The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  Dialogue and voicing

  The individuation of some aspects of linguistic speech theory, along with the stress on individual character, and characterisation, conceals the complex nature and interactive social function of both speech and of dialogue. A differently angled approach, which allows for both social as well as language-based perspectives, has come from the renewed interest in Bakhtin, referred to in chapter 5.

  However, in the context of writing drama this becomes more complex.

  Raymond Williams has pointed out: ‘It is impossible to read

  “dramatic writing” adequately unless we are aware that it is writing for speech in many voices and for action.’11 He linked this not just to drama from the past, but to a significant literary form, which was revived during the Italian Renaissance: ‘There is a familiar kind of written argument in which the method is the representation of different positions, and of exchanges between them, through the arranged alternating speech of named persons or elements. This has been common in philosophy and related arguments since Plato . . .’12

  Williams’s reference to ‘multivocal speech’ reminds us that ‘it is 11 Writing in Society, pp. 4–5.

  12 Ibid., p. 31.

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  almost universally assumed . . . that dramatic dialogue is a representation of people speaking to each other, in the simplest sense’.13

  This shifting between speech in everyday life and its contexts, and speech as represented in writing, on the page (dialogue), which then is transformed into an encoded, artificial, fictionalised enunciation in performance, shows how complex the exchange between spoken and written language is. Referring to Derrida’s distinction between written and spoken language, Elinor Fuchs has pointed ‘to the particular premise that dramatic performance traditionally imitates the hierarchy of speech/writing that Derrida locates in the Western philosophical tradition as a whole. That is, drama has evolved as the form of writing that strives to create the illusion that it is composed of spontaneous speech . . .’14

  When it is on the page, written dialogue may or may not resemble spontaneous speech, depending on the style in which it is composed; however, in performance, which privileges the immediacy, the nowness, the present-momentness of dialogue, no matter what the style of the writing, the appearance of spontaneity must, at all times, be the quality to which the enunciation and effect aspires and which rehearsal attains. However much performers and audience may know that weeks of preparation have preceded the performance, each individual presentation is ‘as if’ happening for the very first time at that moment, in complete spontaneity.

  Dialogue – turn-taking, exchange

  Raymond Williams has pointed out that ‘The idea of dialogue, even in its variable forms, presumes a form of exchange. This is represented in modern information theory in A-B or A-B-C models 13 Ibid., p. 32.

  14 Fuchs, op. cit., p. 74.

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  and diagrams, with arrows of interaction.’15 Aston and Savona, advocating ‘a systematic approach to dialogue analysis’, have characterised dialogue as being ‘structured as a turn-taking system’.16 Castagno describes this further: ‘Turns relate dialogue to pairs of speakers.’17

  Eric Bentley has encapsulated the fundamental contradiction within dramatic dialogue: ‘it is the first person that is dominant.

  Dramatic discourse is egocentric: the speaking subject defines everything (including the you-addressee) in terms of his [sic] own place in the dramatic world.’18 In further amplification: ‘The speech event is, in its own right, the chief form of interaction in the drama.

  The dialogic exchange, that is, does not merely . . . refer deictically to the dramatic action but directly constitutes it . . . carried, above all, by the intersubjective force of discourse.’19

  In the context of dramatic dialogue, the speech event is, of course, the individual ‘utterance’ of each ‘character’ at any given moment.

  That is why the idea that each character must have her/his own idiosyncratic ‘voice’ – i.e., dialect, speech patterns, rhythms etc. – is appropriate, no matter what the style of writing (on the whole).

  However, a play is not made up of a series of isolated speech acts, any more than everyday conversation is. Nor is it merely a matter of

  ‘taking turns’, although speakers do, in drama, tend to alternate, rather than overlap or interrupt each other, while still able to carry on their interaction. It is not even a matter of exchange. Alternation is the procedure whereby the speakers relate to each other and, as Bentley wrote, ‘constitute’ the action.

  The dependence of dramatic dialogue on what is called ‘deixis’

  has been noted by more than one writer. Deixis refers to those tiny words which refer to place or person, from within the action, as it 15 Williams, op. cit., p. 60.

  16 Aston and Savona, op. cit., p. 52.

  17 Castagno, op. cit., p. 100.

  18 The Theory of the Modern Stage by Eric Bentley (Penguin, 1968), p. 143.

  19 Ibid., pp. 156–7.

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  were: ‘here’, ‘there’; or to time: ‘now’, ‘after’; to objects: ‘this’, ‘that’; or to another person, without naming her/him: ‘you’, ‘he’. In the context of both conversation and dramatic dialogue, these shorthand elements or (in the theory of socio-linguist Basil Bernstein) uses of ‘restricted code’ make complete sense to the participants.

  Two friends in the same room can refer to objects around them, to each other and to other people they know; they can use the word

  ‘this’ to refer to a table, without having to use the word ‘table’. They are inside the situation, and are responsible for creating and perpetuating it together.

  Reaction and interaction: dialogue and

  relationships

  As characters talk, speak, exchange speech acts, however, there is another crucial element, which extends beyond the idea of exchange and interaction: that is, that every single speech, line, phrase, word, is also, and at every point, reaction or response to both the sum and the detail of everything which has gone before. Considering this from the other side of the footlights, as it were, from the point of view of the performer, this is automatically understood throughout the process of rehearsal and performance. Cicely Berry, voice, text and dialogue coach, has written of ‘how each character is changed by what another character has spoken, and how their very choice of words affects how he/she replies’.20 Examples of exercises she uses with performers include asking each performer to repeat the last word spoken to him/her or a phrase from that speech, before he/she replies with his/her own line, to highlight the way in which each speech provokes the next.

  Dialogue, building from the very first line, becomes a complex edifice, a highly structured verbal creation in which no line or 20 Berry, op. cit., p. 140.

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  speech can be considered or understood except in relation to a series of reactive eddies outwards into the rest of the drama. No wonder it is so difficult to understand and define, and no wonder (in a sense) that there is a desire to resort to what looks simple and graspable: the idea of the individual voice and individual character (the human agents who carry the action/narrative). Students need, above all, to be able to move from the more common and familiar ability to write single-voiced narrative into writing multi-voiced dialogue.

  Response as the condition of dialogue

  Dramatic dialogue is, and constructs, relationships in reactive, interdependent interaction, in a constant state of responsiveness.

  ‘Response’ is the only inevitable condition of dialogue. Writing dramatic dialogue, therefore, consists of im
agining and writing relationships, not speeches and not individual speech acts. The ‘action’

  – emotional, psychological – is what happens ‘between’ speeches and the moment-by-moment study each performer gives to his/her part consists of a series of decisions about what is happening between speeches, in order to establish what and how each speech is uttered.

  There is a temporal accumulation of dialogue: as the narrative/drama progresses, the edifice becomes more and more complex.

  Relationships and character

  The individuated concept of character, which reaches back to Aristotelian notions of a central ‘hero’, which in its turn finds echo in the individuated narrative voices of the novel, jostles up against the concept of relationships in the drama. If there were only ever two ‘characters’ in a drama, this might be a relatively simple matter of just one relationship being written/explored. But, to compound matters, the more characters in the drama, the more breathtakingly

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  compounded is the number of relationships to be imagined and written by the dramatist.

  Two figures constitute one relationship (from two points of view).

  Figure 1

  1

  Three figures constitute seven relationships in all: Figure 2

  1

  4

  7

  3

  2

  6

  5

  Four figures constitute a total of twenty-five relationships, in different numerical permutations and combinations. Draw the figures and do the sums! Five figures, in different combinations and permutations, add up to 121 relationships. If four or five characters are onstage at once, then the number of relationships the dramatist is carrying in his/her head (consciously or not) is breathtaking. This helps to demonstrate why some people find it hard to imagine in dramatic terms and to write drama. In prose they can inhabit the

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  singular dramatic narrative voice, and in poetry (especially lyric poetry) the leading ‘voice’ is also more likely to be singular.

  In class I demonstrate this on the floor. Two students face each other. The space between them shows clearly that this is one relationship. Add a third, stand them in a triangle again facing each other, and this tests the rest of the class to count up the number of relationships. Four students test this even more, and so on. Now the secret is out!

  To add to all the reasons given so far, this is another overwhelming reason for writing dialogue from the start. It is challenging enough to carry a narrative in a relationship between two voices (human agents/characters), in which each can only articulate in the dramatic first person. To do so with more relationships, building and alternating, is even more complex. It takes practice and training to be able to do so in such a way that everything – narrative, relationships, individuation – is carried via this constant twining and intertwining play of relationships.

  Experiments in writing monologue simply confirm this. However neatly turned a monologue may be for an individual ‘character’, as soon as that figure comes into interaction (existential conflict, if you like) with another, the apparently individuated speech acts are subject to manipulation and interplay from the other human agent.

  This conceptualisation lies behind the popular idea that once you

  ‘put’ characters onstage, they will somehow ‘speak for themselves’, or ‘take over the action’. They do nothing of the kind of course; but they are subject to the responsive controls of the dialogue (other human agents) as well as the narrative in which they are placed.

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  11 Teaching and learning the art of

  writing drama

  As all teachers and students know, the quicksilver ambience and activity of the classroom is virtually impossible to document accurately. Teachers sometimes describe the way they work, aiming to create an impression of the atmosphere, as well as a blow-by-blow account of the pedagogic process that happens. Creative writing texts cannot, by definition, re-create the workshop in which students bring in pieces of writing for the class to discuss. They consist, therefore, mostly of writing ‘exercises’, as ways to encourage students and readers to generate and develop their writing. But however stimulating these may sometimes be, no exercise can ever fully substitute for the living exchange in the classroom. And such a procedure is constantly piecemeal, dealing with new pieces of writing, rather than building cumulatively week by week.

  My approach to teaching is very different. I did not set out to be different just for the sake of it. Like most other writers who teach imaginative writing, I made it up as I went along. I developed ways of teaching which sharpened my own understanding of the way I write drama, and, gradually evolved a structured way of teaching writing in class. Each week tested the developmental and cumulative nature of the learning process. As I read literature about creative writing and met other teachers, I became aware that I was developing rather differently inflected sets of pedagogic priorities from those enshrined in the literature and other approaches to teaching.

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  CW literature argues that creative writing workshops depart from conventional academic assumptions. For example, creative writing is presented as a ‘practice-based’ form of teaching and learning –

  acquiring knowledge and understanding by ‘doing’. By analogy with other art forms – music, drama, dance, the visual arts – imaginative writing clearly must be developed and practised. However, in a structured educational context there is, I believe, also an obligation to push the boundaries further; to think about, to study and to expand student understanding of the cultural context in which their particular genre is located, with due attention given to analytic and intellectually searching work. This must mean studying the history of drama on the page and in performance, and exploring dramatic criticism and literary theory.

  Aims and boundaries

  First of all, it must be absolutely clear that the pedagogy of the art of writing drama is neither a training for professional dramatists, nor a proto-therapeutic exercise in self-expression. It is, of course, entirely possible that undergraduate and/or postgraduate students may indeed go on to write for the dramatic professions and each student may gain emotional satisfaction from the process, but the discipline is no different from any other educational experience.

  English students may go on to write important critical or theoretical books; or not. History students may go on to do original research and write about it; or not. Music students may end up as performers; or not. Graduates and non-graduates in all kinds of subjects may end up writing drama. A training in writing drama is not, and cannot be, determined by the imperatives of an employment-based outcome.

  This does not gainsay enthusiasm or ambition. The point about educational training is that it provides an opportunity to study, explore, deconstruct, think about, as well as practise the art form.

  The base-line aim for a course in the art of writing drama is that

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  each student should, ultimately, develop an increased understanding of the relationship between her/his own imagination and the various dramatic conventions which determine the translation and transformation of that imagination onto the page, making it available for transformation onto the stage. This entails: 1. Imaginative acuity, involving each student’s ability to deploy, or begin to deploy, his/her own individual resources: cultural, linguistic, imaginative and intellectual. This is developed via an incremental understanding of how to think about, discover and explore different kinds of subject matter, incorporating active research and knowledge seeking and the
n to transform these into dialogue.

  2. Textual acuity: verbal, and aural, developed and refined through writing, analysing and hearing dialogue, and through the movement from page to stage and back again.

  3. Spatial acuity: through an ongoing and active movement from page to stage (classroom space) and back again.

  4. Temporal acuity: through an understanding of the relationship between different timescales: within the imaginative work and in staged-completed performance running time. A real understanding of presentness, and the immediacy of performance and the way this is refracted in writing dialogue; the drama’s past and its treatment of time.

  5. Analytical acuity: the ability to hear both the literal moment of the dialogue and to analyse the possibilities for development inherent in it.

  6. Acuity of convention: in the same way that it is necessary to understand the historical and contemporary conventions of prose fiction and poetry, to study and explore the resources and conventions (historical and contemporary) of dramatic writing. In an ideal pedagogic set-up, this would involve some prior writing-based study of prose fiction and poetry.

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  Through class work, students need to acquire a practical and analytical understanding of the following:

  1. The way narrative in drama is constructed through dialogue in interactive relationships of varying complexity.

  2. Ways in which drama is structured through scenes, ‘beats’

  and ‘units’, if such terminology is useful, and how each scene relates to the balance of the whole piece. Each scene always contains a pivotal point or moment, around which the narrative is structured. This must be understood through careful analysis. Understanding of different inflections of cause-and-effect in narrative.