by Robert McKee
The suspense and cumulative designs sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Between opening a line with its core word versus closing with it run countless variations.
Parallel designs, for example, link phrases of similar length, meaning, and design for contrast and emphasis:
When I walked into that church, I walked into a new life.
The Balanced Sentence
The balanced sentence puts its core word(s) somewhere in the middle with subordinate phrases on either side:
Jack’s sex and gambling obsessions are high risk enough, but I think the guy must be an adrenaline junkie when I add his rock climbing and skydiving.
The suspense sentence, straight or in parallel, is dialogue’s most compelling and dramatic design. So for tension, emphasis, flourish, and laughs, delay the core word. On the other hand, cumulative and balanced sentences are the most conversational and free-running designs. But the constant use of any single technique becomes as repetitious as wallpaper and artificial as a robot. Therefore, to compel involvement and build tension, while at the same time expressing a sense of characters living in the moment and making up whatever they say, dialogue calls for a mixture of designs.
Mixed Designs
In Season 1, Episode 3 of TRUE DETECTIVE, the co-protagonist, Rustin Cohle, relates his worldview to Detectives Gilbough and Papania. Once again, I bolded the core words. Note where each is located within its sentence. (DB is cop-talk for dead body.)
RUSTIN COHLE
This… This is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talkin’ about time and death and futility. All right there are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. Fourteen straight hours of staring at DB’s, these are the things ya think of. You ever done that? You look in their eyes, even in a picture, doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive, you can still read ’em. You know what you see? They welcomed it… not at first, but… right there in the last instant. It’s an unmistakable relief. See, ’cause they were afraid, and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just… let go. Yeah, they saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw… what they were. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. To finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight. To realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.
Of the twenty-plus ideas Rust expresses, a dozen use suspense sentences, and the rest are a mix of balanced, parallel, and cumulative structures. As a result, this long passage hooks, builds, and pays off interest, yet seems spontaneous, almost wandering. Note also how series creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto caps Rust’s speech with a metaphor: Life is a dream. Like a grace note that enhances a passage of music, a trope tagged on a suspense sentence can add a mind-catching ornament.
ECONOMY
One final but critical quality of expressive dialogue is economy—saying the maximum in the fewest possible words. All fine writing, especially of dialogue, follows the principle of economy as laid down by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White in The Elements of Style: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”6
Not vacuity, but economy.
This principle became the Strunk and White imperative: “Omit needless words.” Do your writing a favor and tape that dictate to your computer screen, then do it. No speech, no matter its length, should ask the reader/audience to absorb one more word than necessary. Extraneous language annoys us. Omit it.
(The dialogue in Sofia Coppola’s film LOST IN TRANSLATION executes the principle of economy with perfection. See Chapter Eighteen.)
THE PAUSE
Inside the give-and-take of dialogue, the pause serves many uses. When used prior to a turning point, a moment of wordless hesitation tightens tension in the reader/audience, focuses their attention on what will happen next, and emphasizes the gravity of the event. A pause after a turning point allows the reader/audience time to absorb the meaning of the change and savor its aftermath.
A pre-crisis pause dams emotion momentum. In a well-written scene, curiosity and concern flow toward the moment of critical change. The reader/audience asks itself, “What’s going to happen next? What’s she going to do when it does? How will this turn out?” As this impetus peaks, a pause holds it in check and compresses its power. When the turning point pivots, all that pent-up energy explodes into the scene’s climactic beat.
Overused, however, the pause—like talk—can wear out its welcome. The principle of economy applies as much to this tactic as any other. If dialogue halts again and again and again to signal emphasis, emphasis, emphasis, nothing gets emphasis. Like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” the more often an author repeats a technique, the less effect it has. Then when the scene arrives in which she wants the tactic to deliver its effect in full, she discovers that repetition has blunted its edge.
Be judicious in the placement of pauses. Shape the rhythm of scenes without undo hesitation, so that when you put on the brakes, the standstill moment grips attention. There are no free rests: A pause must be earned.
THE CASE FOR SILENCE
Lean, pacey dialogue, more implicit than explicit, keeps readers and audiences hungry for more; stuffed, sluggish speeches, more explicit than implicit, discourage interest. As overwritten dialogue wears on and on, the reader skims, the audience stops listening. So, in the same way that tragic scenes often call for comic relief, surplus talk may call for silence.
From story to story, scene to scene, how much is too much is impossible to say. Your taste and judgment must guide that decision. But if you feel that your pages overtalk their scenes, switch gears and write for the eye rather than the ear, make image substitute for language.
Challenge yourself with this question: How could I write this scene in a purely visual way, doing all that needs to be done for character and story without resorting to a single line of dialogue? You can call upon the power of images in one of two ways:
One, paralanguage. Gestures and facial expressions are not, strictly speaking, linguistic. Nonetheless, they can speak with all the overtones and undertones of words. So rather than cluttering scenes with verbalized affirmations or disaffirmations such as “yes/no,” “I agree/I disagree,” or “I think you’re right/I think you’re wrong,” carry the moment with a nod, a glance, a wave of the hand.
This is especially true when writing for television and film. Whenever possible, leave room for the screen actor’s creativity. Because the camera can magnify a face many times larger than life, thoughts and emotions seem to flow behind the eyes and under the skin like swells across a sea. Silence invites the camera in. Use it.
Two, physical action. At every opportunity ask yourself this question: What physical, rather than verbal, behavior would execute my characters’ actions and reactions? Let your imagination paint word-pictures of doing rather than saying.
Consider, for example, a scene from a film by Ingmar Bergman with an apt title in this context, THE SILENCE. In it, a woman in a hotel restaurant allows herself to be seduced by a waiter. How to write that?
Does the waiter offer her the menu, listing the specials of the day? Does he recommend his favorite dishes? Does he compliment her on how she’s dressed? Does he ask her if she’s staying at the hotel? Traveling far? Does he ask if she knows the city? Does he mention he’s getting off work in an hour and would love to show her the sights? Talk, talk, talk?
Here’s how Bergman played it: The waiter, acc
idently on purpose, drops a napkin on the floor next to her chair. As he slowly stoops and kneels to pick it up, he sniffs and smells the woman from head to crotch to foot. She, in reaction, inhales a deep, pleasure-filled sigh. Bergman then cuts to a hotel room where the customer and waiter writhe in passion. Their intensely erotic, visual, physical, wordless seduction in the restaurant executes its turning point on her inhale.
Silence is the ultimate economy of language.
PART 2
FLAWS AND FIXES
Introduction:
SIX DIALOGUE TASKS
Effective dialogue executes six tasks simultaneously:
1. Each verbal expression takes an inner action.
2. Each beat of action/reaction intensifies the scene, building to and around its turning point.
3. Statements and allusions within the lines convey exposition.
4. A unique verbal style characterizes each role.
5. The flow of progressive beats captivates the reader/audience, carrying them on a wave of narrative drive, unaware of the passage of time.
6. The language strikes the reader/audience as authentic in its setting and true to character, thus maintaining belief in the story’s fictional reality.
Fine dialogue harmonizes all six of these objectives at once, so let’s look at the various faults that break the flow and cause discord.
6
CREDIBILITY FLAWS
INCREDIBILITY
The standards of credibility we set for the physical behaviors of characters apply equally to what they say. Dialogue written for television, stage, or film must inspire believable performances in its actors. Scenes written for a novel or short story must inspire the reader to imagine credible behaviors in literary characters. So, no matter how complex and compelling the psychology of your characters, no matter how emotional and meaningful your story design, if your characters do not talk in a manner true to their natures, true to the setting and genre, the reader/audience loses faith. Unconvincing dialogue destroys interest faster than sour notes destroy a recital.
Hollow, phony dialogue cannot be cured with naturalism. If you eavesdrop on the conversations of your fellow passengers on planes, trains, and buses, you realize in a flash that you would never put those gossipy bull sessions on stage, page, or screen. Actual chatter repeats like a dribbling basketball. Everyday talk lacks vividness, resonance, expressivity, and, most critically, significance. Business meetings, for example, often roll on and on, hour after hour, without metaphor, simile, trope, or imagery of the least expressivity.
The crucial difference between conversation and dialogue is not the number, choice, or arrangement of words. The difference is content. Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it. Therefore, even in the most realistic settings and genres, credible dialogue does not imitate actuality.
In fact, credibility has no necessary relationship to actuality whatsoever. Characters who live in impossible worlds, such as Alice’s Wonderland, deliver lines that would never be said by a living person but are true to themselves and true to the settings.
In all settings from the most down-to-earth to the most magical, in all genres from war stories to musicals, in all styles of speech from inarticulate monosyllables to lyrical verse, dialogue should sound like the spontaneous talk of its characters. For that reason, we gauge dialogue against a standard of fictional authenticity, not factual accuracy. A character’s word choices and syntax should not be so true to life that they imitate the redundant banalities of the everyday. Rather, they must strike us as plausible and vernacular within the context of the story’s world and genre(s).
The reader/audience wants to believe that characters speak offstage, off-page, or offscreen exactly as they speak onstage, on the page, or onscreen, no matter how fantasized the story’s setting. Even in worlds as fantastic as Guillermo del Toro’s film PAN’S LABYRINTH, as absurd as Eugène Ionesco’s play Exit the King, as poetic as T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, or as archaic as Robert Graves’s novel, I, Claudius, the cast’s talk need not be factual, but it must seem credible.
On the other hand, anyone might say anything at any time. So, how do we judge dialogue credibility? How do we know when a line is true to its character and true to the moment, or false on both counts?
Aesthetic judgment will never be a science. It is, by nature, as feeling as it is thoughtful. Instead, you must rely on skilled intuition, on your sense of rightness based on knowledge, experience, and inborn taste. Learn to judge your dialogue by listening past the words and sensing the harmony or disharmony between cause and effect. Dialogue rings true when a character’s verbal actions resonate with his motivations, when his inner desires and outer tactics seem to complement each other.
Exactly how you will master judgment in your own work is yours to discover, but to help guide you in that goal, below is a short list of faults that damage credibility: empty talk, overly emoted talk, overly knowing talk, overly perceptive talk, and excuses substituting for motivation.
EMPTY TALK
When a character speaks, the reader/audience looks into the subtext for a motivation to make sense out of the lines, a cause to explain the effect. If they find none, the dialogue sounds phony and the scene with it. The most commonplace example: one character telling another character something they both already know to satisfy the author’s expositional exigencies.
OVERLY EMOTIVE TALK
When a character uses language that seems far more emotional than his actual feelings, again the reader/audience wonders why and checks the subtext for an explanation. If they find none, they may assume that either this hyper-dramatic character is a hysteric or that the author is desperately trying to make too much out of too little. At some social/psychological level, emotive dialogue and its context should complement each other.
OVERLY KNOWING TALK
Know what your characters know. Characters are an author’s creatures, born of exhaustive research into the story’s setting and cast, countless observations of human behavior, and ruthless self-awareness. A bold line, therefore, runs between creator and created. Or should. But if a writer crosses that line and injects his author’s knowledge into his character’s awareness, we sense a cheat. When a character onscreen or onstage talks about current events with a breadth and depth of understanding only his author could have, or when a novel’s first-person protagonist looks back on past events with factuality and clarity of insight beyond his experience, again, the reader may sense that the author is whispering into his character’s ear.
OVERLY PERCEPTIVE TALK
Similarly, beware characters who know themselves better than you know yourself. When a character describes himself with a depth of insight more profound than Freud, Jung, and Socrates combined, readers and audiences not only recoil at the implausibility; they lose faith in the writer. Authors set traps for themselves when they create characters with excessive, unconvincing self-awareness.
It happens like this: Hardworking writers fill notebooks and files with character biographies and psychologies, generating ten or twenty times more material than they would directly use in the writing. They do this, as they must, to give themselves a surfeit of material in order to win the war on clichés with original, unexpected choices. Having amassed this knowledge, the desire to get all they know out into the world can become an irresistible temptation. Unwittingly, the author crosses the line between writer and character, turning his creation into a mouthpiece for his research.
EXCUSES MISTAKEN FOR MOTIVATION
Create honest motivation for behavior. In an effort to match a character’s over-the-top action with a cause, writers often backtrack to the character’s childhood, insert a trauma, and pass it off as motivation. Over recent decades, episodes of sexual abuse became an overused, all-purpose, mono-explanation for virtually any extreme behavior. Writers who resort to this kind of psychological shorthand do not understand the difference between excuse and motivation.
Motiva
tions (hunger, sleep, sex, power, shelter, love, self-love, etc.) are needs that drive human nature and compel behavior.1 More often than not, these subconscious drives go unrecognized, and as often as not, cause more trouble than they cure. Unwilling to face the truth of why they do what they do, human beings invent excuses.
Suppose you were writing a pivotal scene for a political drama in which a national leader explains to his cabinet why he is taking the country to war. Throughout history, two primary motivations have driven one people to war against another. First, the drive for power abroad. Land, slaves, and wealth seized from the defeated empowers the victor. Second, the drive for power at home. When rulers fear losing strength, they provoke war to distract their citizens and regrip domestic power. (George Orwell dramatized both motivations in his masterpiece, 1984.)
These two motivations compel the reality of war, but no ruler who declares war thinks like that. Or if he does, he would never say it. So, to write your scene, you would have to bury motivation in the subtext, create a leader with just the right quality of self-deception, and then write his dialogue to frame an excuse other characters believe and follow.