On Writing & Storytelling: Getting to Know THAD (Talking Heads Avoidance Device)

Late Evening, Wednesday, September 27, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, all.

I apologize for posting this so late – I usually write my blog entries in the morning, publish sometime around noon, then reserve my afternoons for work on the novel. However, since I am a bit behind my self-imposed schedule for finishing the first draft of Reunion: Coda, I decided to focus on the novel a bit more in the early hours of the day – at least for today – and write this post in the evening.

If you follow this blog regularly, you will recall that after making reasonably good progress with the first 10 chapters of the novel, I ran into difficulties while writing Chapter 11. It took me longer than usual to write the first three scenes of this chapter, and now I’m stuck on Scene Four. Even though the scene – hell, the entire chapter – is a “fleshing out” of a plot point introduced in Reunion: A Story, I can’t get seem to get past a certain point in the story as easily as I thought I would.

Well, today I planned to “write new words” to move Scene Four forward a bit. I had no illusions of writing a complete scene and finishing Chapter 11, but I believed that I’d at least reach the midway point, or maybe even two-thirds of the way point.

Alas. I did not work on Scene Four today. I ended up, instead, editing and revising some of the existing chapters, especially Chapters Nine and 10.

Some of those edits were based on recommendations made by my trusted and talented Beta Reader, while others involved the use of Talking Head Avoidance Device (THAD), which is a creative writing technique to improve scenes with a lot of dialogue between two or more characters.

Here is one of the segments that I revised using some THAD techniques. I removed as many “I said,” “she said” attributions and added details such as body language, on-page action or internal thoughts to avoid the dreaded talking head syndrome that makes dialogue-heavy scenes hard to read:

From Reunion: Coda – Chapter Nine

I blinked, not quite sure how to respond. Well, I could tell you that I think you’re quite possibly the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known, and that I wish we could be more than just singing partners, I thought. I bit my lip to squash the impulse to say something like that.

Reunion: Coda

I was about to grab my backpack and rummage through its contents for my dogeared paperback copy of Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, one of my favorite books about a World War II battle, when I heard the squeaking of the chorus room door swinging slowly open. By now, of course, I was beginning to think Marty had either forgotten about our practice session or, worse, had changed her mind about singing the duet with me. It’s probably just one of the custodians coming to tidy up and turn off the lights, I thought glumly.

Still, I stopped searching for A Bridge Too Far and placed my backpack on the floor again. I looked toward the door…

My heart skipped a beat at the sight of Marty’s chestnut hair. “Hi, Jimmy,” she said presently as she smiled at me. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”

She looked radiantly beautiful, clad in a pair of slightly faded Lady Levi’s jeans, a gray sweatshirt with rainbow-colored stripes above her midriff and a faint outline of a cobra – our school mascot – in the center, and white Keds sneakers. Her long hair was done up in a ponytail, like it usually was on most school days, although I’d seen it cascading down past her shoulders on several occasions, mostly when we sang for our fellow Cobras at our twice-a-year series of concerts. A big brown leather purse hung down from her right shoulder.

“Oh, no,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “Not at all.”

“I would have been here a bit sooner, but I ran into a couple of friends on my way down from sixth-period English with Mrs. DeVargas – “she said apologetically.

“That’s okay, Marty. You don’t need to explain. I’m glad you’re here. We’re just gonna practice singing a song.”

Marty smiled again, and my heart did an Immelmann turn inside my chest cavity. Oh, if you only knew how beautiful you look right now, how much I want to say I love you, I thought but didn’t say.

Marty bit her lip, looking unsure. She glanced at the sheet music, then at me. She seemed to be weighing her words carefully. She cleared her throat and asked, “Did Mrs. Quincy give you a xerox of the score?”

“I’m sorry – what?” I shook my head to clear it of the thoughts that were bubbling up from my subconscious as I realized that this was the first time Marty and I had been alone together since she had auditioned for Mrs. Quincy on the same day I’d joined the Men’s Ensemble back in in January of 1981.

“Did you get a copy of the score for ‘Somewhere’ from Mrs. Quincy?” Marty asked again, her eyebrows knitted in a frown that was half-puzzled, half-annoyed.

“Oh!” I said when my head cleared, and I’d come out of my lovelorn reverie. “Yes, of course she did!” I picked up my backpack, unzipped the smaller compartment on its front, then pulled out the neatly folded photocopy of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere.”

“Great!” Marty said happily as she fished her own smartly folded copy out of her brown purse. It looked, I thought, almost like a Japanese origami.

“Too bad,” I said, “that Mrs. Quincy or Marva aren’t here to play the piano for us. You know that one of them will be our accompanist at the Spring Concert.”

Marty glanced at the Kawai piano, then pointed at herself. “Oh, that’s okay. I can play the piano a bit if you want to practice with the accompaniment.”

 “Wow!” I said, trying – and failing – to hide my thunderstruck surprise. “I didn’t know you played the piano.”

Marty laughed, probably more at the comical look of amazement and unabashed admiration that graced my face than at my efforts to not sound flummoxed by this revelation. “I am no Alicia de Larrocha or Mitsuko Uchida,” she said, amusement in her voice, “but I have taken piano lessons since I was nine. My big sister – she’s at university now, back home in London – is a better player than I’ll ever be. She wants to make a career of it, too.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” I said, a bit glumly. I felt a surge of disappointment, realizing that there was so much I didn’t know about Marty. She had a whole life outside of school, a family, a sister who shared her talent. I wished I could be closer to her, but I felt like I was just a singing partner, not a friend, much less a potential boyfriend.

“Well, we don’t often get to talk like this. In fact, this is the first time we’ve ever spent time alone together, you know,” Marty replied in a gentle, reassuring tone. “I don’t know much about you, either, except that you sing well, and that you’ve always been nice to me.”

I blinked, not quite sure how to respond. Well, I could tell you that I think you’re quite possibly the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known, and that I wish we could be more than just singing partners, I thought. I bit my lip to squash the impulse to say something like that.

“There’s not much to tell about me,” I said instead. “I’m just a history nerd who likes to sing on the side.”

Marty’s hazel eyes twinkled with barely repressed mischief. “So, ‘just a history nerd,’ eh? I’m sure there’s more to you than that. You know what they say: ‘Still waters run deep,’ or something along those lines.”

“Well, maybe I oversimplified things a bit, but I’m nothing special,” I said, looking down at my shoes as if suddenly I needed to know if my shoelaces were untied, or my socks were mismatched. And, as I often did when I thought about Marty or saw her walking past me in the hallway on our way to class, I felt a hot flush rising from the back of my neck up to my cheeks and to the tips of my ears.

“Don’t say that, Jimmy,” Marty admonished me in a quiet but firm voice. “You’re one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, and one of the smartest. Plus, you’re a good singer. You should be in the Advanced Chorus, too. At least, I think you ought to be.”

In Closing

Well, it’s late evening here, and I have been working on my novel for quite a while, so I’ll take my leave of you here. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the sunny side of things.