After many months away from it, I am back to actively working on The Relentless. It is going well. I jumped back in as if I had never taken a break.
My latest insight has to do with dialogue, which infers that you have at least two people talking. Who you have talking together is very important. It is like at a cocktail party where people tend to gravitate around the most interesting conversations. You need to make sure that the characters you have talking with each other have a chemistry, positive or negative, that makes their conversations interesting beyond just the topic they are talking about.
Belle had a good example. She said it was like the Lost in Space (the original 1965 television series) decision to bring Dr. Smith forward as the real star, and pair him with Will Robinson and the Robot. Everyone else got less screen time. This was due largely to Jonathon Harris, who played Dr. Smith, realizing immediately that his character was so evil that they would have no choice but to kill him off after a few episodes. He began adding humorous dialogue to make him less detestable and less airlock worthy, as he was very experienced playing more light-hearted villains.
Irwin Allen liked what he was doing so much that he let him do something unprecedented. Harris was allowed to write all of the dialogue between himself and the robot and between his character and Will Robinson. Harris wrote all of the alliterative comic insults Dr. Smith used on the robot, such as “bubble headed booby”, “doddering dunderhead”, “rusty Rasputin”, and “ferrous Frankenstein.”
This changed the direction of the show and probably kept it on the air an extra couple of years. The interactions between Will, Smith and the robot are what people best remember about the show (some of it, like the Great Vegetable Rebellion episode, you try hard to forget).
The reason it worked was because Harris made sure that he took advantage of the chemistry between the characters and gave them entertaining dialogue based on those relationships. Because of the established relationships, their dialogue was always interesting and entertaining in a way a conversation between, say, John and Don, never could be. They were both straight men.
There are certainly story reasons to pair up certain characters, but if you can pair them up with another character they have developed a relationship with, that allows for interesting dialogue. It gives you more to work with and the dialogue develops more organically. I have found that once I understand the relationships between the characters, the dialogue almost writes itself.
These relationships between characters develop over the course of writing. I realized that both Wall and Maggie have gone though horrific experiences, and I have them bond over that. Hector bonds with Grace over their shared interest in programming, and he bonds with Barry as a substitute father figure. Maggie and Grace bond over a previous history and their both having been women with a long history in espionage.
Once you figure out which characters are going to become closer, you can put them in situations together where their conversations can be more meaningful than those between characters who are not as close. For me, nailing down the relationships helps the rest of the writing go much easier.
What’s Up with Us
They found our stolen car. Actually, it is now owned by the insurance company (Geico, by the way, and we were more than happy with the way they quickly settled the claim). We went to the tow yard to see if there was anything of ours still in it.
It was a bit of a shock seeing it. Covered in dirt, dust, tree debris, and fingerprint powder, it was barely recognizable. The front end had sustained damage from some type of collision and was missing parts. There was a big dent in the side. The inside was filled with trash. Every crevice was stuffed with cigar and joint remains. The car reeked so badly that you had to take a step back when you opened the door.
There was little left of ours of any value. The most valuable thing to us but also the least valuable to a thief was Belle’s notebook. In it were notes from all of the shows she did this year. She did a rundown on each show: things that killed, things that could be better. That, for some reason, they took out of the car.
The one thing we did retrieve, buried in the bottom of a trunk that was now filled with trash and a few obviously stolen items that were not ours, was her beloved cart that she used for shows. The wheels folded flat and she had not been able to find a replacement.
We have added more lighting to the outside perimeter, and a new alarm system just arrived. I have to set it up today. That will give us sensors on the doors, motion detection, and cameras. Belle nixed my ideas of connecting it to a fog machine so that when triggered, besides and alarm, the room would fill with fog and low wattage lasers would trace across the room with a voice announcing “Warning. Gas is toxic. Breathing it in will result in unconsciousness or death. Avoid direct contact with lasers.” For some reason she thought that was overkill.