by Robert McKee
As a third choice, Söderberg, who also wrote plays, may have chosen to dramatize these ideas onstage. He could have split the doctor into two characters: Glas and Markel. In the novel, the journalist Markel is Glas’s best friend. In a play, Markel might personify the morally righteous side of Glas, while Glas could play the tormented side that’s tempted toward murder.
In the subtext of the scene below, Glas seeks Markel’s help to cure his troubling dreams. Sensing this, Markel makes positive moral statements in answer to the doctor’s questions. The text retains the novel’s imagery (the theatre in fact encourages figurative language), but it changes line design from cumulative to periodic to aid the actors’ cueing. (See Chapter Five for studies in line design.)
Glas and Markel sit in a café. As dusk turns to night, they sip after-dinner brandies.
GLAS: Do you know the proverb “Dreams run like streams”?
MARKEL: Yes, my grandmother always said that, but in reality, most dreams are just fragments of the day, not worth keeping.
GLAS: Worthless as they are, they live shadow lives in the attic of the mind.
MARKEL: In your mind, Doctor, not mine.
GLAS: But don’t you think dreams give us insights?
MARKEL: At times. When I was a lad, I spent a whole afternoon pondering a geometrical problem and went to bed with it unsolved. But my brain went on working and a dream gave me a solution. Next morning I checked and damned if it wasn’t correct.
GLAS: No, I mean something hidden, insights into oneself, bubbles of truth from the depths, those dark desires one wouldn’t dare admit over breakfast.
MARKEL: If I ever had such, and I’m not saying I ever have, I’d fling them back into the foul depths where they belong.
GLAS: And what if these desires came back, night after night?
MARKEL: Then I’d dream a dream of ridicule and laugh them out of my thoughts.
These three versions contain the same essential content, but when what’s said changes direction from told to self, to told to the reader, to told to another character, language radically changes shape, diction, tonality, and texture. The three fundamental dialogue modes require three sharply contrasted writing styles.
DIALOGUE AND THE MAJOR MEDIA
All dialogue, dramatized and narratized, performs in the grand symphony of story, but from stage to screen to page, its instruments and arrangements vary considerably. For that reason, a writer’s choice of medium greatly influences the composition of dialogue—its quantities and qualities.
The theatre, for example, is primarily an auditory medium. It prompts audience members to listen more intently than they watch. As a result, the stage favors voice over image.
Cinema reverses that. Film is primarily a visual medium. It prompts the audience to watch more intently than it listens. For that reason, screenplays favor image over voice.
The aesthetics of television float between the theatre and cinema. Teleplays tend to balance voice and image, inviting us to look and listen more or less equally.
Prose is a mental medium. Whereas stories performed onstage and onscreen strike the audience’s ears and eyes directly, literature takes an indirect path through the reader’s mind. The reader must first interpret the language, then imagine the sights and sounds it describes (every reader’s imaginings are her own), and, finally, allow herself to react to what she envisions. What’s more, because literary characters are actorless, their author is free to use as much or as little dialogue, as dramatized or narratized, as he sees fit.
So let’s look at how a story’s medium shapes its dialogue.
DIALOGUE ONSTAGE
Dramatized Dialogue
The scene is the basic unit of story structure in all four major story media. In the theatre, the majority of talk plays out as dramatized dialogue, performed by characters in scenes with other characters.
The one-character play is no exception. When a lone character paces the stage, he creates scenes of inner dramatized dialogue by splitting himself in two, as it were, and pitting his warring selves against each other. If the character sits back to air his thoughts, these memories, fantasies, and philosophies play best as inner actions, motivated by a desire and taken with a purpose. No matter how passive and aimless such musings may seem on the surface, they are in fact dramatized dialogue, said within a scene by a conflicted character struggling within himself to understand himself or forget the past or sell himself on a lie—or any other inner action a playwright might invent. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape stands as a brilliant example of dramatized dialogue in the one-character play.
Narratized Dialogue
In keeping with the theatre’s ancient conventions, a playwright may employ narratized dialogue by stepping his character out of the flux of scenes and turning him to the audience to speak in soliloquy, or if very brief, in an aside.3 What’s revealed is often a confession, a secret, or a revelation of what a character genuinely thinks, feels, or wants to do but could never say aloud to another character. For example, the painful contritions of Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.
In one-person performances like The Year of Magical Thinking, Mark Twain Tonight, and I Am My Own Wife, the soliloquy becomes an entire play. These works often stage adaptations of biographies or autobiographies, and so the actor plays a well-known contemporary (Joan Didion) or a personage from the past (Mark Twain). In the course of the evening, the actor may use all three forms of character talk. For the most part, however, he will confess his story to the audience in narratized dialogue. Now and then, he might impersonate other characters and act out scenes from the past in dramatized dialogue.
Modern stand-up comedy came of age when comics moved from joke telling to narratized dialogue. A stand-up comedian must either invent a character to play (Stephen Colbert) or perform a selected, characterized version of himself (Louis C.K.) for this reason: No one can step onstage as the exact same self that got out of bed that morning. It takes a persona to perform.
Onstage, the line between dramatized and narratized dialogue can shift, depending on the actor’s interpretation. When Hamlet, for example, questions his continued existence, does he aim the phrase “To be or not to be” at the audience or at himself? It’s the actor’s choice.
Narration
On those occasions when a play’s story encompasses a large cast over decades of time, a playwright may stand a narrator at the side of the stage. These non-characters perform any number of tasks: They relate historical exposition, introduce characters, or counterpoint the action with ideas or interpretations that could not be directly dramatized in scenes.
Examples: In Donald Hall’s An Evening’s Frost (an enactment of the life of poet Robert Frost) and Erwin Piscator’s epic theatre adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, onstage narrators bring a godlike knowledge of history and personae to the audience, but they have no personal desires. They stand above the drama, facilitating the storytelling. By contrast, in Our Town, playwright Thornton Wilder’s narrator, known as the Stage Manager, mixes functions. He narrates exposition, guides the audience’s attitudes, but from time to time, he steps into dramatized scenes to play some small parts.
DIALOGUE ONSCREEN
Dramatized Dialogue
Like the theatre, the majority of onscreen talk is dramatized dialogue, spoken in-character on-camera in live action or voiced off-camera in animation.
Narratized Dialogue
Screen characters narratize dialogue in one of two modes: either off-camera voice-over over the images, or direct to camera in cinematic soliloquy.
Off-camera, self-narrating characters have been a staple since movies began to talk. Sometimes they speak in calm, logical, and reliable voices (HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER); sometimes they rant in hysterical, irrational, and unreliable outbursts (PI). Sometimes they make sense out of bewildering events (MEMENTO); sometimes they counterpoint events (THE BIG LEBOWSKI). Some characters expose painfully honest thoughts in dramat
ized dialogues with their inner selves (ADAPTATION); some hide their secret self behind excuses and rationalizations (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE); some comment on their predicaments with wit (MY NAME IS EARL).
When characters look down the camera lens and whisper something secret and personal, it’s usually a self-serving tactic to win us to their side (HOUSE OF CARDS). Since Bob Hope, comedians have tossed lines and looks to camera to punch jokes (IT’S GARRY SHANDLING’S SHOW). And the greatest of all, Woody Allen, uses narratized dialogue both off-camera and to-camera to charm our empathy and sting gags (ANNIE HALL).
In Ingmar Bergman’s WINTER LIGHT, a woman (played by Ingrid Thulin) sends her ex-lover (Gunnar Bjornstrand) a letter describing his cowardly failure to love her. As he picks it up to read, Bergman cuts to her face in close-up as she speaks the letter, eyes direct to camera, for six uninterrupted minutes. Bergman’s subjective camera transports us into the ex-lover’s imagination, so that as he envisions her speaking, we identify with him and his suffering, while Ingrid Thulin’s work to camera ignites their intimacy.
Narration
In films such as BARRY LYNDON, AMÉLIE, and Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN, non-character, offscreen narrators with resonant, articulate voices (Sir Michael Hordern, André Dussollier, Daniel Giménez Cacho, respectively) link episodes, fill in exposition, and counterpoint the telling.
Counterpoint narration imports ideas and insights from outside the story’s world to add dimension and depth to the telling. A narrator, for example, might lade comedy with drama or leaven drama with comedy; he might punctuate delusion with reality or reality with fantasy; his comments might play the political world off against the private realm or the reverse. As often as not, the ironic observations of this non-character rescues a film from sentimentality by undercutting the emotional indulgences of its characters. For example, TOM JONES.
DIALOGUE ON PAGE
Stories performed onstage and onscreen move through the physical media of air and light, and then enter the mind through the senses of sound and sight. Stories performed in prose move through the mental medium of language to find life in the reader’s imagination. Because the imagination is far more complex, multifaceted, and multileveled than the senses, literature offers a greater variety and flexibility of dialogue techniques than the theatre, television, or cinema.
Stories in prose can be told from either inside the story’s world by a character or from outside the story’s world by a narrator. This simple division, however, becomes further complicated by literature’s three point-of-view choices: first, second, and third person.
First person. In a first-person telling, a character who refers to herself with the pronouns “I” or “me” speaks to the reader about events as she remembers them. She may describe these events or present them dramatically as scenes in which she and other characters talk directly among themselves. She may also turn inward and talk to herself. If so, the reader comes along with her to overhear, as it were, her self-to-self conversations.
Because the first-person narrator is a character involved in the story, she is an imperfect witness to the life around her, unable to comprehend events in their entirety, often less than objective as she pursues her unspoken or subconscious desires. For this reason, the reliability of first-person narrators spans a wide spectrum from trustworthy to deceitful.
What’s more, the first-person narrator is often more focused on herself than others, so her inner actions, self-observations, and ruminations tend to fill the page. The inner life of other characters, therefore, can only be known by the first-person narrator’s speculations or implications the reader draws from between the lines.
An omniscient first-person narrator with preternatural insight into the thoughts and feelings of other characters is a rare device. This conceit needs an exceptional explanation. In The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, for example, the first-person narrator is the spirit of a murdered girl who looks down from her otherworldly vantage and sees into the hearts of her family as they struggle with her disappearance.
A first-person narrator could be the story’s protagonist (Brother William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco), a confidant to the protagonist (Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes), a group speaking in the first person plural (The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides), or a distant observer (Joseph Conrad’s unnamed narrator in Heart of Darkness).
Third person. In a third-person telling, a narrating intelligence guides the reader through the story’s events. This intelligence often has deep insight into the thoughts and feelings of all characters. Even though this awareness is not a character, it may have strong opinions, moral and otherwise, about the fictional world and its society. Yet, by convention, it maintains a distance by referring to the cast with the pronouns “her,” “he,” and “they.”
Because this third-person intelligence is not a character, its narration is not dialogue. Nor is it the transcribed voice of the writer. No one, not even the most eloquent talk show guest on NPR, goes through life talking in a third-person voice.
This non-character may be more or less compassionate than its author, more or less political, more or less observant, more or less moral. Whatever the case, in the same fashion the prose writer creates a voice for each of her characters, she invents a linguistic manner for narration, knowing that in the same way that audiences put themselves in the hands of onstage and offscreen narrators, the reader accepts narration as a storytelling convention, characterless and dialogueless.
The language used by this intelligence may be profoundly expressive, and the reader may listen to it in her imagination as if it were someone’s voice, but it is not. Only characters have true voices. What we call a third-person narrator’s “voice” is simply the author’s literary style. That is why the reader feels neither empathy for this voice nor curiosity about the fate of the consciousness behind it.
The reader knows via conventions older than Homer that the author invented this non-character for the sole purpose of putting the telling into language that the reader can follow. If, on the other hand, this intelligence should suddenly refer to itself as “I,” a non-character would become a character, and the telling would shift into first person.
The breadth of knowledge in third-person narrators ranges from omniscient to limited; their judgment from morally neutral to morally critical; their presence in the mind of the reader from overt to covert; their reliability from truthful to (in very rare cases) deceitful. As the prose writer plays with these dimensions, he can shade his third-person narrators with degrees of objectivity/subjectivity, ranging from ironically detached to deeply invested.
The third-person objective (a.k.a. covert or dramatic) mode shows far more than it tells. It observes but never interprets. This awareness sits back like a patron in the theatre of life, never entering the inner realms, never describing the thoughts and feelings of any character. Famous examples: Ernest Hemingway’s short stories such as “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” In the mid-twentieth century, the French nouveau roman took this technique to its absolute limit in works such as Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The third-person subjective mode penetrates the inner life and may switch between the thoughts and feelings of more than one character. More often than not, however, the author restricts access to the inner life of the story’s protagonist only. This mode may feel something like first person but keeps its distance by using the impersonal pronouns “he” and “she” rather than “I.”
In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, for example, each chapter takes up a separate storyline, each restricted to the point of view of that tale’s protagonist.
This technique of subjective exploration, in both its limited and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective in twentieth-century prose. A subjective narrator may come with a touch of personality and overt opinions (see the passage from The Corrections quoted below), but no matter how playful or sarcastic
, how familiar or personal a third-person narrator may be, this voice is the author’s creature, a special dimension of himself that he invents to convey his story from outside its events.
An author may even choose to let his narrator break the bond of trust that millennia of poetry and prose has built between writers and their readers. In rare tellings, writers have given this voice character-like traits of confusion or duplicity. But, once again, no matter how manipulative, unreliable, or uncertain a third-person narrator may become, its language is not dialogue. This is an author speaking from behind a mask. Third-person narration requires unique strategies and techniques that are outside the focus of this book.
Second person. The second-person mode is a disguise for either the first person or third person. In this mode, the storytelling voice eliminates the pronouns “I/me” of first person and the “she/he/they” of third person to address someone as “you.” This “you” could be the protagonist himself. When, for example, a person berates himself with the thought “you idiot,” one aspect of the self criticizes another aspect. A second-person voice, therefore, could be analyzing or encouraging or reminiscing with himself (Second Thoughts by Michel Butor). Or “you” could be a silent, unnamed other character, thus turning the telling into a one-sided dramatized dialogue (A Song of Stone by Iain Banks). Or in the third possibility, “you” could be the reader. In Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, an ineffable awareness takes the reader through the story in the present tense until the reader feels as if he’s acting out the events himself: