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For those unfamiliar with the slangy term in the title, think of a dial such as you might have on a stove or an electric blanket. As you turn it the heat gets more and more intense, until it might very well be too much for the current circumstances. So you “dial it back” until proper temperature is achieved.
With the kitchen stove in my home, dialing back is often a necessity since the way the burners light is by turning the dial to its maximum setting. High heat is how it always begins, with a quick, unrefined motion. It’s necessary to get started. But in most cases, after that needs to come some more careful adjustments so dinner doesn’t end up a burned, unpalatable mess.
So it is with fiction writing. The comparison isn’t perfect as not every scene is going to be “high heat”, but it’s rare that a first draft isn’t that unrefined beginning, full of energy but lacking in control. A good case in point would be this week’s page, where the dialogue in its final form is greatly reduced and altered from my original. It sounded great in my head. It even looked great when I got it on paper (or, well, word processor)– it was a continuation of the speech started in comic 179, stuffed full of the themes and big ideas I like to think I have bubbling beneath the surface of the comic, finally getting another chance to express themselves through my “big picture”, erudite executive as opposed to being constrained by the work-a-day, practical outlooks of my main cast.
It flowed. It was poetic.
And somehow, it was way, way too much.
Thinking back I suppose I felt a strange restlessness even at the time of writing. The page before where the executive began his speech seemed much like it, but where that one worked, this one was somehow problematic. I couldn’t pin that feeling down until one day I experienced one of those weird moments I’ve talked about before. I don’t truly believe fictional characters of my creation have a life of their own, but they do represent some parallel space in my head that’s allowed to give occasional input on the big picture of the story, like an actor/director sort of relationship. In this case, I narrowed down my restless feeling to where I could imagine my mysterious executive calling me in for a chat:
“Now listen, I’ve liked the lines you’ve written for me in the past, but this… this is overdoing it. I’ve dropped enough hints that the audience should be able to infer some of my worldview and motivations without having everything shoved down their throats. Even though I’m technically talking to myself, you made me subtler than that, didn’t you?”
Goddamn if he wasn’t right. To borrow one of the gambling metaphors he’s so fond of… he’s not going to lay all his cards on the table right now, even for us. Well, technically I can see his hand, but the point is I needed to resist blabbing about it too much. That would ruin the game. Also, it made me remember that it would be best to keep any metaphyscial murmurings on point, or for story purposes I’d be edging entirely too close to a boring character filibuster, or even a dreaded author filibuster born of being too damn excited with my own ideas.
I still believed the scene itself was good, and would make for the nice reveal and the segue back to the ranch I wanted, but I mercilessly hacked away a lot of my pretty, pretty prose until that parallel portion of my brain nodded, took a thoughtful drag off his cigar and declared, “I can work with that.” It’s still got some ideas in there, delivered in the practiced rhythms of a smart man who has thought deeply about what he’s doing and why… but it’s far more economical, and in keeping with the character is hiding away at least as much as it reveals.
I dialed things back, hopefully to that point where the story simmers with a promise of tasty things to come, rather than wrinkling noses with an uncontrolled burn. We’ll see how it cooks up.