Edit Your Scrabble Dictionary Accordingly

Attention writers:

It’s official.

From this day forward, you will no longer have the luxury of resting on the old, worn crutch to describe your characters, scenes, plots, conflicts, dialogue, imagery, tone, theme, and music. Assigning characteristics and attributes to the aforementioned must now require a whole 0.005 seconds of thought.

Say goodbye to ‘quirky’.

I’m killing it. Skewing this shitty little Q, setting it on fire, burying it 600 feet beneath the core of acceptable lexicon.

Why? That’s not the real question. The real question is: Why has it taken this long?

I interviewed for a staff job on a little show. The interviewer was a lovely lady, sharp and motivated - I’ll not hold her accountable for her handicap. On six distinct and separate occasions, she referred to her character by the dreaded Q. I tried to mask the violent tremors racing through my body like an Asian teen’s Accord - not sure I was successful.

The cherry? On the subway ride home, I checked out the one sheet she gave me to peruse. Guess how many times Q was used on a single 8.5x11 piece of paper? Twice. On ONE SHEET. That’s exactly four times more than it should have appeared.

It’s lazy. There’s no less descriptive descriptor. It’s vapid and vague and vacuous (This triple V thing has me beaming - Embarrassing Fact #326). It’s used to instil some sort of spice, but its very use carries exactly the opposite connotation - bland.

It’s an instant red flag.

Filmy McTuberstein: “You’ve got a great character. Really funny - I mean, quirky…[beat to let it sink in] … and not the usual quirks, either. Really quirky quirks --

Me: “ (inside my brain) MAYDAY!! Sinking ship!! Wait...wet shoes. Shit. I hate wet shoes. It means wet socks...and that’s no good…

It’s like a megaphone going off between my ears.

Here’s the thing: If you know your story, and have lived with any element of its being, you MUST be able to pinpoint what makes your [insert story element here] important and unique.

This is a blanket affliction, a disease industry-wide. I do my absolute best not to fall prey to its guiles. I think it replaced ‘zany’ in the mid 90’s. Well, quirky has met its maker now.

There’s no higher authority on this matter. Consider it done. And, please - use a real adjective.

Let us all join hands and say goodbye.

Random note I couldn’t fit into the body of this posting 1: I really wanted to call this post ‘Death Cab For Quirky’, but thought the title would steal the punch from my intro. Was I right?

Random note I couldn’t fit into the body of this posting 2: I don’t mean to sound elitist. Honest. It’s just the way it is.