storytelling

It looks as though HBO is keeping on track with this newest series. The casting promises great things. Timothy Oliphant --seen here -- is the cynical Seth Bullock, an ex-lawman from Montana (look for a romance or two in this story line), and Keith Carradine projects just the right amount of quiet menace as Wild Bill Hickok. The writing is excellent and the pacing perfect. The cast of characters is, of course, predictable; bad guys and good guys and girls gone bad; the stupid rich man from a big city is duly duped right up front, and his wife (addicted to laudanum) is in a fog about the whole thing. I think she may turn out to be the more interesting character.

Two things which bothered me enough to note: first, enough of pigs. Three books and/or films in the last few years have featured bad guys who toss their victims to the pigs: Hannibal, Snatch (which I loved, so I'll forgive the pigs), and now Deadwood. The second thing is the nature of the cussing. I'm not prudish; no problems here with the way fuck is tossed around on shows like The Wire. Realistic dialogue is not always pleasant. But language evolves, and word taboos evolve, and it's only in the last thirty years that fuck has made its way out of the absolute taboo into the daily use category. That kind of anachronism really bugs me. Next thing you know, somebody will tell Wild Bill that he's being neurotic.

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This link comes by way of Red (she who was pivotal in Rescuing Farscape; mistress of the monkey cabal) and it's an interesting read for a variety of sociological reasons. It is also so well done that I'm going to actually do what I'm being asked to do. It's an open letter from Tim Minear, of genre television fame, about Wonderfalls.

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There's an interesting website called The Nonverbal Dictionary here, which is a great source of ideas when you're trying to describe the way people move when they talk to each other. There's a particularly interesting section on the shoulder-shrug display. In 1872 (we are told) Charles Darwin identified an interrelated set of thirteen body motions, from the head to the toes, used worldwide to show helplessness, resignation, and uncertainty with secondary meanings depending on the nature of the interaction; in courtship a shoulder shrug often indicates friendly intent.

Have a look at the Nonverbal Dictionary, because it's bound to give you a new appreciation for the way you can use body language in your writing.

In the meantime, it's useful to see what other authors have managed to accomplish, through a combination of concrete descriptive details and short-cuts.

'We also have many wounded.' He touched his own bandaged shoulder. 'And no hope of reinforcements.' Julian, Gore Vidal

from Dorothy Dunnett's novels:

The glare in Felix's eyes was replaced by a look of normal exasperation. His shoulders slackened. He said, 'I told you. You shouldn't have jumped in after it.'

A slight movement of the fat man's shoulders appeared to constitute a bow. "Then continue, Madame Katelina, with your lively history," said the vicomte.

'Why?' asked the Dame de Doubtance, and settling herself in her chair, smoothed out her thick skirts with one bezelled claw. 'Dear Francis. Do you wish to ask me something so private?'

Nicholas embraced his knees with one hand and waved the other. "Well, tell him!"

from A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin

"I don't know," Alessandro said, waving his arms in the air as if to indicate confusion. "It just came to me."

He proudly pointed at his own chest. "Not me. Never. I never shed my own blood."

"I didn't say I would." Orfeo cocked his arm and made a fist. "Will you fight?"

"Were you in the army?" Alessandro asked Arturo. Arturo bowed slightly and blinked. When he bobbed up he said, "I was an armorer in Trento."

The scholar touched his glasses. "What did you do before the war?"

I suppose you might look at these bits of body language (and the facial expressions discussed earlier) as the mortar that holds the dialogue together and allows the author to build something (that's a bit of stretch, but I'll work on rephrasing it). It's sometimes possible to have a short run of pure conversation, but it's very difficult to pull that off effectively. Elmore Leonard can do it once in a while, but otherwise it's hard to find good examples.

A useful exercise is to take a scene with dialogue from a favorite novel and strip out everything that isn't between quotation marks.

More tomorrow on this.

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