The Art of Writing Drama
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The basic and ongoing continuing process of transforming imagined material from the mind/brain to the page in the form of the dramatic text means that everything must, in the end, be sustained by the dialogue. Although it is the case that there is much less dialogue in a film than there is in a stage play, in the end the same principle applies. No film script is ever accepted and produced on the basis of its ‘stage directions’, its visuals. While it may be structured according to cinematic formulae, conventionally judged elements of story, characters, action and conflict etc. are what clinch the deal.
Narrative through dialogue
The dramatic text is a narrative told through the convention or literary device of dialogue. It is highly formalised – each speaker’s name stands at the left-hand side of the page – all that really remains in the body of the text of impersonal narrative. This is just
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for ease of reading – in performance the dialogue remains, but there is no need for someone to come and name each ‘character’
before he/she ‘speaks’. The written is transformed in production to the enunciated. This is only one of the ways in which the text can be read. It can also be read perfectly well on the page, complete in itself.
Monologue and character
The embodiment of drama in the performer (the human agent) seems to lend particular significance to the concept of ‘character’; the words-on-the-page representation of a human figure is given
‘life’ in the three-dimensional appearance of the performer. This is part of the rationale behind the still powerful Aristotelian concept that drama is ‘about’ a single hero (or heroine). In fact, as we shall see, even if there is a narrative driven by one figure more than the rest (for example, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger), the story is, because of the absence of the novel-based narrative voice, enacted in a very different way. The device of dialogue actually contradicts the concept of the single central figure and therefore of many of the conventional notions of character, which are derived from the novel.
In all the approaches and methods offered in the how-to books the dominant recommended way of working leaves writing dialogue till last. For the rest, advice depends almost entirely on prose-based ways of translating thinking and imagining on to the page. Plans, outlines, scenarios, scene-by-scene breakdowns, while they are all analytically important, continually delay the moment when material out of which the work is actually made (dialogue) begins.
Not surprisingly, then, the assumption is made again and again that the way in to writing drama is through writing monologues. Or, to put it another way, that the way in to writing dialogue is through writing monologue. The argument also goes that because drama is
‘based’ on character, and/or because the dramatist has to construct
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the characters before the dialogue arrives, the ‘voice’ of the character in the monologue enables dialogue-based writing to be done better. This is not so. It conflates and confuses the processes of preparatory thinking, imagining and analysing (vital as these are at different points and in different ways) with the literary form itself.
Drama is again usurped in a pedagogy which privileges the writing of prose, through the monologue.
Monologue and prose
At its most fundamental, monologue is a form of short story. When performed, it becomes dramatic storytelling, but it does not become drama just because it is performed. The proverbial idea that a brilliant performer can make even the telephone directory vivid is a tribute to the art of performance, not a statement that the telephone directory ‘is’ drama. The contemporary monologue developed after 1968 as an opportunistic form, either to provide material for auditions, or to incorporate storytelling forms as (a) ways to represent ‘inner life’ and (b) to include polemical elements, or messages.
Attitudes to monologues, or soliloquies, have varied across the centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century Archer announced that he did not favour asides and that soliloquies were out of fashion.
This did not, however, lead him to any clear conclusions about dialogue: ‘it does not seem very profitable to try to concentrate into a definition the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue.’1 Baker optimistically remarked that the advent of naturalistic dialogue at the end of the nineteenth century (in parallel with the naturalistic novel) effectively dispensed with the soliloquy. Like Archer, he warned against resorting to monologue, because it described and replaced action which would be interrupted if another character 1 Archer, op. cit., p. 225.
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were onstage.2 In other words like stage directions, it was a substitute for drama itself.
The monologue – in the form of a very long speech by a single character, generally given when there is no other character onstage
– returned to dramatic writing during the 1960s and 1970s.
Influenced in part by Brecht’s use of direct address to the audience in the middle of scenes, and also perhaps by ideologies derived from the oral history movement, which privileged the individual voices of women, minorities and under-represented social groups, the monologue had an ideological, sociological and artistic place in drama. At the same time increased interest in the psychological and emotional make-up of characters (treating them as if they were real people) provided an aesthetic rationale. As Alan Ayckbourn has put it, ‘Long speeches are good ways to reveal the inner thoughts and feelings of your characters.’3
However, during the 1970s monologues, or very long uninterrupted speeches, were also ways to convey historical or biographical information (research) in a quick narrative fashion. In sections of Caryl Churchill’s plays, Vinegar Tom and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the first commissioned by Monstrous Regiment, the second by Joint Stock and both produced in 1976,4 the politically conscious historical play, playing out the cross oppres-sions of class and gender, incorporated polemical elements in long speeches, which also conveyed what the ‘character’ ‘felt’.
The monologue has remained in fashion in a more conventional storytelling form-within-a-play in the drama of Conor McPherson.
For example, The Weir, first performed in 1997, has a number of long speeches and, effectively, monologues up to three pages long, in which the Irish tradition of oral storytelling is reproduced as part of the fabric of the play.5 This works as both cultural tribute, and also as a way to move between storytelling prose and drama proper.
2 Baker, op. cit., p. 392.
3 Ayckbourn, op. cit., p. 71.
4 Plays: 1 by Caryl Churchill (Methuen, 1985).
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Monologues are consistently present in all the how-to books as a kind of think-tank device, through which the student can develop her/his own ideas about the ‘characters’. The fact that this is done through prose fiction gives the illusion that the drama is under way, while the exercise is, in fact, little more than note-taking. Pike and Dunn follow their discussion of character with a suggestion to write a monologue for each character.
Castagno suggests a range of different kinds of monologue, including one based on the recording of a sports commentator, to develop approaches to language register. He comments that interpolating a monologue between sections of dialogue can provide an effective strategy for discovering a character’s function and thematic values without drafting scenes.6 Precisely. It is selling the dramatic imagination short. Yeger recommends writing projects at the end of each chapter, suggesting that students observe a person and then write a monologue for them. All these are techniques for procrastination, for putting off the moment when the genre-specific work itself begins, and directing
the imagination towards prose.
Even the best and most meticulous how-to drama-writing books by Noel Greig and Jean-Claude van Italie privilege monologue before dialogue. Greig, whose book is the most perceptive and detailed of all those currently available, grafts writing drama on to a general foundation of creative writing. The first part of his book habituates students to the process of observation and imaginative writing in ways which would be equally at home in more general CW texts. For example, he suggests writing a description of a room, using each of the five senses, and also writing a series of monologues for different people on the subject of love, to explore different kinds of speech patterns and attitudes. In themselves, of course, any kind of writing work or practice is always going to be useful. That is not the main issue.
What is important is that the first-person narrative voice entailed 5 The Weir by Conor McPherson (Nick Hern Books, 1998).
6 Castagno, op. cit., p. 141.
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in monologue is not drama in the writing. It may be fun and productive, and stimulate the imagination, but it is also blocking access to the appropriate written form, which is to convey the matter only through dialogue, through individuated and interactive reactive speeches. To leave dialogue writing until last and then to give it short shrift is thus to deny the very centre of the drama-writing learning process. Eric Bentley commented, ‘What sets dialogue off from the rest of literature is precisely dialogue, as opposed to monologue, verbal intercourse as opposed to verbal discourse.’7 It is from this point that really learning the art of writing drama begins.
7 Life of the Drama, p. 78.
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10 The text – dialogue and relationships
So what exactly is dialogue? In a purely pragmatic way it can be compared to everyday conversation, to the verbal exchanges between people, which bind the way we live our social and personal lives. But in its literary form, as the sine qua non of dramatic writing, it is something rather different. It is not mere imitation of speech, even where it appears most realistic. As anyone knows who has listened carefully to spontaneous conversation, the latter is full of gaps and interruptions, of conscious and unconscious applications of register. Recording and transcribing any casual conversation illustrates this clearly. There is an additional complication, which is that – at one level – the test of the written product – the performance end – is subjected to the process of enunciation, in context. It is not conversation. It is dialogue. Dialogue can be naturalistic, poetic, elliptical, written in verse. It has its own literary and stylistic conventions.
I am aware that, like other books about writing drama, I am addressing dialogue rather late on. However, I am doing so for completely different reasons. It is not because it is the least important, or the easiest, or something which can only be done (relatively easily) after ‘everything else’ has been decided. It is precisely the opposite. It is because it is the most important (how could it be otherwise?), because it is the only significant (and signifying) literary means whereby the dramatic text can be
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imagined and written. Because this seems to be such a rare view in the literature, I have had to prepare the ground for discussing dialogue as the practice at the centre of the pedagogic approach. My advocacy of dialogue in a pedagogic context is different. I work almost entirely in and with dialogue in class, with students working exclusively with dialogue from the very beginning.
So what, exactly, is dialogue in the context of writing drama? ‘The root word is the Greek dialogos, meaning conversation or discourse, and this has passed through Latin and French into English.’1
Dialogue in prose fiction shares a particular temporal feature with the drama, but does so in quite a distinct way; and both deployments of dialogue are distinct from the ranges of everyday verbal discourse in which we all engage. The latter is often thought of as spontaneous, or relatively so, but it is also differently formalised and structured, on the basis of differently socially appropriate ‘registers’.
So, for example, the language one might use in a meeting with a bank manager will be determined by the context and purpose of the discussion, and also by the relative relationship of the participants: a discussion about a bank loan presupposes a variant on certain kinds of power relations. Dialogue between lovers will (not always, of course) carry the possibility of intimacy and the use of a language
‘normally’ only available in private. Conversations between a parent and child will be similarly determined – by age, the day-to-day functions of such exchanges and many other factors.
Dialogue, action and speech acts
In both the critical literature on drama and in the how-to books the notion of action (with conflict as a sequencing sub-category) is given prominence. Drama, it is said, ‘must have’ action; drama, it is implied or suggested, is built round the idea of action. In terms of 1 Raymond Williams, Writing in Society, p. 31.
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discussion about how the action is shaped, how it might or should be directed towards conflict, possible crisis and some kind of denouement, resolution or ending, it is clear that the concept of
‘action’ is to drama as the concept of ‘narrative’ is to the novel.
Confusingly, however, it also carries (explicitly or implicitly) the idea that ‘action’ in some way is likely to be, should be, or must be, physical rather than verbal. While this is entirely valid as one possibility, it privileges the physical over the emotional and verbal.
A tension or contradiction is thus often set up between a rather crude notion of ‘action’ and the knowledge that (for example) emotional or psychological events or ‘actions’ also form part of the dramatic experience (action driving narrative) on both sides of the footlights and via the written text.
Even before semiology and performance theory addressed drama directly, there have been occasional perceptions that the concept of action can be extended to apply to dialogue. John Howard Lawson commented, ‘Speech is a kind of action, a compression and extension of action. When a man speaks he performs an act . . .’2 From a more contemporary theoretical point of view, Aston and Savona have pointed out that ‘traditionally, action in drama has only been considered in terms of external action, but semioticians have tried to show how the use of language also constitutes a form of action’.3
One of the theoretical bridges between the study of everyday uses of language and formalised speech in drama is speech act theory.
Philosopher J. L. Austin delivered a series of twelve William James lectures at Harvard in 1955, based on work he had begun at the end of the 1930s.4 In Lecture 2 he commented that ‘to say something is to do something . . . by saying or in saying something we are doing something’.5 This is linked with a very specific idea of social
‘performance’: ‘the idea of a performative utterance was that it was 2 Lawson, op. cit., p. 288.
3 Aston and Savona, op. cit., p. 55.
4 How to do Things with Words by J. L. Austin (Harvard University Press, 1975).
5 Ibid., p. 12.
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to be (or to be included as part of ) the performance of an action.
Actions can only be performed by persons, and obviously in our cases the utterer must be the performer . . .’6
John R. Searle’s book, subtitled ‘An Essay in the Philosophy of Language’, drew on work in cognitive science and linguistics, starting with a basic question: ‘How do words relate to the world?’7
‘Speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behaviour. To learn and master
a language is ( inter alia) to learn and to have mastered these rules.’8 Since speaking a language is, effectively, performing ‘speech acts’, ‘a theory of language is part of a theory of action, simply because speaking is a rule-governed form of behaviour’.9
From the point of view of understanding some of the complexities of what happens when people speak, Searle suggested ‘there are a series of analytic connections between the notion of speech acts, what the speaker means, what the sentence (or any other linguistic element) uttered means, what the speaker intends, what the hearer understands, and what the rules governing the linguistic elements are.’10 In the context of drama, this can be taken to refer to and cover concepts that are expressed through terms such as subtext and motivation. Clearly, underneath each line which is spoken is a whole edifice of what is not spoken. The concept of motivation thus returns us to the notion of character in a way which, in its turn, diverts away again from dialogue itself.
These brief references to speech act theory enable us to see how it prioritises dialogue in drama in an illuminating way virtually ignored by most other how-to books. If speech (dialogue) is understood as one of the forms of action, and if action is held to be at the core of drama, then the art of writing dialogue must be given 6 Ibid., p. 60.
7 Speech Acts by John R. Searle (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 3.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
9 Ibid., p. 17.
10 Ibid., p. 21.
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its rightful prominence. The assumption that it will simply somehow follow on planning and character summaries assumes that all work on dialogue is external to its practice-based procedures in writing.
However, even speech act theory is not entirely appropriate for dialogue. In its valuable attention to the nature and variety and categorisation of individual utterances, and of their utterance by individuals, it bears some similarity with the post-novelistic foregrounding of ‘character’ as the motor and motivator of dramatic action. Again, we are steered away from dialogue itself.