That Dangling Part...

...iciple.

As a onetime screenwriter I often blog in dialogue rather than readalogue. People speak far different than the written word and someone who is actually good at it is creating all of those cool monologues our favorite actors beguile us with. Someone who is actually bad at it, let's say, Anne Rice for example, has her characters preening in full frontal prose, not conversation. And you can tell how bad a screenwriter is by the number of times the characters call themselves by name. "John, is that you, John?" "Why yes, Mary, it is I, Mary."

Sometimes it is easier...so as not to confuse the actors...to have them referring to one another's given name CONSTANTLY, but a good director will sort all of that out and delete the phony speechifying. This used to be called synesis...the sometimes art of writing in the way people talk. Novelists can have the devil of the time when converting their works to screenplays, because they've spent months if not years trying to be oh so literary, and from the moment a living character translates print to the spoken word all is lost. Except if you're Anne Rice, that is. Or an English teacher. Like Steven King. Mr. King can actually write and that shines through in passages such as "The gunfighter chased in the man in black across the open plain..."

He can crank that out all day long but let two or more of his characters begin speaking to one another, and ouch. Then it's "Henry? Did you lock the front door, Henry?" "Alice you ask me that every night and every night I say, 'yes, Alice, I locked the front door', Alice."

Of course I'm exaggerating but you get the picture. Or not, depending upon how for-real the characters are. There really ARE people who say "indeed" a lot, too, but they all live in Great Britain. It's laziness that has us tempering our online discourse, so indeeds crop up everywhere because we've become proficient in netspeak and typing is no fun so let's abbreviate whenever possible. I can always tell a good writer when he or she refrains from such common pitfalls, except when overwrought or over tired. Blogs are blogs, though, and some folks post in between computer crashes and the headache of dial-up so offerings CAN be deceiving.

Dear reader? Are you with me, dear reader?

Good. Then let me tell you about how dark and stormy last night was...