Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Gazing out the window daydreaming is not creativity. Aesthetic choices only come alive on paper. No matter how banal a line may be, write it down. Write down every choice that passes through your imagination. Do not wait for the moment your genius decides to wake up and give you a gift. Make the perfect choice by continuously moving your thoughts out of your brain and into the real world of the page. That’s writing.

  But even the most experienced writers will hit a wall as they stare at a beat and realize that for this particular action/reaction in this particular scene, no perfect choice exists. They do what they must. They stop banging their head against the keyboard and make a decision.

  They go back and look through all the imperfect choices they wrote down. They ask, “Which of all of these possible choices is the best? Could there be a combination of imperfect choices that’s better than any one choice?”

  The final choice may not be ideal, but it is the one that comes closest to perfection. They will live with it today and hope that in some future draft, they will find an even better choice. But for the moment, at least, they’ve pruned their repetitious bramble.

  MISSHAPEN LINES

  Ideally, every line of dialogue is so perfectly worded, it fits its character in the moment and makes the immediate sense its author intended. Misshapen lines are like trip wires strung across a scene’s path. They force confused readers and audiences to reread, rewind, or ask the person in the next seat, “What did he say?” I can think of three primary reasons that the wording of a line fails to instantly express itself: blurred meaning, mistimed meaning, and mistimed cues.

  Blurred Meaning

  Nouns name objects; verbs name actions. The amplitude of nouns and verbs ranges from the universal to the concrete, from the generic to the specific. As a general rule, specific nouns and verbs tend to sharpen meaning, while generic nouns and verbs modified by adjectives and adverbs tend to blur meaning.

  Imagine writing a scene set in a shipyard. As a deckhand struggles to repair a sailboat’s mast step, a boatsmith looks over his shoulder and offers advice. Which of these two lines conveys its meaning with instant clarity: “Forcefully utilize a big nail” or “Hammer a spike”?

  The second, of course. The first not only seems unnaturally formal, but it also forces the reader/audience to rethink the meaning because the word “nail” covers many dozens of sharp-pointed fasteners, the adjective “big” could be anything over a couple of inches, “utilize” is as vague a verb as any in the language, and the adverb “forcefully” seems unnecessary. As a result, the first line needs two or three mental passes to make sense.

  The lesson is this: Lines of dialogue that name specific objects and actions tend to express immediate understanding in clear, vivid images. Therefore, unless you intend ambiguous or mysterious qualities, avoid generic nouns and verbs strung with adjectives and adverbs.

  Mistimed Meaning

  The instant a speech makes sense, its reader or audience absorbs the line’s action and leaps ahead to witness the reaction from the other side of the scene. Lines that mistime their meaning disrupt this action/reaction rhythm. Break interest frequently enough, and readers will toss your book; TV viewers will change channels, theatre audiences will leave at intermission. Therefore, before you send your writing into the world, reread the dialogue carefully, act out speeches if necessary, study each line, and listen for the precise moment of meaning.

  Too late: When a speech drones on word after word without getting to its point, the reader/audience has one of two reactions: Either they lose patience and skip over the point, or they guess the point long before it arrives, and then sit in boredom as the speech stumbles to an anticlimax.

  Too soon: When a speech begins with its meaning and then rattles on, interest quickly wanes. Readers skim over the words that follow; audiences tune out.

  To skillfully time the meaning of each line, follow the guiding principles we previously covered: economy and design. 1) Say the maximum in the fewest words. 2) Master the three basic sentence designs—cumulative, balanced, suspense—so you can place meaning wherever you think best: beginning, middle, or end.

  Mistimed Cues

  A scene finds its natural rhythm of action/reaction in the give-and-take of meaning. Until a character has some sense of what was just said, of what just happened, he waits in limbo. But the instant Character A senses (or thinks he senses) what Character B is saying or doing, he reacts. Although most reactions seem instinctive, spontaneous, and instantaneous, they are in fact triggered by a glimpse of meaning. Character A may completely misinterpret the moment and overreact, underreact, or react off-the-wall. Nonetheless, his reaction, indeed every reaction, needs an action to prompt it.

  Therefore, ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene. On page, mistiming the core word is a relatively minor problem, but in the theatre or on a soundstage, it can break scenic rhythm and ruin performances.

  A miscue happens when a core word is placed too early in Character A’s line and prompts a reaction from Character B, but because Character A has more words to recite, Actor B must swallow her response and wait while Actor A finishes performing his speech.

  To make cueing technique clear, let’s work with this passage adapted from Act 1, Scene 5 of John Pielmeier’s play Agnes of God.

  Sister Agnes, a young nun, has given birth inside a convent. The newborn’s dead body was found in a wastepaper basket next to Agnes’s blood-soaked bed. Agnes claims to be a virgin. Some weeks prior to Agnes’s giving birth, a hole appeared in the palm of Agnes’s hand. The convent’s Mother Superior wants to believe that these events are the work of God.

  The police suspect that Agnes committed neonaticide, and so the court has appointed Dr. Martha Livingston, a psychiatrist, to determine Agnes’s sanity. After examining Agnes, the doctor and Mother Superior talk.

  As you read this passage, notice how the line structure places the core word or phrase at or near the end of speeches. This technique creates crisp cueing and a well-paced rhythm of action/reaction:

  MOTHER SUPERIOR: Look, I know what you’re thinking. She’s an hysteric, pure and simple.

  DOCTOR LIVINGSTON: Not simple, no.

  MOTHER: I saw the hole. Clean through the palm of her hand. Do you think hysteria did that?

  DOCTOR: It’s been doing it for centuries—she’s not unique, you know. She’s just another victim.

  MOTHER: Yes, God’s victim. That’s her innocence. She belongs to God.

  DOCTOR: And I mean to take her away from Him. Isn’t that what you fear?

  MOTHER: You bet I do.

  DOCTOR: Well, I prefer to look upon it as opening her mind, so she can begin to heal.

  MOTHER: But that’s not your job, is it? You’re here to diagnose, not to heal.

  DOCTOR: I’m here to help her in whatever way I see fit. That’s my duty as a doctor.

  MOTHER: But not as an employee of the court. You’re here to make a decision on her sanity as quickly as possible.

  DOCTOR: Not as possible. As quickly as I see fit.

  MOTHER: The kindest thing you can do for Agnes is to make that decision and let her go.

  DOCTOR: And what then? If I say she’s crazy, she goes to an institution. If I say she’s sane, she goes to prison.

  Now, I’ll rephrase the lines and move their core words back into the middle of each speech. Notice how the overall meanings stay more or less the same, but the cueing stumbles, the actions/reactions seem to spasm, and the scene staggers along.

  MOTHER: Look, she’s an hysteric, pure and simple. I know what you’re thinking.

  DOCTOR: No, not simple.

  MOTHER: Clean through the palm of her hand. Do you think hysteria did that? I saw the hole.

  DOCTOR: It’s been doing it for centuries. She’s just another victim. She’s not unique, you know.

  MOTHER: Yes, she belongs to God. God’s victim. That’s he
r innocence.

  DOCTOR: Is that what you fear? That I mean to take her away from Him?

  MOTHER: I do, you bet.

  DOCTOR: Well, opening her mind, so she can begin to heal, is how I prefer to look upon it.

  MOTHER: You’re not here to heal but to diagnose. That’s your job, isn’t it?

  DOCTOR: My duty as a doctor is to help her in whatever way I see fit.

  MOTHER: You’re here to make a decision on her sanity as quickly as possible as an employee of the court.

  DOCTOR: As quickly as I see fit. Not as possible.

  MOTHER: Make that decision and let her go. That’s the kindest thing you can do for Agnes.

  DOCTOR: And what then? She goes to prison if I say she’s sane. She goes to an institution if I say she’s crazy.

  When actors encounter scenes of this kind, one of three things will happen: Actors will cut off each other’s lines, talk over each other, or phony up their performance by politely and unnaturally waiting for each speech to end. None of these options solves the problem of mistimed cues.

  Generally, speeches that end with cumulative sentences cause miscues. Before your scenes reach performance, act them aloud into a recorder and listen for the core words. Then go through the lines again, this time with a highlighter, and mark the core words, paying special attention to the last sentence of each speech. You will see that some phrases, especially prepositional phrases, tend to float to the ends of lines (just as they did in my last sentence). If so, cut or rephrase so that each speech ends on its cue.

  MISSHAPEN SCENES

  Faulty designs may also infect scenes. Like a misshapen line that mistimes its core word, a misshapen scene can mistime its turning point, bringing it in too soon or too late or not at all. A well-shaped scene pivots around its turning point in just the right way at just the right moment. From story to story, the “right” moment for any scene’s turning point is unpredictable and idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, when timing misfires, the reader/audience feels it.

  Too soon:

  The first beat powerfully jolts the scene around its turning point. But from that moment on, the scene runs anticlimactically downhill as characters pour out exposition.

  Example: A scene we’ll call “The Lovers Break Up.”

  Version 1: In the first beat one lover declares the relationship over; the other agrees. The action/reaction of this immediate turning point swings the value charge of love from positive to negative. A beat of resolution may need to follow, but if the scene goes on and on as the lovers pour out their history, reminiscing about the good times and lamenting the bad, the reader/audience may turn against the scene and its characters, thinking, “You guys are done. Get over it.”

  Too late:

  Repetitious beats of dialogue prattle on far too long until, sometime after the audience has lost interest, the turning point finally arrives.

  Version 2: Lovers whose relationship has run its course reminisce about the good times and lament the bad until the audience sees the turning point coming long before it arrives. When the lovers finally agree to break up, the unsurprised audience sits there, thinking, “I saw this coming ten minutes ago.”

  Not at all:

  Version 3: A couple floating in the doldrums of their relationship reminisce about the good times and lament the bad. They never take an action to either break up or recommit. The value of love is at the same tepid temperature it was when the scene opened. None of the scene’s beats executes a turning point. The beats may zigzag in conflict, but the scene still has no shape, no arc, because the charge of its core value at the end of the scene is exactly what it was at the beginning of the scene. If nothing changes, nothing happens. The scene is a repetitious nonevent, leaving the audience to sit in wonder, asking, “What was the point of all that talk?”

  As you compose beats of dialogue, give thought to the scene’s shape. Build it beat by beat, line by line, progressively to and around the turning point, timing that pivotal beat for the perfect moment. You must decide how sharply or gradually a scene progresses. Your judgment guides what’s too soon or too late. Every scene has a life of its own, and you have to feel your way to its ideal shape.

  SPLINTERED SCENES

  Scenes flow with life when the reader/audience senses a unity between the characters’ inner motivations and outer tactics. No matter how subtle, indirect, or disguised their maneuvers may be, somehow what the characters say and do links back to their underlying desires. Scenes splinter and die for the converse reason: We sense a breakdown between what drives the scene from the subtext and what is said and done on the text, a disconnect between inner intentions and outer behaviors. As a result, the scene strikes us as false.

  I can think of four reasons that an otherwise promising scene rambles out of joint, and the dialogue seems phony or lifeless: 1) The inner desires are fully motivated, but the dialogue is too bland, and so the scene falls flat. 2) The inner wishes are weakly motivated, but the dialogue is overwrought, and so the scene feels melodramatic. 3) The inner intentions and outer actions seem irrelevant to one another, and so the scene makes no sense and dialogue ricochets into non sequitur. 4) The characters’ desires run side by side, never crossing in conflict. Without conflict, the scene has no turning point and so nothing changes; without change, dialogue thickens with exposition, the scene flattens into a nonevent, and we sit bored at best, confused at worst.

  The writers of nonevents often try to conceal their ineptitude behind excessive language. Profanity is the common choice. They think that by inserting expletives into tepid dialogue, they raise the dramatic temperature. They would be wrong.

  Not, as Seinfeld would remind us, that there’s anything wrong with profanity per se. Certain settings demand profanity. In long-form crime series like DEADWOOD, THE WIRE, or THE SOPRANOS, profanity fits the characters like a silk suit. In fact, when criminals stop swearing, we know they mean business: A silent gangster is a lethal gangster.

  To reshape a faulty scene, start at either level, subtext or text. You could work from the outside of it by rewriting the line and then backtracking to create an inner action to fit. Or you could work from the inside out by going down into the inner life of your characters and layer by layer rebuild their deep psychologies and desires from the subtext outward into the scene’s actions and reactions, sayings and doings. This process demands hard work and time, but because the inside-out method is more difficult, its successes are more powerful.

  THE PARAPHRASING TRAP

  Novice writers want to believe that writing problems are word problems, so when they sense the need to rewrite, they start by paraphrasing faulty dialogue, over and over. The more they rephrase, the more on-the-nose their language becomes, until subtext vanishes and the scene is irredeemably dull and false.

  When scenes fail, the fault is rarely in the words; the solution will be found deep within event and character design. Dialogue problems are story problems.

  Parts One and Two mapped out the complexities of dialogue. Part Three takes on the task of imagining and refining dialogue to serve your characters and their story.

  PART 3

  CREATING DIALOGUE

  10

  CHARACTER-SPECIFIC DIALOGUE

  THE TWO TALENTS

  Creative writing calls on two sources of creativity: story talent and literary talent. Story talent converts daily existence into meaningful, emotionally moving events and characters, then sculpts a work’s inner design—what happens and to whom—to create metaphors for life. Literary talent converts everyday talk into expressive dialogue, then sculpts verbal designs—what’s said and to whom—to create metaphors for talk. These two talents combine to shape scenes.

  Drawing on both talents, fine writers employ an iceberg technique: To drive their story, they submerge the massive content of unspoken thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions out of sight in the subtext of scenes; to tell their story, they create a text of words on the visible tip of character behavior. Let’s
step back to the time those voices first spoke.

  Homer, the earliest storyteller we know by name, recited the more than 250,000 words of description and dialogue in the Iliad and the Odyssey from memory. With the invention of the alphabet around 800 BC, his epics were written down and the first dialogue appeared on page. Homer’s characters argue and accuse each other, they recount the past and predict the future, but despite the blind poet’s image-rich rhyming couplets, their speeches tend toward declamations rather than conversations. As a result, although the choices and actions of his characters express their individuality, in dialogue they sound remarkably alike.

  In this same period, the first onstage performances were sacred rituals in which choruses sang, danced, and chanted verse stories of gods and heroes. Religious ritual slowly evolved into theatre as the chorus leader stepped forward to become an actor with a distinguishable character. The playwright Aeschylus introduced a second actor and invented the technique of rapid face-to-face exchanges of short speeches known as stichomythia, literally line-talk (from stikho, meaning “line,” and muthos, meaning “talk”). The rhythmic intensity of characters alternating single lines or phrases, combined with quick, biting language, unleashed great dramatic power, as in Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon.

  But it was the introduction of the third actor by Sophocles in plays such as Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Electra that gave rise to character complexity. Sophocles transformed ancient archetypes such as king, queen, princess, warrior, and messenger into characters with personality, dimensionality, and singular voices. What these first playwrights sensed—and what writers of all story media have understood since—is that the more complex the psychology of a character, the more distinctive his dialogue must become. In other words, originality in character design finds its final expression in character-specific dialogue.