Daily Dialogue — November 5, 2015

Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you’re always telling us that writers make choices?
Grady Tripp: Yeah.
Hannah Green: And even though you’re book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… it’s at times… it’s… very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. And… I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all. And I was just wondering if it might not be different if… if when you wrote you weren’t always… under the influence.

— Wonder Boys (2000), screenplay by Steve Kloves, novel by Michael Chabon

The Daily Dialogue theme for the month: Writers and Writing.

Trivia: The term ‘Wonder Boys’, a derivative of the German ‘wunderkind’, refers to someone who has greatly succeeded in their profession or art at an early age. In the movie, Grady applies the term “Wonder Boy” to James specifically. During the DVD extras, director Curtis Hanson also applies it to Grady, though not in an entirely flattering way, since in Grady’s case, the term refers to his early literary promise on which he has failed to deliver. In Michael Chabon’s novel “Wonder Boys” (upon which this movie is based), the term also doubles as the title of Grady’s giant unfinished manuscript, and “Wonder” is the last name of the brothers who are the main characters in that book.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is a nice scene because of the multiple meanings of the word “choices”. As Grady intended it in class, he is saying that as writers, we confronted with choices with every scene, page, paragraph, even sentence we write. Hannah inverts its meaning to refer to life choices, specifically Grady’s addiction. Then there’s this: The choice to sit down… ass in chair… and actually write.