Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  At the story climax of the second film, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Luke Skywalker makes a hero’s choice to fight Darth Vader. As lightsabers clash, the arch-villain takes command and the underdog struggles. Empathy for Luke and anxiety about outcome lock the audience into the moment.

  In the conventional action climax, the hero finds an unforeseen way to turn the tables on the villain. Instead, in the midst of the duel, George Lucas puts in play a motivation he has hidden in the subtext: Darth Vader wants his estranged son to join him on the infamous dark side, but faces a lesser-of-two-evils dilemma: Kill his own child, or be killed by him. To escape this dilemma, Vader uses one of the most famous pieces of exposition in film history as ammunition to disarm his son: “I am your father.” But, instead of saving his son with his revelation, he drives Luke to attempt suicide.

  Suddenly, the truth hidden behind the first two films shocks and moves the audience to compassion for Luke and fear for his future. This biographical fact used as ammunition delivers massive retrospective insight into deep character and past events, floods the audience with feeling, and sets up the trilogy’s final episode.

  Revelations

  In almost every story told, comedy or drama, the most important expositional facts are secrets, dark truths that characters hide from the world, even from themselves.

  And when do secrets come out in life? When a person faces a lesser-of-two-evils dilemma: “If I reveal my secret, I risk losing the respect of those I love” versus “But if I do not reveal my secret, something even worse will happen.” The pressure of this dilemma pries secrets loose, and as they come to light, their impact spins powerful turning points. And where do secrets come from?

  Backstory: Past events that propel future events

  Backstory is an often misunderstood term, misused to mean “life history.” A character’s biography contains a lifelong interaction of genes and experience. Backstory is a subset of this totality—an excerption of past, usually secret, events that the writer exposes at key moments to propel his story to climax. Because revelations from the backstory often inflict more impact than straightforward actions, they are reserved for major turning points. Below is a famous example of this technique.

  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  In this play written by Edward Albee in 1962, George and Martha, a middle-aged couple, endure a conflict-filled marriage. For two decades they have fought constantly over every minute aspect of the raising of their son, Jim. After an exhausting, raucous, drink-filled, insult-filled, adulterous party, topped off with a vicious argument about their son in front of their guests, George turns to Martha and says:

  GEORGE. We got a little surprise for you, baby. It’s about sunny-Jim.

  MARTHA. No more, George….

  GEORGE. YES!… Sweetheart, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you… for us, of course. Some rather sad news.

  MARTHA. (afraid, suspicious) What is this?

  GEORGE. (oh, so patiently) Well, Martha, while you were out of the room… well, the doorbell chimed… and… well, it’s hard to tell you, Martha…

  MARTHA. (a strange throaty voice) Tell me.

  GEORGE. … and… what it was… it was good old Western Union, some little boy about seventy.

  MARTHA. (involved) Crazy Billy?

  GEORGE. Yes, Martha, that’s right… Crazy Billy… and he had a telegram, and it was for us, and I have to tell you about it.

  MARTHA. (as if from a distance) Why didn’t they phone it? Why did they bring it; why didn’t they telephone it?

  GEORGE. Some telegrams you have to deliver, Martha, some telegrams you can’t phone.

  MARTHA. (rising) What do you mean?

  GEORGE. Martha… I can hardly bring myself to say it… (sighing heavily) Well, Martha… I’m afraid our boy isn’t coming home for his birthday.

  MARTHA. Of course he is.

  GEORGE. No, Martha.

  MARTHA. Of course he is. I say he is!

  GEORGE. He… can’t.

  MARTHA. He is! I say so!

  GEORGE. Martha… (long pause)… our son is… dead. (silence) He was… killed… late in the afternoon… (a tiny chuckle)… on a country road, his learner’s permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a…

  MARTHA. (rigid fury) YOU… CAN’T… DO… THAT!

  GEORGE. … large tree.

  MARTHA. YOU CANNOT DO THAT.

  GEORGE. (quietly, dispassionately) I thought you should know.

  MARTHA. (quivering with rage and loss) NO! NO! YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THAT!

  GEORGE. We’ll have to leave around noon, I suppose…

  MARTHA. I WILL NOT LET YOU DECIDE THESE THINGS!

  GEORGE: … because there’s matters of identifications, naturally, and arrangements to be made…

  MARTHA. (leaping at him, but ineffectual) YOU CAN’T DO THIS! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THIS!

  GEORGE. You do not seem to understand, Martha; I haven’t done anything. Now pull yourself together. Our son is DEAD! Can you get that into your head?

  MARTHA. YOU CAN’T DECIDE THESE THINGS!

  GEORGE. Now listen, Martha; listen carefully. We got a telegram; there was a car accident; and he’s dead. POUF! Just like that! Now, how do you like it?

  MARTHA. (a howl that weakens into a moan) NOOOOOOoooooo… (pathetic) No; no, he is not dead; he is not dead.

  GEORGE. He is dead. Kyrie, eleison. Christie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.

  MARTHA. You cannot. You may not decide these things.

  GEORGE. That’s right, Martha; I’m not God. I don’t have power over life and death, do I?

  MARTHA. YOU CAN’T KILL HIM! YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM DIE!

  GEORGE. There was a telegram, Martha.

  MARTHA. (up, facing him) Show it to me! Show me the telegram!

  GEORGE. (long pause; then, with a straight face) I ate it.

  MARTHA. (a pause; then with the greatest disbelief possible, tinged with hysteria) What did you just say to me?

  GEORGE. (barely able to stop exploding with laughter) I… ate… it. (Martha stares at him for a long time, then spits in his face) Good for you, Martha.

  The climax of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? turns on the revelation of George and Martha’s backstory secret: Jim, their contentious son, is imaginary. They made him up to fill their empty marriage. The use of backstory to turn story is the single most powerful technique in the execution of exposition.

  Direct Telling

  The admonition to show rather than tell only applies to dramatized dialogue in acted scenes. Skillful, straightforward telling, whether on page, stage, or screen, whether in narratized dialogue or third-person narration, has two vital virtues: speed and counterpoint.

  1) Speed. Narration can pack a lot of exposition into a few fast words, plant understanding in the reader/audience, and move on. Inner monologues have the power to turn subtext into text in a blink. A character’s conversations with herself can leap randomly from memory to memory in free association, or flash with images that bob up from her subconscious. Such passages, beautifully written, can move emotion within a sentence. For example, from the Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This is swift, vivid telling—a complex, concentrated image in a single sentence.

  However, all too often, filmic narration becomes a device to pump out bland exposition in the format of “and then… and then… and then.” This practice substitutes the easy work of telling for the arduous task of showing. Dialogue scenes on film and television that dramatize complex characters demand talent, knowledge, and imagination; word-thick narrations need only a keyboard.

  To turn narratized exposition into a dramatized scene, call upon one of two techniques:

  One, interpolate a scene. Convert the “and then…
and then… and then” of telling into a narrated scene of dramatized “I said/(s)he said.” Narrators (whether first person in prose, onstage, or voice-over onscreen) can either act out a scene’s dialogue verbatim from memory or use indirect dialogue to suggest it.

  The Netflix series HOUSE OF CARDS, for example, often interpolates scenes of indirect dialogue. Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood frequently turns to the camera and talks to us as if he were a professor and we his students in a course on political tradecraft. In the aside below, Underwood dramatizes exposition by giving us insights into himself as well as a character named Donald. Underwood acts out Donald’s character flaw in this vivid, two-sentence metaphorical scene:

  What a martyr craves more than anything is a sword to fall on. So you sharpen the blade, hold it at the right angle, and then 3, 2, 1…

  In the next beat, just as Professor Frank predicted, Donald takes the fall for Underwood’s misdeeds.

  Two, generate inner conflict. Stage a self-to-self duel in which one side of a narrating character argues with another. Two film examples: Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Martin Scorsese’s BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, or the adult Ralphie Parker (Jean Shepherd) in Bob Clark’s A CHRISTMAS STORY.

  2) Counterpoint. In my experience, the narration technique that most enriches a story is counterpoint. Rather than using a narrator to tell the tale, some writers fully dramatize their story, then appoint a narrator to contradict or ironize its themes. They may use wit to ridicule the dramatic, or the dramatic to deepen the satire. They may counterpoint the personal with the social, or the social with the personal.

  Take, for example, John Fowles’s postmodern, historical, antinovel novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Half the pages dramatize the story of Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman, and his involvement with Sarah Woodruff, a disgraced governess. Interlaced with this tale, however, a narrator with modern knowledge of nineteenth-century culture and class conflicts undercuts the Charles and Sarah romance. Counterpoint after counterpoint, the narrator argues that the nineteenth century offered women without means far more misery than romance.

  Other examples: In Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN the voice-over narrator frequently reminds the audience of Mexico’s social suffering as a counterpoint to the coming-of-age drama. Woody Allen’s witty voice-over in ANNIE HALL counterpoints his protagonist’s self-inquisition. In Samuel Beckett’s play Play, a trio of characters, buried to the neck in urns, stare out over the audience and narrate their seemingly random thoughts in a three-way system of counterpoint.

  Prose is the natural medium for direct telling. The novelist and short-story writer can foreground exposition as nakedly as they wish, and draw it out for as many pages as they wish, so long as their language captivates and satisfies. Charles Dickens, for example, opens A Tale of Two Cities with a burst of counterpointing exposition that hooks the reader’s curiosity:

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

  Notice how Dickens’s omniscient third-person narration uses “we” to put an arm around the reader’s shoulder and draw him into the telling. Compare that to the confrontational first-person, fast-paced voice of “I” that opens Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:

  I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

  In later chapters, both Dickens and Ellison dramatize scenes, but some prose writers never do. Instead, they pave page after page with direct telling narration, never acting out a single event.

  Try to imagine how you might dramatize the exposition in the two passages above into scenes of actable dialogue. In theory it could be done. Shakespeare could have managed it, but with what difficulty? When writing for readers, telling works wonders. When writing for actors, the reverse is true.

  Ideally, in the performance arts of stage and screen, exposition flows to the audience unnoticed within the spoken words. As we’ve seen, the craft of rendering exposition invisible takes patience, talent, and technique. Lacking those three qualities, impatient and uninspired screenwriters force exposition on the audience and hope to be forgiven.

  Forced Exposition

  Since the dawn of cinema, filmmakers have inserted shots of newspapers with foot-high headlines announcing events such as “War!” They have walked characters past televisions or radios conveniently tuned to a news broadcast of exactly what the audience needs to know precisely when it needs to know it. Rapidly edited montages and split-screen collages have packed screens with as much information as possible in the briefest possible time. Filmmakers rationalize these devices with the notion that if exposition comes fast and flashy, it won’t bore the audience. They would be wrong.

  Similar thinking governs opening films with a title roll, as did STAR WARS (which delivered rapid-fire exposition and a tone of grandiosity), or closing with one, as did A FISH CALLED WANDA (which got laughs and a touch more closure). When thrillers race against time, hopscotching from place to place, they often superimpose location names and dates over establishing shots. In such cases, a little telling goes a long way. With a brief halt for a cogent image or a quick-printed fact, the story stubs its toe but then strides on, and the audience shrugs it off.

  But audiences will not forgive a deluge of facts artlessly shoehorned into dialogue for no reason intrinsic to the characters or the scene. When inept writing forces characters to tell each other facts they already know, the pace trips over a high hurdle, falls face-first in the cinders, and may never get up.

  For example:

  INT. LUXURIOUS GREAT ROOM—DAY

  John and Jane sit on a silk-tasseled sofa, sipping martinis.

  JOHN

  Oh my goodness, darling, how long have we known and loved each other now? Why, it’s over twenty years, isn’t it?

  JANE

  Yes, ever since we were at the university together, and your fraternity threw a mixer and invited the Women’s Socialist Club. Your house was so rich, we poor girls called Beta Tau Zeta Billions, Trillions, and Zillions.

  JOHN

  (gazing around their magnificent home)

  Yes, and then I lost my inheritance. But we both worked very hard over the years to make our dreams come true. And they did, didn’t they, my little Trotskyite?

  This exchange tells the audience seven fictional facts: This couple is rich, they are in their forties, they met within the elite of their university, he was born to a wealthy family, she came up from poverty, they once had opposite political views but no longer, and over the years they’ve developed a banter that’s so sweet it hurts your teeth.

  The scene is false and its dialogue tinny because the writing is dishonest. The characters are not doing what they seem to be doing. They seem to be reminiscing, but in fact they’re mouthing exposition so the eavesdropping audience can overhear it.

  As mentioned above, prose writers can avoid these fake scenes by sketching a brief marital history that strings facts together with a pleasing style. If they wish, prose writers can, within limits, simply tell their readers what they need to know. Some playwrights and screenwriters ape novelists by resorting to narration, but with rare exceptions, direct address onstage and voice-over onscreen cannot mete out exposition with the intellectual power and
emotional impact of fully dramatized dialogue.

  To make this point for yourself, do an exercise in exposition as ammunition. Rewrite the scene above so that the two characters use their expositional facts as weapons during a fight in which one character forces the other to do something that he or she does not want to do.

  Now do it again. But this time, put the same facts into a seduction scene in which one character uses what he or she knows as ammunition to subtly manipulate the other into doing something the other does not wish to do.

  Write the scene so that the exposition becomes invisible and the characters’ behaviors credible. In other words, write it so that the conflict or seduction fascinates the reader/audience, and the exposition they need to know slips unawares, invisibly, as it were, into their minds.

  CHARACTERIZATION

  The second function of dialogue is the creation and expression of a distinctive characterization for each character in the cast.

  Human nature can be usefully divided into two grand aspects: appearance (who the person seems to be) versus reality (who the person actually is). Writers, therefore, design characters around two corresponding parts known as true character and characterization.

  True character, as the term implies, names a character’s profound psychological and moral being, a truth that can only be revealed when life backs the character into a pressure-filled corner and forces him to make choices and take actions. The Principle of Choice is foundational to all storytelling, fictional and nonfictional: to wit, a character’s true self can only be expressed through risk-filled choices of action in the pursuit of desire.

  Characterization denotes a character’s total appearance, the sum of all surface traits and behaviors. It performs three functions: to intrigue, to individualize, to convince.