by Robert McKee
You’re not sure exactly where you are going. You don’t feel you have the strength to walk home. You walk faster. If the sunlight catches you on the streets, you will undergo some terrible chemical change.
After a few minutes you notice the blood on your fingers. You hold your hand up to your face. There is blood on your shirt, too. You find a Kleenex in your jacket pocket and hold it up to your nose. You advance with your head tilted back against your shoulders.4
If this passage were rewritten into the past tense with “you” switched to “I,” it would become a conventional first-person novel; if “you” were changed to “he,” it would become a conventional third-person telling. The second-person present tense makes this tale ambiguously both, and moves through a filmic atmosphere akin to subjective camera.
To help clarify this complexity, let’s compare the conventions of prose to their equivalent onstage and onscreen.
Dramatized Dialogue
Dramatized scenes in prose can be written from any of the three points of view—first, second, or third person. In all three voices, scenes take place in their temporal and spatial settings, the characters and their behaviors are described, and their talk is quoted verbatim. Conceivably, such scenes could be lifted off the page and transported, more or less intact, to a theatre or sound stage to be performed by actors.
Narratized Dialogue
Everything said outside of dramatized scenes in a first-or second-person voice is, by my definition, narratized dialogue. These passages are spoken in-character with a story-driven purpose and affect the reader much like an onstage soliloquy or a direct-to-camera address. When narratized dialogue modulates into stream of consciousness (see below), the pages read like an inner monologue in a play or a protagonist’s voice-over in films like MEMENTO and PI. In all instances, the author writes in-character.
INDIRECT DIALOGUE
All four major media offer the writer the choice to either recall scenes from the past and describe them, or to put them in front of the reader/audience and act them out. If he chooses description, what could have been a scene of dramatized dialogue turns into indirect dialogue.
Should the writer use a character to describe a prior scene, then her immediate dialogue paraphrases another character’s previous dialogue. For example, in this passage from Bruce Norris’s play Clybourne Park, Bev complains about her husband.
BEV
—the way he sits up all night long. Last night he was just sitting there at three o’clock in the morning and I say to him, “Say, don’t you feel sleepy? Do you want to take a Sominex, or play some cards maybe?” and he says, “I don’t see the point of it,” as if there has to be some grand justification for every single thing that a person does.5
The audience can only guess at the accuracy of her paraphrases, but in this context, exactly what was said is not important. Norris uses indirect dialogue so that the audience hears what is important: Bev’s interpretation of her husband’s behavior in her own words.
When third-person narration paraphrases dialogue, once again the reader must interpret how it sounded when spoken. This scene, for example, between a husband and wife from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections:
Made happy by pregnancy, she got sloppy and talked about the wrong thing to Alfred. Not, needless to say, about sex or fulfillment or fairness. But there were other topics scarcely less forbidden, and Enid in her giddiness one morning overstepped. She suggested he buy shares in a certain stock. Alfred said the stock market was a lot of dangerous nonsense best left to wealthy men and idle speculators. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy shares of a certain stock. Alfred said he remembered Black Tuesday as if it were yesterday. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy shares of a certain stock. Alfred said it would be highly improper to buy that stock. Enid suggested he nonetheless buy it. Alfred said they had no money to spare and now a third child coming. Enid suggested that the money could be borrowed. Alfred said no. He said no in a much louder voice and stood up from the breakfast table. He said no so loudly that a decorative copper-plate bowl on the kitchen wall briefly hummed, and without kissing her goodbye he left the house for eleven days and ten nights.6
By repeating the word “suggested” five times, Franzen pushes Enid’s nagging and Alfred’s rage to the edge of farce. The phrase “eleven days and ten nights” presages their holiday cruise, and the image of a bowl humming on the wall pushes the scene beyond farce to absurdity.
Because indirect dialogue invites the reader to imagine the scene, the heated, possibly melodramatic language of direct dialogue becomes a more personalized, believable version invented by the reader.
2
THE THREE FUNCTIONS OF DIALOGUE
Dialogue, dramatized and narratized, performs three essential functions: exposition, characterization, action.
EXPOSITION
Exposition is a term of art that names the fictional facts of setting, history, and character that readers and audiences need to absorb at some point so they can follow the story and involve themselves in its outcome. A writer can embed exposition in the telling in only one of two ways: description or dialogue.
Onstage and onscreen, directors and their designers interpret the writer’s descriptions into every expressive element that isn’t dialogue: settings, costumes, lighting, props, sound effects, and the like. Comic book artists and graphic novelists illustrate their stories as they tell them. Prose authors compose literary descriptions that project word-images into the reader’s imagination.
Dialogue can do the same work. For example, picture this: a gilt-gleaming, marbled lobby with business-dressed, fair-haired visitors signing in at a security desk manned by uniformed guards, while in the background busy elevators open and close. The moment we glimpse this image, it instantly denotes a number of expositional facts: Place—an office building in a major city somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Time—a weekday between eight a.m. and six p.m. Society—the professional class of Western culture that hires armed guards to protect the executives on the upper floors from the poverty class on the streets. What’s more, the subtext of this image connotes a commercial, competitive, white-male-dominated world, questing for wealth and power, always on the verge of corruption.
Now picture a high-energy investment broker lunching with a potential client. Listen for the implications beneath his glib double entendre: “Come on up, meet my young hawks. We roost on the seventy-seventh floor and prey on Wall Street.” In fewer graphemes than a tweet, word-pictures can express more dimensions than a camera can see.
Virtually anything expressed in images or explained in narration can be implied in dialogue. Therefore, the first function of dialogue is to pass exposition to the eavesdropping reader/audience. The following precepts guide this difficult work:
Pacing and Timing
Pacing means the rate or frequency with which exposition is spliced into the telling. Timing means choosing the precise scene and the exact line within that scene to reveal a specific fact.
The risks governing the pacing and timing of exposition are these: Give the story-goer too little exposition and he will disengage in confusion. On the other hand, big helpings of static exposition choke interest: The reader puts down the book; audiences shift in their seats, wishing they had bought more popcorn. Therefore, you must pace and time the placement of exposition with care and skill.
To keep interest moving, fine writers parse exposition out, detail by detail, passing on only what the audience member or reader needs to know when she absolutely needs and wants to know it. Not a moment before. They give only the minimal exposition necessary to maintain the flow of curiosity and empathy.
If you give the modern, story-savvy reader/audience too much exposition too soon, not only does their stride shuffle to a crawl, but they also foresee your turning points, including your ending, long before they happen. Annoyed and disappointed, they sit in front of your work thinking, “I saw it coming.” As the nineteenth-century novelist Charles R
eade advised: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”
Lastly, not all expositional facts are of equal value to the telling, and therefore do not deserve equal emphasis. In a separate file, list every fact in your story, and then rank them in order of importance to the reader/audience. As you rewrite and polish your work, you may realize that certain facts need to be stressed and repeated in more than one scene to guarantee that the reader/audience remembers them at a critical future turning point. Other less important facts need only a single hint or gesture.
Showing versus Telling
The axiom “Show, don’t tell” warns against dialogue that substitutes passive explanations for dynamic dramatization. “To show” means to present a scene in an authentic setting, populated with believable characters, struggling toward their desires, taking true-to-the-moment actions while speaking plausible dialogue. “To tell” means to force characters to halt their pursuits and talk instead and at length about their life histories or their thoughts and feelings, or their loves and hates, past and present, for no reason intrinsic to the scene or its characters. Stories are metaphors for life, not theses on psychology, environmental crises, social injustice, or any cause extraneous to the characters’ lives.
Too often, recitations of this kind simply serve the writer’s extrinsic need to opine into the ear of the captive reader/audience, rather than a character’s intrinsic need to take action. What’s worse, telling erases subtext. As a character copes with antagonisms and pursues desires, her vocal reactions and tactics invite readers and audiences to seek her unspoken thoughts and feelings. But when a writer forces unmotivated exposition into a character’s mouth, these opaque lines block the story-goer’s access to the speaker’s inner life. And as the character flattens into a spokesperson for its author’s ideas, interest fades.
Finally, showing speeds involvement and pace; telling discourages curiosity and halts pace. Showing treats readers and audiences like adults, inviting them into the story, encouraging them to open their emotions to the writer’s vision, to look into the heart of things and then forward to future events. Telling treats them like a child who a parent sits on a knee to explain the obvious.
This speech, for example, is telling: As Harry and Charlie unlock the door to their dry-cleaning business, Charlie says:
CHARLIE
Oh, Harry, how long have we known each other now? What, twenty years, maybe even more, ever since we were in school together. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, old friend? Well, how are you this fine morning?
That dialogue has no purpose except to tell the reader/audience that Charlie and Harry have been friends for over twenty years, went to school together, and the day is just beginning.
This speech, on the other hand, shows:
As Charlie unlocks the door to the dry cleaners, an unshaven Harry, dressed in a T-shirt, leans against the jamb, toking on a joint and giggling uncontrollably. Charlie looks over at him and shakes his head.
CHARLIE
Harry, when in hell are you going to grow up? Look at you and your stupid tie-dyed shirts. You’re the same immature ass you were twenty years ago in school and you haven’t changed since. Sober up, Harry, and smell the shit you’re in.
The reader’s imagination or the audience’s eye glances to Harry to capture his reaction to that insult, and invisibly, as it were, they happened to have learned “twenty years” and “school.”
At some point, every vital fictional fact must find its way into the story, timed to arrive at the most effective moment, loaded to deliver a critical insight. These details, and the perceptions they inspire, must pass into the reader/audience’s awareness without distracting them from the flow of events. Somehow the writer must send the reader/audience’s attention in one direction while he smuggles a fact in from another.
This sleight of hand calls upon one of two techniques or both: Narrative drive and exposition as ammunition. The former skill draws on intellectual curiosity, the latter emotional empathy.
Narrative Drive
Narrative drive is a side effect of the mind’s engagement with story. Change and revelations incite the story-goer to wonder, “What’s going to happen next? What’s going to happen after that? How will this turn out?” As pieces of exposition slip out of dialogue and into the background awareness of the reader or audience member, her curiosity reaches ahead with both hands to grab fistfuls of the future to pull her through the telling. She learns what she needs to know when she needs to know it, but she’s never consciously aware of being told anything, because what she learns compels her to look ahead.
Witness, for example, the power of exposition to compel narrative drive in a novel titled after a piece of exposition: Catch-22. The author, Joseph Heller, invented the term to name bureaucratic traps that cage their victims in a vicious circle of logic.
The story takes place on an air force base in the Mediterranean during World War II. In Chapter Five, Captain John Yossarian, the novel’s protagonist, asks Dr. Dan Daneeka, the base physician, about a pilot named Orr:
“Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”
“That’s all he has to do to be grounded?”
“That’s all. Let him ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Notice how Heller inserted a passage of indirect dialogue into a scene of dramatized dialogue. The prose paragraph’s summary tells us what Daneeka said to Yossarian and how Yossarian whistled in reaction to it. Even though it’s in a third-person voice that adds a touch of authorial commentary, this is showing and not telling for these reasons: 1) It happens within the scene. 2) It furthers the dynamic actions of the scene: Daneeka wants Yossarian to stop pestering him with excuses to get out of combat, and Yossarian suddenly realizes the futility of claiming to be crazy. Daneeka’s revelation becomes a turning point that moves the Yossarian plot to the negative.
In terms of narrative drive, the instant the reader grasps the inescapable logic of Catch-22, her expectations leap ahead. How, if possible, she wonders, will Yossarian, or any of the other characters, escape the vise grip of this absurd military rule? The reader/audience’s constant search for answers to questions aroused by revelations of exposition propels narrative drive.
Exposition as Ammunition
The second technique for passing exposition unnoticed to the reader/audience relies on the story-goer’s emotional involvement. Empathy begins with this thought: “That character is a human being like me. Therefore, I want that character to get whatever the character wants because if I were that character, I’d want the same thing for myself.
” The moment a story-goer recognizes a shared humanity between herself and your characters, she not only identifies with them but also transfers her real-life desires onto their fictional desires.
Once this empathetic connection hooks involvement, the technique of exposition as ammunition operates in this way: Your cast has the knowledge of the past, present, themselves, and each other that your readers or audience members will need to know in order to follow events. Therefore, at pivotal moments, let your characters use what they know as ammunition in their struggles to get what they want. These revelations will deliver the pleasure of discovery to the emotionally invested reader/audience as the fact quickly vanishes into the story-goer’s background awareness.
Consider, for example, the original Star Wars trilogy. All three films hinge on one story-fact: Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. The storytelling problem for George Lucas was when and how to deliver that piece of exposition. He could have revealed it at any point in the first film by having C-3PO whisper to R2-D2, “Don’t tell Luke, he’d really be upset to hear this, but Darth’s his dad.” The fact would have reached the audience but with minimum, almost laughable effect. Instead, he employed exposition as ammunition to turn the trilogy’s most famous scene.