, however basic, to communicate something unsaid. We hanker for more than words. Our desire to communicate other layers of meaning had led to the development of more sophisticated emojis employing animated graphics and sound. We hanker for more than words and a twodimensional image. It is the same with dialogue on the page. The more I read, the more I realise that the key to good dialogue lies not in what is said between characters, but in the narrative snippets between quoted speech that reveal what is not said. If you think cinematically, these snippets are the camera showing us what the characters look like and how they are positioned in the setting. Body language is a huge part of face-toface communication, and without some sense of the unspoken physical exchange that occurs between characters, dialogue can fall flat. Simple descriptions of what characters look and sound like when they are speaking or listening are like adding emojis, enhancing the meaning of the words. For example, a character may be sitting, absentmindedly playing with the hem of her skirt as she timidly asks her best friend’s advice; or glaring at the fruit bowl, unwavering in his attention to the brown spot on the

apple as he listens to his mother’s loud rebuke. You can picture the options for relevant emojis. Similar descriptive narration about the setting helps the reader to witness the scene and to feel the heat of the stuffy room, or sense the anticipation of a formal dinner setting. What lifts dialogue to the next level, however, is beyond what the camera shows us; it is the artistry of a good soundtrack. Music plays a key role in screen-based storytelling, adding emotional depth to a scene, prompting and guiding conscious and unconscious responses to what is being played out before us. On the silent page, a similar effect can be achieved by reference to a specific image or detail that resonates beyond what is being described, suggesting a character’s inner world in that moment, or more of their outer world, amplifying the dramatic tension. Such telling details enrich further the words, the body language and the setting of a dialogue scene. Let me give you some examples. In this scene from Nick Earls’s The True Story of Butterfish, the narrator’s brother casually mentions something unexpected about the narrator’s ex. ‘But you’d know she’s getting married again. You would have heard that from her.’ I felt like I was falling, a long way and into something dark. It was hard to breathe. Married again. He had really said that. ‘No. No, I haven’t heard from her for a while.’ I was looking at the table, at an ant that was crawling across the glass. Even my own voice seemed like it was coming from far away. ‘Oh. She sent out a group email, but I figured she’d talked to you separately...’

The description of the feeling is strong, but that ant, and the narrator’s attention to it, tells us so much more about his emotional state in that moment. In the opening scene of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, Beverley and Fix are hosting a christening party. Well into the party, Fix opens the front door to Cousins, a work colleague he barely knows, who has turned up uninvited:

‘This makes a boy and a girl?’ ‘Two girls.’ Cousins shrugged. ‘What can you do?’ ‘Not a thing,’ Fix said and closed the door. Beverly had told him to leave it open so they could get some air, which went to show how much she knew about man’s inhumanity to man. It didn’t matter how many people were in the house. You didn’t leave the goddamn door open. Fix’s annoyance and discomfort is supercharged by the focus on the door. And his transference of irritation to his wife tells us something about their relationship, and perhaps about accepted gender relations of the time (1960s). In this scene from Stuart Turton’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, the narrator is probing Peter about the reasons he is being blackmailed.

‘You know me, Peter, so you know what it takes for me to ask such a thing,’ I say. ‘I must have all the pieces of this nasty business to hand.’ He considers this, returning to the window with his drink. Not that there’s much to see. The trees have grown so close to the house the branches are pressed right up against the glass. Judging by Peter’s demeanour, he’d invite them inside now if he could. ‘Charles Cunningham’s parentage isn’t why I’m being blackmailed, ‘he says... Here the narrator is making the link between the outer and inner worlds, illustrating his own powers of observation. Paying attention on the page to what is unsaid when characters speak to one another can make a tremendous difference to the effectiveness of a scene featuring dialogue. I have found myself searching for these snippets of enhancing detail when I read, enjoying the insight they provide not only into the characters and the scene in play, but also into the writer and their imaginative capacities. I could express this delight as a fat, pink heart, but somehow an emoji just doesn’t quite do it.

Laurel Cohn is a developmental book editor passionate about communication and the power of stories in our lives. She has been helping writers prepare their work for publication since the mid-1980s, and is a popular workshop presenter. She has a PhD in literary and cultural studies. laurelcohn.com.au

Notes from the Festival: Jessica White

Jessica White’s hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud, began from an innocuous comment in a footnote she came across while researching Australian novelist Rosa Praed for her PhD. White spoke to Katinka Smit at Byron Writers Festival 2019 about deafness, societal silence and the accidental writing of her memoir.

Were you always intending to intertwine your story with that of Rosa Praed’s deaf daughter, Maud? No. That was a strategic decision because the book wasn’t working. My PhD was half about Rosa Praed and half about a nineteenth-century botanist. I thought about getting it published but it was academic and inaccessible. I started putting Maud’s story in and it became more like a biography, but it was still boring. I realised there were parallels with my story; I had to rewrite it and put myself in. And that’s when it worked.

What was that like, involuntarily writing a memoir? Writing about myself, about my childhood, was very easy. The difficulty came in trying to knit the threads together. It had to be about us. I had to write enough of my story to make it engaging but also make sure there were no info dumps. That was quite difficult.

How did you do that? Intuition. I can tell when it doesn’t sound or doesn’t feel right and I move things around until it feels harmonious. I noticed doing it with Entitlement [White’s 2012 novel] as well. I originally wrote that in third person, then in two women’s voices writing letters to each other and that didn’t work. I realised it was the protagonist’s story and I wrote it in first person. I don’t know where it comes from.

Did Rosa Praed’s novels shed light on Maud? Did they influence your writing about Maud? No. Her novels were interesting for finding out her attitude towards Maud. She was very troubled by her daughter. Rosa had a really hard life as well, lots of highs and lows. She felt that Maud was punishment for something she had done wrong in a previous life. A lot of Rosa’s attitudes towards Aboriginal people were replicated in her attitude toward her daughter. She expected her daughter to act in a particular way, like Aboriginal people were expected to act in a particular way, to assimilate into a dominant culture. When I read Rosa’s novels I realised the patterns were forming, but she was of her time. I’ve spoken to people who have children with disabilities and they say, ‘Look at the options. She wanted Maud to have the best possible life. They thought that an institution would do that.’ After having those conversations I realised I had to be more sympathetic towards her because she wouldn’t have known what to do. I think she just wanted the problem to go away, as well, but she never really left Maud. She was always living near her and visiting her but every time she went to the asylum she was very troubled by what had happened. I think if Maud had been born now and she’d had the psychological help that she needed, she would have been okay. But it was just really bad. They didn’t have those kinds of facilities in the nineteenth century. Your poem, Almost Hearing parallels deafness with social attitudes and the Stolen Generation - can you talk about these parallels? It’s a tricky area to navigate. I’m still privileged, but in terms of not being able to speak your own language, being forced to speak this incredibly difficult language, being alienated from your culture because people think this is going to be better for you, there are parallels in that sense. I’m very sensitive to people who are spoken over the top of, and white people have been doing that to Indigenous people since they turned up. I’m aware of the things that are not said – the sensitivity to silence comes in, in that sense. Who is speaking, who is spoken for? Who’s not being heard?

You’ve written about deafness as ghostliness, a non-existence. Is writing reinserting the self into the world of hearing? Very much so. Part of myself has been ghosted. People don’t believe in ghosts, they don’t believe in the deaf part of myself. So it is about asserting a presence and it’s quite a nuanced way of operating in the world. When people think of deafness they think of the stereotype of a speech impediment and being able to sign. I can’t sign and my family worked me really hard on my speech. I wrote the book because people don’t believe me. There are deep associations of sound with comfort, of the human voice being a ‘civilising force’. Is this where historical associations of deafness with ‘animal’ and ‘savageness’ come from? It’s more the idea that if you can’t speak clearly you must be an imbecile, an association between reason and speech that has a very long history. They thought that deaf people could never be taught to speak until they discovered sign language. Mum and Dad worked hard on my speech because they wanted me to succeed. I don’t begrudge that. It meant I could become a writer. What do you mean by that? I’m unusual as a deaf person. For a lot of deaf people, writing, reading and speaking are just hard work, but for me it was salvation. If I hadn’t had those tools I wouldn’t have been able to take that path.

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