“Even If It Rains . . .” Dialogue and ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”

Dialogue.

Some writers adore writing dialogue. Characters leap off the page, verbal weapons in hand. Some writers are naturals at it – each character has a completely different voice, inflection, accent, use of words. For others . . . well, given the choice between writing dialogue and spending a night on Alcatraz, they’d be packing the sleeping bag.

But no matter what, if you’re a writer, you can’t avoid dialogue.

When you’re writing a story – be it fiction or nonfiction, a short story or a novel – there are building blocks you have to include, or else it will all fall apart. Things that not only provide your story with structure, but breathe life into it, make it come alive. Possibly the most important of these is dialogue.

Plot? Sure, we need it. But let’s face it:  unless you’re James Patterson, you’re hopefully writing fiction that’s more character driven than plot driven. And dialogue is one of the most important ways our characters leap off the page. It tells us, more than description, more than backstory, more than interaction with others, who these people are. Where are they from? Do they have an accent? Do they mispronounce certain words? If so, why? Do they use regionalisms? (Example:  a friend’s grandfather lives in Tennessee. He asks “You wanna Coca-Cola?” You say, “Sure!” He says, “What you want? We got Sprite, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper . . .”) And along with that, how’s their diction? Is their speech liberally peppered with idioms? Do they use African-American Vernacular English? Or is the prim, proper effect of boarding school evident in every sentence?

In short:  dialogue should tell us nearly everything we need to know about your character.

But. It can also provide so much more! Through dialogue, we should be able to see how they interact with each other. Do your characters have nicknames for each other? Do they reference jokes and incidents from their past that even you, the author, don’t quite get? When do we sense antagonism? And for whom do they feel it?

Dialogue can provide a sense of the characters lives prior to this point in time. It can tell us about their relationships. It can tell us how others see them.

One of my new obsessions is the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Haven’t seen it? You must. If you drool over 1950s fashion (me!), you must see it. If you love comedies (me!), you must see it. If you like to be flabbergasted by how women were treated in the 1950s (me, apparently!), you must see it. And if you don’t know how women were treated in the 1950s, this show shall be your education!

In Season 1, Midge Maisel is left by her husband, for a woman with no discernible brain cells. So Midge decides to become a comedienne. She’s very good at it. But it’s 1958. She’s 26 years old. She has two children, overprotective parents, and no income. I’m seven episodes into the first season, and bang my head against something (sometimes the table, sometimes the cats . . .) every time Midge’s parents, especially her mother, makes remarks about how she ‘has’ to get her husband back, and her father gives her a curfew. At twenty-six! (This clip here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uetOWf7jU2Q)

The dialogue, though! There is a reason this show has won so many awards.

For starters, the two halves of Midge’s life – the proper Jewish housewife who shops at Neiman-Marcus, and the abandoned woman who gets drunk and does totally improv comedy laced with profanity (and, at times, nudity) – are delineated neatly, and nowhere more so than through the dialogue. Midge’s manager, Susie, is a streetwise alley cat (think an adult, jaded, f-word-dropping, Oliver Twist who never got adopted), while Midge’s father is a maths professor and her mother seems to only leave their Riverside apartment to go to her synagogue and her psychic.

For another thing, almost every line sparkles. It’s witty, it’s fast, it’s a current that carries you through every single scene, and every single episode. It’s what dialogue is supposed to do, and it does it in a way that is both hilarious and biting.

But even among this incredible deluge of dialogue, there are lines that rise above the rest. For me, the pinnacle of these lines was in Season 1, Episode 5. Midge, tired of living with her parents and having a curfew, has gotten a job at the makeup counter at a department store. The next morning, she announces this to her parents.

(For a short clip of this scene, start watching at :54 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adG3j9n5fl8.)

For the next thirty seconds or so, her father bombards her with questions. But for me, the kicker, the one that made me both howl with laughter and scream in frustration, was this one:

“If it rains, you still have to go in.” 

This one line suddenly rises above all the hilarious one-liners her father throws at her – utterly ridiculous statements like, “And they’ll pay you? In money?” and “You’ll need a bank account” – to suddenly reveal multiple levels of what’s really going on here. 

1.) There’s obviously the overprotective dad thing going on, evidenced by Midge’s patient acceptance of the litany. But . . .

2.) Think about what this line says about Midge’s father. About how he sees Midge. What does it say about him? Does he really think she’d rather quit her job than get her Neiman-Marcus heels wet? Is this a patronizing line from a male chauvinist pig? Or is it something else?

3.) And think about what this line says about their relationship. He doesn’t even know she has a bank account. What does he know about his own daughter? And is anything he thinks he knows accurate? Can we extrapolate 26 years’ worth of relationship from this one line?

4.) And now let’s take it one step further. What does this line say about Midge? She’s 26. She married at 22, straight out of college. Never had a job. Never needed one. But even if you didn’t know any of that, what would this one line say about her, and her life up until this point? Does he ask this question because he’s insulting her – or because he truly thinks she would stay home rather than go out in the rain? And does he think this due to past experience?

5.) And when we put it in context of the entire conversation (go watch the very short clip, I beg of you, start at :54), is her dad happy she has the job? Does he think she can actually do it? Is he trying, in his own way, to be encouraging? Is he trying to undermine her confidence, or bolster it? Does this conversation potentially signal a turning point in their relationship?

Yeah. So this one line – again, out of thousands of fantastic ones in this series – was the one that made me hit the Pause button and listen to it over and over. It hit me so hard, made me think on so many levels. And that’s what dialogue should do. It should make us think. It should stay with us, haunt us, confront us days after we read or hear it. It should stay with us. 

It should say something more. 

 

“The American Story” -Part Review, Part Inspiration

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago. Typically, I go find myself something small – my mom and I used to hit a local antiques shop, but the shop has been shut for a few years now and frankly, let’s face it:  I saw Hamilton three times this year, along with Les Mis. What else could I possibly give myself that would top THAT?! 🙂

Well . . . as it turns out, there is something.

Back in November, I picked up an amazing book, The American Story:  Conversations With Master Historians. This is a collection of discussions hosted by the Library of Congress, for Congressional members, facilitated by David M. Rubenstein. If you have ever wanted to know why and how historians do what they do, this is the book you want to pick up. It’s part historiography, part inspiration, and completely unique in its approach.

This series was conceived by Rubenstein:  what if major American historians were invited to speak before members of Congress to talk about their work and the major figures they have studied? So in this amazing book, we have conversations with some of the most eminent historians of today, including Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Jon Meacham, Cokie Roberts, A. Scott Berg, Robert Caro, and yes, of course, my favorite, Ron Chernow. (I am such a freaking fangirl.)

As a historian, this is a fascinating look into not just the men and women these historians have studied, but also into the process of history. We get an up-close, intimate look at the men (and women!) immortalized in their works, and you may definitely learn some new things – I sure did! For instance, did you know that Thomas Jefferson burned every letter his wife ever wrote, even those she wrote to her friends? We don’t know why. He just did.

Each interview covers at least one book written by the author (sometimes, two or even three). So we have broad overviews – and yet, each author has the ability to choose small kernels of insight, those moments that make each person come alive. Those are the tiny details I strive to put before my students, and those are the tiny details that enliven almost every page of this book.

But there are also amazing insights from the authors themselves about the process of writing history. And yes, anyone who has ever done even so much as a decent research paper will tell you that there is a process to it. Even when you think you know everything about a person, as A. Scott Berg thought when he wrote Lindbegh, there are things you don’t know. The records don’t exist. No one talked about it. And Berg realized that when  he met seven of Lindbergh’s illegitimate children, after his book was published. But he knew Lindbergh so well that when one of the German children faxed him letters Lindbergh had written to her mother, Berg recognized his handwriting on sight. It was true. But no one, ever, had talked about their existence.

For me, though, the greatest takeaway from American Story isn’t the knowledge – although that is a fantastic takeaway – but the insights into the authors. If you know anything about my blog, you know I’ve been on again, off again obsessed with the George Kimmel disappearance for years. I get obsessed . . . and then I back away. And I wait six months, maybe a year, before I re-submerge myself into the research, only to back out again as soon as I feel those tentacles of mystery start to grab at me. Obsession isn’t healthy, everyone says, and so I get cold feet. Get out.

That ended as soon as I read the interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin about Team of Rivals. Rubenstein asks her why she wrote another Lincoln book, when we have hundreds already, and she said:

“I don’t think I thought that the world needed another book. I just knew that I wanted to live with him Because it takes me so long, as I was saying, to write these books, and because I get so involved with whoever it is – I haven’t written twenty books like a lot of my historian friends. I knew that I wanted to live with Lincoln.”

I paused.

Underlined this.

And then, in the margin, I scribbled, Okay. So it IS okay. 

Ask Robert Caro about obsession. He’s been writing the master work of biographies about Lyndon B. Johnson for decades. He spends almost every day at Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library, at the Archives, at the presidential libraries of Roosevelt and Kennedy and Nixon. Digging. Talking to those who knew him. Not taking no for an answer. Coming back time and again, as long as it takes, to get the answers he needs. (I actually just finished Working, Caro’s book about his process in writing – extremely interesting and well-worth the read as well.)

So for me . . . this was a revelation. I don’t think we covered ‘Getting Obsessed With Your Subject 101″ in grad school. Because we cover so much, so fast, there isn’t time to get obsessed – unless you’re writing a thesis, of course, and even then you may not dig deep enough, because you don’t have the time. Robert Caro moved his wife into the middle of Texas nowhere in order to understand Johnson better. Goodwin simply wanted to spend as much time with Lincoln as she could.

And it suddenly occurred to me that Ron Chernow did not write Alexander Hamilton in five years without a slight bit of obsession. (Well, and full-time assistants, I’m sure.) Robert Caro has not spent two decades writing about Johnson without a teensy bit of obsession driving him. Bottom line:  historians become obsessed. It’s what drives us. And it’s okay to give in to it. Because if we don’t, then how will we ever finish the research? How will we find the courage to ask the hard questions? To stay at the desk a little longer, to look in one last file folder, to dig deeper?

It’s necessary. 

It’s what has driven me to the National Archives, to keep returning to those files again and again. Only this time, I’m sticking with it. And that was my birthday gift to myself this year:  permission to stick with it. Permission to remain obsessed, to follow the trails, to get lost in the research, to try whatever it takes to find the truth.

So if you, too, struggle with those kinds of issues – or if you just want further insight into some of the most important historical people in American history and their biographers – go pick up American Story. There are a handful of editing issues – mostly dates, as on page 62 when the wrong election year is given – but I adored this book. It’s a master class not only in American history, but in American history writing. 

And it was precisely the book I needed, at precisely the moment I needed it.

 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-american-story-david-m-rubenstein/1130641281?ean=9781982120337#/– link to the book at Barnes & Noble