Somehow, I don't have any work to do for class right now. Wound up cranking this out fairly quickly as I killed time. I intend to keep working at it, since I'm starting to get an idea of where it might go, but I probably won't post more here. Thought feedback could be useful, though. Fair warning: I've never quite figured out how to handle prose dialogue within my default writing style. I feel like I swap over to writing a script the moment I have characters interacting verbally. Fixing this is my major goal for this project. Okay, story:
As usual, Darren woke up five minutes before his alarm was set to go off. He laid in bed staring at it, hoping desperately that it wouldn’t sound. If it didn’t, it might mean that it was secretly a weekend or a holiday or some other day where he wouldn’t be expected at work instead of just Thursday. Three hundred seconds later it turned out to be Thursday after all. Darren cursed history for not having provided anything worth celebrating on this particular date as he hauled himself out of bed and staggered into another day.
Coffee, of course, was the first order of business. Darren briefly considered the sack of fair-trade beans sitting prominently on the counter next to an overpriced French press as he tried to remember a time before the amount of effort you put into making your coffee was a direct reflection on your coolness. Surely, it wouldn’t be long before old-fashioned convenience was trendy again and he could stop pretending he actually used those ridiculous things. He pulled the actual coffee pot and the can of grounds out from the cupboard by the sink. He preferred the taste to that crap from Guatemala or wherever it came from, and it never asked him to feel guilty over his privileged existence.
Well, relatively privileged.
He hopped into the shower while the coffee brewed and tried to determine just how embarrassed he should be about the night before. The problem wasn’t that he’d had too much to drink. After all, Darren’s budget and conscience conspired to impose a fairly strict limit of four drinks per night under ordinary circumstances. No, the problem was that, in his nervousness, he’d consumed his allotment far too quickly. It had taken him weeks to convince Abbey that it was worth going on a date with a coworker, that they had enough in comon that the potential for paperwork wasn’t enough to merit not giving it a shot. He wasn’t sure if she’d slap him when he inevitably ran into her at the office or if she’d laugh at him. He did know that he’d prefer the slap.
The urge for coffee hit again as soon as he stepped out of the shower. He gulped down one cup before he finished getting dressed and poured the rest of the pot into a travel mug before sauntering down to the next corner. It was a chilly morning, which the weather forecast suggested would set the tone for the rest of the day. Darren fastened another button on his flannel shirt and largely ignored the cold while waiting for his bus to arrive. He saw Roger as he boarded, sat down across from him and took a swig from his mug, knowing full well what was coming next.
“So?” Roger asked.
“‘So,’ what?” Darren was not looking forward to this.
“Dinner. With Abbey. How did it go?”
“Less well than it could have.”
“That’s not saying much. How, particularly, did it stray from the ideal?”
“I may have propositioned her”
“May have?”
“It’s quite possible that the first words out of my mouth after dinner arrived were,” Darren glanced around and lowered both the pitch and volume of his voice, “‘So, we gonna fuck tonight?’” He must not have been quiet enough because an older lady turned around to frown at his choice of words.
“I take it she ordered the steak?” Roger smirked. Darren was not particularly amused.
“It was a joke! I said it in a funny voice and everything!”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t so bad.”
“She made an excuse to duck out as soon as she finished her chicken. Left half of her baked potato right there on the plate.”
Roger paused to choose a new cliche. “Hey, it’s not like she’s that great a catch.”
“Roger, this girl knows the full starting lineups for the Cardinals, both Arizona and St. Louis. Her favorite Coen Brothers movie is The Man Who Wasn’t There. She cried when Gandalf died, and she can play Chopin in her sleep.”
“...That sucks, man.”
“That it does.” Darren took another swig of coffee and questioned his decision not to add just a drop or four of whiskey to it.
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1 comment:
I actually like your dialogue a lot here--although take that with some grains of salt, because my dialogue is usually so shitty that I'd never dream of releasing it from the sub-sub-sub-sub folder of my hard drive within which it's been confined.
Basically, I don't think you need to worry too much about treating dialogue as a script. In fact, the idea of dialogue-as-script can actually be helpful, since it helps us focus on action, not description. As amateur writers, our biggest problem is that we try to tell when we should show--too many adjectives, not enough nouns; too many adverbs, not enough verbs. Pure dialogue (ROGER: "May have?") is as close to pure action as a writer can get, and it's definitely worth experimenting with.
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