by Robert McKee
Three: Extreme Characters
In life, some people outfeel, outthink, and outtalk the people around them. Such characters deserve and should get imaginative, one-of-a-kind dialogue.
Suppose you were writing for extreme characters such as Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in BREAKING BAD; Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN; Melvin Udall in AS GOOD AS IT GETS, Jimmy Hoffa in HOFFA, or Frank Costello in THE DEPARTED (all played by Jack Nicholson); or Sophie Zawistowski in SOPHIE’S CHOICE, Suzanne Vale in POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, or Margaret Thatcher in THE IRON LADY (all played by Meryl Streep). Excellent writers gave these bigger-than-life characters image-rich language that attracted actors who knew what to do with it.
Consider these two characters: Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) from THE BIG SLEEP (1946). William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman adapted the film from Raymond Chandler’s novel. In Hollywood jargon, the film is a crimedy, the merger of two genres: crime story and romantic comedy. Repartee and mimicry leaven the intrigue and gunplay. In one sequence, for example, Marlowe, a private detective, pretends to be a gay rare book collector.
In the scene below, Marlowe meets his client’s daughter, Vivian. The two use racehorses as metaphors for themselves, and horse racing as a metaphor for sex. Their flirtation characterizes them as quick-witted, worldly-wise, self-assured, amusing, and mutually attracted. (To “rate” a Thoroughbred means to restrain the horse early in a race in order to conserve its energy for the finish.)
VIVIAN
Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them work out a little first to see if they’re front-runners or come from behind, find out what their hole card is, what makes them run.
MARLOWE
Find out mine?
VIVIAN
I think so. I’d say you don’t like to be rated, you like to get out in front, open up a lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, then come home free.
MARLOWE
You don’t like to be rated yourself.
VIVIAN
I haven’t met anyone yet who could do it. Any suggestions?
MARLOWE
Well, I can’t tell till I’ve seen you over a distance of ground. You got a touch of class but… I don’t know how far you can go.
VIVIAN
That depends on who’s in the saddle.
MARLOWE
There’s one thing I still can’t figure out.
VIVIAN
What makes me run?
MARLOWE
Uh-huh.
VIVIAN
I’ll give you a little hint. Sugar won’t work. It’s been tried.
When writing for the screen, even within the most fantasied genres, always write for the actor. Language knows no limits, but acting does. Once your work is in production, an actor will have to act your lines with clarity and conviction. Therefore, what’s said must be kept within the realm of what’s actable. This demand leads to a major difference between dialogue for the stage versus the screen: improvisation.
In the theatre, the playwright owns the play’s copyright. As a result, actors may not improvise or paraphrase dialogue without the author’s permission. In film and television, however, the writer assigns copyright to the production company, so that when the need arises, directors, editors, and actors can cut, change, or add dialogue. The professional reality of writing for the screen is that the script you write may not be performed verbatim as you wrote it. As a result, sadly, an actor’s improvisations may diminish your work.
Inept improvisations are easy to spot. When spontaneity blears and actors lose track, they often buy time by repeating each other’s cues until the scene sounds like an echo chamber:
ACTOR A
I think it’s time for you to leave.
ACTOR B
So you want me to leave, huh? Well, I’m not going anywhere until you listen to what I have to say.
ACTOR A
I’ve listened to everything you have to say and none of it makes sense.
ACTOR B
Sense? Sense? You want me to make sense? What did I say that didn’t make sense?
And on they ramble.
In rare cases, however, such as Robert DeNiro’s “You talkin’ to me?” riff in TAXI DRIVER, an actor’s improvisation eclipses the script. In FORREST GUMP, for example, Forrest (Tom Hanks) joins the army and befriends fellow enlistee Bubba Blue (Mykelti Williamson). During a montage of their boot-camp labors, Williamson improvises this passage as transcribed from the screen:
Bubba Blue: Anyway, like I was sayin’, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sauté it. Dey’s uh, shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan-fried, deep-fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, cave shrimp, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, cave shrimp. That– that’s about it.”
Notice that Williamson used “cave shrimp,” a colorless crustacean found in the subterranean streams of Alabama and Kentucky, twice. Even the best of improvisations are prone to accidental repetition.
DIALOGUE ON TELEVISION
Comparing film to television, film (with exceptions) likes to take the camera out-of-doors onto the streets and into nature; television (with exceptions) gravitates toward indoor stories of families, friends, lovers, and coworkers. For that reason, television tends to write more face-to-face scenes, leaning the balance of dialogue versus image toward talk for three reasons:
1) The small screen. Facial expressions are hard to read in full-length shots. This motivates the television camera to close in on a character’s face, and when it does, that face talks.
2) Genre. Television favors genres such as family comedy, family drama, the love story, the buddy story, and professional dramas of all kinds (cops, criminals, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, etc.). These series frame personal relationships in homes and workplaces where intimacy begins, changes, and ends first and foremost through talk.
3) Small budgets. Image costs money, resulting in high film budgets. Because dialogue is relatively inexpensive to stage and shoot, television’s limited budgets encourage talk.
Looking toward the future, if wall-mounted screens continue to grow in size and popularity, TV budgets will also rise, causing a spike in subscription fees. In time, large home screens will merge film and television into one grand medium—the screen. On the other hand, when not at home, people will consume stories on their iPads and iPhones, thus keeping dialogue critical to the tellings. In either case, however, movie theatres will close.
DIALOGUE IN PROSE
Prose translates conflicts from the private, personal, social, and physical realms into word-pictures, often colored by the inner lives of characters, before projecting them onto the reader’s imagination. Consequently, prose writers pour their most vivid, high-intensity language into first-or third-person narration rather than exchanges of dialogue. Indeed, free indirect dialogue turns speech itself into narration. When prose writers do use direct dialogue in dramatized scenes, they often restrict themselves to very naturalist language in order to contrast the plainness of talk with the figurative potency of their narration. With exceptions, such as Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne, many novelists and short-story writers use quoted dialogue as a technique to simply change pace or break up blocks of prose.
The stage and screen confine dialogue to acted scenes and occasional direct address that soliloquizes or narrates. Both media rely on actors to enrich their characters with subtext and the paralanguages of tonality, gesture, and facial expression. For that reason, an author’s expressivity in the theatre or on film and television has to work within the possibilities of the actor’s art. But because prose performs in the reader’s imagination, it offers the writer the widest spectrum of dialogue styles.
At one end of the continuum, prose creates conventional scenes that could be transplanted direct
ly to the stage or screen without changing a word. In the middle ranges, the first-person voice becomes a novel-length, uninterrupted speech composed of tens of thousands of words, all spoken to the reader. Some authors turn away from the reader, as it were, and distill thought into inner dialogues—secret conversations argued between the many voices of a multifaceted self. Finally, at the far opposite edge of the spectrum, third-person prose often eliminates quotation marks and characterized voices altogether to subsume character talk into free indirect dialogue.
Chapter One looked at the three categories of point of view in prose and how they affect the qualities and quantities of dialogue. Now, let’s take those distinctions into more depth and detail by grouping the many varieties of prose dialogue into two grand modes: in-character versus non-character.
Non-Character Narration
The non-character side of prose tells its stories through a third-person narrator, an intelligence that is neither a character nor the real-life voice of the author, but a guiding awareness a writer invents and then endows with varying degrees of omniscience and objectivity to describe characters and events as well as provide commentary in various kinds of discourse.
A non-character narrator can present dialogue explicitly in dramatized scenes or implicitly via narratized indirect dialogue. Consider this from the short story “The Widow Predicament” by David Means:
They sat across from each other at the Hudson House and conversed. His skin was weathered and he talked about Iceland most of the time until rising naturally out of his talk was the suggestion that perhaps she might want to see the country someday; nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it.3
Indirect dialogue in non-character narration gives the writer the usual assets of direct dialogue. It channels exposition when the reader needs to know that the talk took place and the upshot of what was said. It characterizes the speaker in terms of what the character talks about, although not how he says it. And as in the example above, the narration that surrounds indirect dialogue can express its subtext. Note how Means describes subtext as something “rising naturally out of his talk,” and uses the words “suggestion” and “hint” to convey a sense of ineffability.
The two chief benefits of indirect dialogue in non-character narration are 1) acceleration of pace, and 2) protection against banality. The dinner table talk about Iceland that Means summarized in a phrase could have gone on for an hour. He saved us from that. And unless his character could describe with a Hemingwayesque eye, Means knew best to leave landscape adjectives off-page.
The characterless voice of a third-person narration can be quite distant, observant, and objective.
For example, a Joseph Conrad narrator describes a tropical dawn:
The smooth darkness grew paler and became blotchy with ill-defined shapes, as if a new universe were being evolved out of somber chaos. Then outlines came out, defining forms without any details, indicating here a tree, there a bush; a black belt of forest far off. The day came rapidly, dismal and oppressed by the fog of the river and the heavy vapors of the sky—a day without color and without sunshine: incomplete, disappointing, sad.
When non-character awareness moves in the opposite direction and becomes intimate, imitative, and subjective, it adopts a stream of consciousness mode to invade the unsaid and unsayable realms and mirror a character’s inner life. This technique mixes the third-person narrator’s composure with the character’s emotional energies and word choices, melding into the role, replicating her thought processes, generating the impression of inner dialogue but without crossing the line to an in-character voice.
Consider, for example, this passage from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s non-character narrator uses words plucked from Clarissa Dalloway’s vocabulary (“lark,” “plunge,” “something awful”) to emulate the flow of memory:
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she can hear now, she burst open the French windows and plunged into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen…
Not all stream of consciousness “streams” with Virginia Woolf’s breathless fluidity. Some interiorized passages zigzag or circle or pulse (see the Ken Kesey and David Means examples below). For that reason, some schools of writing use “stream of consciousness” and “inner dialogue” interchangeably as if the terms were synonyms. But for the purposes of this book, I give them distinct definitions. I draw the line with the answer to this question: Who is talking to whom? Stream of consciousness uses a third-person non-character voice to talk to the reader (as in the Woolf example above); inner dialogue uses a character’s voice in first or second person to talk to himself (as in the Nabokov example below).
The In-Character Voice
The in-character side of prose speaks with character-specific voices. Dialogue, as I previously defined the term, includes all purposeful character talk, whether spoken in duologues with other characters, said to the reader, or by the character talking to herself. As we noted in Chapter One, because prose does its acting in the reader’s imagination, it offers a far greater range of in-character techniques than stage or screen. In-character prose employs six tactics: 1) dramatized dialogue, 2) first-person direct address, 3) indirect dialogue, 4) inner dialogue, 5) paralanguage, and 6) mixed techniques (see Chapter Five for the last two tactics).
Dramatized Dialogue
In the novel, dramatized dialogue rarely reaches the intensity of a verse play. Nonetheless, within the limits of genre and characterizations set by the author, figurative language may enhance scenes, just as it does onstage and onscreen. First-person narrators often enact “I said”/“she said”/“he said” scenes, purely dramatized and without commentary.
Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is narrated by Jack Burden, an aide to a ruthless politician and the novel’s central character, Willie Stark, a.k.a. the Boss. Stark needs a secret piece of dirt to smear the reputation of a political foe, Judge Irwin. Note how Stark uses the decades that span from diapers to the coffin as a metaphor for life:
It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me… “There is always something.”
And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”
And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”4
Direct Address
First-person narration is first cousin to soliloquys onstage and in-character voice-overs onscreen. In all three cases a character speaks directly to the person consuming the story. More often than not, the protagonist narrates his or her story, but occasionally a supporting character does the talking. Direct address can be more or less emotional, more or less objective, the specific tone dependent on the personality of the narrator.
Here, a Rudyard Kipling protagonist recalls looking out to sea and describes the wide, calm, objective pleasure of his experience to the reader:
I remember the windjammer as she sailed toward me. The setting sun ablaze astern. Out flung water at her feet, her shadow slashed rope furled sails bulging sideways like insolent cheeks of angels.
Or, a first-person narrator’s view may contract, blinded by strong emotions or lesser degrees of sanity. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a patient in a mental hospital, “Chief” Bromden, begins the novel with:
They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them. They’re mopping when I come out of the dorm, all three of them sulky and hating everything, the time of day, the place they’
re at here, the people they got to work around. When they hate like this, better if they don’t see me. I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment to detect my fear and they all look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio.5
Bromden’s imaginings of unseen orgies and fear-detecting technology, enriched with his metaphors (quiet as dust) and similes (faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes) express his paranoid inner life, but at the same time, give the impression that despite the Chief’s constricted, insane thoughts, he is knowingly talking to us, the reader.
Indirect Dialogue
When a non-character third-person narrator uses indirect dialogue, subtext often becomes text. For example, in the David Means scene above, his third-person narrator tells the reader what was not said: “… nothing about dancing on the lip of volcanoes, or throwing themselves into one sacrificially, but a hint of it.”
When in-character first-or second-person prose relates indirect dialogue, subtext can only be implied because a first-person narrator doesn’t have access to his own subconscious. For example, this scene from The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes: Webster, the protagonist, wants to take action against an ex-lover because she won’t give him a letter he believes is rightfully his, so he consults a lawyer: