Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Consider, for example, this exchange between Matthew McConaughey’s Detective Rustin Spencer “Rust” Cohle and Woody Harrelson’s Detective Martin Eric “Marty” Hart from the television series TRUE DETECTIVE. As they watch an old-fashioned tent revival in rural Louisiana, Rust turns to Marty and says:

  RUST

  What do you think is the average IQ of this group, huh?

  MARTY

  What do you see up there on your high horse? What do you know about these people?

  RUST

  Just observations and deduction: I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales. Folks putting what few bucks they do have in a little wicker basket that’s being passed around. I think it’s safe to say nobody here’s gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.

  MARTY

  You see that? Your fucking attitude. Not everybody wants to sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals. Some folks enjoy community, the common good.

  RUST

  If the common good’s got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.

  The scene focuses the Rust/Marty conflict through a trialogue. In this scene the revivalist congregation becomes the third thing, allowing word choices to distinguish Rust from Marty in two ways: First, their conflicting attitudes toward the congregation. Rust feels contempt, Marty compassion. Rust criticizes them; Marty forgives. Second, Rust’s logical intellectualizations versus Marty’s emotional personalizations. Rust keeps his cool; Marty loses his. As a result, Rust’s phrasings run noticeably slower and longer than Marty’s.

  Compare these two lines:

  Rust: “Just observations and deduction: I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales.”

  Marty: “Not everybody wants to sit alone in an empty room beating off to murder manuals.”

  Note Rust’s abstract, polysyllabic terms with Latinate suffixes of “-ion” and “-ity” versus Marty’s concrete images in iambs and trochees: “alone,” “empty,” “murder.” Showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s precise word choices contrast the loner Rust and his need for justice against the gregarious Marty and his need for intimacy.

  Crafting idiosyncratic speech, however, does not mean tricking up a role with vocal quirks. A self-conscious stylishness can be like bad acting, the literary equivalent of hamming it up and hogging the spotlight. Panache may impress us, but a true voice affects us. The former calls attention to itself; the latter calls us to life.

  Contemporary writing workshops often stress development of an inimitable presence in language known as “a voice.” To me, this talk seems pointless. A writer’s style or so-called voice cannot be found or created self-consciously. Voice is not a choice; it’s a result.

  A distinctive writing style pays off when a creative personality embraces a broad and deep knowledge of the human condition. When talent wraps its arms around content, the tumultuous coupling that follows breeds a singular manner of expression. Voice is the instinctive, spontaneous consequence of genius working up a sweat.

  In other words, as you explore your story’s content of role, meaning, emotion, and action, as you do the hard work that brings life to your characters, you will write as only you would. That, for better or worse, like it or not, will be your voice. And like a painter covering canvas after canvas through decades of toil in search of his vision, your evolution toward a true voice will take time.

  In writing dialogue, the same principle applies. When an original character reaches inside for expression, her voice will be the second-nature consequence of her one-of-a-kind personality, experience, knowledge, locution, and accent. Ideally, a character’s language is so plausible, so seemingly natural, so idiosyncratic that every line in every scene seems to be an improvisation that no one but that specific character in that specific moment would invent.

  In saying this, I am not advocating difference for the sake of difference. Quirkiness is not originality, and it takes taste to know the difference. The ability to tell a true phrase from a clever phrase does not come easy; if it’s not innate, it must be learned over years of reading and rereading quality novels, while watching and rewatching exceptional television, films, and theatre. As you hone your judgment of story and character, one insight shifts into sharp focus: The foremost facet of dialogue is vocabulary.

  Dramatized storytelling is not about words but characters using words as they struggle through life. All components of speech from grammar to phrasing to pace are therefore vital to dialogue. But nothing conveys or betrays personality as much as a character’s choice of words, the names of the things that live within him.

  VOCABULARY AND CHARACTERIZATION

  As noted in previous chapters, nouns name objects and verbs name actions. A character’s vocabulary names what he knows, what he sees, and what he feels. His choice of words is all-important because a character’s façade of talk should be a doorway to his depths. Passive, blurry, generic phrases flatten a character and numb the audience; active, concrete, sensory language arouses insights that weave dimension and complexity into a character.

  To create a brilliant surface of talk that leads the audience into a character’s depths, your method must move in the reverse direction: Start within your character, and then work outward from content to form to effect.

  First, draw on your sensory and visual powers to imagine content (what your character sees and feels on the inscape, the unsaid and unsayable), then craft his dialogue (the said) into a form that slips his words into the reader’s or audience’s ear with effect. In essence, you must transform the images in your character’s inner life into the verbiage of his outer talk.

  THE PRINCIPLE OF CREATIVE LIMITATION

  The tougher the technique, the more brilliant the feat.

  Constraint, discipline, and limitation inspire stunning creative achievement; unrestrained freedom, on the other hand, usually ends in a sprawl. If you take an easy, undisciplined path that makes little claim on your talent, the results smudge with paint-by-numbers banality. But if, contrarily, you choose an arduous technique that demands a master’s proficiency, then talent builds muscle until your imagination, strained to the tearing point, explodes with power.

  The great difficulties imposed by creative limitations are why a Beethoven symphony transcends whistling. Why Whistler’s Mother surpasses a doodle. Why a high school prom is not the Bolshoi.

  The strategy of surrounding yourself with aesthetic obstacles to compel creative excellence begins by pitting language against image. Language is the medium of conscious thought; image is the medium of subconscious thought. Therefore, writing the first banal phrases that pop to mind is far easier than expressing character in lucid, three-dimensional imagery found in the far reaches of your imagination. When you write off the top of your head, all characters sound alike and the sounds they make irritate like fingernails on a blackboard. Their grating voices fake life and then fill the sham with irredeemably false dialogue—out of character, out of scene, void of feeling, void of truth.

  Dialogue takes work. Compare the effort to bring someone to mind with words (“my cousin Judy”) to the task of first conjuring up a glowing image of your cousin—her Alice-blue eyes, and the almost Asian shape they take when she smiles—then holding her living picture before your mind while you rummage through your vocabulary, searching for the perfect words to make your vision of Judy shine in the minds of your readers. Writing vividly for the outer eye and ear of a spectator or for the inner eye and ear of a reader demands fierce concentration.

  The language-bound art of writing aims its effects at the mental cortex that deciphers words. To tell a story in pure image runs contrary to writing’s psycholinguistic nature. Therefore, the masters of page, stage, and screen dedicate their lives to doing exactly that. They choose the strenuous, indeed, next-to-impossible technique. To inspire excellence, to create an insightful, original telling, the dedicated writer condemns himself to chain-gang labor, a long dig down the back roads of the uncons
cious in search of vigorous, deep-image language.

  Sensory dialogue resonates with the speaker’s inner life. Specific, vivid, image-rich language leads the reader/audience to the character’s subtext of hidden, unconscious thoughts and feelings. As a result, when such characters take verbal actions in pursuit of their desires, they become transparent and we can know them in depth. But when characters sound like a business report—generic, literal, Latinate, polysyllabic—their language flattens the action and diminishes the scene’s inner life. The more opaque the characters become, the more we lose interest. Therefore, even if a character is in fact a bore, his dialogue must express his lifeless soul with vivid dreariness.

  LOCUTION AND CHARACTERIZATION

  Character-specific locutions depend on both sides of a sentence, subject and predicate. Subject (what or whom the sentence is about) and predicate (something about the subject) combine to create a line of dialogue that helps express two primary dimensions of characterization: knowledge and personality. One aspect of the line tends to convey the former, and the other, the latter.

  Although characterization can be expressed through dialogue in a variety of ways, a character’s knowledge tends to be expressed in the names of things, nouns and verbs, while a character’s personality tends to be expressed in the modifiers that color those nouns and verbs.

  Knowledge. If a character uses a vague phrase such as “a big nail,” we sense that his knowledge of carpentry is limited. Generic nouns suggest ignorance. But if he names the thing—“shank,” “clout,” “spike,” “corker,” “sinker”—we sense a much fuller knowledge.

  The same principle applies to verbs. Core verbs (as opposed to modal verbs) span from generic to specific. If a character remembers that someone “moved slowly across the room,” we sense that his recall is dull. Generic verbs also suggest ignorance. But if his dialogue sharpens and he says that another man “sauntered,” “waltzed,” “padded,” “slouched,” “moseyed,” “pranced,” or “dragged himself” across the room, his choice of verb suggests a vivid memory and insight into the other man. Specific names of objects and actions convey a superior mentality.

  Personality. The idiosyncratic by-products of a character’s life experience—his beliefs, his attitudes, his individuality—are chiefly expressed through modifiers.

  First, adjectives. Two characters look at a fireworks display. One describes it as “big” and the other as “stupendous.” These are two very different personalities.

  Second, adverbs. Two characters watch a motorcycle go by. One says it was going “ferociously” and the other says it was moving “quickly.” Again, two very different people.

  Third, voice. Core verbs also span the spectrum that runs from active to passive. In active sentences, the thing doing the action is the subject, and the thing receiving the action is the object. Passive sentences reverse this so that the object becomes the subject. As a result, someone who tends to use phrases such as “The family planned the wedding” (active) versus someone who would remember the event as “The wedding was planned by the family” (passive) have two very different feelings about how things work in life, two very different temperaments.

  Fourth, modals. Modal verbs (could, can, may, might, must, ought, shall, should, will, would) attach to core verbs to add qualities of modality: ability, possibility, obligation, permission, and the like. Modal phrases convey:

  1. A character’s sense of self and the world around him.

  2. His feelings for his place in society and the interplay of relationships.

  3. His view to the past, present, and future.

  4. His attitudes toward what is possible, what is permitted, and what is necessary.

  Someone who says “The family could plan the wedding” versus someone who insists “All weddings must be planned by families” are probably two very different personalities.

  PRINCIPLE OF CHARACTER-SPECIFIC DIALOGUE

  Nouns and verbs express a character’s intellectual life and range of knowledge. Modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, voice, modalities) express his emotional life and personality.

  To figure out how your character’s personality expresses itself, ask: “How does my character see life? Passive? Active? How does my character modify subjects and especially predicates?” Before your fingers hit the keys, constantly ask: “What words, phrases, and images would make my character’s dialogue his alone? What in the psyche, life experience, and education of my character will express the content of his knowledge (names of nouns and verbs) and the one-of-a-kind mannerisms of his personality (modifiers and modalities)?”

  CULTURE AND CHARACTERIZATION

  To answer these questions, consider this: Through the totality of your character’s living hours, awake and sleeping, his or her mind, conscious and unconscious, has absorbed an immense and character-specific volume of culture: a combination of language, family, society, art, sport, religion, and the like.

  Year after year, life’s events have hurt, rewarded, and influenced your character in countless ways. Into this sea of customs and encounters, the character has mixed the dispositions and physical givens he or she was handed at birth: attractive/plain, healthy/ailing, aggressive/shy, high IQ/low IQ, and so on. The result is a specific admixture of genes and life experience that makes each character unlike any other character and gives him or her a singular voice.

  In the four case studies that follow, notice what their authors found when they entered into their characters’ psyches: popular culture. In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare references the Colossus of Rhodes, which was the most famous, and certainly the largest, bronze statue of the classical era, which in turn means that the well-traveled Cassius and Brutus must have sailed past it in awe. In Out of Sight Elmore Leonard weaves images from THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, a hit film in the Watergate era. His characters probably saw it in their impressionable teens. Passages from 30 ROCK feature upper-class obsessions like yachts and mergers. Fine wine, on the other hand, is no longer the province of the rich; schoolteachers are as expert as sommeliers, which plays crucially in SIDEWAYS.

  To write each scene, the author has gone inside to see what his character has seen. He then discovered a cultural icon to enrich the scene as the character draws an analogy between his immediate life and a work of art or cuisine. Once again, using a third thing to create a trialogue.

  Think about it: How in fact do people express themselves in words? How do they explain what they’re thinking and feeling, say what needs to be said, and, most importantly, do what needs to be done? Answer: They use the bits and pieces of everything they know. And what, first and foremost, do they know? Culture. Whether popular or esoteric, whether acquired from formal education or overheard on a street corner, culture is our dominant source of knowledge. To that we add all the imagery rooted in characters’ encounters with nature, cityscapes, workscapes, and religious ritual. Plus images from dreams, from fantasies about the future, from the totality of the day and night musings that weave these familiarities together. This mass of experience creates a treasure chest of images that will inspire distinctive dialogue in the mouths of your characters.

  The next four case studies illustrate these principles.

  11

  FOUR CASE STUDIES

  THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR

  Consider this setup: Senator A is powerful and popular. The envious Senator B wants the respected Senator C to join forces against Senator A. So Senator B pulls Senator C aside to persuade him:

  SENATOR B

  Senator A is so popular and so powerful that compared to him, we’re nobodies.

  Senator B states the obvious in passive and opaque language. His dialogue couldn’t be less persuasive, less imaginative, less interesting. The comparison he makes might irritate Senator C, but Senator B’s words have no imagery to give them life; no subtext to give them depth. His complaint is so bland, Senator C could easily shrug it aside.

  Here’s how history’s greatest dia
logue artist rendered the moment in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2:

  CASSIUS

  (to Brutus)

  Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.

  Shakespeare’s Cassius hugely overstates the case, which, of course, is what people do when trying to wheedle their way inside someone else’s head. They use the techniques of rhetoric to distort, exaggerate, or manipulate.

  The Colossus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. More than one hundred feet tall, this bronze statue of the sun god Helios stood astride the harbor at Rhodes with ships sailing in and out of port under its legs. Cassius compares Caesar to an awesome, imaginary colossus that would have one foot in Spain, the other in Syria, and the whole Mediterranean world between its legs.

  And yet, note that Shakespeare gives Cassius this phrase: “the narrow world.” The instinctive, off-the-top-of-the-head phrase would be “the wide world.” So, why “narrow”?

  Because Shakespeare (I suspect) wrote in-character. He slipped his imagination into the mind of Cassius, so he could work from Cassius’s subjective point of view. He was then able to see the world the way Cassius saw it and write imagistic dialogue for the eye: “the narrow world.”