Uphill Writing

I’ve noted that with movies and television–perhaps the most potent trend-setters of the modern world–a concept becomes very clear.  A movie maker creates a story based upon something in life (as do all writers), and then audiences see and experience the story and their lives are changed in some way by that experience.

The people whose lives have been changed–some of them, at least–go on to make new movies or TV shows, write books or essays, or manage to promulgate the ideas in a new way, adding experience, the flavor of imagination, and so on, and the cycle begins again.

Our writing, therefore, is a function of a self-creating cycle.  We write, we read, we experience, we grow, and we write.

The easiest way to see this is to watch how dialogue has changed over the years in writing.

True, writing dialogue to achieve the feel of the vox populi is natural.  We want to communicate with our readers, and what better way than to have our characters (at least) speak in a way that best mirrors that of the reader?

There is a trap in this, however.  And that is forgetting that chat-speak, for example, is a written form, not a spoken form.  We do not misspell words we speak.  We say “you” not “u”, and “your” not “ur”.  We write those short forms, but we do not speak them.  Therefore while our characters my tap out a note in chatspeak, our narrator never will.

Now, before you get all huffy, I’m not trying to “bad mouth” chat-speak.  It is a new and naturally occurring language that has practical value and a huge acceptance.  Speaking against it would be like disagreeing with a river.

The point of all of this is for us to see that the things we say in our stories, are perforce, the things we read or hear in movies and TV.

The amazing thing is that we are trend-followers and trend-setters all at the same time.  We are for the most part, literary puppies chasing our own tails.

May we never catch them.