Dialogue and "Maus: A Survivor's Tale"

I want to talk about one assignment which draws upon my experience in my specialty area of fiction writing (and my passion for the comic book genre). In teaching the memoir (which, in my opinion, is the closest related assignment to writing fiction), I decided to elaborate on the discussion of dialogue. When I asked my students how many of them had written with dialogue in the past, every student raised his/her hand. When I asked someone to come forward with ideas about how/why dialogue is used to propel a story and contribute to characterization, I was met with silence. When I asked some specifics about formatting dialogue, I was met with silence. (I get the same thing when I ask students about writing MLA. Everyone has used MLA, but no one can tell me anything about citation. This cracks me up.)

Anyway, so I started out what I like to think of as my "dialogue unit" with a reading from Maus: A Survivor's Tale, a graphic novel written by Art Speigelman. This graphic novel (and I'm very much oversimplifying here) is about the author's father's experience during WWII and the Holocaust, and also about the author's own experience interviewing his father and writing the novel. Needless to say, it is fascinating. With this reading, I establish the power of dialogue as used to propel plot, to enhance characterization, to establish conflict, to create mood, to establish setting/region/time period, etc. I like to point out the specific dialogue that provides information without seeming to provide information, and dialogue with dialect to establish characterization and voice.

After they've read these excerpts, I have an in-class writing exercise. First, I give them the following prompt:

Joe and Beth are friends sitting in a restaurant in New York City. They have been friends for a long time. Joe wants to tell Beth he’s moving away, but is scared she’ll be upset. He’s nervous. Meanwhile, during the conversation, Beth is excitedly telling Joe about her new job as a waitress. She has no idea something’s going on with Joe. Joe interrupts her to tell Beth he’s moving away. Beth reacts.

I then challenge students to write this scene using ONLY dialogue (no narrative passages and no tags) and to try to infuse as much of the setting, exposition, and mood they possible can. This exercise is SO FUN -- students are very creative! After they're done writing, I'll ask students to volunteer their dialogue and then I have two students read it aloud (kind of like a script). After the reading is over, I try to encourage students when I see them attempting characterization; for example, students might try to show Joe is nervous by having him say, "Um" or stutter a bit. I'll praise this technique. I use this exercise in my 215 (creative writing/short story) class, and it's just as effective. This is also a great exercise to get students involved and to interact with each other. After this is over, I ask students to use the same approach to create a scene from their memoir. I found in both semesters that students will usually use this freewrite in their papers.

Now that I've taught ENG 215 for a bit (just this semester), I've come across a number of activities/lessons I'd like to incorporate into ENG 110 with a little tweaking. I've also come across a number of readings I'd like to hand out to my students as substitutions for some I'm using from A Presence of Others. I love working in my own skills/passion/experience in writing/reading fiction in the 110 classroom, but I haven't done it too much quite yet. To be honest, I wanted to familiarize myself with the curriculum first to get a better feel of what elements of the papers could be manipulated. Now that I do feel more confident, I'm excited to see what else I can do to make the class more interesting, not just for me but for my students as well.