When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “Conversations with Various Time Warner Cable Technical Support Reps, 8 p.m. to 3 a.m.” by Ron Currie, Jr., (published online at Monkeybicycle), we meet a person (I’m going to gender them male in this essay, after the writer) who’s calling his cable service reps in hopes of getting to watch a basketball game. He is immediately thrust into the nonsensicality of unchecked capitalism: Though he has purchased a plan from the cable company, and though his television is perfectly capable of receiving the channel he wants, the company has made some channels impossible to view unless additional services are purchased. This particular challenge is insurmountable for various reasons, from the implacability of the various service reps, to the immutability of corporate insistence upon profiteering at every possible juncture, to the wide-lens view of both the caller and the various service reps having zero power to change anything about the situation. From the start, there is no resolution available, and the caller recognizes this by veering almost instantly into something close to the fantastical, or at the very least the absurd: In his second call, he has given up on the basketball game because of the poor quality provided by the very company that wants to charge him for better quality, and is instead interested in the American education system and whether Time Warner can show Cosmos more often; in the third, he considers using them for therapy, since they’re functionally useless as a television service. By the fourth, nearly six hours after the initial frustration that spurred that first phone call, he’s calling intent on canceling his service, which of course can’t be done online because that would be far too simple. In the fifth, he discovers that canceling will have consequences—perhaps minor, but nonetheless, legalese wins the day—and finally in the sixth, defeated entirely, he capitulates and, rather than cancel he instead re-ups and agrees to pay the extra fee to unlock the channel that had befuddled him originally.
It feels especially important to point out that the fourth, fifth, and sixth section aren’t separate calls; he’s transferred to cancel at the end of section four, and to a supervisor at the end of section five. No, let’s be precise: He is put on hold at the end of each section. These are five-minute conversations, at most, then he’s put on hold for… oh my God, almost an hour each time. I can feel my temperature rising along with him. On hold for an hour, to talk to another rep who tries to convince him not to cancel, to another hour-long hold, to—oh goodness, and in the end, what else is there in the face of implacability but to give up and pay them the extra money? So much for company-as-therapy. And the soul-sucking nature of corporate helpfulness stacks them a few more Benjamins.
The Basics
This story is written entirely in dialogue, and more than simply narrative conversation, it’s presented as a transcript, as a chat, interview-style. There are six scenes, set in a single night, as the title tells us, from 8pm to 3am. The first three are independent calls; the fourth is an attempt to cancel, with scene five and six both being escalated responses from the fourth. There is an immediate conflict presented, with our unnamed caller hoping to figure out how to watch the HD broadcast of a basketball game, but that devolves fairly quickly, as only two calls take place during the game itself. Still, the inciting incident remains the attempt to view the game, and the subsequent discovery of channels he possesses but cannot access: this leads him to call again, and to attempt to cancel, and ultimately that access is what he buys once the corporatocracy has done its work and beaten all rebellion out of him.
And all of this is done with at least one fictional arm tied behind his back; Ron has put himself in a box, has created the restriction that this piece can only be told through transcripted dialogue. Why, and how, does this work?
Dialogue as Basic Elements of Fiction
Every story is composed of the same basic elements: character, plot setting, POV, and language. A piece composed entirely of dialogue may appear visually different from the norm, may scan slightly offbeat, but all of our traditional elements remain intact. On a character level, we watch our narrator struggle and rave at the service rep; we learn his interests, from basketball to Barton Fink; and we can make some assumptions about him from the very fact that this becomes an all-night conversation for him. On a plot level, he calls in with a specific request, is given an option that he refuses, rails against it for a while, and by the end is broken down to such an extent that he accepts the original option and pays more money for the service he thought was already included in his plan. In considering setting, we can place this in America and in a generally now-ish timeframe, which is more specific than some stories get. The POV is a static camera set somewhere inside the phone, capable of listening to conversation and nothing else. And the language certainly exists in its own space: our caller possessing a somewhat elevated casual diction, comfortable talking philosophically and dropping references and cursing at the same time, while the service reps all possess that same dispossessed, uninterested politeness masquerading as syrupy compassion that no one quite believes.
Dialogue as Realism
The inherent challenge of writing dialogue is that it needs to read both naturally and unnaturally. It needs to sound something like the way we talk as humans, while also being responsible for all of the larger elements of story that would normally be skipped in a realistic conversation. That dual responsibility creates so much pressure, and never more so than when it’s the only technical element on the page.
The dialogue is kept natural in its most basic form: We’re not going hyper-academic even when we’re dropping Barton Fink references and arguing over the greatness of America (“I happen to think America is a fine country, sir,” is the most hilariously blasé service-rep comment) or using words like “purview,” but we’re also not pandering by writing verbatim dialogue using speech pauses, cut-offs, or repetitions. There are contractions—it’s amazing how often literature refuses to write dialogue in contractions; once you start looking for it, it’s so distracting—and the occasional curse, and we get the occasional non sequitur that apes the lizard-brain thought process of speech. On a writing level, this is a great story to look at to see how to construct language that sounds natural while, as discussed before, pushing forward character and plot.
But natural-sounding doesn’t necessarily mean perfectly realistic, and as we’re thinking about the purpose and role of dialogue, I think that’s especially important to hold onto. The perfect reality of human speech is often not interesting enough for story; much of the complication and conflict in spoken dialogue can come from inflections, from intonations, from the physical body, and a story like this is intentionally side-stepping all of that. Here, conflict has to come entirely from the language, so we end up getting things like the service reps taking on almost a matronly tone at times (“Language, sir”), but also moments of startling clarity and honesty, such as: “We no longer have any motivation to keep you happy,” or even, when our caller is ruminating on “all the stupidity we’re exposed to these days”: “I wonder if that’s really different from any other time in humanity, sir.” On a strictly realism front, these moments of pontification might bump a little for a reader, but considering the mental hellscape (at least halfway of his own choosing, since he kept calling) that these calls have created for our caller, it makes complete sense to use them as narrative and tonal counterweights rather than as exact analogues for this type of conversation. The calls themselves have become something more like a mental exercise, and have come to something like a landline representation of Plato’s Theory of the Cave: They exist as the wall-sketched outline of a conversation rather than the conversation itself.
Dialogue as Stepping out of Dialogue
Because the structure of this story is so intentionally restrictive, the moments where the story is able to step out of its dialogue take on outsized importance. Perhaps valuable to note: This is an inverse of what can often happen in heavy voice-driven stories, or in pieces with unreliable narrators, where the dialogue is the place we step out of the narrator’s control. Here, the only moment we’re able to escape
It’s a very small opportunity, but Ron uses it. Often, sections are untitled, given a line break or a dinkus and ignored. That’s fine, when you have all the narrative tools at your disposal. Put yourself in a box like this, and you need to use everything left to you. This is both a lesson in conservation, and also a lesson in the value of placing rules and restrictions upon ourselves; the more boxes you have to write out of, the more you learn what options exist to get you out of these self-made jams.
Dialogue as Somewhat Meta
I’m teaching a class on metafiction right now, and one of the things I highlight constantly is the difference between meta as experimental or weird fiction, as it’s often considered, and meta as a device of storytelling. This story is not exactly weird, and it’s not particularly experimental, but it does have a certain figment of meta in its foundation: Because of the choice to exist entirely in dialogue, we as readers are constantly aware of the device at the heart of the story. We’re reading a transcript that is built to be a story; as careful readers, then, we are being shown the bones of the story in front of us.
This is, I’m sure, a distinction mostly of interest to myself, but as a writer, it’s something I think about a lot: Where am I directing the reader’s attention, and what is the benefit of doing so? If I want the reader engaged in the goings-on of the story, folded into the mysteries of a story, that requires different techniques than a piece like this, which is far more focused on the emotional tenor of the moment and the ever-increasing ridiculousness that is getting us there. This piece wants us to see, carefully and clearly, each of the steps that the character is taking, and the thought process therein; all is being opened up to us. This isn’t meta in the classic sense, and it’s not meta in the brain-exploding complications of Danielewski, but it is storytelling interested in the process of the story it’s telling, and that’s worth acknowledging for a second.
Dialogue as Conclusion
Those previous sections show all the different things that dialogue can do for a story. But they don’t quite answer the “why” question that is central to any effort at creating unorthodox fiction. What is the point, what is the purpose, why are we writing in all-dialogue?
For a story like this, I can see a few reasons. One, we’re highlighting the absurdity and frustration of American customer relations, which exist intentionally and entirely on a surface level. Two, the lack of showing any actual people in the piece, and of dehumanizing our narrator to simply being a caller and the reps to their first names, makes a pretty clear point about the starkness and emptiness of these interactions; nothing really matters here but working through the script, going through the motions, and honestly that’s kind of true on both sides.
On a more practical level, going dialogue-only means we have no need to force an external conflict onto the piece. Neither character, the caller nor whoever he may be talking to at any moment, have to be doing anything. Yes, that means we don’t have to describe the trivial motions that can often clog up stories with long conversations, but more importantly it means we don’t have to invent things for them to get up and accomplish around the conversations. If the conversations are enough, as this essay and the existence of this story both posit that they are, then we don’t need to dance around an empty secondary plot just to argue there’s action in what really wants to be a conversational piece.
All in all, this isn’t a technique you’d want to pull out for every story, but it’s absolutely something to have in your bag of tricks. You don’t see it employed often—although Susan Straight has a story in her collection Between Heaven and Here that is all-dialogue for a very different purpose and using a very different technical approach to the dialogue—but there’s a lot to take from Ron’s choice to utilize the strategy.
by Brandon Williams