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San Francisco, 2:31 PM
Sun Nov 8
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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George V. Higgins - The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Carl Hiaasen - Tourist Season
Thomas Perry - The Butcher's Boy, Metzger's Dog
and particularly in 'lowlife', 'outsider', crime capers:
James Grady - Six Days of the Condor
Donald E. Westlake - The Hot Rock
Jay Cronley - Quick Change, Good Vibes
I don't think it's a coincidence that nearly all of those were made into very good films (particularly in the early Seventies).
120 minutes is just right to learn to love a 'voice' for what it is and not long enough to learn to loath it for what it isn't. #writing
11/04/09
Does it destroy the flow of the dialogue when the reader has to figure out written pronunciations of a particular accent? and are you better off just using word choice and sentence length and all the other tricks you describe above? #writing
11/04/09
On the other hand, I am reading a novel where the protagonist is from Liverpool, and he's back in his hometown after escaping to Oxford many years before. The author stresses some of the Liverpool-specific pronunciation because it grates on the protagonist. He's lost the ear for the accent that used to be his own, and it sounds strange to him. It works. But it's small and almost an aside as the character rides the bus, so it's a very light touch.
Everything in moderation, I guess. #writing
11/04/09
The question is: how much is just enough? I guess another way to handle it is to simply tell the reader there is an accent at the beginning of the story and then not to worry about it. #writing
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What enrages me is author who use the same accent for every character that speak a language, even if they come from different places (a French-speaker from Quebec, one from Paris and one from Lyon is not going to speak the same way at all. Just like a New-Yorker, a Londonian and a Texan doesn't speak the same way) #writing
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But artificial languages are like accents in that regard--you can't use too many strange words, or the reader gets overwhelmed, and perhaps annoyed. #writing
11/04/09
But it's funny you brought up Joss Whedon. I was just thinking about a particular Buffy episode where Buffy and Faith switch bodies. And so you have Sarah Michelle Gellar speaking with Faith's idiosyncrasies, and Eliza Dushku talking like Buffy...
The whole body switch trope has been done a lot on TV and it usually sucks, but between Whedon's writing and Dushku & Gellar's acting ability, when Buffy & Faith switched voices (and mannerisms) it was completely, awesomely believable. #writing
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It's the second half of a two part episode.
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You should have seen my copy of Dune... there was a post-it on like every third page. #writing
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Robert B. Parker
Elmore Leonard
Raymond Chandler
James Ellroy
Martin Cruz Smith
that I could recommend as examples. Of those, Elmore Leonard writes dialog that I'm tempted to (and sometimes do) read aloud, it's so interesting. #writing
11/04/09
Not that I could write fiction if my life depended on it, but I long to write a science fiction western taking place in 1890. Or a circa 1950 noir about a private detective that foils an alien invasion plot. Or... you get the idea: mashups of favorite genres. #writing
11/04/09
People had very different mindsets in the past. Heck, 50 or 60 years ago beating your spouse was seen as a the basis for high-larious jokes. Go back further in some cultures and infanticide was a wise economic move. (Yeah, this stuff still goes on today in some regions) Even enlightened and sympathetic characters should not have present-day attitudes.
This is getting off Charlie's topic but It's been on my mind lately. Sorry. #writing
11/04/09
A friend of mine (who had three kids of his own) remarked it was an unusually accurate portrayal compared to other books that kind of ignored the realities of stuff like that.
I also recall reading the reason wealthy Victorians had lots of servants was (besides what the Game Theory folks would call "signaling" their wealth) was that the typical large household was tremendously labor intensive to maintain.
In his Westerns (e.g. ALL THE PRETTY HORSES) Cormac McCarthy has a lot of great detail about the care and feeding of the characters' horses.
Takes a good writer though to present that level of detail in their novels, whether SF, Victorian, Western, etc. without making it sound like a lot of exposition. Makes for good world building, though. #writing
11/04/09
Some of these things I can learn, some are just out of my reach because I lack the means to travel or because the culture / skill / detail in question is lost to history.
It's that whole "write what you know" thing. A lot of it you can get from books, or community college classes, but that only goes so far.
I'm often amazed at how much a given writer has had to learn just to write believably. #writing
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I think the other thing about research is that it's often expensive as well as time consuming. So, hopefully if you're planning to travel to Europe to research a new book, you're already successful enough to afford it, and disciplined enough not to let the trip stop you from writing.
That's the great thing about it, though. You can take a laptop or even a paper notebook just about anywhere, and write while you're there. #writing
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Tha play is The Rivals. #writing
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Note to self: must read Sheridan. #writing
11/04/09
There is one modern master of dialogue: Elmore Leonard. Just read his stuff and you should be okay. #writing
11/04/09
#@! #writing
11/04/09
The story started off with a raid on an O'Neill space habitat with half a dozen super soldiers out of hundreds zooming around in powered armor and rocket packs. Sounds bitchin' right, how could that go wrong?
Well, with all these super soldiers screaming or growling variations of "They got Wallinsky!"
"He was expendable, we're all expendable!!"
"We gotta get to the airlock!!!"
"GET TO THA CHOPPAH!!!"
Often without dialog attribution, none of this namby-pamby "He said", "Smith growled", "Wallinsky screamed". I had no idea who was who and it really didn't seem to matter--Attack of the Cookie-Cutter Commandos. The soldiers find the President and his guards who they are trying to rescue and-- they spoke just like that too.
"Mr. President we've got to get you to tha choppa!!"
"I'm not the President, I'm Wallinsky!"
"Really, I thought you bought it at the last airlock!?!"
"Really? You're right! Who the Hell am I?!?!!!"
"It doesn't matter, we're all expendable!! I'm the President, GET ME TO THA CHOPPA!!!!"
This went on for 300 pages. I could not finish the book. Awful stuff. #writing
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Cheap jokes aside, I had a writing workshop instructor who said he'd go to the mall or some other public place and sit down with a off walkman (this was a while ago) and basically pretend to listen to the headphones, but really eavesdropping, b/c it was like having camouflage and people would say all kinds of things when they didn't think anyone could hear.
Personally, I'm not even sure the headphones were even necessary, but it's an interesting way to get dialog. #writing
11/04/09
"The Art of Self Invention"
Studying humans, observing their manners, movements, modes of speech. All methods actors use when becoming a new character. #writing
11/04/09
What you learn from this exercise is that most people talk like fucking idiots. I'm not exaggerating--you tend to ignore how many "ums" and "likes" and hideous gaping silences and misused words and incomplete sentences you use in regular conversation. We kind of just blot all that stupid bullshit out, and our brains knit what we're hearing into something coherent.
Something, by the way, that often has no bearing at all on what the other person was saying, which is something else you learn from overhearing conversations in coffee shops.
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God, I can't wait to get a cat. #writing
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You haven't lived 'till you've transcribed a thirty minute four-party conversation timeline fashion so that you can go back and analyze the interruptions.
But it does give you a great ear for, you know, conversation. #writing
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But what it's really highlighted for me is the extent to which everyone fills in the blanks and, basically, rejects everyone else's reality and substitutes their own. When we ask these kids a question, more often than not their answer isn't for the question that was actually asked, but an alternate version of that question, which they formulate in their own head, that more closely meshes to what they actually want to talk about, or a belief they already have. So you get Q and A dialogues where neither party is actually truly responding to the other, they're just slotting their own pre-existing inner monologue into what passes for a conversation. #writing