Writers are Always Writing

(no matter where they are)

People at my former health club often asked me “What are you working on?” or “Are you writing another book?” This happened even if I had just published a book and it was well-covered in the local newspapers and on local radio.

When I said “I’m always working on something,” most people looked bemused. It probably sounded too vague, or maybe they thought it’s an excuse, a cover for the fact that I wasn’t actually writing anything at all.

But it’s the truth. I never stop writing. I don’t need a PC, tablet, legal pad, Post-it notes or anything physical to write. Once I have an idea, it settles into whatever part of my brain has become “Lev Raphael, Inc.” and gets its own independent life. Sometimes it LRI has Casual Fridays or staycations, but that company is busy 24/7 and unlike conscious me, has no problem with spreadsheets or multitasking.

Watching a movie or TV show, I’m not a passive viewer. I rewrite dialogue in my head and sometimes say it out loud (only at home). When I once caught an episode of The White Princess, I winced during a scene in which two characters in Tudor England said to someone whose daughter had died, “I’m sorry for your loss.” That struck me as way too contemporary, and LRI was thinking of ways the show’s writers could have expressed the thought with a somewhat less 21st century feel: “Your loss grieves me” or maybe “I mourn for your loss.”

Dialogue that misses the mark makes me think harder about the dialogue in whatever book, story, or essay I’m working on.

Of course, I enjoy series and films when the dialogue is memorable, and that’s one reason I used to watch the over-the-top series Scandal. It generally showcased characters each episode by giving them moments where they went off and repeated themselves in various ways with different emphases. Sometimes the feel was comic, sometimes threatening or even grotesque, sometimes it was all of that--and for me, almost always entertaining.

On Scandal the character playing Attorney General David Rosen once actually brought a human head in a box to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, asking her to store it briefly in her freezer or fridge. She was incredulous and demanded to know why a powerful, shady character had given it to him. Hapless Rosen said it was because he needed a DNA sample to track down a deceased villain. While the box sat in his lap, he explained:

That man terrifies me, I was not about to argue. He gives me a head, I say thank you for the head. I take the head and I go, right?

I had DVR’d the episode, so I replayed this a few times. His lines made me take mental notes about a character in an extreme situation not responding with panic, but acting almost normally while reporting something completely bizarre. The contrast between the box and how he spoke about it was highly instructive: LRI opened another file.....

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and hundreds of personal essays, short stories, book reviews, blogs, and Substack columns. He’s read from his work in nine different countries.