20/100, thinking about tells

and how you show them

It’s Sunday and I’m on the way to the hospital. Although by now it’s Wednesday now and I’m home and almost upright, in bed.

I’m fine or will be fine but also have learnt what I knew already, that if you’re ill it’s best not just to diagnose yourself and continue with travel plans and work and research trips and really it’s better to get yourself seen sooner rather than later but that’s another story; bad in life, good in a book, as a friend of mine says.

But for the sake of this, let’s say it’s Sunday and I’ve just come off the phone from the emergency services. They’ve given me an appointment in urgent care, and I have 20 minutes between coming off the phone and the taxi arriving.

What I do in those 20 minutes is I hang the kid’s school shirts for tomorrow, I pack the book I’m currently reading and go through my proof pile to work out which I need to read next, I pack a book for an event I’m doing next month, I also pack my laptop, three notebooks, two pencils, one fresh ballpoint pen, face serum, a facemask, thick socks and flannel pjs.

And then I realise, everything I’ve chosen to pack in this speculative, possibly overnight bag, gives something about myself away. The fact I hang the washing also gives something away in relation to my relationship. In short, they’re all tells.

Characters exists and gives themselves away in relation to how they interact with other people. In screenwriting everything is precious, every shot, every gesture, every single thing is limited by time - if a page equals a minute, then a 90 minute film is a 90 page screenplay, there’s hardly anything at all to play with. They’re short but they’re dense, everything works hard. One of the ways you can put a screenplay to work is by the tells characters are giving all the time.

Think about what you’ve just learnt about me by my overnight bag. If that’s a scene you immediately know I either work too hard or am worried about missing work by the addition of the laptop, the selection of books I have to read rather than choose to read. You know I hate having cold feet. You know I’m used to the effect of airconditioned environments on my skin. You know I never travel anywhere without at least one notebook. You know I have an almost pathological fear of running out of ink. You know I hate being bored. You also suspect I’m trying not to think about the fact I’m about to be admitted to a hospital by packing as for a day in the office, bar the pjs and socks. You also could infer I’m worried the kids’ shirts won’t get hung.

I’ve said nothing though. All of it’s been told visually; all show. There’s no dialogue, no exposition. Just a woman packing a bag. This relates to prose as much as screen.

Sometimes it’s useful to look at life like this, asking what we are telling all the time, and then relate this back to characters. Every day we give so much of ourselves away and it’s in this granular detail that we, and characters, come to life. In the end, I didn’t open my laptop. I finished one of the books, made notes on the next. I did have an amazing encounter with an other writer, bonding over Lydia Davis, and as it turns out this writer had written one of my all time favourite kids’ stories, and I gave her injured husband the book I’d just finished to pass the time. This conversation too would be a tell that sit me next to a stranger and ten minutes later I’ll know a lot about about them - possibly a weakness. I didn’t mean to write a kind of writing post, because largely I’m not that good at writing and woefully unqualified to give advice but I’m a the stage of rest/recovery where my brain feels like it’s turned to butter and there’s not much I’ve been thinking.