One of the joys of writing
fiction, historical or otherwise, is imagining and developing dialogue between
your characters. Dialogue can advance the plot, reveal nuances of your
characters’ personalities and illustrate a situation. Are your characters
happy? Sad? Angry? Worried? Let them tell you through their words.
Dialogue can lurk behind what is
written in historical documents. When my grandfather moved the farmstead and
built the new house clear across the section in 1917, he moved more than the
buildings from the original homestead site. All the garden plants came, too, as
these diary entries prove:
Wednesday, November 14, 1917: dug rhubarb
Monday, November 19, 1917: dug up plants & fruit bushes in old
garden. Planted same in new garden in pm.
Thursday, November 22, 1917: planted raspberries
Did Abe and Addie discuss this
at all? Perhaps the conversation went something like this:
Addie: When are
you planning to move the garden plants over?
Abe: Can’t
right now. We’re too busy building the barn and the new house. It will have to
wait till next spring.
Addie: You’re
not too busy to scrape out that slough now, though.
Abe: That’s
different. We need the pond to collect water for the livestock. We’ll move the
garden come spring
Addie: And next
spring you’ll be too busy with seeding and harrowing. Then come summer, you’ll
be too busy with summerfallowing and breaking new land. Next thing you know, it
will be fall and you’ll be too busy with harvesting. You want raspberry jam and
rhubarb pie, don’t you, so move those plants over now before the snow flies.
Otherwise there’ll be no jam next year.
And so, the garden was moved.
Of course, maybe it didn’t
happen that way at all. Maybe Abe merely announced one morning at breakfast
that he was moving the rhubarb today, and all Addie said was, “Okay,” and went
back to wiping Bert’s nose or punching down the bread dough or doing one of the
thousand and one things that a farmer’s wife had to do back when there was no
electricity and running water.
Now, there’s a boring bit of
dialogue.
*
* *
You can read about the move, and
Addie’s best Christmas present ever, in Chapter 16, “A New House,” in “Our
Bull’s Loose in Town!”: Tales from the Homestead. Here’s my imagined bit of
dialogue (in this case, monologue) that started the move:
August
of ‘16, things came to a head. Bert had been fussing all day; he was teething.
Edith wouldn’t stop running around and eventually she knocked over one of my
freshly cleaned lamp chimneys and broke it. I scraped my knuckles on the wash
board and they were raw and hurting. The dog had upset the basket of freshly
washed clothes, so I had to rinse them off again, which meant another trip to
the barrel and heating up more water on the stove. I was tired, it was hot, the
house was hot, the wind wouldn’t stop blowing, the stove wouldn’t burn
properly, and I was in no fine mood. Abe and Mr. Little came in wanting supper
just as the potatoes boiled over. I lost my temper right proper and gave them
both barrels.
“I’ve
heard that a farm has a big mouth, but why does that mouth feed only one-half
of the farm? Why is it that you can get new machinery and the horses can get
new harnesses and you can find the time to build a new granary, but I have to
put up with a two room house with an old used granary for the summer kitchen
and a cranky old cook stove and water I have to pail out of the barrel.” I
turned to the stove and stabbed the potatoes over and over. “Supper isn’t ready
yet, so just bide your time.”
You're probably right about dialogue can be boring when you're living it.
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