Charlie Sheen and Quotability in Fiction

For the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with all the news relating to Charlie Sheen. I guess you could call me a bandwagoner—prior to his current media blitz, I have never really been a fan of his indefinitely postponed show, Two and a Half Men, or any of his movies. In the nineties, I dimly remember watching him in Platoon, but I don’t remember if he lives or dies in it. The excitement with his current misadventures is somewhat related: It seems like he’s tinkering on the very edge of life, taunting the abyss below. For what it’s worth, I have found him tremendously entertaining. His quotes about his “tiger DNA” or “Adonis blood” or “goddesses” would make for great lines in a book. I do hope a publisher springs on the chance to buy his tell-all memoir, for which he has reportedly set the starting bid at ten million dollars, as I would be the first in line. If Charlie Sheen wrote it himself, and not a ghostwriter, it would make for a laugh-out-loud ride, full of memorable, and in extension, quotable quips. I can see fans reciting his quips to one another as inside jokes, and many of them living on in Youtube infamy as memes. This, I think, makes for an important lesson to us aspiring writers in the digital age. Even if our medium is not as fragmentary as the Net (or as pastiche as David Shields would want), it would benefit our narratives if they could still be broken down into smaller excerpts or aphorisms even that could be spread around pretty easily. The small excerpt or aphorism might then invite people to read your book in its entirety.