# Write the Unsaid Conversation

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 62 · Part 7: Dialogue, exposition, poetry, and dramatic form

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> Let subtext carry what speakers cannot or will not say.

Charles W. Chesnutt’s story “The Wife of His Youth” (*The Atlantic Monthly*, July 1898) begins with Mr. Ryder, head of a club of light-skinned Black people in a Northern town, planning a ball at which he will propose to Mrs. Dixon. Chesnutt spends the whole opening section on the ball and the proposal, so you know what Ryder has at stake before anything touches it. That afternoon, as he rehearses a toast on his porch, a small, very dark old woman comes through the gate. She is looking for her husband, Sam Taylor, who ran away to escape being sold. She has searched for him, and carried his daguerreotype, for twenty-five years.

Ryder, with “an air of kindly patronage,” questions her. Her husband, he says, “may be dead long ago.” She may have passed him “a hundred times during the twenty-five years” without knowing him. He asks to see the picture: “It might help me to remember whether I have seen the original.” He looks “long and intently,” hands it back, and says he knows of no man in town by that name. The picture is a task that lets him keep acting while the real matter sits in the pauses. When she has gone he stands “for a long time before the mirror of his dressing-case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection of his own face.”

Nothing says “I am your husband.” At the ball he puts the question to a room instead. Asked to answer the toast to “The Ladies,” he tells the guests her story and asks them to “suppose” a man who, though “absolutely safe from recognition or discovery,” learns that the wife he left behind is seeking him. The narrator says his voice “seemed rather in the nature of a personal appeal,” and his look rested on Mrs. Dixon. She answers, in tears: “He should have acknowledged her.” Only then does Ryder lead out the old woman and say it plainly: “this is the woman, and I am the man, whose story I have told you.”

Harold Pinter described the same thing from the writer’s side in a 1962 address to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol, later published as “Writing for the Theatre.” There are two silences, he said, one when no word is spoken and one when a torrent of language is being used. The speech we hear is “an indication of that which we don’t hear,” a “necessary avoidance.” Yet a character can say what he means, Pinter added, and when that moment comes it cannot be taken back. Ryder reaches it at the ball. Nora reaches it in Ibsen’s *A Doll’s House*, a play that builds a marriage out of evasions. Early on she eats a macaroon or two and denies it when her husband asks whether she has been nibbling sweets, and the macaroons carry a marriage in which a wife hides a small pleasure from a man who calls her his “little squirrel.” In the last act she sits him down and observes that in eight years they have never had a serious conversation. After three acts of indirection the play turns to plain speech.

Subtext is the gap between what a speaker says and what the speaker is trying to do, with the reader aware of both. The gap is legible only when the reader knows what is at stake (Chesnutt’s opening section makes sure you do), when the speakers have a reason not to say it, whether fear of refusal, pride, etiquette, or an imbalance of power, and when the surface talk gives them something concrete to hold, like the daguerreotype and the toast.

A draft loses it when a character announces the feeling (“I’m angry because you left me.”). It loses it as surely when people mumble and deflect for no reason the reader can feel, so that the evasive talk has nothing underneath, and the reader can’t tell evasion from emptiness. The unsaid seems to work because a conclusion reached on your own is easier to credit than a statement handed over, and reconstructing it draws the reader into the scene.

**Practice.** Choose a scene where two characters circle something. If the scene is farce or a comedy of manners, where blunt statement can be the pleasure, choose another: subtext forced onto such a scene may only sound affected. On a separate sheet, write the single sentence each character is privately trying not to say. Then, in forty minutes, write the scene, about a page, with those sentences and their paraphrases forbidden, and give each speaker a physical task or object to hold: packing, a form, a pot on the stove. Afterward, give the page to a reader who hasn’t seen your sheet and ask what each character wants. If the reader names something close to your forbidden sentence, the subtext works. If the reader says “nothing,” you have hidden too much, and the repair is one fact earlier in the story rather than one more line here.

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