Writing alone

I promised in March I'd write about what I miss, working from home, and it's taken me this long to work out what it is. It's the arguments.

Dialogue at the studio was never really written alone. You'd draft a scene, and then you'd go and find someone in the hallway and read it to them, or make them read it to you, and they'd say "she wouldn't say that," and you'd say "she would," and ten minutes later, standing by the coffee machine, the two of you would have found the line she actually would say. Half the good dialogue I've written came out of those hallway arguments. The rest came from losing them.

You can't have a hallway argument on a video call. I've tried. Someone has to share their screen, and someone else is muted and doesn't know it, and the cat walks across a keyboard. By the time everyone's ready to argue, the thing that made you want to argue has gone. The calls are fine for deciding things. They're no good for finding things.

So I've been writing dialogue alone, at the kitchen table, and reading it out loud to the empty apartment. I take both parts. I've found I do one voice slightly higher than the other without meaning to, which my neighbors must enjoy. It works, sort of. It's slower. I miss the moment when someone else's face does something I didn't expect while they're reading my line, and I know it's wrong before they say a word.

Owen is the strange exception. He's been on most of my calls since March, for one reason or another, and in three months I haven't once seen his face. His camera is never on. His picture is a gray square with an initial in it. I asked him about it in April and he said "the internet doesn't need to see my kitchen," and that was that. But the odd thing is, he's the one I can still argue with. He doesn't need the hallway. He says one word, usually "no," and then waits, and the silence does the rest. I've rewritten more lines this spring because of Owen's silences than because of anyone's notes.

I think that's what I'm learning. The arguments were never about the hallway. They were about having someone on the other side who'd tell me when I was wrong. I can still find that, it just takes more asking.