 ""Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette" by Vincent Van Gogh |
I just try to let the characters say what they would. I've seen a lot of messed up dialogue where the writer tried to make the dialogue do all the work, but that's not the way people talk most of the time. We leave a lot out. Context is everything. For example, here's one side of a conversation: "A little to the left." "That's it." "Right there." "Oh yeah."
If it's a sex scene, the words mean one thing. But those same words could be two people trying to hang a picture. The person on the receiving end of the words doesn't need more information because they are part of the context. So I try to get my dialogue down to that level—let the characters talk as they would—and then build up the context so the dialogue makes sense to readers.
Did this story end up at the place you expected? What surprised you as you wrote it?
This story was rescued from a much longer story that was an utter failure. So no, it didn't go where I expected. I had the idea of the car crash, which was actually the ending of the longer story, but when starting over I asked, what if he chased them? After that everything was a surprise. I thought he'd catch them and they'd be meek, scared. Instead he nearly gets his head bashed in with a rock. I thought he'd get revenge and feel good about it, but he didn't.
What were you like as a kid? Does it matter at all what you were like when dealing with kids as an adult?
I was into everything. Always in trouble. Tell me something couldn't be done, and I was gonna prove you wrong. A mindset which still dogs me to this day. I don't know if it matters all that much what we were like as kids—although certainly experience gets encoded—because both kids and adults think they are smarter than each other. And they are both right. They're just wrong about what they think the other doesn't know.
What are in the works for you? And how goes it at Storyglossia?
I've recently quit my job and joined a business venture that
provides me more time to focus on literary interests. I'm working on a new cycle of stories and also playing around with some stuff that I'm not sure whether it will be a screenplay or a novel, so maybe it will be both. Issue 14 of Storyglossia is coming out in June, and submissions are now open for the Storyglossia Fiction Prize Contest, which has a deadline of October 1st. $1000 for the winning story.
Time for the first (and perhaps only) SLQ deserted island questionnaire. One CD. One novel. One flash piece. One movie. One very much alive famous person. One very much alive writer. One SLQ editor with the initials R.B.. Go!
One CD: Dirt, Alice In Chains
One novel: Toss-up between Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) by Gunter Grass and Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
One flash piece: "The Hit Man" by T. C. Boyle
One movie: Pulp Fiction
One very much alive famous person: Jim Cramer
One very much alive writer: Edna O'Brien
One SLQ editor with the initials R.B.: Randrown Ball
Read Tough Act.
