Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Mr. Gunnell is a calm, gaunt man who doesn’t mind silence. After all, it costs his clients just as much as speech.

  “Mr. Webster.”

  “Mr. Gunnell.”

  And so we mistered one another for the next forty-five minutes, in which he gave me the professional advice I was paying for. He told me that going to the police and trying to persuade them to lay a charge of theft against a woman of mature years who had recently lost her mother would, in his view, be foolish. I liked that. Not the advice, but the way he expressed it. “Foolish”: much better than “inadvisable” or “inappropriate.”6

  The reader senses that beneath his glib approval of Gunnell’s choice of words, Webster rages.

  Inner Dialogue

  Onstage and onscreen, the actor brings the unsaid to life within her performance, where it stays mute in the subtext. But when novelists and short-story writers wish, they can turn subtext into text and convert the unsaid directly into literature. The chief difference, therefore, between in-character direct address and inner dialogue is who’s listening. A first-person voice narrates to the reader; an inner dialogist talks to himself.

  Lolita, for example, begins with Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in self-celebration:

  Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

  Humbert is not talking to us. Rather, we sit outside, listening as his inward-facing mind revels in memories. To capture this self-absorbed admixture of sex and worship, Nabokov opens with metaphors for passion as prayer, then focuses on Humbert’s tongue as it pounds “t” sounds in alliteration.

  Compare Humbert’s masturbatory fantasy with a passage from “The Knocking,” a short story by David Means. Means’s protagonist talks directly to us as he reclines in his New York apartment, listening to the tenant above him hang pictures or do repairs. His in-character voice guides us through his hopscotching thoughts as they leap from now to then and back to now.

  A piercingly sharp metallic tap, not too loud and not too soft, coming out from under the casual noise of summer afternoon—the roar of traffic on Fifth combined with high heel taps, taxi horns, and the murmur of voices—again, many of these knockings come late in the day when he knows, because he knows, that I’m in my deepest state of reverie, trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions, throwing out, silently, wordlessly, my theorems: Love is a blank senseless vibration that, when picked up by another soul, brings form to something that feels eternal (like our marriage) and then tapers and thins and becomes wispy, barely audible (the final days in the house along the Hudson) and then, finally, nothing but air unable to move anything (the deep persistent silence of loss).

  Inner dialogue mimics free association to leapfrog through a character’s mind. When we glance in the cracks between the images, we glimpse the unsayable.

  To sum up: from stage to screen to page, the nature, need, and expressivity of dialogue vary considerably. Stage dialogue is the most embellished, screen dialogue the most concise, and prose dialogue the most mutable.

  5

  EXPRESSIVITY III: TECHNIQUE

  FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

  Figurative devices range from metaphor, simile, synecdoche, and metonymy to alliteration, assonance, oxymoron, personification, and beyond. In fact, the list of all linguistic tropes and ploys numbers in the hundreds. These turns of phrase not only enrich what’s said, but also send connotations of meaning resonating into the subtexts of the unsaid and unsayable as well.

  For example: In Scene Six of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois, a desperately vulnerable, aging Southern belle on the edge of mental and emotional collapse, meets Mitch, a lonely, sensitive, working-class bachelor who lives with his dying mother. After an evening out, they confess to very different but equally pain-filled lives. Their attraction builds to this moment:

  MITCH: (drawing Blanche slowly into his arms) You need somebody. And I need somebody, too. Could it be you and me, Blanche?

  She stares at him vacantly for a moment, then with a soft cry huddles in his embrace. She makes a sobbing effort to speak but the words won’t come. He kisses her forehead and her eyes and finally her lips. Her breath is drawn and released in long, grateful sobs.

  BLANCHE: Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly.

  These five words condense tremendous meaning and emotion. The phrase “there’s God” is not a metaphor comparing Mitch to a deity, but rather hyperbole to express Blanche’s sense of an overwhelming, heaven-like salvation. We suspect, however, that this epiphany is not her first.

  The words “Sometimes” and “so quickly” suggest that Blanche has been rescued by men many times in the past. But the men who suddenly saved her must have abandoned her just as fast because here she is, still desperately alone, clinging to yet another stranger. In five words the audience instantly glimpses the implied pattern: When Blanche meets men, she plays the victim and inspires their inner white knight. They rescue her, but then, for reasons we are yet to discover, desert her. Will Mitch be any different?

  In one ear-catching trope, Tennessee Williams exposes the tragic cadence of Blanche’s life and raises a dread-filled question in the audience’s mind.

  Language composed into dialogue offers a spectrum that runs from mental meanings at one end to sensual experiences at the other. For example, a character might call a singer’s voice either “lousy” or “sour.” Both terms make sense, but “lousy” is a dead metaphor that once meant “covered with lice.” “Sour” still has life. The moment the audience hears “sour,” their lips start to pucker. Which line stirs the most inner feeling: “She walks like a model” or “She moves like a slow, hot song”? Dialogue can express the same idea in countless ways, but, in general, the more sensory the trope, the deeper and more memorable its effect.1

  Tropes work within a single sentence, but because dialogue dramatizes conflict-filled talk speech after speech, temporal and counter-punctual techniques also come into play: rapid rhythms versus silent pauses, run-on sentences versus fragments, repartee versus argument, literate versus illiterate grammars, monosyllabic versus polysyllabic vocabularies, politeness versus profanity, verisimilitude versus verse, understatement versus overstatement, and countless other examples of stylistics and wordplay. Dialogue can dance to as many different tunes as life can sing.

  I have emphasized the infinite array of creative possibilities that face the writer a few times already and will again. I repeat this point because I want writers to understand that form does not limit expression; it inspires it. This book explores the forms that underlie dialogue but never proposes formulae for writing it. Creativity is choice-making.

  PARALANGUAGE

  Actors provide their audiences with all forms of paralanguage, those nonlexical nuances of voice and body language that enhance the meanings and feelings of words—facial expression; gestures; posture; rate of words; pitch, volume, rhythm, intonation, stress; and even proxemics, the distances characters keep between themselves and others. An actor’s paralanguage speaks a gesticulate dialogue. The eye of the audience reads these microexpressions at up to one twenty-fifth of a second.2 On page, however, paralanguage calls for description enhanced with figurative language.

  In this example from “Railroad Incident, August 1995,” a short story by David Means, four homeless men sit around a fire at night when a half-dressed man comes out of the shadows.

  What they saw emerge was a man softening into middle age. In his limp was a slight residue of dignity and formality, the way he lifted his feet as if they were still shod and weighted by the expensive shoes; or maybe all of that wasn’t noticed until, coming up to them, he opened his mouth and spoke, saying hello softly, the vowels widening, the cup of his mouth over those words like an expensive shell… 3

  (David Means writes shor
t stories, I suspect, because his arsenal of prose techniques is so diverse, he needs hundreds of tellings to explore them all.)

  MIXED TECHNIQUES

  Prose techniques can be used singularly or in concert. In this exchange from An American Dream, Norman Mailer weaves three: direct dialogue, first-person direct address, and paralanguage, both literal and figurative.

  “You want a divorce?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “Like that?”

  “Not like that, darling. After all that.” She yawned prettily and looked for a moment like a fifteen-year-old Irish maid. “When you didn’t come by today to say goodbye to Deirdre—”

  “—I didn’t know she was leaving.”

  “Of course you didn’t know. How could you know? You’ve been nuzzling and nipping with your little girls.” She did not know that at the moment I had no girl.

  “They’re not so little any more.” A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode.

  “Give us a bit of the rum,” I said.4

  A quick point about adaptation from medium to medium: If you wish to adapt a prose story to the screen, recognize that novelists and short-story writers tend to concentrate their finest language in the voices of their narrators and not in the dialogue of their dramatized scenes—just as Mailer did above.

  Literature resists filmic adaptation for the obvious reason: The camera cannot photograph thought. Inner dialogues of concentrated prose cannot shift sideways from page to screen. Therefore, to adapt you must reinvent. You must re-envision the novel’s storytelling from the inside out, and transform its novelistic narratized dialogue into filmic dramatized dialogue. No small task.

  LINE DESIGN

  A line’s design pivots around its key term—the word or phrase essential to its meaning. An author can place that key term first, last, or anywhere in the middle. That choice results in one of three fundamental line designs: suspenseful, cumulative, balanced.

  The Suspense Sentence

  Curiosity drives the thirst for knowledge—our intellectual need to solve puzzles and answer questions. Empathy drives the hunger for connection—our emotional need to identify with others and root for their well-being. When the rational and emotional sides of life merge, they generate the phenomenon of suspense. Suspense, simply put, is curiosity charged with empathy.

  Suspense focuses the reader/audience by flooding the mind with emotionally tinged questions that hook and hold attention: “What’s going to happen next?” “What’ll happen after that?” “What will the protagonist do? Feel?” And the major dramatic question (MDQ) that hangs suspended over the entire telling: “How will this turn out?” These powerful questions so grip our concentration that time vanishes. As events build to story climax, suspense intensifies and peaks at the final and irreversible turning point that answers the MDQ and ends the telling.

  This combination of curiosity and concern arcs the story’s overall suspense, but when we zoom in for a close-up, we see that inquisitive emotions permeate every story component, no matter its size. Each scene dramatizes a suspense-filled turning point; each speech within the scene grips interest from first line to last; even the smallest element of all, the line of dialogue, shapes itself into a miniature unit of suspense. A superbly told story holds unbroken intellectual and emotional involvement scene by scene, speech by speech, line by line. The reader never pauses and the audience never looks away, not for a moment.

  The key to composing dialogue that holds the eye to page and the ear to the stage and screen is the periodic sentence. A periodic sentence withholds its core idea until the final word. By front-loading the sentence with modifiers or subordinate ideas and thus delaying the meaning to last, the periodic sentence compels uninterrupted interest.

  For example: “If you didn’t want me to do it, why did you give me that________?” What word would give that line its specific meaning? “Look?” “Gun?” “Kiss?” “Nod?” “Photo?” “Money?” “Report?” “Smile?” “E-mail?” “Ice cream sundae?” Almost any noun imaginable could nail the meaning. To inspire intrigue, the periodic design makes meaning wait, and thus compels the reader/audience to listen in wonder from the first word to the last.

  In other words, the periodic sentence is the suspense sentence.

  For example, the opening scene from Art, a play by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton. I have put the core word or phrase in each sentence in bold.

  Marc, alone onstage.

  Marc: My friend Serge has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five-foot by four: white. The background is white. If you screw up your eyes, you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.

  Serge is one of my oldest friends. He’s done very well for himself, he’s a dermatologist and he’s keen on art.

  On Monday, I went to see the painting; Serge actually got hold of it on the Saturday, but he’s been lusting after it for several months. This white painting with white lines.

  At Serge’s.

  At floor level, a white canvas with fine white diagonal scars. Serge looks at his painting, thrilled. Marc looks at the painting. Serge looks at Marc looking at the painting.

  Long silence: from both of them, a whole range of wordless emotions.

  Marc: Expensive?

  Serge: Two hundred thousand.

  Marc: Two hundred thousand?

  Serge: Huntington would take it off my hands for two hundred and twenty.

  Marc: Who’s that?

  Serge: Huntington?

  Marc: Never heard of him.

  Serge: Huntington! The Huntington Gallery!

  Marc: The Huntington Gallery would take it off your hands for two hundred and twenty?

  Serge: No, not the Gallery. Him. Huntington himself. For his own collection.

  Marc: Then why didn’t Huntington buy it?

  Serge: It’s important for them to sell to private clients. That’s how the market circulates.

  Marc: Mm hm…

  Serge: Well?

  Marc: …

  Serge: You’re not in the right place. Look at it from this angle. Can you see the lines?

  Marc: What’s the name of the…?

  Serge: Painter. Antrios.

  Marc: Well-known?

  Serge: Very. Very.

  Pause.

  Marc: Serge, you haven’t bought this painting for two hundred thousand Euros?

  Serge: You don’t understand, that’s what it costs. In an Antrios.

  Marc: You haven’t bought this painting for two hundred thousand Euros?

  Serge: I might have known you’d miss the point.

  Marc: You paid two hundred thousand Euros for this shit?

  Serge, as if alone.

  Serge: My friend Marc’s an intelligent enough fellow, I’ve always valued our relationship, he has a good job, he’s an aeronautical engineer, but he’s one of those new-style intellectuals, who are not only enemies of modernism, but seem to take some sort of incomprehensible pride in running it down… 5

  Of the forty-five ideas expressed in these two soliloquies of narratized dialogue and the scene of dramatized dialogue they bracket, forty are shaped for suspense. Even the brief description of paralanguage (the nonverbal facial expressions on Marc and Serge) delays its point until the phrase “wordless emotions.”

  The suspense sentence is not only the most dramatic design but the most comic as well. Almost all verbal jokes trigger laughter by ending on a suspense sentence that suddenly severs its rising tension with a final punch word. By saving the core word for last, Reza and Hampton energize their lines, hold the audience’s interest, and concentrate impact into a single, final, often comic punch.

  The Cumulative Sentence

  How old is the cumulative technique? Aristotle advocated it over 2,300 years ago. In Book Three, Part Nine of On Rhetoric, he examined the differences between the tight, periodic suspense sen
tence and the loose, free-running cumulative sentence. The two designs reverse mirror each other: the suspense structure puts subordinate phrases first and ends on its core word; the cumulative design puts its core word up front, then follows with subordinate phrases that develop or modify the point.

  Consider the line design of Character B’s dialogue:

  Character A

  Remember Jack?

  Character B

  (nodding)

  Smoke circling his head like an angry halo, cigarette butt burning his lip, wrestling the spare, cursing the jack, trying to fix a flat…

  (with a sense of loss)

  … last time I ever saw him.

  When we reverse the design, this suspense sentence turns into a cumulative sentence:

  Character A

  Remember Jack?

  Character B

  (with a sense of loss)

  I saw him, last time ever, trying to fix a flat, cursing the jack, wrestling with the spare, cigarette butt burning his lip, smoke circling his head like an angry halo.

  Although the free-running cumulative style may be less dramatic than a suspense sentence, it is not slapdash. When well crafted, it paints an ever-growing, more detailed picture of its subject. This snowballing quality gives dialogue a conversational spontaneity while its phrases roll out with a pleasing rhythm.

  The suspense design offers many advantages but drawbacks as well. First, the meaning, constantly delayed, risks sounding contrived. Second, a long suspense sentence may force the reader/audience to remember too many pieces of a complex idea while waiting for the ending to pull the thoughts together. If overwritten, a suspense sentence takes on the same tedious feebleness of a badly built cumulative sentence.