Child-Like Dialogue For Adult Characters

Real adult: "Well, I guess...  I don't know.  I mean I could get the... how big is this?  It comes with cream, right?  I had some of this at this place in Sarasota a couple years ago, it was great but so rich...  I don't want to get any fatter.  Not that I'm fat, it's just that when you're my age -- okay, so I'm old and fat.  To hell with it.  I'll have one of those.  And a coffee.  You know what, though?  Decaf."
Real kid: "I want pie."

In screenplays, it can be helpful to express decision points in your story -- moments when somebody needs to make a choice -- more like the way a kid thinks than an adult thinks.  It's a lot easier for audiences to follow what's going on.  That's why George W. Bush was so effective at leading the nation into disasters.  "I'm the decider," he would say.  "You're either for us or against us."  He spoke like a child, and his decisions were framed in that way.

Contrast this with Barack Obama, who requires half an hour in order to say "we're supporting the fight for freedom in Libya."  Whether or not one agrees with his policies, nobody can accuse Obama of talking like a kid.

But talking like a kid works.  It's straightforward and clear.  So for fictional purposes, when somebody needs to say "this, not that," or "I'm becoming a nun," or whatever, consider how a kid would say it.

I don't mean adult characters should actually talk like children, of course.  Not just like that.  Not child diction.  But Forrest Gump did pretty well by it.  I just mean keep it simple so the audience knows what's going on.  Quentin Tarantino writes those long, naturalistic speeches -- but they're interstitial, when people are driving or sitting around prior to doing something or after they've made a decision. 

When it's time for a decision, it can be helpful to say it like a kid would: straight out.

Received Wisdom

I've talked about this before: there are certain tips on writing that everybody has heard.  "Kill all your darlings" is one; it's attributed to William Faulkner.  I believe the original sentiment came from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch: I wouldn't remember this except Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch is such a wonderful name.

What does this mean?  Many beginning writers take this advice too much to heart, believing it's an admonition to destroy anything you actually like about your work.  A sort of puritanical casting-out of pleasures.  But that's not the point.  The darlings in this case are those cute little turns of phrase, clever scenes, and bright shiny moments we end up straining mightily to include in a manuscript, often distorting the narrative simply to work them in.  They're the bits that escape rewrite after rewrite because we can't bear to let them go.

Let them go.  But don't scrub out all the useful fun stuff.  Merely remove the fun stuff you're hanging on to, at the expense of the surrounding material, simply because it's fun.

Another classic writers' admonition is 'show, don't tell.'  This leads to a lot of heartbreak.  It's good advice in general -- if you can have something happen right there on the page, do it.  Better than a messenger wandering in with news.  But that's about as far as this particular suggestion ought to go.  People often take it to mean that everything has to happen in the expository mode, without reversion to summarization.  It's not true. 

Often, falling back to summary narration is a mercy on the reader, swiftly conveying transitions in space and time, events secondary to the narrative, and so forth.  If someone sails from Dover to Calais in a schooner, by all means, use the expository mode and tell us all about it.  If they sail back again, summarize.  We don't need to hear the whole thing repeated backwards.  Show, don't tell, if the subject matter is central to your story.  If it's merely business that needs getting out of the way, go ahead and tell.

Here's another old writing rule: character is action.  That is true.  Character is revealed by what people do.  But new writers often take this to mean everybody needs to be active all the time, doing stuff at a frantic pace. 'Action' isn't meant that way in this instance, however.  Think about it this way: how many novels have you read in which there's continuous, frenetic action, with hardly any lifelike characters at all?  The trouble isn't in how much the characters do, but whether their actions are motivated by their particular personalities.

Finally there's this gem: write what you know.

Nonsense.  Rotten, undiluted hogwash.

I'm not even sure where this comes from, unless it's a misappropriation of what high school English teachers say in order to keep their students from handing in essays about topics of which they are entirely ignorant.  If you're writing for keeps, reverse the sentence and you're a lot closer to the truth: know what you write. 

Do your research.  Understand your subject, your characters.  In order to know what I write, I've ridden around with police officers, quizzed doctors, military veterans, and scientists, and learned the rudiments of skills and professions of which I was completely ignorant; I've scouted real-world locations for my stories, visited museums, watched documentaries, read books, and flailed around the internet.  I try to know as much about what I write as possible.  But do I write what I know, in the sense this advice is commonly understood?  Of course not. 

If that was the case, all my stories would be about 40-something guys who design theme parks and write in their spare time.

On Making Notes

Over the years, I have written probably 7,000 pages of notes. These notes are sometimes on yellow legal pads, sometimes in digital form.  Also 3x5 cards, the back of receipts, the margins of magazines, and the back of old scripts.  I use note-writing to warm up for writing fiction, to store ideas, fragments, and observations, and as a place to explore concepts. Along the way, my notes are also a form of diary.  My divorce is outlined almost accidentally in the notes.  Anecdotes, quotations, worries about money, political events, parenthood, history, personal milestones -- anything can turn up in the notes.

The notes are often in essay form.  I find this valuable to do because it's part of the practice of organizing and defining the subject.  Some of my notes read like they're intended for publication; others are long lists of apparently random names, bits of dialogue, and jottings that make no sense out of context.


Here's the peculiar thing about these notes: I almost never look at them again.  They're more like prayers or offerings, in that regard, whispers to my muse.  When I do find something in them, it's because I was looking for some specific thing like a story title from 1997, or whether I ever did anything with that idea about the goat spiders (dont ask).  In the last decade, I've probably returned to my notes fewer than thirty times.

So I just made a rare foray into the notes, looking for something else, and found this little discursion on the topic of cowboy movies.  I post it here for a couple of reasons: first, it represents a very early indication of the thinking that led to my zombie novel Rise Again.  It's down at the bottom: zombies plus western plus The Road Warrior.  At the time, I wanted it to be a television series.  But of course everybody said zombies would never work on TV. 

Second, it's fairly typical of my note-taking approach to ideas.  I'll gather influences and observations, discuss my response to the subject, and then muse about how it influences whatever I'm working on at the time.  The form is similar to the essay, but without any particular need to tie the beginning to the end.  It's a walk through the woods.

I love some westerns, but have no interest in most westerns. Hawks put out some beauties, and Ford; Eastwood’s Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, and his later self-directed projects, are often powerful. Then there’s 'The Wild Bunch,' which in many ways is the epitaph to the genre. There are some scattered examples by others, like 'Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,' 'High Noon,' and the like. Of hundreds of pictures I’d say maybe a dozen are great movies. Then again, how many great comedies are there? So the western isn’t a bad genre.

Among the ones I don’t like are all the ones in which the cavalry kills a bunch of Indians. Racist horseshit, and I can’t get past that to the stories. I can’t bear the singing cowboy genre, or the innumerable Technicolor morality plays with cowboys as knights, duking it out with their fists and shooting bloodlessly, one shot and the bad guy is dead. Then there are all the tedious ones in which ‘modern’ stories took over, including the endless 'Dances With Wolves,' and worse, the ones like ‘Silverado’ that were supposed to be a return to the good old mythical days but finally came off as coke-fueled vanity projects.

But I certainly see there’s life in westerns, and it’s a genre that can be done for not a lot of money, which is always useful. The expensive part is horses. And all those stories, including the evil Indian ones, make for great templates to turn into science fiction (or samurai pictures). Just change the species of the bad guys or make everybody Japanese.

I just randomly wrote a dozen or so pages of a western, trying on the boots as it were. Interesting, because it’s uncomplicated. And the setpieces write themselves. Train robberies, shootouts, ranches and dusty main streets. Characters from a stock ensemble that still work, people with a moral compass they can show you in a matter of moments. The pages I wrote are probably no good at all, but it was interesting.

Here’s what it set in motion, though. Several unconnected thoughts. Zombie TV show = western, for one thing. The zombies are the 'Indians,' in the old-fashioned pre-politically correct sense.  Wagon train, empty places, treachery, breakdown of law and order. Another thing: I would love to write a western like the Sergio Leone ones or Eastwood’s in which the hero has nothing to lose but his life. And during the course of the picture, either he ends up lumbered with people he now can’t lose, and does the Hawks/Road Warrior/Wild Bunch thing of giving up his individuality for the sake of the group—OR he saves the day for somebody and rides into the sunset, as one sees in the Kurosawa kimono-westerns and Leone’s Italian westerns.

Part of the fun is inventing the ultimate antihero. Like Eastwood’s Man With No Name, or the Road Warrior (the Mad Max movies are westerns set in the future). These are guys that have to be blackmailed into helping, but once they do, they kill the shit out of their enemies and win the day, then spit on any reward and ride off.

And westerns allow for enormous latitude in terms of metaphorical content, especially because they are in many ways about growing up, about manhood, about honor and valor and the way powerful individualists are always eaten by the ants eventually (or conversely, how people with great weaknesses and great talents can win by teamwork).

Ironically, the dozen or so pages of western screenplay I wrote are nowhere to be found.  They're probably in the notes, somewhere.  Best place to hide anything.

Getting Started

Write a first paragraph to something.  Don't write any more than that.  Abandon the project after one paragraph.

You might find it cries out for a second paragraph.  If it does, well... okay, write that, too.

If you absolutely MUST write a third paragraph, go ahead.  And maybe another page or two.  But no more!  Stop writing!

Sometimes, telling yourself to stop is the best way to keep going.