by Robert McKee
Writing In-Character
When Arthur Schnitzler published Fräulein Else, he was a sixty-two-year-old man writing in the first-person inner voice of a nineteen-year-old socialite. How is this possible? First, he wrote plays as well as prose, so his dramatist skills must have helped him find words for this character. Then, life experience. He married a twenty-one-year-old actress when he was forty-one. In fact, over a lifetime he had many affairs with young women. Each must have given him a chance to hear a fresh voice and imagine life from a new and female point of view.
But my best guess is this: In addition to talent, skill, and a practiced ear, Schnitzler could act. Maybe not in front of an audience, but at his desk and pacing his study. He became her. He wrote in-character, a technique we will explore in Chapter Nineteen.
THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
Orhan Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence two years after winning the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. He worked long and hard with novelist Maureen Freely to perfect the English translation. The English edition, rather than the original Turkish, was the likely basis for further translations (sixty languages to date), and so its faithfulness was critical.
SETUP
Pamuk’s novel tells a story of love at first sight and its conflict-filled aftermath. Kemal, a Turkish businessman, has converted a house in Istanbul into a repository of mementos and memories he calls The Museum of Innocence. Like the Taj Mahal, the museum celebrates love. In Kemal’s case, nine passionate years with Füsun, his exquisitely beautiful lover and eventual wife, now deceased.
The author’s unique narrative strategy places Kemal inside the museum, where he acts as docent and guide to its exhibits. Pamuk then treats the reader as a visitor to the museum, allowing Docent Kemal to speak to the reader in first person as if the reader were the museum’s guest.
Nine tumultuous, love-soaked years have seasoned Docent Kemal to maturity. But living in his memory is the museum’s main exhibit: Kemal’s previous, immature, ultra-romantic self. Throughout Kemal’s youth, this self feverously sought something he could not grasp. He told himself he was in love with Füsun and, up to a point, he was. But deep within, his true obsession was a passion for passion. He quested after that ancient and elusive absolute: the life-fulfilling, transcendent romantic experience. Füsun merely played a role in his all-consuming drama.
Obsessive romantics devour the rites of romance: quiet walks in moonlight, tireless lovemaking, candlelit dinners, champagne, classical music, poetry, sunsets, and the like. But these enthralling rituals are pointless without an exquisite creature to share them, and so the man-in-love-with-romance tragedy begins when he falls for a woman because, and only because, she is gorgeous. Young Kemal, in other words, suffered from the curse of beauty: that insatiable craving for the sublime that makes living a simple life unthinkable.
Having created these two selves, Docent Kemal and Romantic Kemal, the author needed to characterize the two voices and solve three dialogue problems: 1) In what tone and manner would the Docent Self speak to a visitor? 2) How would the Docent Self express the Romantic Self’s silent inner dialogue? 3) When we hear Romantic Kemal speak, what qualities would texture his voice?
The passage below answers those questions as Docent Kemal talks to us:
I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day. As I paced the rooms, glancing out the windows, stopping in my tracks from time to time, standing motionless, I would listen to the pain sluicing within me. As the clocks in the apartment ticked away, my mind would fixate on the seconds and the minutes to distract myself from the agony. As the appointed hour neared, the sentiment “Today, yes, she’s coming, now” would bloom inside me, like spring flowers. At such moments I wanted time to flow faster so that I could be reunited with my lovely at once. But those minutes would never pass. For a moment, in a fit of clarity, I would understand that I was fooling myself, that I did not want the time to flow at all, because Füsun might never come. By two o’clock I was never sure whether to be happy that the hour had arrived, or sad that with every passing minute her arrival was less likely, and the distance between me and my beloved would grow as that between a passenger on a ship leaving port and the one he had left behind. So I would try to convince myself that not so very many minutes had passed, toward this end I would make little bundles of time in my head. Instead of feeling pain every second of every minute, I resolved to feel it only once every five! In this way I would take the pain of five discrete minutes and suffer it all in the last. But this too was for naught when I could no longer deny that the first five minutes had passed—when I was forced to accept that she was not coming, the forestalled pain would sink into me like a driven nail…
Docent Kemal begins this passage in the present tense as if he were standing in front of an exhibit case filled with heirlooms and speaking to a visitor. But The Museum of Innocence is primarily a temporal museum; its chief artifacts are episodes from a love story, taken out of time and placed in its galleries. So Docent Kemal switches to the past tense as he puts Romantic Kemal, trapped in an archived event, on display.
Docent Kemal quotes Romantic Kemal just once with four present-tense phrases: “today,” “yes,” “she’s coming,” and “now,” uttered with the staccato of excitement. Other than this exception, Docent Kemal leaves the implied line-by-line thoughts of Romantic Kemal’s inner dialogue to the reader/visitor’s imagination. In the sixth sentence, a third self, Critical Kemal, appears briefly to chide Romantic Kemal for his childish self-deceptions.
Docent/guest is a ceremonial relationship, more formal than professor/student. Professors and their students engage in the excitement of ideas, but the docent and museum guest join in a solemn reverence for the past. Therefore, Docent Kemal’s dialogue pours out flowing, elegiac sentences.
The passage runs 325 words long in eleven sentences that average 29.5 words each. Subordinate clauses in series build each sentence to a mini-climax: “pain sluicing within me,” “distract myself from the agony,” “Füsun might never come,” and so on. The passage’s formality and grace also suggest that Docent Kemal has relived this scene again and again, recited it to many guests many times, perfecting his wording with each rendition.
Although Docent Kemal is no longer the hopeless romantic he once was, nostalgia for romance still fills his voice. He is as much poet as docent. So to characterize his protagonist’s heightened romantic imagination, Pamuk interlaces Docent Kemal’s descriptions with metaphors and similes. Here and there the docent resorts, as people do, to clichés: sugar-sweet images such as thoughts blooming like spring flowers inside Romantic Kemal, and the tear-streaked B-movie scene of a passenger on a departing ship gazing back at a beloved left on shore. Docent Kemal’s most personal language, however, goes dark and animates pain: Liquid pain flows through his body, then takes the form of a driven nail. In the most vivid image of all, he transforms time into the conduit for pain, complete with a mental valve, as it were, that can turn it on and off.
Of the passage’s eleven sentences, the word “would” finds its way into all but the first line. “Would” is the past tense of the verb “will,” but in this context the author uses it as a modal to create a soft sense of uncertainty.
Feel, for example, the difference between the hard versus the soft expression of the same ideas: “I listen to” and “my mind fixates on” as opposed to “I would listen to” and “my mind would fixate on.” Instead of the phrase “pain sunk into me,” the translator uses “pain would sink into me” to give the moment a sense of melancholy. Overall, the frequent repetition of “would” softens the hard edge of reality and spreads an aura of things happening as much in its characters’ imaginations as in an actual room in the actual past.
The phrase “would never” intimates unknown repetitions; “would try” hints at hope and wishing. Taken together, ten “would
s” yield an air of things that may or may not happen. The word “suggests” and the phrase “ten or fifteen” further distend this shifting atmosphere, until Docent Kemal’s dialogue sounds like what it is: a memory in the mind of a failed romantic.
Reflexive Conflict
Pamuk’s writing draws its energy from two sources of reflexive conflict: the tyranny of love and the tyranny of time.
The tyranny of love: While engaged to another woman, Romantic Kemal met Füsun, a beautiful shop clerk. The lightning of love at first sight struck, and his life veered out of control on a trajectory aimed at the transcendent romantic experience. Romantic Kemal blames fate, but fate is the excuse we use when our subconscious pries our hands off the wheel of life.
The arch-romantic wants his beloved with him every minute of every hour of every day. Suffering her absence causes more suffering as the agony of loneliness feeds on itself, making her absence all the more acute. The more he thinks about it, the worse it gets. If and when she were to finally show up, who knows how his mood might have reversed.
The tyranny of time: The clock on the wall measures time, but our inner Big Ben has no hands. Sometimes hours vanish in a glance; sometimes a minute drags by longer than an arctic February. Romantic Kemal tries concentrating on time because he thinks it will soothe his torment: “As the clocks in the apartment ticked away, my mind would fixate on the seconds and the minutes to distract myself from the agony.” But fixating on time makes its passage all the more excruciating. He tries to bring time under control by bundling it, parsing it, speeding it, slowing it, but his battle to rein time only gives time all the more power to torture him.
This is the nature of reflexivity: The character inflicts it on himself and then persists in stirring its poison. Needless to say, reflexive conflict offers the storyteller soaring dialogue opportunities.
A final note: Docent Kemal portrays Romantic Kemal’s passion with a powerful and yet self-obsessed intensity. When Füsun doesn’t show up, he might have thought: “My God, did something happen to her? Is she hurt?” But he didn’t. Instead, he dissected his painful anticipation of pleasure to the microsecond. For the romantic, it is, as we say, always about him.
18
MINIMAL CONFLICT
INTRODUCTION: THE BALANCE OF TEXT AND SUBTEXT
Every line of dialogue strikes a balance between the literal meaning of the words said and the unsaid meanings that the reader/audience senses resounding through the subtext.
When this balance tilts so that a minor motivation causes a massive vocal response, dialogue sounds hollow and the scene feels forged. Recall the definition of melodrama from Chapter Six: the overwrought expression of limp needs. Like chefs who use rich sauces to hide spoiled food, writers who whip up blubbery stylistics to smother stale content risk the sour odor of melodrama.
When balance levels out so that unsaid thoughts and feelings transcribe directly and fully into what is said, we call this blatancy writing on-the-nose. If a scene’s implicit and explicit meanings echo each other, subtext turns into text, depth dries up, lines sound tinny, and the acting clanks.
When the balance favors content over form, when minimal words express maximal meaning, dialogue gains its greatest credibility and power. Using Robert Browning’s famous phrase, “Less is more.”1 Any word that can be cut should be cut, especially if its loss adds to the line’s effect. Sparseness of language gives the reader or audience a chance to peer ever more deeply into the unsaid and unsayable. With few exceptions, when understatement takes the upper hand, dialogue resonates.
What follows is a superb example of the fewest possible words used to express the maximum possible feeling and meaning.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Sofia Coppola wrote and directed LOST IN TRANSLATION when she was thirty-two. It was her fourth script to reach the screen and her second feature to direct. The film won numerous awards around the world, including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Coppola grew up surrounded by artists, she has traveled to Japan many times, and, like all of us, she has won and lost at love. So although it’s fair to assume that personal experience influenced Coppola’s storytelling, it would be a mistake to treat LOST IN TRANSLATION as autobiography. Rather, her writing expresses the widely read, finely tuned mind of an artist who uses fiction to express her insights into life’s secret places.
In Coppola’s minimalist writing, dialogue progression does not use arguments to sling words like stones (the conjugal hostilities of A Raisin in the Sun) or manipulations to weave words into a trap (Daisy’s malicious feigning in The Great Gatsby). Instead, subtle, indirect, sparse language shapes implicit, virtually invisible but deeply felt conflicts that haunt her characters out of their pasts and into the present.
In the scene below, Coppola works into the inner selves and past selves of her characters simultaneously. She reveals both in each without resorting to choices under the pressure of dilemma.
Choices between irreconcilable goods and the lesser of two evils, once poised, are profoundly revealing of true character but relatively easy to dramatize. Coppola takes another path: Her characters are not in conflict with what life imposes but with the emptiness of what life denies. This quiet scene hooks, holds, and pays off without direct, indirect, or reflexive conflict.
SETUP
The key to creating a scene of minimum dialogue and maximum impact is its setup. If, prior to a scene, the storytelling has brought characters to crisis points in their lives, the reader/audience can sense their needs swirling in the subtext. These desires may or may not be conscious, but the reader/audience knows them, feels them, and waits in high tension to see how they play out. A well-prepared reader/audience reads chapters of content implied behind a phrase or gesture.
LOST IN TRANSLATION perfects this technique. The film’s opening scenes crosscut to counterpoint dual protagonists: Charlotte, a recent Yale graduate, traveling with her photographer husband, versus Bob Harris, a middle-aged Hollywood star, famous for action roles. As the two settle into the Park Hyatt Tokyo, we see their differences of age (at least thirty years), fame (everyone ignores Charlotte; everyone fawns on Bob), and marriage (she needs her husband’s attention; he wishes his wife would leave him alone).
That day, they notice each other in passing twice—once in an elevator and later in the lounge. That night, neither can sleep, so they make their way to the hotel bar where they meet by chance.
Scene Intentions
As the scene opens, Charlotte and Bob seem to share a simple need: to kill time over a drink. But if all they really wanted was a drink, they could have opened their minibars. Instead, an unthought wish for someone to talk to sends them out of their rooms. Once they see each other, their scene intention becomes: to kill time with talk.
Scene Values
As Charlotte nears Bob sitting at the bar, tension rises. Earlier that day, she and he exchanged a smile, but suppose he turns out to be an arrogant bore, or he discovers that she’s a lunatic fan. The question “Should I talk to this stranger or drink alone?” runs through the minds of both. Those doubts charge the tension of comfortable isolation versus risky intimacy that opens the scene and inflects their choices.
Once they dare to converse, however, a deeper, instinctive need inspires them to move from a chat to confession. As they reveal unpleasant home truths about themselves, intimacy wins out over isolation. That step then ignites yet another value: lost in life versus found in life. Lost/found becomes the story’s core value.
As the film’s title suggests, Bob and Charlotte, each in their own way, feel lost. When the scene opens, lost/found sits squarely at the negative. Over the course of the scene, it never touches the positive; rather, it sinks to the bleakness of Beat 15. At the same time, however, the charge of isolation/intimacy arcs toward the light and by the capping beat, their relationship touches an immediate and natural closeness.
At the end of each beat, I have scored its value charge (+) for posi
tive, (-) for negative, (++) for doubly positive, etc.
Read the scene (printed in bold) straight through to get a feel of the dialogue’s minimalist language. Then review it against my notes on the arc of its beats, subtext, and value charges.
INT. PARK HYATT BAR—NIGHT
Bob sits alone over a drink.
BEAT 1
BOB
(to the Barman)
He got married a couple of times to some nice women, beautiful women, too, I mean you and I would be crazy for these women, but there were always rumors. I never liked his acting, so I never gave a damn whether he was straight or not.
ACTION: Bob trying to impress the Barman.
REACTION: The Barman pretending he’s impressed.
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
Rather than starting with that all-too-familiar image of a solitary man sitting at a bar, staring into the back of his head, Coppola opens the scene with showbiz chitchat. A Hollywood star gossiping to a Japanese Barman makes Bob’s loneliness character-specific and poignant. This first beat hits an amusing note that counterpoints the dark beat that climaxes the scene.
BEAT 2
Charlotte steps up to the bar. The Barman pulls out a stool near Bob.
CHARLOTTE
(to Barman)
Thank you.
(to Bob)
Hi.
(to Barman as she sits)
Thanks.
ACTION: The Barman seating her.
REACTION: Charlotte fitting in.
Intimacy/Isolation (-)
When composing a scene, ask this question before committing to any line of dialogue: At this precise moment, what are my character’s choices of action? Which tactic could she take? Which does she take? Every choice of tactic suggests a quality in the character’s nature and determines the words she’ll use to carry it out. Once again, dialogue is the outer result of inner action.