The Tin Ear
I don't pretend to be immune. Good lord, no. But in the spirit of the fact that consumers, observers, critics and enjoyers do not necessarily have to have the skills they appraise, may I offer a few thoughts on that great disabler of good dialogue writing, The Tin Ear.
Experienced script writers can have it, and experienced actors save them from it. Whenever an actor says, "No, you could never *say* this", it saves any number of script writers from ridicule. I know Jensen and Jared have done so, many times. Something that reads heroically on the page sounds just shit-awful when uttered. The very good writers already hear that beforehand, of course: but I don't count Dabb and Lofflin in my pantheon of 'good' writers.
I downloaded two series recently. One was Copper, set in New York in the late 1800s; one was Ripper Street, ditto. I can't speak to the quality of the stories in comparison; I lasted twenty minutes with Copper. It looked a million dollars - they spent twenty minutes and five bucks on the script.
Here's where I lost it: a female character says to a male, "Promise me you'll be safe." It reeked of every soap I've seen in the last twenty years. "Give me your promise that you will keep safe", or something like it; *yes*, then, I am transported back a hundred and fifty years, then it all makes sense. But I don't care how beautiful the sets and costumes, if characters are speaking like they wandered off the set of the Bald and the Buggered, then it's just not going to work for me as an historical series. That example was simply the last of a series of increasingly tin-eared efforts in the show. There was no sense of era, no sense of language, which is always, more than wallpaper or fashion, *the* indicator of time. People are still sitting in Regency design drawing rooms today, but they're not talking like Regency people, and it's *language* that differentiates them one from another.
Ripper Street, on the other hand, benefits from writers immersed in late nineteenth century primary sources. The language is flowery, on occasion, but also formal and circuitous and laden with Latin derived nouns and adjectives. I don't know how absolutely accurate it is, but I'd bet an effort has been made, and whether right or not it doesn't insult the viewer with 21st century banalities. Even if it's ersatz, it *sounds* right. And, you know: Matty MacFadyen rocks.
Of all the thousands of fanfics I've read, I reckon I've come across a handful of decently written historical fic. But, to be fair, that's comparable with the amount of decently written historical fic that I've read in formally published stories. I liked early Winston Graham; his Poldark stories managed to avoid sentimentality and convey a sense of the time. He was also brilliant at evoking dialect and accent without writing pages of tortured English: I remember him writing a character saying, "Tedn't right. Tedn't proper" and immediately getting a sense of the Cornish accent, without reams of other examples to capture it. (Then he got all weird and sexually frustrated in the later series).
Just try it, if you're writing: try saying the words you've put into your characters' mouths out loud. If it's embarrassing to say, if it shrieks of bullshit, it's probably not what people say in real life. Often we say the most banal things in the times of the most extreme torment. But those banalities are not going to be screen banalities: I don't think people ever say, "Let's get out of here", despite it being the most common line in modern film (or so I've heard). In Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvian eruption, they weren't saying that, or "Thus ends a great city." They were saying, "I've left my bag": "Where's the flagon?"; "Do we - should we do something?"; "I haven't got my shoe". They were saying something utterly commonplace and irreversibly *human*, and when we read that or see that in movies or literature, we recognise it and go, "Yes."
So: Ripper Street good, Copper bloody awful. And Elizabeth Kostova, Queen of the Tin Ear, forever consigned to the flames of hell.
Experienced script writers can have it, and experienced actors save them from it. Whenever an actor says, "No, you could never *say* this", it saves any number of script writers from ridicule. I know Jensen and Jared have done so, many times. Something that reads heroically on the page sounds just shit-awful when uttered. The very good writers already hear that beforehand, of course: but I don't count Dabb and Lofflin in my pantheon of 'good' writers.
I downloaded two series recently. One was Copper, set in New York in the late 1800s; one was Ripper Street, ditto. I can't speak to the quality of the stories in comparison; I lasted twenty minutes with Copper. It looked a million dollars - they spent twenty minutes and five bucks on the script.
Here's where I lost it: a female character says to a male, "Promise me you'll be safe." It reeked of every soap I've seen in the last twenty years. "Give me your promise that you will keep safe", or something like it; *yes*, then, I am transported back a hundred and fifty years, then it all makes sense. But I don't care how beautiful the sets and costumes, if characters are speaking like they wandered off the set of the Bald and the Buggered, then it's just not going to work for me as an historical series. That example was simply the last of a series of increasingly tin-eared efforts in the show. There was no sense of era, no sense of language, which is always, more than wallpaper or fashion, *the* indicator of time. People are still sitting in Regency design drawing rooms today, but they're not talking like Regency people, and it's *language* that differentiates them one from another.
Ripper Street, on the other hand, benefits from writers immersed in late nineteenth century primary sources. The language is flowery, on occasion, but also formal and circuitous and laden with Latin derived nouns and adjectives. I don't know how absolutely accurate it is, but I'd bet an effort has been made, and whether right or not it doesn't insult the viewer with 21st century banalities. Even if it's ersatz, it *sounds* right. And, you know: Matty MacFadyen rocks.
Of all the thousands of fanfics I've read, I reckon I've come across a handful of decently written historical fic. But, to be fair, that's comparable with the amount of decently written historical fic that I've read in formally published stories. I liked early Winston Graham; his Poldark stories managed to avoid sentimentality and convey a sense of the time. He was also brilliant at evoking dialect and accent without writing pages of tortured English: I remember him writing a character saying, "Tedn't right. Tedn't proper" and immediately getting a sense of the Cornish accent, without reams of other examples to capture it. (Then he got all weird and sexually frustrated in the later series).
Just try it, if you're writing: try saying the words you've put into your characters' mouths out loud. If it's embarrassing to say, if it shrieks of bullshit, it's probably not what people say in real life. Often we say the most banal things in the times of the most extreme torment. But those banalities are not going to be screen banalities: I don't think people ever say, "Let's get out of here", despite it being the most common line in modern film (or so I've heard). In Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvian eruption, they weren't saying that, or "Thus ends a great city." They were saying, "I've left my bag": "Where's the flagon?"; "Do we - should we do something?"; "I haven't got my shoe". They were saying something utterly commonplace and irreversibly *human*, and when we read that or see that in movies or literature, we recognise it and go, "Yes."
So: Ripper Street good, Copper bloody awful. And Elizabeth Kostova, Queen of the Tin Ear, forever consigned to the flames of hell.