I've Been MIA

As some of you might have noticed... I've been a way for a while. I've had some personal stuff going on - nothing life threatening to anyone, including myself - but it's left me disinclined to communicate and write much with anyone or about anything while I process through it. I view today's post on laguage as a god sign (good Freudian there). I will maybe catch up on all the blogs I've meant to write at some point. My main goal once getting my creative legs back under me will to be catching up with all the WRITING I need to do. Need I say more... But fear not, I usually have some down period each year and I still get the books out when I say I will. :)

The Language of Telepathy

I just had an e-mail discussion with my editor about the unlikely topic of whether or not telepathic speech should be in quotes. I had simply assumed it was done one way: it was speech between characters, therefore it was in quotes, but also in italics to indicate it was not normal speech. She is from the position that, though there is no “wrong” way as long as consistency is maintained, telepathic speech should be in italics – like other character thoughts – but not in quotes. I think that’s wrong, because then how does a reader tell between a thought being transmitted (said) to another character, or just a thing they were thinking if they’re the pov character. And then I realized that I couldn’t remember how I had seen it done in any book I had seen with telepathy – of which there have been hundreds since I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. But I couldn’t remember how they had punctuated it – I just remembered they had punctuated it so that it was set apart from normal dialogue in some fashion.

This led to a good deal of musing on the language of writing and two inter-related issues: communication to a reader and communication between people in general. Language developed so that we, as a species, could, concisely and with clarity, communicate the thoughts in our heads in a coherent fashion. Commonly-defined words – as in words that both parties in the communication (not the society at large) understand - give meaning, and grammar gives clarity by providing structure. Grammar is that part of language that allows your listener to know who did what to whom, and when it occurred in relation to the now. When we’re writing it down, punctuation is that thing that allows us to give clarity by mimicking the pauses and intonation of the spoken version of the language. Those pauses, intonation, etc are all part of the language in its spoken form, just as its order (grammar) is, but we only see the symbols when we need to write things down. So, all that stuff that writers have to worry about, like “proper” grammar – relevant to audience and content being conveyed, etc. – and punctuation are just there to allow us to communicate.

It occurred to me that when I write a character that is using telepathic speech, I assume that they are not transmitting every thought in their head: that they are parsing through their thoughts and organizing them into language in order to effectively communicate with their “listener”. If they were communicating in images, they would edit them along the lines of film or comics. Basically, a person using telepathy would screen, bundle, and package their thoughts into a form that would be understandable to their communication recipient. And then tinting those communications with emotion, the same way we use body language and facial expression in the physical world. Obviously, someone could “think” something at someone; but when I think about all the thoughts going through my head in any given second it becomes obvious to me that unless someone is oblivious to most sensory input, extremely challenged mentally, or in a deep state of meditation – lol – doing a second by second system dump of the mind’s content would be useless to a recipient in terms of conveying meaning. Thus, even with mind to mind communication, I feel any being of our species – or who developed language as our species has, would feel compelled to compile the thoughts into the same structure as the language they speak. And then maybe make it like a multimedia presentation, with sound, images, and emotions thrown in. So whereas “normal” spoken speech would be just words on a page, telepathy would allow for Power Point presentations. ROFL – poor telepathy would be an overhead presentation…

Because that’s where I’m coming from on how telepathy would work, I choose to both italicize and quote telepathic dialogue. I view it as dialogue: speech, and not just thoughts. Therefore, by convention, it must be put in quotes. Yet, I view it as non-normal speech, therefore it should be italicized. I also add things like what the character transmitted emotionally or visually along with the speech when necessary: “Now, I don’t think that was a good idea,” he said, tinged with regret, and I saw a brief memory of Clarice standing alone in a doorway.

And it is a “when necessary” issue. The whole point of writing is to convey ideas. As noted above, the whole idea behind grammar and punctuation is to give clarity to language. A writer uses the entire arsenal of their medium to convey meaning: vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, metaphors, dialogue, POV, etc. We carefully choose words, being mindful of our audience’s understanding of them. We order them carefully, and then we punctuate them carefully. We decide who is telling the story. We limit what they can see to provide viewpoints. The whole process is designed to convey meaning. In my book of style, if a reader can’t tell the difference between what the POV character (the narrator) is thinking to himself and what he’s transmitting via telepathy to someone else, then there’s a loss of meaning.

Another writer might take a different stance on the mechanics of telepathy, and thus not feel compelled to make the same choices I do concerning punctuation. If a writer sees telepathy as just thought without need of the construction of language, I could see where they could just italicize. And, within the writing itself – not the story - if another writer does not have characters thinking to themselves in thoughts set apart with italics - the equivalent of internal quotes – then anytime they used italics – if it was indicative of speech – the reader would quickly assume that it was telepathy. (notice how muddy that last sentence got with all them there en dashes… bad writer bad) So, “punctuation” choice becomes merely a consistency issue as long as it gives meaning. The punctuation we’re talking about here is not indicative of the pauses in language associated with conveying speech, but in writing about things that cannot be recorded from the real world because they don’t exist… (And yes, I’m making fun of two different ways of doing punctuation justice for meaning, but perhaps not clarity in this paragraph.)

Aren’t we just a fun complicated species...

The Film List - Take One

Post One of Several - You can see how long these are... sigh.

My Top Ten Favorite Movies – in no particular order after the number one slot. These are not the greatest films of all time from a cinephiles perspective, or the ten films I would consider my guilty favorites, but the ten that I think influenced me the most and I wish I had been party to the creation of just to share in the glory. Essentially, these films match what I want to do with my art – they say things I like to see said in ways I want to watch it being said.

1. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – I spent my formative elementary-age years in the time before VCRs, Cable, Tivo, etc. Back then, you were left with whatever was in the theaters or whatever they broadcast on TV – when they chose to broadcast it. My father worked second shift at the railroad, and he would come home at 11:30 at night and, seeing whatever was on TV, wake us kids up and have us watch it with him. Leone’s The Good The Bad and the Ugly was always deemed by my father as “being important for my education” – more important than anything they could teach me in school. And you know what, he was right.

It wasn’t until I was in film school that I came to understand what an amazing director Sergio Leone was from a thematic and technical standpoint. This film is still gorgeous and brilliant. And it was about that time that I came across an article in a cult film book that talked about the Leone mythology – as showcased in this movie and mirrored in Once Upon A Time In The West. These are movies about gods and demigods, not normal people. The story is a myth set against an odd piece of American history: there really was a Civil War battle in New Mexico. And everything Leone does from framing to music reinforces the story as myth told at a very gritty level. I will probably spend several blog posts on it at some point.

Suffice it to say, it had a deep impact on me and my work – beyond the technical and aesthetic side of it. The reason my father wanted me to watch it, that it would be “good for my education”, was because these guys were “cool.” They were tough, competent, emotionally removed, morally ambiguous: cool. And I could do a number of posts on how that affected my gender identification…

Still, my favorite scene is one that maybe needs to be appreciated by a more sensitive soul. It’s the part where Blondie and Tuco have arrived at a church run by Tuco’s brother. Tuco meets with his brother as they are getting ready to leave, and the brother curses him for becoming a bandit, and Tuco punches him and feels regret over it. Blondie watches this through a hole in the wall. When they climb up in the carriage to leave, Tuco is lying bombastically about how his brother was so happy to see him and begged him not to leave. Blondie nods, and kindly offers Tuco a cigar. He knows, and it is subtly implied he might even feel sympathy for Tuco, but he doesn’t say anything that would embarrass him. He was cool.

2. Mr. & Mrs. Smith – This is my favorite relationship/romance movie. Some people have erroneously compared it to The War of The Roses. I think the films are an inverse of one another. The War of The Roses is a dark comedy where two normal people descend into outrageous fantasy in order to amuse a theater full of estranged married people. It makes fun of marriage, and more importantly divorce and the stupid things people will do out of misunderstanding. It's a bitter nasty little movie. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a romantic adventure comedy where two abnormal people with unreal lives come to terms with the very real and normal aspects of marriage and their abiding love for one another, and thus show normal theatergoers that if they think they have it bad, they know nothing. It's very uplifting and you leave the theater feeling happy.

This movie is one good line after another, but my favorite scene has got to be the chase scene in the mini-van. "I knew I saw your father on Fantasy Island."

I loved that Jolie's character is the more competent assassin, but the colder of the two regarding the marriage. I love how they almost kill each other repeatedly and regret it. The look on Pitt's face when he accidentally shoots a hole in her windshield is priceless. It's that whole she's really going to be pissed now... like he broke her favorite vase or something. I adored how it took the wild and weird and made it accessible and normal. When they're dancing the tango in the restaurant and he asks her, "So why do you think we failed, was it the double lives or all the lying?" I thought it was beautiful the way all of the over the top violence serves as the vehicle for them to work out the way they relate to one another and learn to communicate better as a couple. That's brilliant.

The next to last scene in the home store where they come full circle is gorgeous, and not necessarily from a cinematic standpoint, but from a filmmaking perspective. Them dancing together to the song they first seduced one another with, but in a different way, a way that encompasses all that they are, their strengths and weaknesses and has them presenting themselves to the world as a couple. And the fact that they start that scene in a garden shed ala the end scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – Priceless…

3. Adaptation – My favorite film on writing and the creative process. It is Charlie Kaufman (the screenwriter) at his most brilliant – though I dearly love Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind too. Adaptation is layers upon layers of surreality and speaks volumes about the creative process. It’s based on the process of adapting a real book about real events – and that’s where reality stops. It’s taking screenwriting as a medium to the top of its form in the name of dissecting it. It’s just brilliant.

My second favorite film on writing would be Naked Lunch. The damn scene where he's at the border and the border guard asks him for his occupation and he says, "writer". And the border guard says, "Can you prove that?" And he holds up a pen and says, "I have a writing instrument."

Every time I doubt what I do, I pick up a pen. :)

4. La Femme Nikita – No, not the abysmal American remake (Point of No Return), or the entertaining in its own way USA cable production (La Femme Nikita) – we’re talking the original French film directed by Luc Besson. This is an incredible tale of a woman being made human by the process of trying to turn her into a cold-blooded killer. Essentially the secret agent making machine backfires by curing a sociopath. And the action is tight and believable, and the acting excellent. And it makes an interesting film study when compared with that American remake – in that some of the scenes in the remake are meant to duplicate the original scene by scene, and yet the remake fails to garner the emotional involvement the original did, because it isn’t shot for shot, or lighting set up for lighting set up, or editing choice… You get the idea. Study that if you want to figure out how to make a good movie as opposed to a merely pretty and expensive one. It really does come down to the director’s choices.

More to follow...

Readin' Ritin' & Rithmatic

Hi, I'm back maybe. At least enough to do some posts. I've been readin'! Chabon and Duncan. And I want to do reviews on the books, but not this morning.