Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  A true monologue would provoke no response as it pours out long, uninterrupted, inactive, unreactive passages to no one in particular, turning characters into mouthpieces for their author’s philosophy. Whether voiced aloud or thought from within, any speech that runs on for too long without change in value charge risks lifelessness, artificiality, and tedium.

  How long is too long? The average speaking rate ranges between two to three words per second. At that pace, a two-minute speech could contain three hundred words. Onstage or onscreen, that’s a lot of talk without someone or something reacting. In a novel, three hundred words is a full page. Pages of first-person musing or memory, unbroken by the crisscross of counterpointing inner reactions, would severely test the reader’s patience.

  On the other hand, suppose you were writing a two-character scene and feel that Character A talks throughout, while Character B sits in silence. In that case, long speeches become natural and necessary. As you write them, however, remember that even if Character A has rehearsed her confrontation with Character B, as she begins to tell him what’s on her mind, the scene will not play out the way she expected.

  Let’s say, for example, that Character A expected Character B to defend himself against her accusations and so she memorized a long list of stinging retorts. But instead of arguing, he sits there in dead silence. His stone-faced reaction destroys her prepared speech. This unexpected turn forces her to improvise, and as we noted earlier, life is always an improvisation, always action/reaction.

  On the page, therefore, insert Character A’s nonverbal reactions to Character B’s enigma. Into her column of talk, interlace her looks, gestures, pauses, stumbling phrases, and the like. Break her scene-long speech into beats of action/reaction within her and between her and the silent Character B.

  Imagine another example: Let’s say your character is reading a well-prepared sermon to her church’s congregation. As her eyes move down the page, might she glance up, now and then, to check the congregation for expressions of interest or lack thereof? Suppose some people look bored, what would she do? Might not thoughts bounce through her mind, inspecting her voice, her gestures, the nervous energy in her belly, telling her to breathe, to relax, to smile, to make one adjustment after another as she performs her sermon? Her sermon may seem like a monologue, but her inner life is a dynamic dialogue.

  Let’s take the action/reaction principle a step further: Suppose that your character talks at length by nature. Consider Meryl Streep’s Violet Weston in the film AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. Long speeches drive her behavior as she dominates all conversation and never reacts to what people think or feel. Such a character may bore other characters, but you can’t allow her to bore the audience. Therefore, like playwright Tracy Letts, create the impression of long-windedness without actually going on and on. Watch the film and notice how Letts propels Violet’s speeches, then builds each scene around the reactions of her word-weary relatives who have no choice but to suffer the talkaholic.

  In 1889, playwright August Strindberg wrote The Stronger. The play is set in a café and dramatizes an hour-long scene that pits Mrs. X, a wife, against her husband’s mistress, Miss Y. Mrs. X carries all the dialogue, but when performed, the silent Miss Y becomes the star role.

  THE DUELOGUE

  Think of the thousands of hours of bad film, television, and theatre you have suffered through. I suspect that more often than not, the shallow, tinny acting was not the fault of the actors but of the unactable duelogues that writers and their directors forced them to recite. Duelogue is my term for face-to-face confrontations in which two characters talk directly, explicitly, and emotionally about their immediate problem. Duelogues have the resonance of a brick because every line is on-the-nose, nothing left unsaid.

  For example, this scene from the film GLADIATOR. The Emperor Commodus has imprisoned his rival Maximus Decimus Meridius. That night Maximus discovers Lucilla, Commodus’s sister, waiting in his cell.

  INT. DUNGEON—NIGHT

  Guards take Maximus to an empty cell and chain him to the wall. As they leave, Lucilla steps out of the shadows.

  LUCILLA

  Rich matrons pay well to be pleasured by the bravest champions.

  MAXIMUS

  I knew your brother would send assassins. I didn’t think he would send his best.

  LUCILLA

  Maximus… he doesn’t know.

  MAXIMUS

  My family was burned and crucified while they were still alive.

  LUCILLA

  I knew nothing—

  MAXIMUS

  (shouting)

  —Don’t lie to me.

  LUCILLA

  I wept for them.

  MAXIMUS

  As you wept for your father?

  (grabbing her by the throat)

  As you wept for your father?

  LUCILLA

  I have been living in a prison of fear since that day. To be unable to mourn your father for fear of your brother. To live in terror every moment of every day because your son is heir to the throne. Oh, I’ve wept.

  MAXIMUS

  My son… was innocent.

  LUCILLA

  So… is… mine.

  (pause)

  Must my son die too before you will trust me?

  MAXIMUS

  What does it matter whether I trust you or not?

  LUCILLA

  The gods have spared you. Don’t you understand? Today I saw a slave become more powerful than the emperor of Rome.

  MAXIMUS

  The gods spared me? I am at their mercy, with the power only to amuse the mob.

  LUCILLA

  That is power. The mob is Rome, and while Commodus controls them, he controls everything.

  (pause)

  Listen to me, my brother has enemies, most of all in the senate. But while the people follow him, no one would dare stand up to him until you.

  MAXIMUS

  They oppose him yet they do nothing.

  LUCILLA

  There are some politicians who have dedicated their lives to Rome. One man above all. If I can arrange it, will you meet him?

  MAXIMUS

  Do you not understand, I may die in this cell tonight, or in the arena tomorrow. I am a slave. What possible difference can I make?

  LUCILLA

  This man wants what you want.

  MAXIMUS

  (shouting)

  Then have him kill Commodus.

  LUCILLA

  I knew a man once, a noble man, a man of principle who loved my father and my father loved him. This man served Rome well.

  MAXIMUS

  That man is gone. Your brother did his work well.

  LUCILLA

  Let me help you.

  MAXIMUS

  Yes, you can help me. Forget you ever knew me and never come here again.

  (calling out)

  Guard. The lady is finished with me.

  Lucilla, in tears, leaves.

  In Chapter Four of The Poetics, Aristotle argues that the deepest pleasure of theatregoing is learning, the sensation of seeing through the surface of behavior to the human truth beneath. Therefore, if you use dialogue to turn your characters’ unspoken needs and emotions into conscious pronouncements as in the scene above, if, in other words, you write the scene about what the scene is actually about, you block that insight and deprive the reader/audience of their rightful pleasure. Worse yet, you falsify life.

  In the give-and-take of life, we circle around problems, instinctively employing pretexts and tactics that skirt the painful, unspeakable truths that lurk in our subconscious. We rarely talk face-to-face, openly and directly, about our truest needs or desires. Instead, we try to get what we want from another person by navigating our way through a third thing.

  Therefore, you will find the fix for on-the-nose writing in something outside the immediate conflict, a third thing that diverts a duelogue into a trialogue.

  THE TRIALOGUE

  Trialogue, as I
redefine the term, names the triangular relationship between two characters in conflict and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle.

  Four examples:

  In his novel Legs, William Kennedy tells the story of the gangster, Jack “Legs” Diamond. In Chapter Three, as Jack comes into his house, his wife Alice confronts him. Jack’s men, Oxie and Fogarty, have told her that Jack nicknamed one of their canaries Marion because the bird reminds him of his mistress. In the scene that follows, two canaries act as the third thing. The narrator is Jack’s lawyer:

  We were hardly inside the house when Alice called out to Jack, “Will you come here please?” She was on the front porch, with Oxie and Fogarty still on the sofa. They were not moving, not speaking, not looking at Alice or at Jack or at me either when we got there. They both stared out toward the road.

  Alice opened the canary cage and said to Jack, “Which one do you call Marion?”

  Jack quickly turned to Fogarty and Oxie.

  “Don’t look at them, they didn’t tell me,” Alice said. “I just heard them talking. Is it the one with the black spot on its head?”

  Jack didn’t answer, didn’t move. Alice grabbed the bird with the black spot and held it in her fist.

  “You don’t have to tell me—the black spot’s for her black hair. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  When Jack said nothing, Alice wrung the bird’s neck and threw it back in the cage. “That’s how much I love you,” she said and started past Jack, toward the living room, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. He reached for the second bird and squeezed it to death with one hand, then shoved the twitching, eye-bleeding corpse down the crevice of Alice’s breasts. “I love you too,” he said.

  That solved everything for the canaries.

  When Vince Gilligan pitched his long-form series BREAKING BAD to the network, his logline was “Mr. Chips goes Scarface.” The protagonist, Walter White, faces multiple conflicts on all levels of life in dozens of directions, surrounded by a large cast of antagonists. Although building a drug empire seems to be Walter’s super-intention, Gilligan casts the shadow of Heisenberg, Walter’s doppelgänger, over all his scenes. From the very first episode, Walter’s desires and dreads, his actions and reactions, are simply manifestations of Heisenberg’s struggle to take over Walter and achieve the ultimate triumph of his genius. Heisenberg is BREAKING BAD’s third thing.

  Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is an allegorical novel whose protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is telepathic. But the third thing that modulates the novel’s conflicts is not paranormal. Rather, Rushdie runs Sinai’s every conflict through the cultural gap between India and Europe. By foregrounding what would normally be a background desire and painting every scene with a shade of East versus West, Rushdie colors his novel with an all-constant third thing.

  For many readers and theatregoers, Samuel Beckett was the greatest writer of the twentieth century and his masterpiece is Waiting for Godot. The play shuttles a massive trialogue between Estragon and Vladimir (two homeless tramps) and Godot (the eponymous character named after the French slang for God). As the title implies, the two men spend the entire play waiting, hoping, arguing about, and preparing for “he who will never appear.” The waiting seems futile, but it gives the tramps a reason, as they put it, “for going on.”

  In other words, Godot, Beckett’s third thing, symbolizes the persistent belief that life will ultimately make beautiful and meaningful sense, once we find that transcendent, mysterious something that awaits us somewhere… somehow… out there…

  9

  DESIGN FLAWS

  REPETITION

  What makes otherwise vigorous language lie lifeless on the page? What makes scenes turn antiprogressive and their dialogue fall flat? I can think of many reasons, but the most common fault is the writer’s dread enemy—repetitiousness.

  Two kinds of repetition may infect a scene’s dialogue.

  1) Accidental echoes. When your eye skims down a page, lines like “They’re moving their car over there” may speed by unnoticed. To avoid these verbal mishaps, record your dialogue after every draft, and then play it back. When you act your dialogue aloud or hear it acted to you, accidental echoes pop out, and you’ll instantly know what to cut or rewrite.

  2) Repetitious beats. Beyond echoing words, the greater danger is repetition of feeling: the same charge of value, positive-positive-positive-positive-positive, or negative-negative-negative-negative-negative, running on, beat after beat.

  Repetitious feelings can be insidiously hard to spot because they hide behind variations in wording. So although the scene reads well, it feels, for some mysterious reason, dead.

  Whenever a character takes an action in the pursuit of his or her scene intention, someone or something somewhere in the scene reacts. This pattern of action/reaction in character behavior is called a beat. For example, Character A pleads with Character B to listen to him, but Character B rejects what he has to say. Using gerunds to express action, that beat becomes begging/rejecting. (See Chapter Twelve for the complete definition of a beat.)

  Beats propel scenes by advancing the action/reaction dynamic of character behaviors, each beat topping the previous beat, until the value at stake in the scene changes its charge at the turning point. (See the scene breakdowns in Chapters Thirteen through Eighteen.) But when the same beat repeats itself, the scene flattens out and boredom sets in. Repetitious behavior is far more common than accidental alliterations, more damaging to a scene, and insidiously difficult to spot. Consider this passage:

  CHARACTER A

  I have to talk to you.

  CHARACTER B

  No, leave me alone.

  CHARACTER A

  It’s really important you listen to me.

  CHARACTER B

  Just let me be.

  CHARACTER A

  You’ve got to hear what I’ve got to say.

  CHARACTER B

  Shut up and go away.

  Character A begs Character B three times to listen to him, and three times over she rejects his plea in virtually the same language: “talk, listen, hear; alone, let, go away.” Some writers try to solve this problem by using synonyms or switching the action/reaction beat around in the belief that textual rephrasing changes the beat. In this rewrite, for example, rejecting becomes the action and begging the reaction.

  CHARACTER B

  Just standing there you bother me.

  CHARACTER A

  I’m not bothering you, I’m trying to talk to you.

  CHARACTER B

  I’ve heard enough.

  CHARACTER A

  You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said.

  CHARACTER B

  Because I’m fed up with your BS.

  CHARACTER A

  Believe me, it’s not BS. It’s the truth.

  And on it goes. The identical beat of rejecting/begging, whether in the same words or different words, never changes, never progresses.

  Some writers defend redundancies by claiming they’re lifelike. And it’s true. People do repeat themselves. Monotony is lifelike… and lifeless. My aesthetic calls for life-filled tellings. Stories, after all, are metaphors, not photocopies. Verisimilitude, the so-called “telling detail,” is a stylistic strategy to enhance credibility, not a substitute for creative insight.

  The ultimate storytelling sin is boredom—a villainous violation of the law of diminishing returns. This law states: The more often an experience repeats, the less effect it has. The first ice cream cone tastes great; the second one loses flavor; the third makes you sick. In fact, the same cause repeated back-to-back not only loses its impact, but in time also causes an opposite effect.

  Repetitiousness follows a three-step pattern: The first time an artist skillfully uses a technique, it has its intended effect. If he immediately repeats that technique, it has less than half of the intended effect. If he’s foolish enough to try it a third time, it will not only lack the effect he wants, but swing
around from behind and inflict the reverse effect.

  Suppose, for example, you were to write three scenes in a row, all tragic, expecting the audience to cry in all three. What would be the aftereffect of that composition? In the first scene, the audience members may cry; in the second scene they might sniffle; and in the third scene they will laugh their heads off. Not because the third scene isn’t sad; it may be the most tragic of all. But because you have drained them of their tears, they feel it’s ludicrous and insensitive of you to think they’ll cry a third time, so they flip tragedy into comedy. The law of diminishing returns (true in life as it is in art) applies to all storytelling forms and contents—desires and conflicts, moods and emotions, images and actions, words and phrases.

  Repetitious beats notoriously plague first drafts. Why? Because in the early going, the writer is still searching for the succinct, character-specific language that would nail each action/reaction with a single stroke of speech/reply. Instead, he repeats the same beat in different words, thinking he can substitute quantity for quality, deceiving himself with the belief that repetition reinforces meaning. In fact, it does the opposite. Repetition trivializes meaning.

  So, what to do?

  Never compromise. Fine writers scour their knowledge and imagination until they find the perfect choice. They write draft after draft, constantly improvising, playing one line against another, tossing lines around in their imagination, mouthing them out, and then, writing them down.