No Need for Speed

As writers, we need to be prepared. At any time, we could receive a phone call from a celebrity to ghost write his or her autobiography. That’s how it works, right? A-list celebrities spend hours upon hours searching the blogosphere for a blogger they feel will really be able to adequately capture their voice. Then they take it upon themselves to contact said blogger to set up a meeting. Good, that’s what I thought.

I think I read somewhere that over one hundred celebrity autobiographies came out last year, so it would be impossible to study up on all the celebrities who may want to tell their story in the near future. Therefore, after a lot of thinking, IMDB-ing, and Wikipedia-ing, I have narrowed my list down to one. Based on the fact that we have so much in common, the celebrity I am expecting to hear from is Tom Cruise.

The similarities between us are seriously uncanny.

For example, he once said, “I love kids. I was a kid myself, once.”

Me too! I was also a kid once.

He also said, “I've never done work for money ever. If your choices are based on grosses and the film doesn't do well, what does that mean? It leaves you with nothing.”

I don’t work for money either; I am a teacher.

And this is his quote that really made up my mind: “…I can't do something halfway, three-quarters, nine-tenths. If I'm going to do something, I go all the way.”

I love going all the way too!

At first I wanted to call the autobiography The Need for Speed, but then I realized that people might mistakenly interpret it as a drug reference. And that’s really the last thing Tom needs after his little stunt on Oprah.

Speaking of that incident, I’ve been debating how I am going to portray Oprah’s response to Tom’s antics.

Here’s one way:

“We’ve never seen you like this,” she said as she tried to mask the terror in her eyes with a smile.

This is the other way:

“We’ve never seen you like this.” She tried to mask the terror in her eyes with a smile.

The difference is very subtle. But did you notice that in the first example there is a comma after the word this, and in the second, there is a period?

That is because when we write dialogue we use a comma to separate the quote from the tag only if the tag has a speech verb in it. If there is no speech verb in the tag, we use a period.

The tag in the first example uses the speech verb said, so we use a comma and don't capitalize the first word of the tag line. The tag in the second example simply shows Oprah’s actions, so we use a period, and the tag is considered a new sentence so we do capitalize the first word of the tag line.

I'll let Tom decide which version he prefers during our first meeting. I'm thinking about suggesting we meet somewhere like IKEA or Pottery Barn. I'd have no problem meeting at my place except my couch is a bit old. I'm not sure it would survive the Katie Holmes chapter.

Resources:

“English 3850: Punctuating Dialogue.” 27 March 2011. http://core.ecu.edu/engl/whisnantl/3850/quotes.htm

“Tom Cruise.” Brainy Quote. 27 March 2011. Web.