Hi Hamanites!
In my continuing effort to promote liberty through culture, this week’s newsletter is another installment in my series of writing tips for the fiction author. Even if you’re not a fiction writer, these writing tips will be useful in your every day business communication as well so there should be something of value for everyone. For our paid subscribers, you’ll see the full post. If you’ve thought about upgrading and like what you read below, we hope you’d consider a paid membership. Happy writing!
WRITING TIP: CHARLIE “SPOKE” TRUTH
When the film industry made the switch from silent film to "talkies", Charlie Chaplin criticized the move. In a 1931 NY Times review he said, “The silent picture [...] is a universal means of expression. Talking pictures necessarily have a limited field, they are held down to the particular tongues of particular [peoples].” He acknowledged the talking picture as “a valuable addition to the dramatic art regardless of its limitations, but I regard it only as an addition, not as a substitute,” because, he said, “Pantomime lies at the base of any form of drama.”
While there are certainly "silent" works of fiction in which characters never speak, for stories that do include speaking characters, snappy dialogue quickly becomes the focus for the author. They learned early on in some overpriced writing workshop that every character must have their own voice; that dialogue needs to be captivating and interesting; that the speech should bring the character's unique personality traits to life.
Like so much advice, this is a half-truth. The missing component is that life and dialogue do not happen in a vacuum. Even if your whole story was a conversation between two characters, both of which were computers, there would still be the physical world in which they inhabit. Leaving out the physical world divorces the reader from the story because real people live in a real world. Because of this, every act we make, including our speech which is in fact a form of action, only makes sense for us by its related connection to the world.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, offers this insight:
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