Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  1) To intrigue. The reader/audience knows that a character’s appearance is not her reality, that her characterization is a persona, a mask of personality suspended between the world and the true character behind it. When the reader/audience encounters a one-of-a-kind personality, they listen to the character’s words and naturally wonder: “That’s who she seems to be, but who is she really? Is she actually honest or a liar? Loving or cruel? Wise or foolish? Cool or rash? Strong or weak? Good or evil? What is the core identity behind her intriguing characterization? What is her true character?”

  Having hooked the reader/audience’s curiosity, the story becomes a series of surprising revelations that answer these questions.

  2) To convince. A well-imagined, well-designed characterization assembles capacities (mental, physical) and behaviors (emotional, verbal) that encourage the reader/audience to believe in a fictional character as if she were factual. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted two centuries ago, the reader/audience knows that stories and characters are not actual. But they also know that to involve themselves in the telling, they must temporarily believe, or more precisely, they must willingly suspend their disbelief and accept the character’s actions and reactions without doubt, without argument.

  If your reader/audience thinks the thought, “I don’t believe a word she says” because they sense your character is a liar, that could be a revelation of true character. But if they think the same thought because they don’t simply believe in your character, then it’s time for a rewrite.

  3) To individualize. A well-imagined, well-researched characterization creates a unique combination of biology, upbringing, physicality, mentality, emotionality, education, experience, attitudes, values, tastes, and every possible nuance of cultural influence that has given the character her individuality. Moving through her days, pursuing career, relationships, sexuality, health, happiness, and the like, she gathers behaviors into a one-of-a-kind personality.

  And the most important trait of all: talk. She speaks like no one we have ever met before. Her language style not only sets her apart from all other cast members but also, if the writing is masterful, from all other fictional characters. A recent example: Jeanette “Jasmine” Francis (Cate Blanchett) in Woody Allen’s BLUE JASMINE. (Dialogue to characterize will be fully explored in Chapters Ten and Eleven.)

  ACTION

  Dialogue’s third essential function is to equip characters with the means for action. Stories contain three kinds of action: mental, physical, and verbal.

  Mental Action: Words and images compose thoughts, but a thought does not become a mental action until it causes change within a character—change in attitude, belief, expectation, understanding, and the like. A mental action may or may not translate into outer behavior, but even if it stays secret and unexpressed, the character who took the mental action is not quite the same person afterward as she was before. Character change through mental action impels much of modern storytelling.

  Physical Action: Physical action comes in two fundamental kinds: gestures and tasks.

  By gestures, I mean all varieties of body language: facial expression, hand movements, posture, touch, proxemics, vocalics, kinesics, and the like. These behaviors either modify spoken language or substitute for it, expressing feelings words cannot.1

  By tasks, I mean activities that get something done: working, playing, traveling, sleeping, lovemaking, fighting, daydreaming, reading, admiring a sunset, and the like—all those actions that do not require talk.

  Verbal Action: As novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it, “Dialogue is what characters do to each other.”2

  On the level of outer behavior, a character’s dialogue style melds with his other traits to create his surface characterization, but at the inner level of true character, the actions he takes into the world reveal his humanity or lack of it. What’s more, the greater the pressure in the scene (the more he stands to lose or gain in that moment), the more his actions tell us who he really is.

  What a character says, however, only moves the reader/audience if the actions he takes beneath his lines ring true to that specific character in that specific moment. Therefore, before writing a line, ask these questions: What does my character want out of this situation? At this precise moment, what action would he take in an effort to reach that desire? What exact words would he use to carry out that action?

  Spoken words suggest what a character thinks and feels; the action he takes beneath his words expresses his identity. To uncover a character’s inner life, seek the subtextual action and label it with an active gerund (“-ing”) phrase. Below are the four dialogue quotes from the preface. Look into the subtext of each, and name the character’s action with a gerund. When done, compare your interpretations to mine.

  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

  Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

  To the last syllable of recorded time,

  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

  The way to dusty death.

  —Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine.”

  —Rick in CASABLANCA

  “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

  —Ahab in Moby Dick

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  —Jerry in SEINFELD

  All four quotes above imply disgust, but Macbeth, Rick Blaine, Ahab, and Jerry Seinfeld express their disdain in such radically different speech styles that their personalities could not be more unalike. (Dialogue style as the door to characterization will be the focus of Part Three.)

  My sense of the deep character under the four speeches suggests these subtextual actions: Macbeth—denouncing existence; Rick Blaine—lamenting lost love; Ahab—blaspheming God’s power; Jerry Seinfeld—ridiculing the political correctness that protects asinine behavior from ridicule. Your interpretations of implied action may differ from mine (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but the purpose of this exercise is to reveal the difference between the activity of talk and the taking of action.

  Part Four will further demonstrate this technique by parsing seven scenes beat by beat to separate their outer language from their inner actions and trace how these dynamic designs motivate what’s said as they arc scenes around their turning points.

  3

  EXPRESSIVITY I: CONTENT

  As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

  Jaques (to Duke Senior)

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts…

  Jaques believes that in the theatre of life, everyone acts out his own cast of characters decade after decade from infant to adult to geezer. Jaques steps back to survey this pattern from a philosophical, objective, long-term, outside-in, public point of view. But in order to create Jaques’s dark doctrine, Shakespeare worked (my guess) from the reverse perspective—psychological, subjective, here and now, inside-out, and profoundly private.

  As you compose dialogue, I think it’s useful to imagine character design as three concentric spheres, one inside the other—a self within a self within a self. This three-tiered complex fills dialogue with content of thought and feeling while shaping expression in gesture and word. The innermost sphere churns with the unsayable; the middle sphere restrains the unsaid; the outer sphere releases the said.

  THE SAID

  The surface level of things said supports the more or less solid meanings that words, spoken or written, directly express with both denotations and connotations. “Snake,” for example, literally means “a legless reptile,” but in Western culture it also symbolizes treachery and evil. The word “house” connotes more than domicile. It carries ove
rtones of home, hearth, and family, plus undertones of shack, crash pad, and flophouse.

  This is why quotable dialogue such as “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’” (Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION) and “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight” (Emily Charlton in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA) outlive their stories and their characters. These sentences express their meaning no matter who says it or when.

  Word choices (busy dyin’, stomach flu) naturally enrich the lines with connotations from the culture outside their fictional setting. But because a specific character in a specific situation speaks the lines with a specific purpose, a wholly new and deeper realm comes into play: the character’s intelligence, imagination, and other genetic givens.

  By creating an original dialogue style of vocabulary, diction, syntax, grammar, tone, tropes, and accent, the writer characterizes a role. Verbal choices express the character’s education or lack of it, wit or lack of it, his outlook on life, the range of his emotional behavior—all the observable traits that jigsaw into a personality.

  THE UNSAID

  A second sphere, the unsaid, revolves within a character. From this inner space the self gazes out at the world. As thoughts and feelings form at this level, the self deliberately withholds them. Nonetheless, once the character speaks (text), readers and audiences instinctively look past the words to intuit the unsaid, to glimpse what the character actually thinks and feels (subtext) but chooses not to put into words. The writer, therefore, must hone dialogue so that this is possible, so that the unsaid can be sensed by implication.1

  When Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) says to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,” what she does not say, but we know she is thinking, might go something like this: “The fashion world forces me to live an anorexic life, but I want my career more than my health. Perpetual hunger is a price I’m happy to pay. If you value your job future, you will do the same.”

  Novels thrive at the level of the unsaid. In Chapter One of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, a violent accident kills a man. In the next chapter, as Joe Rose stands among the other survivors, surveying the aftermath, he confides to the reader:

  Clarissa came up behind me and looped her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my back. What surprised me was she was already crying (I could feel the wetness on my shirt) whereas to me, sorrow seemed a long way off. Like a self in a dream I was both first and third persons. I acted, and saw myself act. I had my thoughts, and I saw them drift across a screen. As in a dream, my emotional responses were nonexistent or inappropriate. Clarissa’s tears were no more than a fact, but I was pleased by the way my feet were anchored to the ground and set well apart, and the way my arms were folded across my chest. I looked out across the fields and the thought scrolled across: That man is dead. I felt a warmth spreading through me, a kind of self-love, and my folded arms hugged me tight. The corollary seemed to be And I am alive. It was a random matter, who was alive or dead at any given time. I happened to be alive.

  THE UNSAYABLE

  Deepest yet, concealed beneath the unsaid, the sphere of the unsayable roils with subconscious drives and needs that incite a character’s choices and actions.

  A character’s truest nature can only be expressed when, under the pressures of life, he chooses to act in pursuit of a life-defining desire. As antagonistic pressures build greater and greater power, the character’s choices of action reveal his hidden self, until a final choice under the maximum pressure of life exposes the character’s primal, irreducible self. How deliberate versus instinctive the motivations are that propel human choice of action has been debated for centuries. But whatever the case, choices begin in this innermost sphere.

  Language, therefore, cannot express who a character actually is, only who he seems to be. As the Bible teaches, a person is known not by his words but his deeds. The truth comes full circle, however, once the writer realizes that words are deeds.

  Talk is the foremost vehicle for human action. When a character says something, he is, in fact, doing something. By speaking, he could be comforting a loved one, bribing an enemy, begging for help, refusing to help, obeying authority, defying authority, paying the price, remembering the day, and so on down the limitless list of human actions. Dialogue expresses far more than the meanings of its words. As language, dialogue conveys characterization, but as action, dialogue expresses true character.

  Moment by moment, your character struggles in pursuit of her desires; she takes actions and uses her spoken words to carry them out. At the same time, however, her language choices convey her inner life, conscious and subconscious, without announcing it. Whether read or acted, fine dialogue creates a transparency that allows the reader/audience to gaze through the text of talk. This phenomenon turns the story-goer into a mind reader.

  When you read a page of expressive dialogue or watch a fine actor perform a complex scene, your sixth sense invades the character. You become a telepathist, often better aware of what’s going on inside her than she knows herself. Your story-trained sonar traces vibrations down through the character’s subconscious currents, until the actions she takes in the subtext of her lines enunciate her identity and you discover her profound personal dimensions.

  If, as some people believe, anything and everything can be expressed in words, we should stop telling stories and write essays instead. But we don’t, because at the rock bottom of being, the unsayable energies in the subconscious mind are real and demand expression.

  Dialogue unites these realms because the spoken word resonates through all three spheres. Dialogue wields the double power to express the effable (characterization) while it illumines the ineffable (true character)—what can be put into words versus what can only be put into action. Dialogue, therefore, is the writer’s foremost vehicle for character content.

  ACTION VERSUS ACTIVITY

  The axiom “nothing is what it seems” expresses the primal duality of life: What seems is the surface of life, the activity we see and hear, the outer behavior of what a character says and how she behaves. What is is the substance of life, the action the character takes below the surface of activity.

  Outer goings-on such as playing cards, working out, sipping wine, and, most of all, talking are simply activities. These textual behaviors mask the truth of what the character is actually doing. For even though an activity like chatting with a stranger at a bus stop may seem without purpose, it never is. Therefore, no line of dialogue is finished until you’ve answered this question: In the subtext of my character’s verbal activity, what action is he in fact taking?

  Consider ice cream. We never eat ice cream simply because we’re hungry. Like all behaviors, a conscious or subconscious action underlies this activity. What is the ice cream eater really doing? Perhaps he’s drowning his sorrows in something sweet or rebelling against doctor’s orders or rewarding himself for sticking to his diet. Those actions—drowning sorrows, rebelling, or rewarding—find expression in the activity of eating ice cream.

  The same of talk. As Character A and Character B converse, what are they doing? Are the words Character A uses consoling Character B or ridiculing her? When B reacts, does her dialogue suggest that she is submitting to A or dominating him? Is A feigning interest or falling in love? Is B deceiving A or confessing to him? And on the questioning goes. Behind the textual activities of the characters, what subtextual actions actually drive the scene?

  An activity, therefore, is simply the surface manifestation of an action; it’s the way a character carries out an action. Action is foundational to storytelling, and every activity contains one.

  “Drama” is the ancient Greek word for action, derived from the verb draoō, meaning “to do” or “to act.” The audiences of classical Greece knew that no matter what was happening on the surface of a play, an inner action drives all outer activity. Extending this principle to the writing of a scene, we realize that even silence has underlying acti
on. Not speaking when a situation calls for talk is an action, perhaps a cruel one, aimed at another person. When a character speaks, he is doing something: helping or hurting, begging or bribing, persuading or dissuading, explaining or misleading, attacking or defending, complimenting or insulting, complaining or thanking, and so on down an endless list of actions. Even pauses play into a beat of action/reaction: When a character pauses, she’s either reacting to the scene’s previous action or preparing her next move.

  The term “dialogue” is often contrasted with “monologue,” as if dialogue were always a two-way process. But that’s misleading. As I mentioned in Chapter One, dialogue is a contraction of two Greek terms (dia and legein) meaning “through” and “speak.” “Dialogue” connotes actions taken through talk. Therefore, when a character talks to herself, she takes action within herself. “Monologue” connotes someone talking to no one or nothing, but in reality, that’s impossible. Someone, something, or some aspect of the self is on the receiving end of every word ever spoken or thought.

  TEXT AND SUBTEXT

  Activity and action run parallel to another pair of terms: text and subtext.

  Text means the surface of a work of art and its execution in its medium: paint on canvas, chords from a piano, steps by a dancer. In the art of story, text names the words on the page of a novel, or the outer life of character behavior in performance—what the reader imagines, what an audience sees and hears. In the creation of dialogue, text becomes the said, the words the characters actually speak.

  Subtext names the inner substance of a work of art—the meanings and feelings that flow below the surface. In life, people “speak” to each other, as it were, from beneath their words. A silent language flows below conscious awareness. In story, subtextual levels enclose the hidden life of characters’ thoughts and feelings, desires and actions, both conscious and subconscious—the unsaid and unsayable.