One way to tackle subjects you may not feel up to handling is to learn from the strategies of writers who tell stories and/or evoke issues through the use of dialog alone. Their stories are often very short, striking the heart swiftly. The work does not require a lot of set up or description. Instead, commands and questions, often from one speaker only, throw readers into a hard emotional situation and evoke something for them to chew on for days.

In this article, we’ll look at the strategies of author’s Jamaica Kincaid and Bruce Holland Rogers can be guides to experimenting with sudden writing and its power. You can also learn something about the strength of dialog to tell a short story from Tim Elhajj.

Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl” is told all in commands:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school? Always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming… (Read more of the short narrative “Girl”).

As the story continues with the words the speaker’s Caribbean mother gives her daughter, the phrase “slut you are so bent on becoming” is repeated throughout the short piece. At the very end, when the daughter finally asks a question (“What if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?”) the answer is, “…you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near that bread?” It completely evokes the stifling fear and lack of freedom this upbringing offers. Kincaid has succeeded in evoking the maddening sexist oppression under which a young girl is growing up.

Bruce Holland Rogers’ story “How Could a Mother?” is written all in questions. The effect is horrifying and haunting. Though there is not one answer supplied to any of the questions, the content of the next question in the series continually builds the readers’ understanding of the situation:

 When was it that your daughter—when was it that Josie started to cry? What was your state of mind when you punished her? What were you thinking when she wouldn’t stop crying? Did your boyfriend say anything about Josie’s crying…

What time did you wake up? How soon after you woke up did you check on your daughter? You could tell right away? How did you know? Then what did you do? Was the abduction story his idea, or yours? Which car did you take? How did you come to choose Cascadia State Park? Had you been to the area before? When had he been there? Did he say anything to you about why he thought the park would be a good place? (Read more of story “How Could a Mother”?)

At the story’s end, the questions shift in focus. The questioner is done questioning the mother of the dead baby about the incident and is now questioning her about her thoughts on the interviewer. The tactical switch draws the reader closer to the underlying subject, which is what keeps any of us from disastrous violence:

Do you have any thoughts about the question no one can answer? Not the one everyone asks, but the one only a mother who has felt her own hands shake with a rage that is bigger than she is can ask?

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Although it certainly isn’t a criteria of sudden writing that it deal with problems in human relationships, that subject in its many guises makes for engaging pieces, and most of us have issues in this area to explore through evocation.

Here are two ideas for accomplishing some of your own sudden writing this summer using Kincaid and Rogers as models:

Write a story all in commands–choose the voice of someone who irritates you or trapped you or someone you have to sound like to get something done. If you haven’t listened to the Mom Song on YouTube yet, click over to this rendition of what a typical mother might say in 24 hours condensed to 2 minutes and 55 seconds and sung to the tune of the “William Tell Overture.” It’s composed of all the commands and “isms” we’ve all heard our mother’s say or said ourselves and doing so moves us to laughter at what we recognize of a mom’s life and responsibility for raising us.

Write a story all in questions. Pick a situation that makes you very sad or irritated. Fully imagine to who you are asking the questions. I have recently heard very fine examples of this strategy written by students in only 10 minutes. One was by a mom who had found her 18-year-old drunk and throwing up; another other was by a mother who son was a victim of a terrible crime. The questions in the first were for the son, in the second example, for the perpetrator.

Here’s a third idea if you would like to write a more traditional, short piece. Read Tim Elhajj’s “As a Father, I Was Hardly a Perfect Fit” from the Modern Love column in the New York Times. In this short personal essay, dialog plays a big part. After the author lets us know he is speaking to a school age son who lives with his mom on the opposite side of the country, he reports his phone conversations with his son, who he has promised that he will pay for a coveted baseball cap:

I used to walk to the mall from that neighborhood as a child. “Can’t you walk?”

His mother wouldn’t let him walk on Route 441.

I sighed. “Cut through Grasshopper Hill.”

He had no idea what I meant. I asked him about the streets and his routes and such, and eventually I realized a housing development had been built where Grasshopper Hill used to be. He didn’t know Grasshopper Hill, and neither did any of his friends. The small town where I grew up seemed to exist only in my memory now. Though I was just 31, I was out of touch, demoted by my absence.

I suggested he use his stepfather’s tape measure to determine the size of his head. He said it was a metal tape and he would get in trouble if he were to break it.

“If it’s metal,” I said, “you can’t break it.”

“What if the sharp edge cuts my head?”

I rolled my eyes. In desperation, I told him this first thing that came into my mind: “Unwind a wire hanger and wrap it around your head. Then use the tape to measure that section of the hanger.” As soon as I said it, I knew how absurd it was.

“That sounds even more dangerous than just using the metal tape,” he said. “And anyway I can’t be unwinding Mom’s hangers. Are you trying to get me in trouble?”

To see what you can do with dialog that carries the meaning in a short piece of writing, write a brief account of an awkward situation using mostly dialog to evoke the experience. Your dialog can be reported in snippets of conversations that actually went on over time or in snippets from one day’s conversation. You might use an ongoing interaction with a service provider who you can’t get proper service from, an ongoing interaction with someone who you don’t want to think that you are letting down, or someone with a secret that you know but shouldn’t know, or someone who knows a secret of yours you wish they didn’t.

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You could probably write a memoir in parts by writing the questions exercise or the command exercise using different characters from your family–the father’s questions, the mother’s commands, the grandmother’s, the grandfather’s, the cousin’s, the uncle’s, the aunt’s, the niece’s and the nephew’s, the teacher’s, the neighbor’s, the dog’s, the pet canary’s. You get the idea. By exploring the questions and the command strategies using a different role or person in each piece, you can quickly cover your life history from many angles.

You can also certainly build a series of essays or one longer essay by recording many awkward dialogs.

You might also take a subject and write all three exercises on that one subject and see how your writing might fit together into one essay (possibly an essay in parts).

When you start with a strategy and let yourself follow along behind your fingers without worrying about where things will end up, you’ll find the words to help you make sudden magic on the page.