by Robert McKee
On the other hand, when composing a story in the past tense of prose, reflective passages with little or no conflict become fairly common. So once again, let me remind you that the guidelines in this book only describe tendencies. Somewhere, somehow, someone’s behavior turns every psychological doctrine ever formulated on its head. The same is true of writing. Every principle of craft sets up its creative contradiction.
Consider, for example, Boyd Crowder, the protagonist’s frenemy in the long-form series JUSTIFIED. Showrunner Graham Yost pitched the dialogue for the entire cast at a heightened timbre. But for Boyd, he reached centuries back into the show’s Appalachian setting and found a speech style fit for a Confederate politician. Here’s Boyd on going to bed:
BOYD
Be that as it may, I sense within me a growing, nagging torpor that seeks a temporary hibernation in a solitary area for comfort and slumber.
Over the centuries before the final merger of Latinate French and Old German into modern English, Latin and French were the languages of power in England.2 Like many people in public life, politicians and corporate leaders alike, Boyd Crowder’s quest for power and prestige propels his life down a series-long spine of action. And like the power greedy, Boyd flaunts his polysyllabic vocabulary and puts as many words as possible between the capital letter that opens a sentence and the period that closes it, scoffing at the admonition below.
PREFER DIRECT PHRASES TO CIRCUMLOCUTION
Would you write: “When I punched the guy, I suddenly realized that it hurt me a lot more than it hurt him, because after I took my hand out of my pocket and closed it as tight as I could, making sure that my thumb was on the outside and not the inside of my fingers, and then hit him in the face as hard as I could, I felt a sharp pain and couldn’t close my fist anymore”? Or: “Broke my fist on his jaw. Hurt like hell.”
Wording reflects the distinct qualities of a character played out against his once-in-a-lifetime conflicts. So if, for example, your character is a scientist, theologian, diplomat, professor, an intellectual of any persuasion, or simply pretentious, then he or she may very well use elaborate, academic locutions when calm and rational circumstances allow. But as a general principle, pace scenes with direct, unaffected speeches of crisp words.
This principle holds true on page and stage, but particularly onscreen. The theatre audience listens intensely. The reader can reread a novel’s sentence if she doesn’t get it on the first pass. Television viewers can record and rewind, if necessary, to listen to dialogue a second time. Big-screen dialogue, however, is spoken, then gone. The cinema audience concentrates through its eyes, not its ears. If moviegoers don’t instantly understand, they turn to each other asking, “What did he say?”
But no matter the medium, misunderstood dialogue annoys. What difference does it make how eloquent your language is if the reader/audience misses its meaning? Therefore, expressive inversions aside, let line structure flow from noun to verb to complement in that order. Clarity above all.
PREFER AN ACTIVE TO A PASSIVE VOICE
Passive dialogue uses linking verbs such as “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “be,” and “been” to express static states (for example, “He isn’t very smart”); active dialogue uses action verbs to express dynamic change (for example, “He’ll figure it out for himself”).
When humans enter into conflicts, their minds become energized, their views of themselves and the world around them become active, and therefore, their language becomes charged with action verbs. When situations calm, human beings become more passive, their view of life more reflective, and their language tends to fill with state-of-being verbs. Again, this pattern is only a tendency, not a rule of human behavior. Nonetheless, in a storm of conflict, state-of-being verbs slow headway like a ship dragging anchor.
The passivity that’s most difficult to spot hides inside gerund phrases. In these cases, a state-of-being verb connects to an “-ing” ending verb in phrases such as “She is playing around,” “They are working hard,” “They were coming home yesterday.” Gerunds give dialogue only slightly more energy. Before you commit to a gerund phrase, test the active case: “She plays around,” “They work hard,” “They came home yesterday,” and see whether a single, direct verb doesn’t better fit the moment.
PREFER SHORT SPEECHES TO LONG
When the pretentious wish to impress, they add syllables to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to speeches. They substitute quantity for quality, length for brevity, convolution for simplicity. The effect is often unintentionally comic.
For example, these three bites from the festooned language of Helen Sinclair (Dianne Wiest), the aging Broadway grande dame, in Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath’s screenplay BULLETS OVER BROADWAY.
When she arrives late for a rehearsal:
HELEN
My pedicurist had a stroke. She fell forward on the orange stick and plunged it into my toe. It required bandaging.
Staring into a dark theatre auditorium:
HELEN
This old theatre—this church—so replete with memories, so full of ghosts, Mrs. Alving, Uncle Vanya, here’s Ophelia, there’s Cordelia… Clytemnestra… every performance a birth, each curtain, a death…
Walking through Central Park with her young playwright:
HELEN
Everything is meaningful in some unexplainable form, more primordial than mere language.
(as he tries to talk, she clamps her hand over his mouth)
Shh… shh… be silent… be silent… Let’s just walk holding our thoughts… not revealing them… be still… let the birds have their song but let ours, for now, remain unsung.
So unless, like Woody Allen, your intention is satirical, strive to express the maximum in the fewest, truest possible words.
PREFER EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE TO MIMICRY
Dialogue should sound like character talk, but its content must be way above normal. Fine writers listen to the world but rarely copy what they hear, word for word, to the page. If you study documentaries and listen to what real people actually say in real life, or watch so-called reality shows and listen to the improvisations of untrained actors, you’ll soon realize that everyday talk on camera sounds awkward and amateurish. Fiction takes talk to a much higher level—far more economic, expressive, layered, and character-specific than back-fence chatter. Like marble carved by a Michelangelo, language is raw material chiseled by an author. Don’t copy life, express it.
ELIMINATE CLUTTER
By clutter, I mean exchanges such as “Hi, how ya doing?” “Oh, I’m fine.” “And the kids?” “They’re fine, too.” “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” “Yes, finally. Last week was so rainy.” In the same way people decorate empty shelves with knickknacks, inept writers dress up vapid scenes with verbal bric-a-brac, thinking that small talk adds an air of realism. But chitchat makes characters no more authentic than dressing them in sweat pants makes them athletic. Worse yet, cluttered talk not only hollows out characters and scenes; it misleads the reader/audience.
Dialogue is more than talk in the same way dance is more than movement, music more than sound, and painting more than shapes. A work of art means more than the sum of its parts, and every part of the work means more than the part itself.
Badly written dialogue tends to be literal; it means what it says and no more. Well-written dialogue, on the other hand, implies more than it says; it puts a subtext under every text. Readers and audiences schooled in the conventions of realism assume that every line has significance beyond its words or it wouldn’t have been written. For that reason, story-goers seek the hidden beneath the clutter, the connotation under every denotation. If they cannot find it, confused and annoyed, they lose interest.
If your dialogue does not suggest unsaid thoughts and feelings below its surface, either enrich it or cut it.
8
CONTENT FLAWS
WRITING ON-THE-NOSE
Writing on-the
-nose means putting a character’s fullest thoughts and deepest emotions directly and fully into what she says out loud. Of the many varieties of inept dialogue, writing on-the-nose is by far the most common and most ruinous. It flattens characters into cardboard and trivializes scenes into melodrama and sentimentality. To understand the damaging effect of on-the-nose writing, let’s study this flaw in depth.
The axiom “Nothing is what it seems” bears witness to life’s duality: What seems is the surface of life—what strikes the eye and ear, the things people say and do… outwardly. What is is the actual life of thought and feeling that flows inwardly beneath the things said and done.
As we noted in Chapter Three, a person’s life moves simultaneously through three levels corresponding to the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable: outwardly what people say and do, personally and socially, to get through their day (text); inwardly what they privately think and feel while they carry out these tasks (conscious subtext); and deepest yet, the massive realm of subconscious urges and primal miens that drive their inner energies (subconscious subtext).
It is, therefore, categorically impossible for a human being to say and do what she is fully thinking and feeling for the obvious reason: The vast majority of her thoughts and feelings run below her awareness. These thoughts cannot, by their nature, rise to the surface of the said. No matter how hard we may try to be absolutely open and honest, how we try to put the subtext of truth into the text of our behavior, our subconscious self haunts every word and deed. As in life, so in story: Every text condenses a subtext.
Suppose, for example, you were in mid-session with your psychiatrist, pouring out your darkest confession of the worst thing you’ve ever done to another human being. Tears filling your eyes, pain doubling you in two on the chaise, you choke out the words. And what’s your psychiatrist doing? Taking notes. And what’s in those notes? What you are not saying. What you cannot say.
A psychiatrist is not a stenographer, there to take down your exposés. He is trained to see through the text of you to the unsayable subtext, to those things you cannot say because you cannot consciously think them.
On-the-nose writing eliminates subtext by erasing conscious, unsaid thoughts and desires, along with subconscious, unsayable longings and energies, and leaving only spoken words, delivered in blatant, explicit, hollow-sounding speeches. Or, to put it another way, on-the-nose dialogue rewrites the subtext into a text, so that characters proclaim exactly and fully what they think and feel, and therefore, speak in ways no human being has ever spoken.
For example, this scene: Two attractive people sit across from each other in a secluded corner of a graceful restaurant. The light glints off the crystal and the dewy eyes of the lovers. Beautiful music plays in the background; gentle breezes billow the curtains. The lovers reach across the table, touch fingertips, look longingly in each other’s eyes, simultaneously say, “I love you, I love you,” and actually mean it.
This scene, if produced, would die like a squashed dog in the road. It is simply unactable.
By unactable I mean this: Actors are not marionettes hired to mouth your words and mime your actions. These artists give life to your cast by first discovering their character’s true desire hidden in the subtext. They then ignite this inner energy and with it build ineffable layers of complexity from the inside out that finally surface in the character’s actions, expressed in gestures, facial expressions, and words. But the scene, as I described it, is void of subtext and therefore, by definition, unactable.
The page, stage, and screen are not opaque surfaces. Each storytelling medium creates a transparency that allows us to glimpse the unsaid or unsayable in other human beings. When we watch a television series, a film, or play, or turn pages of prose, our eye does not stop at the words on the page or the actor onstage or onscreen. Our eye travels through the text to the subtext, to the deepest stirrings within the character. When you experience a quality story, don’t you have the constant impression that you are reading minds, reading emotions? Don’t you often think to yourself, “I know what that character’s really thinking, feeling, and doing. I can see what’s going on inside him better than he can, because he’s blinded by his immediate problem”? The combined creativity of writer and actor gives us what we want from any story: to be a fly on the wall of life and see through the surface to the truth.
If I were an actor forced to act this candlelit cliché, my first ambition would be to protect my career. I would not let a bad writer make me look like a bad actor. I would put a subtext under that scene, even if it had nothing to do with the story.
My approach might go like this: Why has this couple gone out of their way to create a movie scene for themselves? What’s with all the candlelight and soft music? Why don’t they take their pasta to the TV set like normal people? What’s wrong with this relationship?
Isn’t that the truth? When do the candles come out in life? When things are fine? No. When things are fine, we take our pasta to the TV set like normal people. When there’s a problem, that’s when the candles come out.
So, taking that insight to heart, I could act the scene in such a way that the audience would see to the truth: “Yes, he says he loves her. But look, he’s desperate he’s losing her.” That subtextual action adds substance as the scene deepens into a man’s desperate attempt to rekindle the romance. Or the audience might think, “Yes, he says he loves her, but look, he’s setting her up to dump her.” That implied action stirs our fascination as we watch a man let a woman down gently with a last romantic dinner because, in truth, he’s walking out.
With rare exceptions, a scene should never be outwardly and entirely about what it seems to be about. Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext. In the two variations above, the subtextual motivations and tactics are conscious but unspoken. As the audience/reader perceives the unsaid tactic beneath the surface of behavior, the inner action gives the scene a depth that enriches the reader/audience with insight. An ever-present subtext is the guiding principle of realism.
Nonrealism, on the other hand, is the great exception. Nonrealism employs on-the-nose dialogue in all its genres and subgenres: myth and fairy tale, science fiction and time travel, animation, the musical, the supernatural, Theatre of the Absurd, action/adventure, farce, horror, allegory, magical realism, postmodernism, dieselpunk retrofuturism, and the like.
In nonrealism, characters become more archetypical and less dimensional. Stories set in imaginary or exaggerated worlds move toward allegorical event designs. Pixar’s INSIDE OUT, for example. As a result, subtext tends to atrophy as dialogue becomes less complex, more explanatory, more on-the-nose. In a work such as THE LORD OF THE RINGS, no hidden or double meaning plays under lines such as “Those who venture there never return.” If an actor were to layer that line with irony, it might prompt a laugh and kill the moment.
At some point during the fiction-writing process, every writer must answer that troublesome question: Exactly what kind of story am I telling? Two grand visions define the storyteller’s approach to reality: the mimetic and the symbolic.
Mimetic stories reflect or imitate life as lived and sort themselves into the various genres of realism. Symbolic stories exaggerate or abstract life as lived and fall into one of the many genres of nonrealism. Neither approach has a greater claim on faithfulness to the truth. All stories are metaphors for existence, and the degree of realism versus nonrealism is simply a writer’s choice in his strategy to persuade and involve the reader/audience while he expresses his vision.
Nonetheless, one of the key differences between nonrealism and realism is subtext. Nonrealism tends to diminish or eliminate it; realism can’t exist without it.
Why?
Because to clarify and purify a character’s symbolic nature—virtue, villainy, love, greed, innocence, and such—nonrealistic genres eliminate the subconscious and with that, psychological complexity.
Whereas, the first premise of realism is that the majority of wh
at a person thinks and feels is unconscious to her, and for that reason, the full content of her thoughts and feelings can never be expressed directly, literally, or completely. Therefore, to dimensionalize, complicate, and ironize the psychology of the role, mimetic genres clash desires arising from the subconscious against conscious willpower.
The psychological and social complexity of realism demands a subtext under virtually every line of dialogue. To avoid these distracting intricacies, nonrealism discourages subtext.
THE MONOLOGUE FALLACY
Every consequential moment in life pivots around a dynamic of action/reaction. In the physical realm, reactions are equal, opposite, and predictable in obedience to Newton’s third law of motion; in the human sphere, the unforeseen rules. Whenever we take an important step, our world reacts—but almost never in the way we expect. From within us or around us come reactions we cannot and do not see coming. For no matter how much we rehearse life’s big moments, when they finally arrive, they never seem to work out quite the way we thought, hoped, or planned. The drama of life is an endless improvisation.
For this reason, when a character sits alone staring at a wall, his flow of thought is an inner dialogue, not a monologue. This inner flux often becomes the stuff and substance of the modern novel. Prose writers can take us inside their characters’ heads, bouncing inner actions back and forth between a thinking self and his doubting, applauding, criticizing, arguing, forgiving, listening, ever-reacting selves. This purpose-filled give-and-take is dialogue that takes the form of thought rather than talk.