Raising Your Voice in Your Memoir, by guest blogger Bob Tarte

Had you noticed that I had abruptly stopped giving you homework, campers? That’s not entirely coincidental: I figure that you already have distractions enough. I’m quite certain that many, if not most, of the Author! Author! community is spending this long holiday weekend (a) prepping queries to send out after Labor Day, (b) prepping requested materials to send out after Labor Day, (c) writing something fabulous and fresh, (d) revising an existing manuscript so it becomes fabulous and fresh, and/or (e) thinking, “Gee, I really ought to be doing (a) (b), (c), and/or (d) today, but the barbecue is already fired up.”

In order to amuse, enlighten, and inform those of you who are tuning in this weekend, I have blandished some very fine authors into sharing a little just-amongst-us literary advice. Yesterday, we talked about fiction. Today, we’re going to concentrate up memoir.

And not just the oft-discussed conundrum how to work up the nerve to be completely transparent on the page — no mean feat in itself — but a burning topic that I do not believe is discussed nearly enough amongst writers: narrative voice in memoir.

To succeed in grabbing the reader, a memoir’s narrative voice must also be a likable and lyrical — wait for it — narrative voice.

Was that loud BOING that just reverberated around the cosmos the sound of memoirists’ jaws bouncing off the floor? I’m not entirely astonished: in the throes of the hugely challenging task of writing one’s own life, the emotional strain of reliving events vividly enough to write about them well can easily trump the imperative to craft lovely sentences. Or even to depict yourself and your environs juicily enough for a reader to long to follow you through 300+ pages.

Let’s face it, there’s more to composing compelling memoir than having had an interesting life and being able to make it sound interesting on the page. There’s even more to it than sounding like yourself.

In order to tackle this recalcitrant problem, I tracked down one of my all-time favorite memoirists, the inimitable and hilarious Bob Tarte, author of the brilliant pet memoirs ENSLAVED BY DUCKS and FOWL WEATHER, and lobbied shamelessly for him to share his insights with the Author! Author! community. Page for page, Bob has one of the strongest memoir voices I’ve ever seen: humorous, honest, and absolutely original.

I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: anyone seriously interested in writing humorous memoir should take a gander (so to speak) at his seemingly effortless wit. In case those of you who are not comedy writers are wondering why: there’s nothing more difficult than appearing to be spontaneously funny; it takes careful, meticulous craft.

A great comic premise isn’t a bad idea, either. Here’s the publisher’s blurb for ENSLAVED BY DUCKS:

enslavedbyducksjacketEnslaved By Ducks
How One Man Went from Head of the Household to Bottom of the Pecking Order

When Bob Tarte left the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan for the country, he was thinking peace and quiet. He’d write his music reviews in the solitude of his rural home on the outskirts of everything.

Then he married Linda. She wanted a rabbit. How much trouble, he thought, could a bunny be?

Well, after the bunny chewed his way through the electrical wires and then hid inside the wall, Bob realized that he had been outwitted. But that was just the beginning. There were parrots, more rabbits, then ducks and African geese. The orphaned turkeys stranded on a nearby road. The abandoned starlings. The sad duck for sale for 25 cents.

Bob suddenly found himself constructing pens, cages, barriers, buying feed, clearing duck waste, spoonfeeding at mealtime. One day he realized that he no longer had a life of quiet serenity, but that he’d become a servant to a relentlessly demanding family: Stanley Sue, a gender-switching African grey parrot; Hector, a cantankerous shoulder-sitting Muscovy duck; Howard, an amorous ring-neck dove; and a motley crew of others. Somehow, against every instinct in him, Bob had unwittingly become their slave.

He read all the classic animal books — The Parrot Who Owns Me, The Dog who Rescues Cats, Arnie the Darling Starling, That Quail Robert, The Cat Who Came for Christmas — about the joys of animals, the touching moments. But none revealed what it was really like to live with an unruly menagerie.

Bob Tarte’s witty account reveals the truth of animal ownership: who really owns who, the complicated logistics of accommodating many species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal in the house – and on its perimeter. Writing as someone who’s been ambushed by the way in which animals — even cranky ones — can wend their way into one’s heart, Bob Tarte is James Herriott by way of Bill Bryson.

Nor does Bob’s comic genius stop there. FOWL WEATHER was one of NPR’s Nancy Pearl’s Under-the-Radar Books for January 2008. Quoth Dame Nancy: “If you’re longing for a book that will make you laugh out loud, then run, don’t walk, to the nearest library or bookstore and pick up a copy of Bob Tarte’s Fowl Weather.”

Before you lose yourself in daydreaming about receiving a review like that, cast your eyes over the blurb:

fowlweatherjacketFowl Weather
How Thirty-Nine Animals and a Sock Monkey Took Over My Life

Bob Tarte’s second book, Fowl Weather, returns us to the Michigan house where pandemonium is the governing principle, and where 39 animals rule the roost. But as things seem to spiral out of control, as his parents age and his mother’s grasp on reality loosens as she battles Alzheimer’s disease, Bob unexpectedly finds support from the gaggle of animals around him. They provide, in their irrational fashion, models for how to live.

It is their alien presences, their sense of humor, and their unpredictable behaviors that both drive Bob crazy and paradoxically return him to sanity. Whether it’s the knot-tying African grey parrot, the overweight cat who’s trained Bob to hold her water bowl just above the floor, or the duck who bests Bob in a shoving match, this is the menagerie, along with his endlessly optimistic wife Linda, that teaches him about the chaos that’s a necessary part of life.

No less demanding than the animals are the people who torment Bob and Linda. There’s the master gardener who steps on plants, the pet sitter applicant who never met an animal he didn’t want to butcher, and a woman Bob hasn’t seen since elementary school who suddenly butts into his life.

With the same biting humor and ability to capture the soul of the animal world that made Enslaved by Ducks such a rousing success, Bob Tarte shows us that life with animals gives us a way out of our small human perspectives to glimpse something larger, more enduring, and more wholly grounded in the simplicities of love — even across species lines.

So the man knows whereat he speaks, memoir-wise. Those of you even considering setting pen to paper to write about the real should pull up a chair and take good notes.

Join me, please, in a big round of applause for today’s guest blogger, Bob Tarte. Take it away, Bob!

You’re probably itching to get started writing your memoir, to sit down with your notes and let the story flow. But before you flow too far, you might want to tighten the tap as you think about refining one of the most important aspects of your writing. And that’s your narrative voice. Check with agents and publishers, and you’ll discover that a unique voice is at the top of their must-have list when they’re looking for new authors.

Voice can be a slippery, elusive element to grab hold of. But if you’ve got good material for your memoir and a strong point of view, you’re probably most of the way there. It’s tempting to use the same voice in your memoir that you’ve been using in your emails, blog, or journal. But don’t just automatically do that. Although your first-person narrator stands at the center of your story, it’s really just another character that needs to be developed. And you need to develop it to a knife’s edge.

The “I” who tells your story is supposed to be you. But it isn’t you exactly. It’s both more and less than that.

In my three pet memoirs, Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather, and Kitty Cornered (which I promise to only mention a dozen more times), my voice isn’t like the real Bob Tarte at all. The voice in my books is whiny, complaining, self-effacing, and funny. And the real Bob isn’t particularly funny. I’m mostly just droopy.

But if I put that droopiness into a book, it wouldn’t even sell to other droopy people. So I’ve gone with the humor angle instead, and it seems to do the trick. I’m never quite sure if I’m a greater or lesser fool than the “I” who inhabits my memoirs, though I suspect the truth.

The important thing is to sculpt a voice that is indisputably in charge of your narrative. And why shouldn’t it be? If you’re not an authority about your own life, nobody is. You just need to pick a personality that convinces your readers of this fact.

Which “I” Are You, Anyway?
There’s another problem with using a voice that supposedly reflects who you really are. Who are you? Are you just one “I”? Or are you a bunch of little “Is” that weave in and out of dominance throughout the day?

I often start my morning with a good case of the jitters due to existential angst. Later I might get crabby. Neither of these is the basis for an appealing voice. But if I refuse to write until an ecstatic mood seizes me, I’m going to have to wait until fall or spring when the warblers migrate through our woods. And that leaves a lot of dead space in between.

What’s a memoirist to do? You need to do what I did, which is to create an artificial intelligence that stands in for you, an I, Robot narrative contraption that will do your bidding and tell your story better than a swarm of little “Is” ever could. Harness those elements of your personality that can tell your story in the strongest and most engaging manner, and leave the other bits and pieces on the floor.

Did I mention that the voice needs to be engaging? Early this year, a woman sent me the manuscript for a memoir about her collie. She had a definite flair for writing and she had entertaining anecdotes about her dog. But her voice rarely shifted out of hysteria as it wrenched her narrative from one crisis to another with never an intervening moment of quiet. And on nearly every page, the voice shouted something IN ALL CAPS.

When I suggested that her approach was too exhausting and too repetitive, she told me, “But that’s exactly how it all happened.”

I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t blame her. I blamed her voice instead.

Voice Determines Content, Too
If she had chosen a different voice, she would have told her story differently. In her e-mails, she told me how much she loved her collie now that the dog was older and calmer. But in her manuscript she used a voice that was continually caught up in each fresh moment of disaster rather than the voice of experience that reflected who she was now. That more mature voice could have supplied the balance that her story needed not only by changing the tone in which it described events, but also by choosing which events to include and which ones to leave out.

Our elderly cat Moobie passed away while I was writing Kitty Cornered. The voice that I had used in Enslaved by Ducks or Fowl Weather might have worked Moobie’s loss into my book. But the voice of Kitty Cornereddidn’t want anything to do with death. It wanted to keep the story light and funny. So instead of seeing Moobie through her inevitable decline in the book, I ended the tale while she still lolled upon the bed with flashes of kitten-like behavior.

Nobody will notice what I left out, because that’s the coolest thing of all about narrative voice. It’s both transparent and opaque at the same time. It’s a guy who stands holding a pane of glass. Most of the time, you look straight through the glass at the action and get caught up in it without even noticing that the guy is there. From time to time he shifts his body. A cuff or a finger get in the way as he points at something happening through the glass, but you don’t mind the intrusion, because he’s showing you something interesting. He’s kind of a magician. And he’s a lot like you.

The ideal voice might not come to you immediately. It always takes me a while to find it. Sometimes I have to write 50 pages while my voice and material dance with one other before they finally make a connection. It’s frustrating because I don’t know how to tell my story until I discover my “I,” but I can’t discover my “I” without writing. So I just have to wait it out.

And speaking of waiting, I thank you for your patience as I flounder around trying to get these simple ideas across. Part of the problem is that I don’t think I’ve ever quite found my voice here. And I wouldn’t, because I’m writing about writing instead of writing about my life with cats, ducks, parrots, or geese.

Bob Tarte and his wife Linda live on the edge of a shoe-sucking swamp near the West Michigan village of Lowell. When not fending off mosquitoes during temperate months and chipping ice out of plastic wading pools in the depths of winter, Bob writes books about his pets, namely Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather. In April 2012, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill will publish Bob’s new book, Kitty Cornered How Frannie and Five Other Incorrigible Cats Seized Control of Our House and Made It Their Home.

Emmy Award-winning actress Patricia Heaton has taken on an option on the dramatic rights to Enslaved by Ducks. and Fowl Weather was selected as an “Under The Radar” book for 2008 by Nancy Pearl on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Bob wrote the Technobeat world music review column for The Beat magazine from 1989 to 2009. He has also written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Miami New Times newspapers.

Bob also hosts a podcast for PetLifeRadio.com called What Were You Thinking? that’s supposedly about “exotic pets” as a general topic, but the show just as often turns into a chronicle of life with his own troublesome critters.

Bob and Linda currently serve the whims of parrots, ducks, geese, parakeets, a rabbit, doves, cats, and hens. They also raise and release orphan songbirds (including woodpeckers) for the Wildlife Rehab Center, Ltd. in Grand Rapids and have the scars to prove it.

Bob Tarte’s website includes photos of Bob, Linda, and the animals, information about Bob’s books, links to Bob’s music review website and pet podcast, Bob’s email address, and several videos of Bob and his animals.

fowlweatherjacket-4enslavedbyducksjacket-4fowlweatherjacket-4enslavedbyducksjacket-4fowlweatherjacket-4enslavedbyducksjacket-4

Pet peeves on parade, part XX: but people really talk that way! revisited, or, what’s up, Doc?

All right, I’ll ‘fess up: last time, I broke one of the cardinal rules of blogging. In Thursday’s post, I blithely signed off with I shall continue to wax poetic on this subject tomorrow. But tomorrow came and went, and so did Saturday. In my defense, I might point out that I stayed away from my keyboard in deference to another cardinal rule of blogging, thou shalt not post whilst feverish. But honestly, with the nastiness of this year’s Seattle Spring Cold (contracted, typically, by rushing out into the elements the nanosecond sunshine breaks through threatening deep-gray cloud cover, madly stripping off the outer layers of one’s clothing and shouting, “Sun! I thought you had forsaken us!”), I might have predicted that tomorrow might see a spike in temperature.

Unless, of course, I was feverish when I wrote the tomorrow bit. Rather than send all of us hurtling down that ethical rabbit hole, I’m just going to tender my apologies and move on.

Or, to be precise, move laterally. I’m taking a short detour from the Short Road Home series — which, as those of you keeping track will recall, was itself a digression from our ongoing Pet Peeves on Parade series — to guide you past a cautionary tale or two. Dropping that increasingly tortured set of compound analogies like the proverbial hot potato, let me simply say that the inspiration for today’s post came, as is so often the case, from the muses stepping lightly into my everyday life to provide you fine people with illustrations of writer-friendly truths.

Thank the nice ladies, please. Where are your manners?

Perhaps I am constitutionally over-eager to put a happy-faced spin on things — my first writing group did not nickname me Pollyanna Karenina for nothing — but I have been thinking for months that one of the many advantages stemming from my long-lingering car crash injuries has been the opportunity (nay, the positive necessity) to have extended conversations with a dizzying array of medical practitioners, insurance company bureaucrats, and folks waiting around listlessly for their dreaded appointments with one or the other. Everyone has a story to tell, and I’ve been quite surprised at how minuscule a display of polite interest will trigger a vivid telling.

Oh, I had expected to encounter an eagerness to swap stories in fellow accident victims — those of you scratching your heads over constructing a pitch for an upcoming conference would do well to spend some time in medical waiting rooms, gleaning summarization technique; the average person-on-crutches can deliver a gripping rendition of how she ended up that way in thirty seconds flat — but you’d be astonished at how readily even the seemingly stodgiest paper-pusher will open up if one asks a few friendly questions. After, of course, getting over his surprise that someone would treat a professional conversation as, well, a conversation.

Admittedly, I am notorious for interviewing people trying to interview me; I’ve seldom walked into my first day on a job in ignorance of what my new boss wanted to be when she grew up, the kind of poetry she wrote in high school, and/or the full details of the time that her beloved terrier, Pepper, got his front right paw caught in that barbed wire fence running along mean Mr. Jones’ alfalfa field. (Mr. Jones’ neighbors, the Heaths, were chronically inept at fencing in their pet pygmy goats, you see.) One never knows where good, fresh material may be found, after all. And having grown up helping authors prepare for interviews and Q&A sessions at book readings, I know from long experience that one of the best ways to be a scintillating interviewee is to learn something about the interviewer.

So on Feverish Friday, after extracting from my chiropractor the exciting story of how his grandfather immigrated by himself from Hungary at age 12, just in time to avoid World War I, and egging on his receptionist as she tried to top his tale with her great-grandparents’ 1880s sea journey from Ireland to Brazil, then around the southernmost tip of South America to San Francisco to establish a community newspaper — isn’t it fascinating how practically every American has at least one forebear with a genuinely harrowing immigration story or a deeply disturbing how-the-federal-troops-displaced-us-from-our-land story? — I hobbled into my next appointment, all set to glean some interesting dialogue.

Why dialogue, you ask? Having been seeing, as I mentioned, an impressive array of practitioners over the last ten months, I had begun to notice certain speech patterns. Doctors, for instance, tend to speak largely in simple declarative statements, with heavy reliance upon the verbs to be and to have, but light on adjectives and adverbs. Frequently, they will lapse into Hollywood narration during examinations, telling the patient what ordinary logic would dictate was self-evident to both parties and asking softball questions to which simple observation might have provided an answer.

By contrast, patients often positively pepper their accounts with descriptors. Although most of their sentences are in the first person singular (“I seem to have misplaced my leg, Doctor.”), they frequently back off their points when faced with medical jargon. They also tend to echo what the doctor has just said to them, as a means of eliciting clarification.

Weren’t expecting that sudden swoop into dialogue-writing theory, were you? I’ll pause a moment, to allow you to whip out your Fun with Craft notebooks.

In the right mindset for some textual analysis now? Excellent. Let’s see what the speech patterns I described above might look like on the manuscript page.

“Let me take a look.” Dr. Ferris poked around her kneecap, nodding whenever she screamed. “Does that hurt?”

“Tremendously,” she whimpered.

That may have been a vague answer, but it apparently deserved a note on her chart. “You have a dislocated knee, Georgette. It is bent at a peculiar angle and must be causing a lot of pain. It will have to be put back into place.”

“What do you mean, back into…”

The wrench knocked her unconscious. When she awoke, her entire leg on fire, a piece of paper was resting on her stomach.

The doctor smiled at her reassuringly. “You will be in pain for a while. I have written you a prescription for painkillers. Take it to a pharmacy and have it filled.”

Hard to imagine that most of these statements came as much of a surprise to Georgette, isn’t it? She may not have the medical background necessary to diagnose a dislocated knee (although the doctor’s dialogue might have been substantially the same if she had, with perhaps a bit more medical jargon tossed in), but surely, she was already aware that the bottom and top halves of her leg were not connected in their habitual manner. Nor, one suspects, was she astonished to hear that she was in pain, or that prescriptions are filled at a pharmacy.

Yet this rings true as examination-room dialogue, does it not, despite an almost complete absence of medical terminology? That would come as a shock to most aspiring novelists writing about this kind of professional interaction: in manuscript submissions, doctors tend to spout medical lingo non-stop, regardless of context.

Stop laughing — it’s true. Whether they are in a hospital or in a bar, at the beach or at a funeral, fictional doctors often sound like they’re giving a lecture to medical students. Similarly, fictional lawyers frequently use terminology appropriate to closing arguments in a murder trial while ordering a meal in a restaurant, fictional professors apparently conduct seminars on Plato at cocktail parties, and fictional generals are incapable of speaking to their toddlers in anything but terse, shouted commands.

Okay, so that last one was a bit of an exaggeration, but you’d be surprised at how often Millicent the agency screener is faced with manuscripts in which professional credentials are established purely through a liberal dose of jargon.

Why is that problematic? Since your garden-variety Millie not only went to college with people who went on to become doctors, lawyers, professors, and the like, but may well have parents or siblings who pursue those avocations, it’s likely to give her pause when characters spout professional-speak in non-professional contexts. To her, those characters are likely to seem either unrealistic — a scientist who spoke nothing but shop talk around non-scientists would have a difficult time socially, after all — or monumentally insecure, because, let’s face it, well-adjusted doctors, lawyers, professors, and/or generals don’t really need to keep reminding bystanders of their standings in their respective fields. Or indeed, to keep reminding them what those fields are.

However, to writers not lucky enough to have spent much time around professionals in the fields about which they are writing — the non-medically-trained writer whose protagonist is a doctor, perhaps, or the non-cook whose mystery takes place in a restaurant — jargon may appear to be the primary (or only) means of demonstrating a character’s credibility as a member of that profession. Dropping some jargon into dialogue is certainly the quickest way to suggest expertise to the non-specialist: as most readers will not be intimately familiar with the actual day-to-day practices of, say, a diamond cutter, including a few well-defined diamond-cutting terms into a gem-handling character’s dialogue during scenes in which s/he is discussing jewelry might add quite a bit of verisimilitude.

Oh, you were expecting a concrete (or perhaps rock-based) example? Ah, but I follow the well-known writing precept write what you know — and its lesser-known but equally important corollary, do not write about what you don’t know — and if you must write about something outside your area of expertise, do a little research, already.

Okay, it’s a mouthful, but it’s fine advice, nevertheless. Because I know next to nothing of diamond-cutting and its lingo, it’s a good idea for me not to attempt a scene where a character’s credibility hangs on her expertise in gemology. It also would not necessarily make the scene ring any truer to those who do know something about the field if I invested all of twenty minutes in Googling the field, lifted four or five key terms, and shoved them willy-nilly into that character’s mouth.

Which is, alas, precisely what aspiring dialogue-constructors tend to do to characters practicing medicine for a living. Let’s invade poor Georgette’s appointment with Dr. Ferris again, to see what the latter might sound like if we added a heaping helping of medical jargon and stirred.

“At first glance, I’d say that this is a moderate case of angulation of the patella.” Dr. Ferris poked around her kneecap, nodding whenever she vocalized a negative response. “You’re a little young for it to be chondromalacia. Does that hurt?”

“Tremendously,” she whimpered.

“Lateral sublexation.” That apparently deserved a note on the chart. “You see, Georgette, if the displacement were in the other direction, we might have to resort to surgery to restore a more desirable Q-angle. As it is, we can work on VMO strength, to reduce the probability of this happening again. In the short term, though, we’re going to need to rebalance the patella’s tracking and more evenly distribute forces.”

“What do you mean, rebalance…”

The wrench knocked her unconscious. When she awoke, her entire leg on fire, a piece of paper was resting on her stomach.

Rather than focusing on whether a doctor might actually say any or all these things — some would get this technical, some wouldn’t — let me ask you: did you actually read every word of the jargon here? Or did you simply skip over most of it, as many readers would have done, assuming that it would be boring, incomprehensible, or both?

While we’re at it, let me ask a follow-up question: if you had not already known that Georgette had dislocated her knee, would this jargon-stuffed second version of the scene have adequately informed you what had happened to her?

For most readers unfamiliar with knee-related medical terminology (and oh, how I wish I were one of them, at this point), it would not. That’s always a danger in a jargon-suffused scene: unless the text takes the time to define the terms, they often just fly right over the reader’s head. Stopping the scene short for clarification, however, can be fatal to pacing.

“At first glance, I’d say that this is a moderate case of angulation of the patella.”

“Angulation?”

“It’s a mistracked kneecap.” Dr. Ferris poked around, nodding whenever she vocalized a negative response. “It must be. You’re a little young for it to be chondromalacia.”

Georgette was afraid to ask what chondromalacia was, just in case she wasn’t too young to get it. She should have asked, because unbeknownst to her, chondromalacia of the patella, the breakdown or softening of the cartilage under the kneecap, is quite common in runners.

A particularly vicious poke returned her attention to the doctor. “Does that hurt?”

“Tremendously,” she whimpered.

Slower, isn’t it? The switch to omniscient exposition (and judgmental omniscient exposition, at that) in the narrative paragraph shifts the focus of the scene from the interaction between the doctor and the patient to the medical information itself. Too bad, really, because the introduction of the jargon raises the interesting possibility of a power struggle between the two: would Georgette demand that Dr. Ferris explain what was going on in terms she could understand, or would she passively accept all of that jargon as unquestionable truth?

Oh, you thought that I was off my conflict-on-every-page kick? Never; passive protagonists are on practically every Millicent’s pet peeve list. Speaking of which, this latest version contained one of her lesser-known triggers. Any guesses?

If you immediately flung your hand into the air and cried, “I know, Anne! Paragraph 4 implied that Georgette had been thinking the entirety of the previous paragraph, rather than just its first sentence,” help yourself to a gold star out of petty cash. Coyly indicating that the protagonist is reading the text along with the reader used to be a more common narrative trick than it is today, probably because it no longer turns up in published YA so much, but that has not reduced the ire the practice tends to engender in professional readers.

“But Anne!” I hear some of you fond of 1970s-style YA narration protest. (You probably also favor the fairy-tale paragraph opening it was then that… , don’t you?) “I didn’t read Paragraph 4 that way at all. I just thought that the narration was cleverly acknowledging the time necessary for Georgette to have felt the fear expressed in the first sentence of Paragraph 3.”

Fair point, old-fashioned narrators, but why bother? Merely showing the thought is sufficient to indicate that it took time for Georgette to think it. Since that would have eaten up only a second or two, showing her so wrapped up in the thought (and, by implication, the sentence that follows, which she did not think) that it requires an external physical stimulus to bring her back to ordinary reality makes her seem a bit scatter-brained, doesn’t it? Combined with the echo of the doctor’s words in her first speech in Paragraph 2, the overall impression is that she quite confused by a relatively straightforward interaction.

Generally speaking, the harder it seems for a character to follow the plot, the less intelligent s/he will seem to the reader. If the distraction had been depicted here as pain-related, it might make sense that someone else would need to remind her to pay attention to what’s going on, but this isn’t a particularly intense thought. Besides, it’s related to what the doctor is doing to her — why would she need to make an effort to think and feel simultaneously?

Speaking of character I.Q. levels, contrary to popular opinion amongst aspiring writers, the use of jargon will not necessarily make a doctor or character in a similar profession appear smarter. In fact, it may well make him seem less articulate: the clichéd fictional male nerd who has trouble speaking to real, live women (although such people tend to study and work beside real, live women every day, TV and movies have conveniently trained us to ignore that fact) is not, after all, a cultural icon for his communication skills. Intelligent people — at least, those who are not trying to impress others with their jargon-mongering — consider their audiences when choosing what to say; deliberately talking above one’s conversational partner’s head is usually indicative of a power trip of some sort.

Or rampant insecurity. Or both.

Yes, really. As a reader — and, perhaps more to the point, as someone who reads manuscripts for a living — if I encountered the last two versions of Dr. Ferris on the page, I would assume that I was supposed to think, “Wow, this doctor is a poor communicator,” rather than, “Wow, this doctor is knowledgeable.” I would assume, too, that the writer had set this up deliberately.

Why? Well, the heavy use of jargon emphasizes the power differential between these two people at the expense of the reader’s comprehension. Indeed, in the last example, Georgette’s reluctance to admit that she does not understand the terms seems to be there almost exclusively to add more conflict to the scene. As the jargon doesn’t seem to serve any other narrative purpose, what else could I possibly conclude?

Oh, you have other ideas? “Yes, I do, Anne,” those of you still slightly irritated by our wrangle over the proper interpretation of Paragraph 4 point out. “Some of us use jargon because, well, that’s the way people in the fields we’re writing about actually speak. There’s no understanding some of ‘em. By reproducing that confusion on the page, we’re merely being realistic.”

Ah, but we’ve discussed this earlier in the series, have we not? Feel free to pull out your hymnals and sing along, long-term readers: just because a real-life person like a fictional character might say something doesn’t mean it will work on the manuscript page. The purpose of written dialogue is not, after all, to provide a transcript of actual speech, but to illustrate character, advance the plot, promote conflict — and, above all, to be entertaining to read.

By virtually everyone on earth’s admission, jargon from a field other than one’s own is not particularly entertaining to hear, much less read. Jargon is, by definition, exclusive: it’s meaningful to only those who know what it means.

That’s why in most published fiction, it’s kept to a minimum: since it’s safe to assume that the majority of readers will not be specialists in the same field as the character in question, merely sneaking in an appropriately avocation-specific term here or there will usually create a stronger impression of expertise than laying on the lingo with a too-generous hand.

And please, just to humor me, would everyone mind laying off the professor-who-can’t-stop-lecturing character for a while? I used to teach Plato, Aristotle, and Confucius at a major university, and I’ve been known to speak like a regular human being.

Case in point: go, Huskies!

See how annoying insider references can be? While that last bit may have brought a gleam of recognition to the eyes of those of you who live in the Pacific Northwest (or who are devoted to college football, women’s basketball, and/or cutting-edge cancer research), I would imagine that it left the rest of the Author! Author! community completely unmoved.

That’s precisely how readers who don’t get inside jokes in manuscripts feel. No matter how trenchant a reference may seem to those who happen to work within a particular industry, unless you plan for your book to be read by only people within that arena, it may not be worth including. At least not at the submission stage, when you know for a fact that your manuscript will need to gain favor with at least three non-specialist readers: Millicent, her boss the agent, and the editor to whom the agent will sell your book.

Oh, scrape your jaws off the floor. Few agents or editors — and, by extension, their screeners and assistants — can afford to specialize in novels or memoirs about a single subject area. The agent of your dreams have represented a book or two in which a doctor was a protagonist, but it’s unlikely that she will sell nothing but books about doctors. Even a nonfiction agent seldom specializes to that extent.

It’s in your manuscript’s strategic best interest, then, for you to presume that virtually any professional who will read your book prior to publication will not be an expert in your book’s subject matter — and thus will not be a native speaker of any jargon your characters might happen to favor. Bear in mind that if Millicent says even once, “Wait — I’ve never seen that term used that way before,” she’s substantially more likely to assume that it’s just a misused word than professional jargon.

Try thinking of jargon like a condiment: used sparingly, it may add some great flavor, but apply it with a too-lavish hand, and it will swamp the main course.

Interestingly, US-based aspiring writers have historically been many, many times more likely to employ the slay-‘em-with-jargon tactic in the dialogue of upper middle-class professional characters than in that of blue-collar workers. On the page, doctors, professors, and other beneficiaries of specialized higher education may flounder to express themselves in a social context, but plumbers, auto mechanics, coal miners, and longshoremen are apparently perfectly comfortable making the transition between shop talk and conversing with their non-specialist kith and kin. Unless Our Hero happens to be dealing with a particularly power-hungry plumber, the mechanic-who-turns-out-to-be-the-killer, or someone else pathologically intent upon establishing dominance in all situations, the writer is unlikely to resort to piling on employment-based jargon so that character can impress a casual acquaintance.

To those of us who happen to have had real-world interactions with pathological plumbers, world domination-seeking appliance repair people, and yes, doctors with poor communication skills, prone to responding to their patients’ input by pulling rank, essentially, this seems like an odd literary omission. Professionals using expertise for power is hardly rare in any field. Rather than taking the time to listen to an objection, consider whether it is valid, and either take steps to ameliorate the situation or explain in a manner comprehensible to the layman why the objection is invalid, some specialists routinely dismiss the non-specialist’s concerns purely on the grounds that a non-specialist could not possibly understand anything.

Best leave it to the professionals, dear. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

According to this logic (at least as it runs in my pretty little head), not only must the non-specialist’s diagnosis of the problem be wrong — her observations of the symptoms must be flawed as well. Since there is by definition no argument the non-specialist can make in response, the professional always wins; the only winning move for the non-specialist is not to play.

Which is why, I suspect, the classic send-up of this situation still rings as true today as it did when it originally aired in 1969. Here it is, for those of you who have somehow managed never to see it before.