Recently I held a small event in which a group of friends read out the dialogue from my latest story, The Long Line. From the outset I knew this book would be influenced by David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, based on Don DeLillo's book which I'm now reading. That influence takes the form of a series of verbose conversations about various abstract and theoretical topics ranging from economic theory to my race theory to ethics and philosophy of value.
While this story has always meant to be a novel the process of adapting it to script helped identify a number of flaws which would have otherwise gone unnoticed. It forced certain scenes and subplots to be lost and others added. In converting it back into prose novel form, all of these lost and added threads will be consolidated.
The reading also made me realise how great of an influence Eidos' 2000 title Deus Ex was on the dialogue, both the sudden ventures into deep or heavy or abstract territory as well as the style of language used. One thing I did not notice the first (/2nd/3rd) time playing that game was the avoidance of contractions. Apostrophes are almost never used in speech. I don't know whether this was an intentional stylistic choice by Warren Spector/Sheldon Pacotti or an error from somewhere along the line to the recording booth, but it was certainly effective in a subtle, unconscious way. This is something that I, without meaning, injected into the dialogue of The Long Line.
After the reading I had an overwhelming sense that the thing was over and done with. It seemed like a good type of workflow: project based, stressing out for a few weeks leading up to some big event, then once it's done washing your hands of the whole thing. Except this story is not done, there is still a lot of work to do. Conversations need to be rearranged, characters developed, holes plugged.
DeLillo's book so far is a very, very good combination of words.
