Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  3. Motivation

  Do not confuse either object of desire or super-intention with motivation. The first two answer “what” questions: What does the character consciously want? What does he subconsciously need? Motivation answers “why.” Why does a character need what he feels he needs? Why does he want his particular object of desire? And if he gets what he wants, will this success actually satisfy his need?

  The roots of motivation reach deep into childhood and, for that reason, are often irrational. How much you understand the whys of your character’s needs and wants is up to you. Some writers, like Tennessee Williams, obsess on motivation; some writers, like Shakespeare, ignore it. Either way, what’s essential to the writing of scenes and their dialogue is an understanding of the characters’ conscious and subconscious desires.3

  4. Scene Intention

  A scene shapes a character’s moment-by-moment struggle toward his ultimate life goal. Scene intention names what a character immediately wants as a step in the long-term effort of the super-intention. As a result, the actions he takes and the reactions he gets in each scene will either take him closer to or bend him farther away from his object of desire.

  If the writer were to grant the character his scene intention, the scene would stop. For example, in a police interrogation scene, Character A wants Character B to stop questioning him. A’s scene intention is to stop the interrogation. If B were to give up and leave the room, the scene would end. B, on the other hand, wants A to reveal a secret. From B’s point of view, his scene intention is to discover the secret. If A were to confess, that too would end the scene. Scene intention names the character’s imminent, conscious desire—what he wants right now.4

  5. Background Desires

  A character’s background desires limit his choices of action. Each of us is constantly aware of the state of the relationship between ourselves and every person and every object we encounter in life—our safety in traffic, which table the maître d’ gives us, our place in the hierarchy of coworkers, to name only three public examples. We are acutely aware of our private rapport with friends, family, and lovers. We’re also attuned to our innermost self, our relative state of physical, mental, emotional, and moral well-being. What’s more, we’re aware of our place in the flow of time, of our experiences in the past, the knife-edge of the present, and what we hope for the future. These complex interwoven relationships create our background desires.

  Relationships become desires in this way: Once created, relationships form the foundation of our existence; they create the system that gives us our sense of identity and security in life. Our well-being depends on them. We try to eliminate relationships of negative value, while at the same time maintaining, if not improving, positive relationships. At the very least, we want relationships of either kind kept within reasonable control.

  Background desires, therefore, not only cement the status quo of a character’s life; they temper his behavior. Background desires form the web of restraints that follows every character into every scene. These fixed desires for stability limit and temper the character’s actions. They influence what the character will or will not say to get what he wants.

  In principle, the more relationships of positive value a character accumulates in life, the more restrained, the more “civilized” his behavior. The reverse is also true: When a character has nothing to lose… he’s capable of anything.

  In some cultures, because of social mores, you can speak your mind; in other cultures, for the same reason, you must obey unspoken codes of address and keep your thoughts to yourself. Humanity’s enormous range of cultures creates a spectrum of polar extremes that spans from cultures that are all subtext with hardly any text versus cultures that are all text and very little subtext. In the social sciences, these polar extremes are known as high-context versus low-context cultures.5 In fiction, they determine the relative quantity of text versus subtext.

  High-context cultures have a strong sense of tradition and history. They change very slowly over time, and so from generation to generation their members hold many beliefs and experiences in common. A high-context culture will be relational, collectivistic, intuitive, and contemplative. It places high value on interpersonal relationships within a close-knit community (Native Americans, for example).

  As a result, within these in-groups many things can be left unsaid because their members can easily draw inferences from their shared culture and experiences. The Italian Mafia is such an in-group. In THE GODFATHER, when Michael Corleone says, “My father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” an entire episode of extortion becomes violently clear. Michael then goes on to make the event explicit to Kay Adams because she’s not in the in-group.

  High-context cultures, such as those in the Middle East and Asia, have low ethnic and social diversity. They value community over the individual. In-group members rely on their common background, rather than words, to explain situations. Consequently, dialogue within high-context cultures calls for extreme economy and precise word choices because within such settings a few subtle words can implicitly express a complex message.

  Conversely, characters in low-context cultures, such as North America, tend to explain things at greater length because the people around them come from a wide variety of racial, religious, class, and nationalistic backgrounds. Even within the same general cultures these differences appear. Compare, for example, two American stereotypes: a Louisianan (a high-context culture) and a New Yorker (a low-context culture). The former uses a few tacit words and prolonged silences, while the latter talks frankly and at length.

  What’s more, in low-context cultures, shared experiences change constantly and drastically, thus creating communication gaps from one generation to the next. In immigrant societies, such as the United States, parents and children have notoriously difficult communication problems that result in long, loud arguments. Characters become more verbose and explicit as subtext shallows out.

  FORCES OF ANTAGONISM

  As a character pursues her object of desire, she consciously or instinctively designs actions that she hopes will cause helpful, enabling reactions from her world, reactions that she expects will move her closer to a balanced life. But instead of getting cooperation, her actions arouse forces of antagonism that thwart her efforts. Her world reacts differently, more powerfully, in contrast or contradiction to what she reckoned. This surprising violation of expectation may move her further from or closer to her object of desire, but whether positive or negative, the turn will not happen in the way she imagined.

  The term forces of antagonism does not necessarily refer to an antagonist or villain. Villains inhabit certain genres, and in his proper place an arch-villain, such as the Terminator, can be a fascinating antagonist. But by forces of antagonism I mean opposing forces from any or all of the four levels of conflict:

  1. Physical conflict: The titanic forces of time, space, and every object in the manmade and natural universe. Not enough time to get something done, too far to go to get something, nature’s tumult from tornadoes to viruses. To these natural forces, fantasy genres add supernatural and magical forces of amazing variety and unlimited imaginings.

  2. Social conflict: The powerful forces of institutions and the people who run them. All levels of government and the legal systems they enforce, all religions, the military, corporations, schools, hospitals, even charities. Every institution shapes itself into a pyramid of power. How do you gain it? Lose it? How do you move up and down the power pyramid?

  3. Personal conflict: The problematic relationships of intimacy between friends, family, and lovers that range from infidelity to divorce to petty squabbles over money.

  4. Inner conflict: Contradictory forces within a character’s mind, body, and emotions. How to cope when your memory betrays you, your body breaks down, or your feelings overwhelm your common sense?

  Over the progressive dynamics of a story, forces from these various levels build in power and focus, deep
ening and widening the story. As these complications build, the protagonist reacts by digging deeper and deeper into her willpower as well as her mental, emotional, and physical capacities in an ever-escalating effort to restore life’s balance.6

  SPINE OF ACTION

  A story’s spine of action traces the protagonist’s constant quest for his object of desire. His persistent pursuit, driven by his super-intention, struggling against the story’s forces of antagonism, propels the entire telling from the inciting incident through the story’s progressions to the protagonist’s eventual crisis decision and climactic action, ending in a moment of resolution.

  What the protagonist (or any character) does from scene to scene or says from line to line is simply a behavioral tactic. For no matter what happens on the surface, no matter what outer activity catches our eye and ear, the protagonist’s grand, unrelenting spine of action runs under every scene.

  Because other people are the most common source of life’s complications, the most common activity taken along the spine of action is talk. And like the five major movements of story (inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution), talk has its own five stages—desire, sense of antagonism, choice of action, action/reaction, expression.

  Of these stages, expression is the activity that carries the character’s action into his world. It’s most often speech, but it may be clenching a fist or planting a kiss, hurling a plate across a room or smiling deceitfully—all the nonverbal activities that may accompany or substitute for dialogue.

  Imagine this story: You are a first-time writer trying to break into the profession. In that secret place where you hide from the world, you feel incomplete as you teeter through life. You dream of a creative triumph that would give you wholeness and balance: a novel, play, or script of surpassing quality (object of desire). Your need to achieve artistic success (super-intention) drives your writing life (spine of action).

  You sit down (scene) and pursue your desire by attempting to write a page of dialogue (choice of action) because you hope it will unlock insight into your characters and story events to come (scene intention). But before you begin, you know that a pernicious horde of forces will oppose your efforts—your mother will call, the baby will wake up, fears of failure will churn your belly, the temptation to quit will whisper in your ear (sources of antagonism). In the face of these forces, you choose to stay at your desk and persevere (choice of action). And so you write and rewrite the same passage over and over (action). But with each pass your dialogue stumbles, sputters, and only gets worse (force of antagonism). You spew a chain of hyphenated profanity, “Stupid damn… mother… son of a…” (expression). Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a new angle of attack springs to mind (reaction). You pound out dialogue that reshapes the scene with surprising power (action). You lean back and mutter, “Wow, where did that come from?” (expression).

  Every immediate desire and action, no matter how seemingly trivial, even a thing as infinitesimal as taking a thought-filled sip of coffee, is somehow affixed to your future desire and your pursuit of literary achievement. Moment by moment, your life moves along a spine of action from desire to sense of antagonism to choice of action to action/reaction to expression.

  As for you, so for your characters. As for your life, so for your stories.7

  STORY PROGRESSION

  The scenes along the spine of action not only move dynamically across the positive/negative charges of the story’s values, but they arc along a progression of conflict. As a character struggles toward his object of desire, the forces of antagonism build, calling on greater and greater capacities from within him, generating greater and greater jeopardy in his life, demanding greater and greater willpower to make more and more risk-taking decisions.

  Finally, there comes a moment when the protagonist has exhausted all possible actions, save one. Faced with the most powerful and focused conflict of his life, the protagonist must choose one final action in a last effort to put his life back in balance. He makes his crisis decision, chooses a climactic action, and takes it. Out of the climax he either gets what he wants or fails to get it. End of story. A last resolution scene may be needed to tie up any loose ends and let the reader/audience gather their thoughts and recoup their emotions.8

  TURNING POINTS

  Ideally, every scene contains a turning point. A turning point pivots the instant the value at stake in the scene dynamically changes from positive to negative or negative to positive. This change moves the character either farther from (negative) or closer to (positive) his object of desire than the previous scene’s turning point. Turning points progress the story along its spine of action toward the final satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the protagonist’s desire at story climax.

  A turning point can be created in only one of two ways: by action or revelation. An event turns either by an immediate, direct action, or by the disclosure or discovery of a secret or previously unknown fact. Because dialogue can express both deeds (“I’m leaving for good”) and information (“I married you for your money”), it can turn a scene’s value charge by action, revelation, or both at once. If a scene has no turning point, if the value charge does not change in any kind or degree, then the scene is merely an exposition-filled nonevent. Too many nonevents in a row and a story collapses into tedium.9

  SCENE PROGRESSION

  “Progression” means the continuous topping of previous actions or events. A scene creates a turning point that progresses the storyline by topping the turning point in the previous scene. Each sequence of events causes a moderate change that surpasses the previous in terms of its impact, for better or worse, on the lives of the characters. Each act climax delivers a major impact.

  But no matter whether a scene creates a minor, moderate, or major change in the story, the scene progresses within itself by building beats of behavior, so that each action/reaction tops the previous beat to and around the scene’s turning point.10

  THE BEAT

  Like the physical objects governed by Newton’s third law of motion, every verbal action causes a reaction. The beat is a unit of scene design that contains both an action and a reaction from someone or something somewhere in the setting. Generally, the response comes from another character, but it could come from within the acting character himself.

  Suppose Character A were to insult Character B. Character B could react in myriad ways, perhaps with an insult of his own or by laughing at Character A. Or Character A could react to his own action and apologize. Or Character A could regret what he said, feel remorse, but say nothing. Or Character B, who doesn’t speak English, greets the insult with a smile. These moment-to-moment exchanges of action/reaction build a scene. Ideally, each beat tops the previous beat and leads to the next. This continuous surpassing of previous beats within a scene generates dialogue progression, shaping the scene’s beats to and around its turning point.11

  Beats are best identified by gerunds. A gerund is a noun that names an action by adding “-ing” to a verb. The four possible beats above, for example, could be labeled insulting/ridiculing, insulting/apologizing, insulting/regretting, insulting/greeting. The use of gerunds to name the actions beneath exchanges of dialogue is the best way I know to stop yourself from writing on-the-nose.

  FIVE STEPS OF BEHAVIOR

  When characters use what they say to pursue what they want, the rambling activity of conversation turns into the focused action of dialogue. Verbal action, indeed all behavior, moves through five distinct steps from desire to antagonism to choice to action to expression. Because people often act and react in a flash, these steps seem fused together because they fly from first to last in a blur. But that’s life, not writing. No matter how quickly and instinctively things might happen, the five steps are always there. To make the flow of character behavior as clear as possible, let’s examine these five steps in slow-motion detail:

  1. Desire: The moment a character’s life is thrown out of balance (inciting incid
ent), he, in reaction, conceives of (or at least senses) what he must achieve in order to restore life’s balance (object of desire). His overarching purpose to reach the object of desire (super-intention) motivates his active pursuit (spine of action). As he moves along the story’s spine, at each specific moment (scene) he must satisfy an immediate want (scene intention) in order to progress toward his object of desire. The foreground desire of scene intention and underlying pull of the super-intention influence each choice of action he makes and takes. But his background desires limit his choices because they influence what he cannot or will not do.

  2. Sense of Antagonism: Before the character can act, however, he must sense or recognize the immediate forces of antagonism that block his way. How much of his understanding is conscious or subconscious, realistic or mistaken, depends on the psychology of the character, the nature of his situation, and the story the author is telling.

  3. Choice of Action: The character then chooses to take a specific action in an effort to cause a reaction from his world that will move him toward his scene intention. Again, how deliberate or instantaneous this choice may be is relative to the nature of the character and his situation.

  4. Action: The activity the character chooses to carry out his action may be physical or verbal or both. Desire is the source of action, and action is the source of dialogue.

  5. Expression: To the extent that the character’s action needs words to carry it out, the writer composes dialogue.