On Real Life Conversations IV: Dialogue, Real Life & Kevin Smith

"Man, there will never be another band as good as Savage Garden, amiright?"

When I was in college, one of the compliments my writing seemed to get a lot was about dialogue. People always seem to think that my writing style is very real, with little stresses in the word which make me feel like the "edgy" character on later seasons of [insert name of current live-in reality show]. This always seemed to come out strongly in the dialogue.

"I read this the way people actually speak."

Great job. So what you're getting at is no one else ever writes dialogue that sounds like two people speaking to each other? That's what you're honestly saying?

I'm not going to even attempt using Kevin Smith as a good example of life-like dialogue. Frankly, he just sounds good. Kevin Smith writes apropos, swear-laden dialogue the way George Lucas wrote techno-babble into Star Wars. Sure, it sounds cool, even fits into the story well without being clichéd, but for the love of Jeff, no one can say those things in daily life. People get beaten up for talking like that on the schoolyard.

I can't talk to you without wanting to express my love for everything you are. And I know this will probably queer our friendship - no pun intended - but I had to say it, because I've never felt this way before, and I don't care. I like who I am because of it. And if bringing this to light means we can't hang out anymore, then that hurts me. But God, I just, I couldn't allow another day to go by without just getting it out there, regardless of the outcome, which by the look on your face is to be the inevitable shoot-down. And, you know, I'll accept that. But I know...I know that some part of you is hesitating for a moment, and if there is a moment of hesitation, then that means you feel something too. All I ask, please, is that you just, you just not dismiss that - and try to dwell in it for just ten seconds. Alyssa, there isn't another soul on this fucking planet who has ever made me half the person I am when I'm with you, and I would risk this friendship for the chance to take it to the next plateau. Because it is there between you and me. You can't deny that. Even if, you know, even if we never talk again after tonight, please know that I'm forever changed because of who you are and what you've meant to me, which - while I do appreciate it - I'd never need a painting of birds bought at a diner to remind me of.
- Holden McNeal (Ben Affleck), Chasing Amy

Who the fuck talks like that? Seriously! Beyond the simple fact no one will ever let you speak that long without interrupting, unless is just waiting for you to be done with it so she can get the fuck out of there, no one speaks that coherently in-the-moment. Sure, maybe you've rehearsed your own speech a dozen times in your head; in real life you blow it. Your heart hurts of you get scared and you fucking blow it. That's why we pause so goddam much when we talk nowadays, either we're afraid to say the words we're thinking or we're afraid that thinking isn't smart enough to say in words.

Even Chasing Amy's tagline says it: "Finally, a comedy that tells it like it feels." Not "how it is," "how it feels." The kind of telling you come up with two days later thinking, "That's what I should've said!"

Would you like to know the secret to creating believable dialogue?

Write it out like your friends would say it.

Regional dialect isn't just for hillbilly characters and wise old bluesmen, it's the diction that makes "Where are you going?" into "Where're you guys headed?" There's something to be said for correcting spelling and grammar in a text, but I live by the rule 'Write it like you'd say it.' (This includes things like the word "you'd.") Here's some dialogue from an actual conversation with an actual person:

Me: You'll just have to get creative with my belated Christmas gift now. Sorry.
Jo: Ugh, you know I'm not creative.
Me: Well, slap some macaroni on a card and staple it to a hooker or something.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is, "you can write quality dialogue by having ridiculous friends." Not sure if that's what I was getting at, but that's where I ended up.

Of Twitter and Autism

This is why there should be living people paid to manage Twitter-bot accounts.

(Which, incidentally, you should pay Dean McGowan to do if you are a local business or celebrity.)

On Unnecessary Advertisements

Is this really a problem people have to deal with? Not having white eye whites?

Possible Target Audiences For Whiter Eyes:

• Stoners
• People with allergies
• Anime characters
  
• Red Coats who are suicidal

And just as a side note: look at those eyes! Where is she looking? It's like she's got one wandering eye and something interesting is happening waaaaay above her but her head is strapped into some kind of Sawian torture device.

Of Psychology and Divorce

My friend and I once had a conversation about divorce and parenthood, chiefly from the perspective of the child. As it stands, the parents of pretty much everyone I was friends with before the age of twelve have gotten divorced. Mine did it when I wasn't even three yet, so I like to think that once again I'm just ahead of the curve when it comes to certain things.

In talking, we noted that a late divorce probably causes more anger on the part of the child but is short-lived. A mature child can eventually deal with it and as an adult even be relatively unscathed. An early divorce, meanwhile, likely has a greater impact on the formation of the child's personality, for example, the way I can't stand loud, angry arguing or baseball.

And somehow, I'm not exactly sure how, we got to talking about the children born to parents who shouldn't have been together in the first place. Granted, my parents were like that, but at least I was planned. Also, I came out awesome.

Some of our friends, however, have already had babies. Others are the product of similar "Oops!" moments for their young parents. Let me say here and now, I have no doubt in my mind that every single one of these individuals has been the light of their parents' lives. These children are the definition of "happy accident." Despite all the possible disadvantages, I have never seen children more loved by their parents.

Still, I wondered what that could do to a child's personality, knowing that, while you are absolutely loved and supported by both parents unconditionally, it is a fact that you were not a planned pregnancy and for at least a few months before and after popping your head into the world (so to speak) were a pretty big inconvenience overall.

I postulated that one of our friends, a child conceived by accident would care very much about people liking them, would go to great lengths to please others and often go quiet as to how much those same actions negatively impacted him/herself. He would be a people-pleaser, but soft spoken. She would be as unobtrusive as possible, willing to stand up for herself when need be but low-key in her self-reliance. There might be resentment towards how the parents interact with each other, and perhaps at an earlier age than most such a child would realize her parents are human and prone to error just as she is. A child could learn from his parent's mistakes and not repeat the behaviors which years later led to their own wonderful birth, achieving great things.
And that's when my friend and I realized we were describing the exact person we had set out to mentally dissect.


Basically, what I'm saying is
a) we conducted a proof by independent verification, and
b) we conducted a colossal waste of time before going into an A&P to buy juice.

Nineteen Profile Pictures That Need To Be Retired

The Four-Square - Have an uninteresting photo? So did Andy Worhol! Until he resized it and made prints side-by-side with different colors! Now you've got a brand new kind of crappy art all your friends will be clamoring over. Bonus points for including another person in the picture, more if it becomes impossible to tell who is who. Final bonus for having 20+ similar shots all in a row.


Anything Sepia - Half of us are barely old enough to remember how to load a roll of film into a non-digital camera, let alone have decades-aged photos lying around. For that matter, those photos weren't designed to be that color, the faded from a better version. To put this on your wall says, "I have neither smarts nor class, but I'm pretty sure this fakes both pretty well." Congratulations, you've cemented yuppie photography as an enduring art form.

The "Up, Up and Away!" (Sideways) - This image can be said to do nothing more than confuse the eye. It's a bird's eye, at an angle, rotated such that gravity is pointing to one of the image's corners. This allows for increasing visual cleavage, decreasing belly rolls, thinning the hips, hiding the jowls, augmenting height and can even be combined with any other digital effect on this list for the most intelligence-insulting images imaginable.


The Baby Picture - We get it, not only were you cute once, but you've just had the stunning realization that you have to grow up and be an adult now, fully culpable for all her own screw-ups. Also, you seem to think your childhood was so much better than your life now, but you know what? You can drive now. You can feed yourself and get up to poop all on your own. You can open a credit card and rent seasons of Firefly off the Netflix. Unless someone close to you in the photo has died and it is the anniversary week of his happening, I don't want to see your dad's skinny man-legs in '80s cutoff shorts.

The Tagger - It's one image, posted 837,000 times by 837,000 people. Half the time it is unsolicited and reposted simply because people who weren't included in the image felt let down and did it all over themselves, slighting the people who slighted them with tags like, "the little slut," or, "the ditzy one."






The Eyeball - "My Best Feature" might be more accurate, but 'The Eyeball' has broader recognition for everyone. A single shot of somebody's sense organ, eye, nose, mouth, ear, even random body parts like a shin bone. Someone snapped a picture they thought would look "artsy," hit soft focus and called it a night. We're tired of looking not at a picture of you, but rather some weird selection of part of you from which we're supposed to infer meaning other than,"I'm apparently friends with an artistic plebeian."

The Beach-Bound Attention Whore - Seriously, this exact posed is utilized in a rather well known internet meme simply titled "ATTENTION WHORE." The very fact that searching for a real-life counterpart to this image through actual Facebook profiles yielded three different women and a dozen or so attempts at a handstand is nothing short of horrifying. This particular image is a particularly striking doppelganger to the original, the only difference being I believe the attention whore in the original was wearing a red bikini. Also, it read, "LOOK AT ME I'M AN ATTENTION WHORE!" But you're all whores.


The Overly Hopeful Celebrity Look-Alike - I don't want anyone to think I'm leaving the men off this list. Frankly, if every redhead on the net wasn't tagging herself in pictures of Scarlett Johansson, men would be the primary perpetrators of this face-crime. I'm light skinned with dark hair and a goatee. Do you see me tagging myself in pictured of Johnny Depp? No. Why? Because I don't fucking look like Johnny Depp. My jaw isn't sharp enough, my hair is too wavy and I refuse to wear black-rimmed glasses and a tiny fedora. (Rimless glasses and a full size, sure.) The point is you do not look like any of the celebrities who are often only famous for being good-looking. Stop it. This is hurting your chances with the ladies by making them think of all the differences between you and more sexified celebs. If you wanna score, through up a picture of Seth Rogan pre-weight loss. Make the ladies realize you are more attractive than someone famous!

Lemon Face Mmmn!! - Lion Face Arrrr! Also called the "superpucker," this does about as much to turn guys off of super-fine ladies as the overachieving celebrity profiles hinder decent looking men. Ladies, you have lovely lips. I can guarantee you that some time this week a guy will want to make kisses with. It's just nature. However, every time you make that ridiculous kissy face in photos we respect you a little less, and not in a good way. We just want you to look nice for us. It's simple of us, but it shows that you take pride in your appearance and that you take pride when we perceive you positively. Moreover, it gives us something to look at in our "alone time."

The "Photoshopped Beyond All Recognition" - Jebus Christy, what the hell were you thinking!? Was this one not even worth trying the Four Square on? Did you just say, "Oh, it's completely out of focus, but I can't bring myself to hit the DELETE key?" You had to save it anyway and play with it so much in Photoshop that it lost all semblance of an image of a human being? Picasso, for Pete's sake, would see one of these and tell you that it resembles only the mad watercolorings of a deranged impressionist grappling with his own hang-ups about breaking classical rules of shape and contour. Also, he'd tell you they weren't very good watercolors.

The Over-Captioned - This is a minor infraction spun out of control. Like lax enforcement of jaywalking or litter laws. First there's the main image, then someone plays with the brightness because it was shot at night at a party. Then it gets forgotten about for months and posted only on a fairly arbitrary month-iversary, tagged with a date, the original time stamp, a title card in curly-cue font and a message of love. Sometimes, the guy will have died of cancer or a car crash and "R.I.P." will be added next to a diminutive of his name, like Rickie of Robby or Johnny. Maybe there'll be glitter.

The Somebody Else's Baby - This profile says, "I have replaced my own desire for having children at a young age with babysitting for the same families for twelve years." Either that or, "My friends and family are all incredibly fertile sluts, but at least I get to play with one of these without spitting it out of my own happy-hole."
Odds are it'll also scare away any guys you are or will potentially be dating. Why? Because our biological clocks tick down to 'power usurped by younger, stronger males.' Not 'baby o'clock.'


The "Money Shot" - It's like Lemon Face gone awry. Why would you do this to yourself, girls? Why are you teasing us with this image and, more importantly, why are you putting twelve of them up at a time for everyone and your grandma to see? I could maybe understand it if you were doing the angry face tongue, or throwing up metal hands at the same time, but no. No, you're always smiling away and rolling out the red carpet to your esophagus like you love it and goddamit you know damned well you never act like you like it when we suggest it so why? Just why?

The Open Invitation/The Open For Business - What did I just get finished explaining to you?!







The Negative - This is either a mediocre picture made increasingly disturbing or a moderately whorey picture made fappable through inversion of color and reduction of the mind's ability to discern all the gross parts of you.





The Digital Polaroid - What? (Often combined with Sepia, Captioning and Beach Whoring.)










High Contrast Harlotry - Turn up that contrast, turn up that tan! Make your bleach-job look blonder, those intimately stained tank tops brighter! Hide your face under some insect-eye Prada sunglasses and a ventilated trucker hat and no one will know that's you showing off her underwear through the bottoms of her cut-off jorts! Sunny day? Even better! Now every item in your room that wasn't already black or white fades demurely into the background to allow for near-total anonymity, perfect for when all those pictures you're posing for and sending to your boyfriend up at school get passed around the internet like a bad case of gonorrheal Windows Vista.

Feet In the Sand - I'm tired of seeing your feet in the sand. I know I've said this a hundred times, yes, women are disproportionately angry at their feet the more attractive they are. It's something she can fixate on because feet really are just plain weird looking things. However, feet do look weird and I don't want to look at them either. There's nothing artsy about feet in the sand. Even the Christians have a poem and associated photograph about footprints in the sand. I think it's called "Footprints in the Sand." This is not a great accomplishment for anyone. More annoyingly, the types of girls who are fine with how their feet look generally have far greater issues with themselves to pick at. I don't need to be seeing your false bravado. I need to be seeing either good beach art or bad art of you at the beach in a bathing suit. Either way, everybody wins.

Your Farmville Photos - The worst offender of all. I really need to see what your farm looks like. Or what you look like on your farm. Or what a frigging pig looks like on your farm. It's not even restricted to Farmville, anymore. Tons of games are adding inane photo albums, which pisses me off. And you know what? This shouldn't even need an explanation. I don't look at pictures of farms in my spare time, and I don't play very many video games. The times I do play video games it's for entertainment and escapism. I don't need to be spending all my free time down at a fake farm growing nothing and earning nothing for all my efforts. If I really wanted to milk a cow, you know what I would do? I'd go out and find a real fucking cow and milk the fucking shit out of it. That cow would be like, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT YEAH, THAT'S A MILKING, ALRIGHT!!!" and then I'd pasteurize the milk myself and drink it with fucking cookies because I earned a real, tangible fucking reward after all that work.

*All images have been utterly stolen without permission (the fun kind of stealing) from people on Facebook and then altered to protect those guilty of these Facebook Infractions. In order to browse photos I had to keep it within a few degrees of separation from my own friends and have already been informed I circuitously snagged one person's photo, but her big sister said she shouldn't mind because it was funny. If I have used your picture and you do not think it was funny, please contact me directly a dzucker1@gmail.com and I shall remove your photo and replace it with something much more offensive.

On Unnecessary Bieber

Really, people?

Do we really need to know what your kid would look like if it was fathered (mothered?) by Justin Bieber?

I was all on board with age progression on Shiloh Jolie-Pitt because, frankly, that kid has Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for parents. It's either going to be some kind of Greco-Roman statuary or the biggest flesh pile of recessive traits since Rodney Dangerfield's mom had to strap a steak around his neck to get the dog to play with him.

I was even alright with this celebrity look-alike craze that comes up every few years. It's fun. I look kind of like some fun people. There are always funny glitches that pop up on humor sites. It's acceptable.

But Bieber? REALLY?

Let me give you a hint. You want to know what your Bieber baby will look like?


It'll look like a fucking baby!

Why? Because Bieber is still a fucking baby.

Look at his cheek bones. Those things haven't grown yet. His eyes are still close together. He doesn't have an Adam's apple, for Christ's sake. This is a boy who obviously has not gone through puberty, hence his ability to sing like a 13th century castrate.

Sweet Jesus, the boy might still have baby teeth and we're popularizing the notion that he can father children? This is exactly the kind of crap that's going to be keeping "16 and Pregnant" on the air for another decade.

Drunken Master and Other Failed Kung-Fu Prodigies and Their Finishing Moves

• Drunken Master - Profuse Vomiting
• Heroin Master - The Shakes
• Weed Master - Sit On the Couch Watching Food Network
• LSD Master - Trip Balls
• Rohypnol Adept - I Forget
• MDMA Master - Rub Up Against Things
  
• Cocaine Sensei - JesusfuckingChristhithiminthefacealreadywhydontchacomeonjustdoitgoddamnitmoveoverIlldoitmyselfheremove!
• The Crystal Meth Monk - Steal Your T.V.