Chris Dee
- Gender: Female
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- Chris Dee on Biased, Stupid, Opportunists or Lazy? This one we can fix.
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- Chris Dee on Cat-Tales 56: Armchair Detective
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- Chris Dee on Joe Straczynski's "Faith Manages"
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- Chris Dee on Investment Strategy
- Chris Dee on We're all still a bit mad here
- Chris Dee on Blinders
- Chris Dee on The DEE...but then again
- Chris Dee on 10,000 Times
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Latest in Chris Dees Blog
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Writing with feathers
I think it was L. B. Mayer who responded to the glut of big budget costume epics with the phrase "let us have no more movies where they write with feathers." Which brings us to tonight's word: Period.
Writing period is a hard needle to thread. There is a misconception even among some professionals that if we're in the past, everyone speaks with great formality. Some of the early adaptations of the Brother Cadfael novels are downright painful that way:
Monk: I am Brother Petronis, cook to this house. It is from me you will come each day to collect your master's daily fare.
Servant: I know my duties. Today my mistress has a dinner prepared. She begs only a little sage and basil to season her dish.
The same mistake was made for a different reason in HBO's John Adams series. Pretty much all of John and Abigail's dialogue is taken from their letters. The letters are a very famous and illuminating look at an extraordinary... -
14 Trailers
Charlie Wilson's War just came out on DVD. Watching it again after all these months, I was struck by how rich the dialogue is. Something that always ticks me off seeing a movie in the theatre is the (mercifully rare) audience that has been silent for 45 minutes, suddenly laughs because they've finally heard a line from the trailers. It's like they have no ability to judge for themselves if a line is funny or not. But if it's in the trailer, that must be a funny one, here comes the dutiful "Ha ha ha" You just know you're surrounded by the people mentioned previously who absorb advertising, publisher's blurbs, and press releases without ever stopping to consider that this is not an unbiased opinion.
Anyway, back to CWW. Most movies, you can always tell a few lines that are here just for the trailer. A ferociously punchy description of some piece of the plot. In CWW, the thing I realized is they have enough of those to make about 14 different... -
He said/She said
Some of the most damaging writing "tips" out there involve the word "said."
There are two schools, equally wrong if taken as dogma.
The one decrees that "said" is dull and repetitive. "xxx," Bruce said. "xxx," Selina said. "xxx" he said. "xxx" she said. will grind your story to a halt and/or rob your snappy dialogue of it character and emotional punch. This group tends to think being a writer means coming up creative substitutes for the "he/she said" phrase. "xxx" exclaimed the sly vixen. "xxx" replied her handsome spouse.
They're called said-bookisms, and they're painful. I have every sympathy for the editors and publishers out there who have to sift through manuscripts full of those forced, artificial phrases.
The problem is that pain has a way of scrambling our perceptions. Bad, amateur writers do...
