Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Some of the excuses warring peoples have used throughout history include: “Saving souls for God” (Christian Crusades, Spanish Empire, Ottoman Empire), “Shining the light of civilization into the darkness of savagery” (British Empire), “Manifest Destiny” (genocide of Native Americans), “Purifying the race” (the holocaust), and “Transforming capitalist tyranny into Communist equality” (the Russian and Chinese revolutions).2

  For an example of an excuse masquerading as motivation, consider Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III. In Act 1, Scene 1, Richard, the hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester, says that because his deformity is repellent, he “cannot prove a lover.” So, instead he will “prove a villain” and murder everyone between himself and the throne.

  Then, in the very next scene, Richard meets Anne, the beautiful widow of a rival he recently assassinated. She hates Richard and curses him, calling him the devil. Nonetheless, Richard, ugly as he is, guilty as he is, mounts a campaign of brilliant psychological seduction. He claims that because Anne is so breathtakingly beautiful and he is so desperately in love with her, he had to kill her husband in the hopes of having her. He then kneels down and offers her his sword so she can kill him, if she wishes. She declines and by the end of the scene this blend of flattery and self-pity wins her heart.

  With that seduction, Richard reveals himself as a masterful lover. So why does he say he is not? Because he needs an excuse to mask his lust for power.

  To write intriguing, layered, credible dialogue, first study the difference between the two motors for human action—motivation and justification. Then see if masking your characters’ subconscious drives with their conscious efforts to excuse, or to at least make sense out of their unexplainable behaviors, adds depth to their words.

  In most cases, false dialogue is not the signature of an overly confident, overly knowledgeable writer, but the opposite: a nervous, unschooled writer. Anxiety is the natural by-product of ignorance. If you don’t know your character beyond his name, if you cannot imagine how he reacts, if you cannot hear his voice, if you write in bewilderment, your hand will scratch out nothing but bogus dialogue. In the fog of not knowing, you have no other choice.

  Therefore, do the hard work. Surround your character with all the knowledge and imagining you can. Test his traits against the people around him and, most importantly, yourself. For at the end of the day, you are the touchstone of truth. Ask yourself: “If I were my character in this situation, what would I say?” Then listen with your most truth-sensitive ear for the honest, credible answer.

  MELODRAMA

  The adjective “melodramatic” indicts writing for excessiveness—shrill voices, lurid violence, tear-stained sentimentality, or sex scenes one shadow this side of pornography. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello rages with murderous jealousy; Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH turns violence into cinematic poetry; Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music explores deep, painful sentiments; and Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES indulges explicit sex; and none of them is melodrama.

  Long before Oedipus gouged out his eyes, great storytellers have sought the limits of human experience. Twenty-first-century artists continue this quest because they sense that the depths and breadths of human nature know no limits. Anything you can picture your characters doing, believe me, human beings have already done it and in ways beyond imagining.

  The problem of melodrama, therefore, is not over-expression but under-motivation.

  When a writer scores a scene with ping-ponging histrionics, trying to make a snit seem lethal; when he cascades tears down a character’s face, hoping to make a setback seem tragic; or when he forces behavior to exceed what’s actually at stake in a character’s life, we dismiss his work as melodrama.

  Melodramatic dialogue, therefore, is not a matter of word choices. Human beings are capable of doing anything and saying anything while they do it. If you can imagine your character talking in a passionate, pleading, profane, or even violent way, then lift his motivation to match his action. Once you have behavior balanced with desire, take it a step further and ask yourself: “Would my character state or understate his action?”

  Compare two versions of a “Cut off his head!” scene: Suppose GAME OF THRONES were to develop a plotline in which two kings fight each other in a long war to a blood-soaked end. Then comes the climax: The victorious king sprawls on his throne; his defeated enemy kneels at his feet, awaiting sentencing. A courtier asks the king, “What are your wishes, sire?” and the king screams his answer: “Smash every bone in his body! Burn his skin black, peel it off, and feed it to him! Rip his eyes from his head and his head from his neck.”

  Or, the courtier asks the king’s wishes, and as the victor examines his manicure, he whispers, “Crucify him.”

  The subtext under “Crucify him” implies a death as hideous as the screamed answer, but which answer conveys greater personal power? The lurid, harsh, overstated rant, or the simple, understated “Crucify him”?

  Either answer could be perfectly in-character, but what kind of character? The first answer implies a weak king at the mercy of his emotions; the second suggests a powerful king in command of his emotions. In the matter of melodrama, motivation and character are never separate. What would drive one character over a cliff wouldn’t get another character off his sofa. Therefore, the balance of motivation versus action is unique to every role and has to be struck inside a character who first feels it and then does it.

  7

  LANGUAGE FLAWS

  CLICHÉS

  Clichés are scenes we’ve seen too many times before, acted with predictable behaviors, mouthed in dialogue we can recite before the actor says a word.

  Like the weeds of repetition, clichés grow in the barren mind of the lazy writer. Many wannabes assume that writing is easy, or it should be, so they try to make it easy by rummaging through the trash of old stories, and pulling out the same tired phrases we’ve heard or read a hundred times in the same tired scenes we’ve heard or read a thousand times.

  Why lazy writers lack originality is no mystery, but why do diligent, professional authors, who should know better, also resort to clichés? Because they work. Once upon a time, today’s hackneyed expressions were inspired creative choices.

  In CASABLANCA (1942), Captain Renault’s gem-quality imperative “Round up the usual suspects” encapsulated political corruption in five smart words. Since then, the phrase “the usual suspects” has topped the list of the usual clichéd suspects in dozens of dictionaries devoted to clichés.1

  Somewhere in humanity’s past, a cave-dwelling storyteller first described a teardrop in a character’s eye to express sorrow, and everyone around the fire felt a wave of sadness. Once upon a time, a king’s raconteur first compared an enemy’s military trap to a spider’s web, and the whole palace felt a rush of fear. Although time has dulled the cliché’s edge, the original invention was so sharp it still cuts a sliver of truth.

  Here, for example, is a short list of clichés that frequently find their way into modern dialogue (to set a limit, I restricted the slate to phrases that begin with the letters “ba”): backseat driver, back to basics, back to square one, back to the drawing board, bad hair day, bag of tricks, ballpark figure, ball’s in your court, bang your head against a brick wall, barking up the wrong tree, battle royal… and the list goes on.

  Familiarity breeds comfort. People, on occasion, enjoy a cliché because it signals cultural continuity. The past is still present. What people loved in their childhood, they still love today. For that reason, clichés infect their everyday talk. People use them because, trite or not, they make immediate sense. As a result, the infrequent cliché adds verisimilitude.

  Just remember this: Sooner or later, every cliché reaches its use-by date and becomes so odorous the world finally turns away in disgust.

  To create fresh, original dialogue, set high standards and never settle for the obvious choice. Indeed, never
settle for the first choice. Just write it down, then improvise, experiment, go a little crazy, pour out as many choices as your talent can create. Let your character say any off-the-wall thing that comes into her head. By playing with every wild thing you can imagine, you might discover that one of your lunatic choices is crazy but brilliant.

  At the end of the day make your best choice, then cut the rest. No one has to see your weak choices… unless you’re foolish enough to leave them on the page.

  CHARACTER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE

  Character-neutral dialogue substitutes generality for specificity.

  When writers use the stale language of everyday talk, they defend their vapidities, once again, with appeals to verisimilitude. And again, they would be correct. For when you turn an objective ear to the talk around you, banalities and clichés do indeed echo and re-echo down the caverns of conversation. In states of surprise, for instance, people call upon their deities. “Oh my God!” naturally pops out of the startled. As dialogue, however, this ready-made phrase robs the actor of a chance to create a revealing, character-specific moment.

  What to do?

  Ask yourself this question: If my character, in a state of shock, were to call upon God, how would she and she alone do it? If she were from Alabama, would she say, “Sweet, bleeding Jesus”? If she were from Detroit, would she look up to the sky and plead, “Lord have mercy”? If she were from New York, would she call upon the devil instead and curse, “Well, damn me to hell”? Whatever your choice, find words so true to your character, they wouldn’t quite fit in anyone else’s mouth.

  We’ll examine character-specific language in depth in Part Three.

  OSTENTATIOUS LANGUAGE

  In a dialogue scene near the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and Lynch, his friend, debate aesthetics. To clinch his argument, Stephen describes the ideal relationship between an author and his finished work in these words: “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

  Joyce’s analogy advocates a writing method that so harmonizes characters and events, the telling seems authorless. Applied to dialogue, the Joycean ideal becomes talk so true to the vocal personalities that any hint of string pulling vanishes. Rather, each spoken word draws us deeper and deeper into the storytelling, holding us spellbound to the end.

  Ostentatiousness breaks that spell. By ostentatious dialogue, I mean self-conscious displays of literariness, lines so unnecessarily expressive, so clearly out of character that they call attention to the writing as writing. The worst of these jumps out of the scene waving pompoms in celebration of its author’s victory, declaring, “Oh, what a clever line am I!”

  Like stand-up comics who laugh at their own jokes, like exhibitionistic athletes who dance in the end zone, literary swagger celebrates its success. But the instant a line of dialogue makes the reader or audience aware of art as art, the bond of belief fused between them and the character snaps.

  As we noted in the “as if” discussion in Chapter Five, when people open a book or sit down as an audience, they shift their mental gears from the factual to the fictional mode. They know that to take part in the ritual of story, they must willingly believe in imaginary characters as if they were real, and react to fictitious events as if they were actually happening. It’s a childlike state, so a bond of trust must run through the story, that ancient contract that conjoins a reader/audience to an author.

  That’s the deal, and no matter how realistic or fantasied the genre, the bond will hold so long as the reader/audience finds the dialogue true to the characters who speak it. The moment technique becomes visible, dialogue rings false, the reader/audience loses trust, the bond breaks, and the scene fails. Break belief often enough, the reader/audience tears up the contract and tosses your work in the trash.

  Of all aspects of characterization—dress, gesture, age, sexuality, mood, facial expression—speech is by far the most susceptible to disbelief. Odd phrasings, eccentric word choices, even out-of-place pauses can betray the odor of bad acting—fake emotions, shallow mind, and hollow heart. That’s why every line of dialogue puts the writer under pressure to maintain the bond of credibility.

  As an author, you must develop taste enough to sense the shift from expressivity to exhibitionism. To do so, first test the limits of language your medium imposes. What could be said with moving conviction on page may be embarrassingly unactable onstage. Because the marker dividing veracity from falsity is set as much by tradition as by authorship, first identify your story’s genre(s), and then study the conventions. Finally, bring your best judgment to bear by asking this question: If I were my character, in these circumstances, what would I say? The only curbs on garishness are your innate taste and schooled judgment. So let your inner acumen be your guide. When in doubt, tone it down.

  ARID LANGUAGE

  The opposite of ostentation is desert-dry, Latinate, polysyllabic language composed into long sentences strung out over long speeches. The suggestions below help avoid arid speech in favor of natural, unaffected, seemingly spontaneous dialogue. But always bear in mind that these points (like all else in this book) are guidelines, not imperatives. Every writer has to find her own way.

  PREFER THE CONCRETE TO THE ABSTRACT

  Would a twenty-first-century character call her home a “domicile” or her car a “vehicle”? Doubtful. On the other hand, there may be people who would. So if you have a character-specific reason for your role’s formality, then by all means, give her an abstract vocabulary. Otherwise, keep it real with specific names for objects and actions.

  PREFER THE FAMILIAR TO THE EXOTIC

  Would your character refer to his house as his palais or his apartment as his pied-à-terre? Doubtful. Then again, he may be la-di-da by nature… or actually French.

  PREFER SHORT WORDS TO LONG WORDS

  Would you write a line such as “His fabrications are falsifications of factuality”? Doubtful. “He stretches the truth,” or simply, “He lies,” or bluntly, “He bullshits,” would be more credible choices.

  And you always have at least two choices. English grew out of the merger of two languages, Anglo-Saxon, a dialect of Old German, and Old French, a dialect of Latin. As a result, the vocabulary of the language that became modern English immediately doubled (see the sidebar). English has at least two words for everything. In fact, with more than a million words, the English vocabulary offers near-inexhaustible choices.

  HOW ENGLISH BECAME A DOUBLE LANGUAGE

  After the Romans conquered England in the first century AD, they hired German and Scandinavian mercenaries from Anglia and Saxony to help fend off pirates and put down rebellions by the native Picts and Celts. When the Roman Empire abandoned England in 410 AD, more Anglo-Saxons migrated to the island, marginalizing the Gallic-speaking Celts, wiping out the Latin of the Romans, and imposing their Germanic tongue throughout England.

  But 600 years later Latin came back this roundabout way: In 911 AD Danish Vikings conquered territory along the north coast of France and named it after themselves, Normandy, land of the Norsemen. After 150 years of marriage to French women, these Danes spoke what their mothers spoke, a thousand-year-old French dialect of Latin. In 1066 King Wilhelm of Normandy (a.k.a. William the Conqueror) led his armies across the English Channel and defeated the English king. With that victory, French came to England.

  Throughout history, foreign conquests usually erase native languages. But England was the exception. For some mysterious reason, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Latinate French of the Normans merged. As a result, the vocabulary of what became modern English doubled. English has at least two words for everything. Compare, for example, the Germanic-rooted words “fire,” “hand,” “tip,” “ham,” and “flow” to the French-derived words “flame,” “palm,” “point,” “pork,” and “fl
uid.”

  Given the massive vocabulary of English, I offer this guiding principle: Shun polysyllabic words, especially those that end in Latinate suffixes such as “-ation,” “-uality,” and “-icity.” Instead, favor the punchy, vivid one-or two-syllable words that, more often than not, come from the ancient Anglo-Saxon heritage of English. But whether your phrasings follow from the Germanic or French traditions, consider these four observations in making word choices:

  1) The more emotional people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more rational people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.

  2) The more active and direct people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more passive and reflective people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.

  3) The more intelligent the person, the more complex his sentences; the less intelligent, the briefer his sentences.

  4) The more well read the person, the larger his vocabulary and the longer his words; the less read, the smaller his vocabulary and the shorter his words.

  Returning to an earlier example, consider the line “His fabrications are falsifications of factuality” as opposed to “The son of a bitch lies.” The former polysyllabic, alliterated, Latinized accusation might be said by a bemused wigged barrister in a litigation comedy that satirizes the formalities of royal high court. The six monosyllables of the latter, however, could be said in anger by almost anyone anywhere.

  When conflict builds and risk soars, people get emotional, active, direct, monosyllabic, and dumb. As conflict peaks, people often say really stupid things they later regret. In all media and all structural shapes of story, conflict-rich scenes not only carry the telling, but as strife progresses, they also tend to shape talk in the four ways I’ve described above.