Subject: Re: Smoking !
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Dec 09 2000 - 17:30:03 GMT
Tim is, of course, right.
Anyone coming to consciousness only in the past
twenty or thirty years can't imagine how much
of one's life before that went up in smoke.
What one smoked & the way one smoked it
was presumed to say quite a bit about one's
personality: the cool Bogart (& certainly the slinky
Bacall) cigarette; the judicious, academic pipe;
the macho stogey; or in my own case (ten-a-day until
coronorary infarct intervened in 1976) the Viennese,
or Freudian, cigar. You couldn't fully delineate
a character in those days until you'd said something
about his smoking patterns.
But there's something else. When you're writing
about people interacting with each other, especially
through dialogue, you have to watch your timing.
In order to maintain the proper 'flow' you need bits
of 'business' - just as an actor does - to introduce
tensions, postponements, diversions & so on.
Twiddling about with various bits of tobacco
used to be a very useful device for this purpose:
one now sadly missed in these more health conscious days.
She came in & sat on the bed. She came in & sat on the bed.
I looked at her. I looked at her.
She began searching in
her bag for her Camels.
'I'm leaving you,' she said. 'I'm leaving you,' she said.
Scottie B.
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