Dialogue in Film and TV

I like well written dialogue.

I like it even more when the actors put the stress in a sentence where the writer intended them to put it. I suppose this is really the fault of the director for letting the actors get away with mistakes. I frequently find myself articulating the interruptions that I feel the director should have made.

If I can remember several lines from the film, in most cases it means the dialogue was good, though in some unfortunate cases it means it was memorably bad.

I like it more still if I don’t need subtitles to tell what the cast are saying. The ability to enunciate is gradually disappearing, sadly, as acting is replaced by verisimilitude (a fashionable word for mumbling). I am not deaf, but I’d often be happier if the film was in French or Italian because the actors would be forced to enunciate better, and I’d have a better chance of understanding them. As a writer, though not yet of film scripts, sadly, I don’t like my work being mangled in the delivery.

One thing that we lack as writers is the ability to transmit our voices as sound. This means we have to communicate expression, stress, and intonation in other ways. Interestingly, one of the things I learned in preparing my audiobook, was that occasionally things that seem to work in text don’t work when you read aloud. I have great difficulty tolerating text-to-speech software, which I suppose does not help. And I can tolerate grammar software for missed commas, but I don’t want my voice standardised, thank you very much.

So, I think it’s an important part of our job to leave as little room for misunderstanding and confusion as possible.

"The Prophets of Baal" Audiobook Pending

 

I am happy to report that a major exercise to produce an author-narrated audiobook of "The Prophets of Baal" has been completed.

The recording worked out a tad short of nineteen hours for approximately 163,000 words. This averages about 143 words per minute, as delivered to the publisher, which I hope listeners will find a satisfactory storytelling speed.

This week, I have received confirmation that the recording passed quality control and the audiobook received approval for release to retailers. I understand that it may take a couple of weeks to become available, and I will let you know when it does.

In the unlikely event that anyone cannot wait to hear a sample of my reading style, you can always check out the recordings of Yorkshire poetry on my YouTube channel.

What do you say about people who use democratic freedom to end democracy? (Quora)

 

This is an old, and complex, question.

It is hard enough to define democracy. Even supporters of the democratic principle have been known to confuse it with the tyranny of the majority. Such a restricted democracy implies the freedom to agree with the majority but not to dissent from it, which is no true freedom at all.

A true democracy implies that freedoms of thought, speech, belief (religious or other), and so on pertain to all citizens and no-one has the right to constrain such freedoms except at the point where they harm, or impinge severely upon the rights of, another citizen or citizens. By such a criterion there exist today very few, if any, true democracies. 

The key requirement of a true democracy is tolerance. This is not an easy concept to explain, and far less easy to practice. It requires patience, understanding, and an acceptance that one is not necessarily always right. It requires one to overcome assorted logical fallacies, especially including ad hominem, and to concede that criticism may be valid, rather than to resort to bombast and abuse when one runs out of reasons. 

Relatively few people today even possess the capacity for reasoned discussion, as opposed to emotional argument. Many people believe in pursuing those of contrary opinion by vilification, harassment, restraint of trade, destruction of property and even physical injury or worse. These people have little or no respect for democracy, or indeed for any view except their own. Often they are monomaniac and incapable of contextualising their own particular passion. They declare themselves the law, the judge, the jury and the exactors of punishment. In short, these people are intolerant, not tolerant, and lack a fundamental grasp of what it means to live in a democracy. 

The problem with this, as has been pointed out by philosophers going back at least to Plato, is that in a conflict between tolerance and intolerance, the latter always wins. Plato believed that all democracies would end in tyranny, which is the worst form of government, because complete freedom of the individual implies legitimising action to restrict the freedom of others. 

Karl Popper is perhaps the best known of those who have discussed the paradox of tolerance. He concluded that a tolerant society could not tolerate intolerance without planting the seeds of its own destruction. Some have quite rightly argued that this makes a tolerant society intolerant (that is, of intolerance). However, that is why we call it a paradox. 

The problem is always going to be where to draw the line. The secretly intolerant, even those who profess themselves liberal, are always going to want the line drawn fairly tightly around their own point of view. The openly intolerant want to enforce their own point of view on everyone else. 

The best answer is a clear understanding of the concept of harm. Tolerance ends where significant harm to others begins. Significant harm does not include hurt feelings or taking offence. Significant harm does not include getting the worst of a rational argument, or being obliged to assert that rationality does not apply to questions where ones own beliefs are challenged. 

I have described above the extent to which some people today believe they are entitled to take the “right to protest”. Peaceful protest is no longer the norm. Intimidation (by behaviour, chanting, placards etc.) is common. The intolerant arrogate to themselves the right to threaten, damage property, disrupt legitimate activities of others, incite violence and so on. There exist no such rights in a free society, and these people are all ignorantly taking democracy down the road to destruction that Plato predicted. 

But those who exploit the tyranny of the majority in order to restrict the legitimate rights of others by law are no better. The fanciful declaration that anything contradicting fashionable moral orthodoxy is “hate speech” is an egregious example of legislative myopia that also cuts the foundations from under democracy. 

If a citizen today must self-censor the expression of his peaceful views because he fears retaliation, either by thugs or by the authorities (who either themselves practise or have yielded to thuggery), then he is not a citizen of a democracy.

History - An Agreed Fable?

Napoleon, of course, was living at the same time that the Romantic Movement was reinventing history and turning it into something literally fabulous.

In particular, in Scotland at this time, Sir Walter Scott was writing the Waverley Novels, in which assorted historical gangsters such as Rob Roy McGregor were turned into loveable Robin Hood style rogues, and the nasty, brutish and short lives of Highland clansmen became rural idylls with hills thrown in. A fictional 13th century Scotland that had never existed was called retrospectively into being and some Norman robber barons, including a murderer called Robert de Brus, (anglicised to Bruce), were reinvented as patriotic Scots.

At this time also, a Scottish industrialist invented the modern short kilt as a suitable garment for workers in the new factories, the army decided that this invention was a suitable uniform for soldiers and adopted it, and the idea that each clan had woven a different tartan into their great kilts or plaids, (a sort of long blanket that was wrapped around the waist and then up over the shoulder and which doubled as a daytime overcoat and night bedding), was invented as one of the first ever tourist scams. Nobody seemed to notice that the science of chemical dyes had been pushed back a few centuries in history to allow this phenomenon.

Now, this was all great fun, as long as it was only used to boost the economy and fool the Sassenachs. (Which by the way was the original Gaelic Highlander’s term for the Saxon (actually mainly Angle and Briton) lowlanders who lived south of Stirling, not in England), and who wouldn’t have been seen dead in Highland attire.) But like many tellers of tall tales, the romantics talked themselves into believing their own fiction. Today the attire that was never worn even north of the Highland Line in antiquity, or south of the Highland Line at all, has been adopted as the national costume, and even some people who live here think that William “Wallace” (anglicised name) went around in late 18th century clothing.

So, in terms of the politics of his age, Bonaparte was correct in describing history as an agreed fable. But when you teach fables in schools for a couple of centuries, they become accepted truth, and when Hollywood takes those fables and turns them into money making blockbusters that masquerade as the truth, there are, sadly, ramifications in the real world. People believe what they want to believe, don’t they?

Civility in Discourse

 A thing one learns in the course of teaching philosophy is that the first person to lose his temper loses the argument. In former days, it was the norm that disagreement did not require incivility and that eccentric viewpoints did not make you a bad person. (Thanks to Rod Steiger for the unforgettable ad lib in “No Way to Treat a Lady”.)

When I was at Oxford, we went to hear speakers of every viewpoint. You need to hear people first hand because you absolutely cannot rely on reported speech. (A certain authoress in my part of the world has recently discovered afresh that it doesn’t matter what you said, it matters what people say you said.)

The second reason to give everybody a hearing is that you can’t answer arguments that you haven’t heard, and in live debate, you need to be able to anticipate the arguments that will be used against you. People who respond to contrary viewpoints with anger are unable to learn anything at all, and are far more likely to tear society apart than to right perceived wrongs.

Writing for The Market

I sometimes decide, in the course of writing, that an emerging story is turning out to be the sort of story that such and such a publisher might like. That’s fine as long as I like it too.

In the early years of Flame Tree, I thought my views must be pretty much aligned with their senior editor. I have been known, as a result, to write or edit with Flame Tree in mind. I managed five Flame Tree anthologies, and would effectively have disqualified myself from WotF on Flame Tree alone, had I not also been securing a number of other pro publications at the same time, including three with AE. However, latterly, Flame Tree have been bringing in outside editors, so that now I can’t sell them a story to save my life.

This is not the place to digress into politics, but I did once stand for parliament, and I still believe that I stand more or where I always did, it’s just that no political party stands there any more. Not only could I not stand for election these days, I can scarcely find anyone to vote for.

It is always possible that I have taken to writing rubbish and lost the knack that I once had. But it is more likely, I feel, that fashion and conformism are enjoying a popularity boom. I sometimes wonder whether there is a correlation with the number of students taking the sort of creative writing courses that produce the opposite of creative writing.

I don’t know, because I never took a creative writing course, but I do know that in my days at Oxford, university professors would never have clubbed together to pronounce a public “excommunication” of a colleague for “heresy” in the way they did not long ago.

I rather fear that the frontier between education and indoctrination was crossed a long time ago. When I taught philosophy, I always said that I was not concerned with what my students concluded, but with how they concluded it. If they came to me with prejudices and went away with a capacity for reasoned justification, I used to consider my job done.

I’m sorry, but I have no wish to write more of the fashionable stuff that is already churned out to excess. And luckily, I can eat without having to do so. I acknowledge that this makes me fortunate.

I remember that Monet was reduced to painting still more water lilies so he could swap them for a car service, while Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his lifetime. And yes, I have made the pilgrimage to Arles.

Islamophobia, Liberalism and Epistemophobia (from Quora)

There are people who believe that criticising Islam is Islamophobia, but such people are not liberals.

Genuine liberals, following the precepts of J S Mill’s “On Liberty”, believe in free speech. The only constraint on free speech, for Mill, is where it would result in serious harm to an individual other than the speaker. By harm, he did not mean hurt feelings or taking offence. A fortiori, he would not have included the taking of vicarious offence on behalf of someone else. Liberalism recognises no right not to be offended. If it did, then, in many cases, it would be necessary to ban speaking the truth.

Any religion is a belief system, and although the adherents of a religion may hold that their particular belief system embodies the truth, they have absolutely no right to demand that other people should believe or behave likewise.

If a religion, for example, forbids the eating of pork, adherents of that religion have no right to demand that non-adherents should abstain from pork. It may, historically, have been the case that such abstinence was justified by the hygiene standards of the day; it is so no longer, and if the only justification is an outdated religious prohibition, then it would be quite unreasonable to expect non-adherents of that religion to practice it.

Now, in describing the above problem, it might be argued that I have criticised Islam. In fact, I have also criticised Judaism, and indeed any other religion which prohibits the consumption of particular foodstuffs on the basis of historic rules. Does that criticism make me Islamophobic? Obviously not. I am not giving vent to irrational fear or dislike, I am offering rational grounds for no longer pursuing what I consider to be archaic practices. The adherents of a religion do not have to abide by what I think, any more than I have to abide by what they think.
In today’s politically-correct environment, an awful lot of people are prone to demand what they call “respect” for their point of view, but they then fail to reciprocate by displaying respect for the contrary or differing views of others. A common method of displaying that disrespect is to burn flags or damage memorials which are valued, or assumed to be valued, by their opponents. But that way lies vendetta, not reconciliation. That way lies the opposite of respect.

The “…ist” words or “…phobia” words are regularly employed as a device for preventing or ending discussion. However, since those words are intended as pejorative, those who use them appear to be reasoning, “I may criticise or abuse others, but if people criticise me, I will condemn them for being prejudiced”.

In condemning reasoned criticism of religions, we are in danger of allowing the introduction of a blasphemy law by the back door. It is not hateful to criticise. It is not disrespectful to criticise. Indeed, if a religion advocates violence or socially harmful behaviour, it is, at least arguably, a citizen’s duty to criticise it.

We should remember that stifling of dissent is not only a tool of the totalitarian, but also a barrier to progress and innovation. This world is not perfect. Anyone who believes that there is no more truth to be revealed than has already been revealed, or that no research or discoveries should be allowed that might lead people to doubt what they think they know already, is someone whose mind is closed and who does not wish for knowledge.

Such a person is epistemophobic. An irrational fear of knowledge is more of a threat to human progress than is criticism of any religion.

More about Writing Classics

Quality and marketability are not necessarily the same thing. There are at least three types of publisher.

Probably most numerous are the “More of the Same” group, who have established what sells in their market segment and are content to supply their readers with variations on that theme. There are writers who are (perfectly reasonably, since they have to eat) happy to write within these established bounds. I take this group to include the politically correct, who like to praise each other for their conformity.

Then we have the “Anybody Famous” group, who will take (or have ghost-written) works by celebrities, regardless of literary merit, because the bulk of their marketing effort has already been done without expense.

But also we have those who will at least entertain the unusual and the original. Now, these guys need to be brave, because risk precedes reward, and by definition a large proportion of risks won’t pay off. Sad to say, one of the risks is being unable to stay in business. I’ve worked with a number of those, so I do hope I’m not a Jonah. But I do believe that this group is far more likely to make a worthwhile contribution to literature, and that is probably why they do it.

The Long, Slow Decline of the EU

I have commented before on the failings of the Euro as a currency.  I have also mentioned protectionist trading and politicised economics, but in addition, I think if you put together:

1. The capture of the Commission by the big business lobbies,
2. Regulation by process rather than by outcome,
3. The precautionary regulatory principle to stifle innovation,

you have a fairly good recipe for long term relative decline.

Not so much an economy as a museum, still popular, but in the process of becoming a quaint antiquity. A bit like Rome in the 5th century AD, complete with a gradually shrinking empire.

The Basic Principles of Teaching

In a formal classroom or seminar environment, proceed as follows:

1. Tell them what you are going to be telling them.

2. Tell them.

3. Tell them what you have just told them.

It helps, especially with beginner students, if you do not expect a multiplicity of outcomes from a single lesson. Depending on the complexity of the elements concerned, consider it a success if, at the end of the lesson, the class has absorbed three solid points.

Our lessons used to be forty minutes, minus a certain amount of initial disruption as the students arrived and got themselves organised, so that made 36 minutes / (3 x 3) points = 4 minutes per iteration of each point.

That was all subconscious as far as I was concerned. I used to take my cues from class reaction as to how well a point was going over, and extemporise when I felt a point needed more explanation. I learned at a very early stage that the detailed lesson planning required of you in teacher training college would get you precisely nowhere. As the man said, "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy." Or as the other man said, "Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face."

Writing a Classic

 Classics require to be written without fear.

When I was first published professionally, I joined an online forum which had many useful features, but on which you would get demands for censorship as soon as you strayed into controversial territory. (Being English, I had very little idea of how immune to criticism certain issues were in the US). You would also get quite horrendously politically-correct offerings which, to me, were almost unreadable in their sanctimony.

I well remember receiving a criticism on a story I wrote about The Albigensian Crusade, informing me I was being offensive to Catholics. I remember thinking, if modern Catholics are offended by their own church’s history, it’s going to be difficult to write about some subjects at all.

Now, one thing we know about fashionable morality is that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. It also happens that modern identity politics is so destructive of social cohesion that either it, or society, cannot last long. In the former case, no one at all will want to read today’s politically-correct writing in two decades’ time; in the latter case, there’ll be no-one to read it anyway. Already half the population or more does not want to read what well-regarded writers of today are writing because they find it insufferably puritanical or intolerant.

Classics cannot be flavour of this month. Villains need to be nasty. Insoluble problems need to be stressful situations. People need to lose as well as win. The unspeakable needs to be spoken. Otherwise, we should give up writing and take up making blancmange.

What we, as writers, must resist is the temptation to self-censor because we fear the mob. Good writing may be loved by some, hated by others, but it is never bland.