“Who knows what descriptive passages are?” the famous writer asked our class.
Eager to shine, I put up my hand. “Descriptive passages are prose that describes a character, scene or action in a story.”
“Wrong.” Wrong? How could that be wrong? It was the textbook definition!
I had won a place in this very exclusive seminar by being one of 10 winners in Maryland’s branch of a national high school writing contest. The prize was admission to this weeklong workshop with famous writers. Novelist James M. Cain was the most famous of the bunch, thanks to films based on his novels, including “Mildred Pierce,” “Double Indemnity” and especially “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
I didn’t want to fight with the famous James Cain, but I was the only student there who’d won for both Poetry and Prose, so I was confident in my answer…and this cranky old man was making me mad.
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” he continued, “or how beautifully they are written. Descriptive passages are just something the reader skips over, looking for the next piece of dialogue.”
I wanted to shout: What about the descriptions of whaling in “Moby Dick”? What about “White Fang,” written from the viewpoint of a wolf? What about most of Faulkner? But while I was planning my rebuttal, Cain had moved on.
“Class dismissed! I will see you all at the party tonight.”
Still, his argument stuck in my craw. I discussed it at dinner.
“Well, he does have a point,” said a boy from the Eastern Shore. “I skip all that stuff myself.”
“But how do you know what anybody looks like or what they’re doing, without description?” I demanded. “How do you even know what’s happening in the story?”
“You’re just mad because he tweaked your ego,” said one of the girls.
Back in my room, I decided on the perfect rebuttal: I would write a story with no dialogue at all. And not just any story, but a murder!
I opened my notebook. I created a mother, “a harried, care-worn woman of middle age, whose gray hair flopped exhaustedly over the lines in her face.” And she had a son. He was “not like any of the other boys. He was – well, different. But that didn’t matter to her.” She called him to dinner – just another dinner like the thousands of others she’d served him, all of his life.
But he wouldn’t come. “He was too busy watching the dust motes fly around in the patches of sunlight on his floor.” He had a chair – a favorite, wooden chair: “The sunlight slid like honey along the curves of its arms and back, and the dust motes flew in between, and he couldn’t bear to leave it alone for a second, not even to go eat the dinner that she had flung down on the kitchen table. Trying to come between him and his chair with its shiny dust particles – he’d show Her what was important!”
I wrote on, missing the party and all through the night, until I reached the point where the boy spots the carving knife and realizes it’s his only chance for freedom. At that point I looked up. The sun was peeking around the shades, and it was time for our final class.
I handed my story over to Mr. Cain and waited to hear how I’d failed.
“Please stay for a moment after class,” he said to me. Then he turned to the roomful of my peers. “I must make an announcement,” he told them. “I owe this young lady an apology. Her story has everything required and not one word of dialogue.”
After everyone else had left, Cain cleared his throat. “I wonder if you would like to have lunch with me, sometime next week,” he asked. “You can bring your mother along if you like.”
I was speechless, but eventually turned him down. What could we have talked about anyway? I was young, and knew far better than some old Hollywood geezer what made for a good piece of writing.
Cut to: Years later, I’m a mom, trying and failing to interest my boy in a book. We’d finished Harry Potter, and he turned up his nose at everything else –- “A Wrinkle in Time,” “The Borrowers,” even “Alice in Wonderland.” “Girl stories,” he called them.
Finally, I tried the goriest book I’d ever heard of: “Redwall,” by Brian Jacques, supposedly full of epic battles drenched in blood. But here’s how it began:
“It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose. Mossflower country shimmered gently in a peaceful haze….”
…and before the end of that sentence, my boy was done!
I found my eyes zooming down one page and then another, looking desperately for a bit of dialogue.
That’s when I realized that maybe James Cain knew a thing or two about writing after all. And then I realized how gracious he’d been to a young, fresh upstart like myself. I wanted to thank him or at least write him a “Funny thing about that” note.
But it was far too late. James M. Cain had passed away 27 years before.
That opportunity only rang once.
