I'm prone to occasional bouts of 'Middle Class Panic'. I've worked extremely hard to break out of my middle class bubble and sometimes, when I feel I'm backsliding, I will find myself in the grip of a strong compulsion to do or say something more or less inappropriate, profane, insane or disgusting. This usually occurs when I find myself talking about property values, matching food to wine or being judgemental about people in track pants.
There were occasional breaks in the drinking for work.
Which should make it easy to understand the degree of trepidation with which I approached the idea of attending a weekend writers' retreat. It's difficult to think of anything more middle class - the only thing I can come up with is those yoga camps people go on, but I'm not really sure I can factor in the absolutely unthinkable when making comparisons.
Me possibly saying something important, but probably not.
Why did I even contemplate going, you may be asking, if I viewed the event with such profound dread? Well, the single most compelling factor was that this retreat would be in the company of the Northern Beaches Writers' Group. This sterling group of people has railroaded me into various projects and undertakings, all of which have been successful, surprising and full of positive learning experiences. Rather like a Disney film, only not so derivative, crap or twee.
So, braced to endure conversations about child-rearing, mortgage brokers, arthouse cinema and a host of other topics in which I have absolutely no interest, I girded my loins, trained my liver and set out grimly determined to get as much drinking and writing done as possible. As it turned out, I was far from being the only person to have had this idea.
Krisand Kylie, living proof that I do not work as hard as I should.
We arrived at our resort some time in the middle of Friday afternoon.
Sorry - that last sentence gave me Middle Class Panic and I had to throw a chair across the room. Anyway, we arrived, nosed around our living spaces and checked all the cupboards and drawers to make sure no previous guest had left a stash of booze by mistake. Well, I assume I wasn't the only one. It was after this that events took a surprising turn.
Me, feeling the effects of unremitting booze, Guy not doing so, and Kylie being unimpressed.
We had arranged to meet at one of the cabins for reasons I did not fully understand. I soon discovered, however, that we were working on a revision and clean-up of ourWrite a Book in a Day entry, The Time of the Jade Spider. We went straight to work. Our fearless leader, Zena the Zealous, moderated a highly productive discussion, which was nowhere near as bad as it sounds because it was also a very well catered (read 'lubricated') discussion as well.
Some idiot with a guitar.
We then proceeded to get rowdily, manically and loquaciously drunk. Well, I say 'we'. A guitar was produced and strangled, songs were sung, pacts of eternal friendship made and, in my case, balconies leapt from. The following morning, after having discovered the resort's critical error of providing me with bacon in all you can eat form, we got down to work. And work we did. Sure, there was all the usual stuff - raging out over internet problems, staring at a blank page becoming convinced that I've completely wasted my life, breaking my resolution not to be, yet again, everybody's IT support person, but these minor problems were as nothing compared to what was actually achieved.
Zena Shapter, group leader, ego wrangler and selfie taker extraordinaire.
Writing was done, knowledge was shared, enormous quantities of alcohol were consumed, sure - but all this stuff is just stuff. The main thing - the thing which made the whole thing worthwhile - was the fact that the weekend re-affirmed my belief in the idea of writing as being the sole most important thing in my life. Spending time with like-minded (and not so like-minded) writers is nice, but the main effect was far more important. More than anything else, the benefit was in regaining a sense of the possible. Seeing how other writers work and hearing about their forays into the harsh and indifferent world of publishing made the whole undertaking of writing seem significantly less nebulous and futile.
A rare picture of me actually listening to someone else.
Are writing retreats worth it? Well, this one was, and I'd highly recommend the experience to any writer, at any stage of their journey. Assuming, of course, that they're able to collect a group of people as excellent as the one I've stumbled into.
One question which is left unanswered by far too many authors is, "Why am I writing this story?"
While a certain amount of arrogance is required to undertake creative writing at all, it needs to be remembered that the fact of a story is not the reason for its being. If we start with the staggeringly egoistic belief that anything we might have to say will be interesting to other people, we're at ops state normal for a writer. This, however, is as far as it should be allowed to go.
Many authors seem to hold the strange belief that people read stories because they like stories. But narrative is not, and never has been, sufficient in and of itself. Story-telling is fundamental to the human experience as a form of communication. This necessarily means that something should be communicated. It is this burden - this payload of thought, concept or emotion - which is the sole justification for a story's existence.
It's a bit like the way children will recount the events of the day. On a superficial level, everything that's required to make a story is there: a sequence of events, characters, setting, etc., but these tales are never what you might call compelling. In fact, if we remove the eye (and ear) of love, it can be seen that these recounts are mind-bendingly tedious. This isn't because of a child's linguistic and technical limitations, it's because the tale being told doesn't actually mean anything. The child is merely practising the skill of recalling and recounting, and has no message to deliver.
Another example is when one of your friends falls victim to the delusion that their dreams are interesting to other people. Listening to a recount of a dream is excruciatingly boring, and this is largely because the thing which makes a dream compelling - the unique internality of the dream experience - is rarely, if ever, conveyed. There's a strong possibility, in fact, that it can't be. So we have a sequence of events which should be interesting but, shorn of meaning, becomes nothing more than a tedious catalogue of irritatingly irrelevant events.
As writers, it's vital that we ask ourselves what we want to say. If your story doesn't have a theme or a message then I'm sorry, but it's not a story. If you're not attempting to capture and convey an idea, a feeling, a way of thinking or being - in short, if you're not using your story to communicate something, then you probably shouldn't bother writing it. Because if you don't have a reason to write your story, no-one else will have a reason to read it.
I am becoming increasingly annoyed at this kind of silliness.
Apparently, the solution to all our problems is to simply call things by different names.
Want to fight Islamic State? Call it 'Daesh'. Concerned about continuing discrimination against disabled people? Then make sure you call them 'differently able' and all will be well. It seems I can't go a day without at least five mass circulation publications insisting that I change what I call something, and vaguely implying that this will help in some way. You know the kind of thing I mean: "Why we shouldn't call it [insert controversial topic here] any more."
It's not like this is new. I remember a brief period in the '90s when I was solemnly informed by everybody that we were obliterating words like 'waitress', 'actress' and 'murderess', and that by doing so we would forever destroy the last dying basis for the patriarchal society. I call this kind of thinking 'bullshit'.
Don't get me wrong - words do matter. The thing is, though, they don't matter because they're words, they matter because of what they mean. Let's take the word 'spastic' as an example. I once had the privilege of working in a centre designed to help people with cerebral palsy get out and about and connect with the world. Part of my job was helping those of our clients who wished to create a Facebook account. My first client was a fifty something sex maniac, closet-genius and dalek lookalike. Let's call him Joe. Joe couldn't really use his hands or voice, so he took to Facebook like a duck to water. Almost literally, because in order to type he had to kind of peck at the keyboard with the pointer attached to his head. This pointer is kind of why he reminded me of a Dalek. I've never seen anyone more pleased than he was when I told him about this.
Anyway, Joe decided to fill in his profile information by writing a brief bio of himself. I clearly remember the first sentence. It was: "My name is Joe and I am a spastic". My first response was confusion, followed very quickly by gales of laughter as I noticed him giving me a rather beady-eyed look to see what kind of reaction he'd provoked. We then had one of our many very slow chats (Joe spoke by indicating letters on a pad with his pointer - it's a bit like interpreting a Ouija board message from a highly intelligent and amusing ghost). What was revealed was that as far as Joe was concerned, 'spastic' was a medical term, and one with which he had grown up. Then, of course, the frequent use of the word 'spastic' as a playground insult caused some troupe of policy wonks to declare that we should no longer use it. At all. Not in it's medical, perjorative, or any other sense.
While I understand the thinking behind this, it does strike me as vaguely reminiscent of 'Newspeak'. Orwell posits that the control of language is the control of thought (I'm sure someone else does too, but Wikipedia's taking ages to load), and as far as I can see, we're living in an era where language is more tightly controlled than at any other time. A very telling example of this is the fact that I have a fourteen year old student who manifests signs of deep discomfort every time he has to use the word 'Jew' when describing the character Shylock, who is, in fact, a Jew. So deeply has it been drummed into him that this generally innocuous word is somehow taboo that he can't comfortably use it in any sense.
I find this deeply worrying. We've always needed to be jealously protective of our few and precious freedoms, and it seems that freedom of thought and speech might be quietly slipping away under the radar. Don't get me wrong - I'm not pulling a Clint Eastwood here. I think much of what he's said recently is the result of long pent-up bad temper, and possibly age-induced psychosis. I'm not sure how much serious consideration his comments really merit. But I do think that when it comes to our approach to hate speech and bigotry, we've got it wrong. It's not words we should be addressing, but meaning.
We've created an environment where many people feel compelled to censor themselves, but we have utterly failed to address the roots of the underlying prejudices which make this necessary. This means that there are some people out there (you know who you are, Ms Hanson) from whom 'Person of Asian Descent' sounds worse than 'Gook' or 'Zipperhead'. And the annoying thing is that I can't call them out on it, because they've conformed to the new convention of the acceptable which stifles racist language, but ignores racist intent. And then there's the further consideration that if you silence someone for long enough, they'll eventually explode. Sometimes literally.
I think the solution, like so many other solutions, lies in us just growing the hell up. As fun as it is, we need to stop this childish game of he said/she said, stop being hysterical about names and get back to the core business of liberalism, which is defending and promoting the real-world equality of rights of every human regardless of shape, colour, creed or gender. If we take care of that, the semantic equality should just naturally follow.
Chekhov's gun is one of my favourite literary principles. For those who don't know, it's basically the rule that any significant element of a story should be directly relevant to that story. So, if there's an interesting salad fork on the table, that fork had better end up protruding from someone's eye, or being valued at a million dollars on Antiques Roadshow, thus saving the protagonist from want. What it shouldn't do is sit there as a kind of cul de sac of description and attention, and then never appear again. Or even worse, appear repeatedly for no reason at all.
On first reading, this idea might seem a bit extreme. What about all my beautiful sunsets, my complex political realities, or my character creations 'too good' to leave out? Well, to put it simply: nobody cares. If your sole object in describing a sunset is to perfectly capture its crimson glory as it bleeds across the flat plain of the horizon, what you should do is go away and write a poem about it. If your grand vision of a dystopian society is so compelling you can't help but describe it in mind-numbing detail for no reason at all, this is why essays were invented. You get the idea.
This is not to say that there is no place in any story for world-building or beautifully descriptive writing - far from it - but discipline must be maintained in all things. If the primary goal is to tell a story, then that story must be told. If the beauty of the sunset affects the mind-state of your characters, inspiring them to change the way they act or view the world, then by all means pick up a thesaurus and go nuts. If the way your world works directly impacts on the actions or options of your characters, then yes, explain away.
A picture speaks a thousand words, but the reverse is not necessarily true.
If you've written something which does not serve the story, then it's got to be cut. It does not matter in the slightest just how hauntingly beautiful, or incisively intelligent the passage is - it must be excised. By all means put it in your 'spare parts' box for later use, but that's about all it's going to be good for.
It might seem that I'm being a little insistent on this point, but there's a good reason for this. By far the easiest thing to lose sight of, when writing a story, is that the theme or message we're trying to convey, while important, is not the story itself. And while technical skill may be important, it is emphatically not in and of itself the reason why people read us. Look at Dan Brown, for instance. The man can barely put a sentence together, and that just doesn't matter next to the fact that he can cobble together a compelling tale. We're story tellers, with an absolute requirement to effectively and entertainingly tell stories.
There's a practical aspect as well. As an editor, when I see this kind of foolishness in a manuscript I know, deep in my bones, exactly what kind of author I have to deal with. A rank amateur, precious, resistant to advice, and an overall nightmare. If that's the way an editor reacts, you can be certain that publishers and agents will see it the same way. It's not too hard, I think, to extrapolate the likely effect on their decision making when it comes to considering your work for publication.
Any time we find ourselves looking at a piece of writing and wondering whether or not to cut it, we should ask the following. Are we thinking of keeping it because of its quality rather than its relevance? Are we thinking of keeping it because it iterates the stunning depth of our personal vision of the world? Or are we perhaps thinking of keeping it because it's good writing and we think readers will appreciate that for its own sake? None of these are good reasons to keep a piece of writing in a story. They are all aspects of the delusion that the primary goal of storytelling is expression and realisation of the self. It's not - that's what group therapy, poetry and Facebook are for. Pick up Chekhov's gun and obliterate, with extreme prejudice, any such notions and the story elements that go with them. I guarantee you that the end product will be well worth the sacrifice.
I'm still idealistic about the internet. I still think, even with all that we've seen and done so far, that it can be a tremendous force for good, giving voice to the voiceless, enriching minds and providing a pathway to mutual understanding, the first and most fundamental pre-requisite of peaceful co-existence.
Of course, not being completely insane, I'm well aware of the fact that it does not currently do any of these things very well. The temptation here is go on a tremendous rant, excoriating the epic, biblical scale of stupidity which is displayed, minute by minute, in any corner of the net you might wish to name. The rational thing to do, however, is to ask why this is so.
Why is the internet so often such a disappointing place? Why has public conversation been so infantilised that most political discussion is indistinguishable from a screaming match between nine year olds? What's happened to feminism? And, most incomprehensibly, why is Donald Trump?
One idea which has been in the public domain for quite some time now is the 'echo chamber' effect. We filter our online experience through algorithms which determine our preferences and prejudices such that it forms a kind of feedback loop - we believe the world is a certain way, and social media sites reinforce this belief by showing us the world according to our conception of it. This means that without breaking the red tube/blue tube effect, we are continually being provided with 'evidence' that the world is, in fact, the way we think it is.
When it comes to the curation of personal interactions, I have absolutely no problem with this. We have so little control over other aspects of our lives, there is an imperative need to control the tenor of what little time we have that actually belongs to us. If your idea of Nirvana involves cat pictures and pseudo-spiritual platitudes delivered by meme, all I have to say to that is: "fill your boots." The problem arises when we then decide to filter news, politics and broader world philosophies through this same set of algorithms.
What this creates is an instant mythologisation of the real world. Without serious effort, it is actually impossible to qualify and compare sources or to access points of view which diverge from our own. This means that every time something happens, each segment of the political spectrum creates, in real time, its own instant mnemo-narrative of the event.
In the past, it used to take years for an historical incident to be warped, mythologised and then co-opted to support a world-view or a broader idea. These days, however, it happens instantaneously. A plane crashes in the Middle East and it's immediately hard evidence of Islamists destroying the world or the CIA protecting its alien overlords or, more generally, of the non-Western world being just a little more crap than our own.
And by the time the investigators and other more responsible brokers of information have caught up, it's too late. The mnemo-narrative has been created, and yet another bulwark constructed between individual ideologies and the pluralism of actual reality.
It is fascinating to watch this happening with the distasteful phenomenon that is Donald Trump. I watch the red tube and the blue tube, the right and the left, and what I see is mutual incomprehension.
On the one hand, we have a mnemo-narrative of Trump as hero of the downtrodden and the excluded. A man for the people, who is radically against the world as it is currently configured - a configuration, I might add, which has routinely excluded, exploited and disadvantaged the unskilled, the under-educated and the poor. The red tube is full of praise for Trump's attacks on 'political correctness' and, more broadly, on what it sees as the 'intellectual elite' and its contempt for the 'ordinary man in the street'.
Over on the blue tube, we see the representatives of this 'elite' being simply unable to understand what is being said and how any message so fundamentally stupid can be accepted by anyone. The mnemo-narrative being created here is of Trump as an atavistic fascist, using populist trickery to drag the world kicking and screaming into the 1930's. His followers must therefore consist only of fascists, racists and the cognitively impaired. Careful interrogation and refutation of his spoken arguments is seen as being the kryptonite best suited for the fight against the Trump phenomenon.
In a way, this is stupider than anything Trump has ever said. One of the major discontents being channeled by Trump is the feeling that the 'elites' think 'ordinary people' are stupid. To attempt to discredit this by calling Trump supporters out for stupidity is a wonderful example of the kind of idiocy possible in a world viewed entirely through partisan filters.
The simple fact of the matter is that what he says doesn't matter. Populism is about being popular, and one look at the world as it is now and has always been should be enough to tell us that popularity has absolutely nothing to do with competence, sanity, rationality or any other objective measure. Populism is all about speaking the language of emotion, and this is a language that does not so much form sentences as it uses tropes. Apparently nonsensical slogans become pregnant with multiple shades of meaning, and the aggregate of these slogans comes to represent the totality of one's discontent with the world. This happens all across the political spectrum, which makes it even more incredible that politicos are confused by Trump.
We need to get un-confused, and very quickly. If we keep concentrating on irrelevancies like words, policies and arguments, and fail to address the very real, very intense emotions behind the rise of Trump, we risk alienating enough of the population to result in his election.
People often ask me for advice on how to write better dialogue, and I usually fob them off with vague platitudes about listening to people and reading Elmore Leonard. This is because I'd prefer them to chalk up a hit on this blog.
There's no getting around it - writing good dialogue is difficult and complicated. The way I see most people go about it, while making perfect sense on a logical level, is unlikely to be effective. This is because some of the fundamental aspects of writing dialogue are a bit counter-intuitive. Today I intend to tackle three of the basic ones: preserving the feel of the spoken word, didactic function and the minefield which is dialect.
"JUST WRITE LIKE THEY TALK" DOESN'T WORK
The Watergate transcripts are practically unreadable.
In one of my many previous jobs, I had to sit in a small room with headphones in and type up the transcript of a court proceeding. As I was listening to the defendant droning on about safety ropes and danger signs, I realised that I was actually editing his speech as I went. Don't get me wrong - I wasn't coming over all Grammar Nazi on the poor bloke - it was simply that his perfectly sound speech patterns, translated directly into prose, were pretty well unintelligible.
Of course, I can't show you what I mean by publishing the transcript I was working on, but Steven Pinker, in his excellent book: The Language Instinct, gives us a really good example using the transcripts of the Watergate recordings.
NIXON: The grand jury thing has its, uh uh uh - view of this they might, uh. Suppose we have a grand jury proceeding. Would that, would that, what would that do to the Ervin thing? Would it go right ahead anyway?
Herein lies the problem - so much of face to face dialogue is non-verbal that a strict rendition of the words actually used will generally become a collection of nonsensical sentence fragments. The writer's job, then, is to convert the spoken word into clear prose which is still suggestive of natural speech.
I think that this mainly comes down to cadence. If we look at Shakespeare or Eminem or any other great poet of human speech, we find that one of the most important factors is meter. This suggests that the rhythm of a passage of dialogue is at least as important as the content. Paying closer attention to cadence can go a long way to making dialogue sound natural without compromising meaning. The excerpt above, for example, could be rendered this way:
"This Grand Jury thing - suppose we have a Grand Jury? What do you think that would that do to the Ervin thing? Do you think it'd go right ahead anyway?"
As we can see, cleaning up the section where Nixon is floundering for a phrase makes it more comprehensible, and the use of a dash indicates his hesitation without confusing the reader with fragmentary verbiage. Additionally, we indicate the hesitant cadence of his questioning by adding words to slow down the rhythm of the questions. Adding "What do you think" and "Do you think" preserves the tentative feel of "would that, would that, what would that do", without bombarding the reader with weirdness.
To sum this point up - it's a kind of transliteration: a way of encoding rhythm, sense and feel without compromising meaning.
SHUT UP AND TELL THE STORY, BUT NOT TOO MUCH
"Let me explain to you, at great length, a bunch of stuff you should already know."
Unless you're Elmore Leonard, it's pretty safe to say that all dialogue performs a didactic function of some kind. It either has to move the plot forward, reveal relevant information or, at the very least, reveal character. If it doesn't do any of these things, the obvious question is, "Why would anyone read it?" You may very well be in love with the interplay of your two characters, but if the conversation doesn't tell the reader anything new, it will represent an annoying flat spot in your narrative. There are exceptions, of course. I mentioned Elmore Leonard, for example, whose novels tend to consist of fascinating, aimless dialogue punctuated by annoying breaks into narrative. Thing is, though - very few people are Elmore Leonard. At present, I count one.
Having said that, there are few things which feel clumsier than obviously didactic dialogue. Take any prime time television drama, for example, and you will find it littered with passages where characters are carefully explaining plot elements to other characters who should already know. NCIS is a major culprit for this, as is almost every sci-fi show ever made.
This is where careful structuring comes in. Doctor Who uses a brilliant device in the form of the Doctor's companion. The fact that there is always a clueless newbie by his side gives him practically limitless scope to explain any and every occurrence, object and character they come across. This, of course, is not appropriate to every situation, so authors need to be careful not to write themselves into a corner, so to speak.
The explanatory use of dialogue should be judicious, limited and, above all, realistic. If you encounter a passage of dialogue which sounds stilted and crap no matter what you do, it may be worth looking at what comes before and after. It could very well be that a structural failing elsewhere has forced you to insert un-saveable dialogue. Fixing this and just deleting any 'Macgyver explanations' may be the best solution.
DIALECT, INNIT?
Put simply, dialect is a nightmare. Do I use phonetic spelling? Do I do this for every word, or just indicatively for key words? And how do I choose those key words? Is it a cop-out to just mention the character has an accent and then write their speech normally? How the hell do you spell the way South Africans grunt?
I have no firm opinions on any of the above, but I do know two things. Faithfully rendering accents phonetically almost always makes for unreadable prose, and clumsiness with dialect is a guaranteed deal-breaker for readers and publishers alike. Happily, as writers we stand on the shoulders of giants. Or, to put it more bluntly, there's plenty of people we can steal from.
One of the funniest scenes in literature.
Charles Dickens, when he isn't unrealistically putting formal English into the mouths of his working class heroes, serves as a good case in point. One of his most triumphant creations is Sam Weller, the cockney manservant of the indomitable Mr Pickwick. It helped that Dickens was a Londoner, and therefore steeped to the gills in the Cockney of Victorian times. This is an important point - dialect and accent need to be approached in the same way as learning another language. Immersion is vitally important - if you haven't internalised the rhythm and feel of an accent, don't use it. It'll just be crap.
Dickens noted that the main features of the Victorian Cockney were the frequent transposition of 'V' and 'W', the dropping of 'h' and the use of different long vowel sounds. In the excerpt from The Pickwick Papers provided below, we can see how minimally, but effectively, Dickens represents this.
Here a voice in the gallery exclaimed aloud, "Quite right too, Samivel, quite right. Put it down a 'we', Lord, put it down a 'we'." "Who is that, who dares address the court?"said the little judge, looking up. ... "Do you know who that was, sir?" "I rayther suspect it was my father, my lord," replied Sam.
Another example is provided by the master hand of Patrick O'Brian. The famously grumpy Preserved Killick, steward to Captain Aubrey, speaks with a thick rustic accent derived from a tiny village now swallowed up by present day London. Well before I'd watched David Threlfall's excellent realisation of Killick, I was able to hear the dialect in the character's voice. This is surprising, considering how little O'Brian does in the way of transliteration. A typical line for Killick would read thusly:
"Which it will be ready when it is ready."
It can be seen that absolutely nothing has been done to the spelling - O'Brian has merely found a telling grammatical variation (which it will) and used it to indicate a whole wealth of sound. A similar technique can be used for some Irish accents. The grammatical quirk contained in "I'll be after seeing where he is" can do great service, where phonetic rendering would serve only to confuse and annoy.
It can be seen from this that the main qualification for being able to write various accents is to know them with sufficient intimacy to be able to isolate and use their key components. Not exactly a short cut, I know, but so little with writing actually is.
THAT'S ALL FOLKS
Well, I hope you found this helpful. If you think I've missed anything, violently disagree with me on any point, or wish to inform me of a lucrative way to work from home, that's what comments sections are made for. Happy writing!
SOCRATES: Another philosopher, and the only man who did not attempt to sleep with Alcibiades. Did some other stuff too.
TERRY WRIST: The newest housemate - a shadowy presence. No one has yet seen his face.
Scene Socrates sits in the living room of their sprawling share house. He is alone, staring suspiciously at a steaming cup of tea. Enter Zeno
ZENO: Morning, Socco - what are you up to?
SOCRATES: Hey, Zeno. Someone left this cup of tea for me, and I don't think it's quite right.
ZENO: You don't think the cup is quite right, or the tea, or the leaving of it?
SOCRATES: Let's not start this nonsense again. We were at it three days last time. Let's just say I've developed a general distrust of herbal infusions and leave it at that.
ZENO: Fine. I don't care, anyway - I'm here on important business.
SOCRATES: Oh yes? What's that?
ZENO: Well, a member of the government, [checks his phone] one George Christensen, says that it's vitally important we have a discussion on Radical Islam.
SOCRATES: Well, if the government says so, we should probably do it. What's Radical Islam?
ZENO: Um... It's Islam that's gone radical.
SOCRATES: You'll have to do better than that.
ZENO: Well, 'radical' means wanting to change things and 'Islam' is a religion. So it's a religion that wants to change things. Yeah - that's it.
SOCRATES: I think you'll have to work on that definition.
ZENO: Whatever for?
SOCRATES: Because if you can't properly define something, you can't really say you understand it.
ZENO: You know I've never really agreed with you on that.
SOCRATES: That's probably because you think a tortoise is faster than an arrow. Anyway, let's leave that aside for now. This Radical Islam - do we have a lot of it around here?
ZENO: I don't know. But what I do know is that it's a big problem - everyone's talking about it.
SOCRATES: If everyone's already talking about it, then why is it so urgent that we have this discussion?
ZENO: I'm not sure. I just have a vague feeling of unease, is all.
SOCRATES: Surely it would make sense to investigate this 'vague feeling' before going around bothering other people with it, don't you think?
Enter TERRY WRIST, composing a Tweet on his phone as he walks past ZENO and SOCRATES.
ZENO: Hey, Terry - where are you going?
TERRY: I've got to catch a plane to Iraq. That's where I mostly work these days.
ZENO: Can it wait? We have to have a discussion about Radical Islam.
TERRY: Sorry, no. And besides, I'm pretty sure your 'discussion' doesn't affect me in any way. See you later, guys.
