Dialogue

by Robert McKee

  Coppola’s next twist of the knife is this: Which is worse? Professional failure or loss of self? Loss of self. Why? Because if we wanted to, we could decide that careers, fame, fortune, and even creative achievement are fleeting and illusionary. We could escape the public realm. Fine, but we have to live somewhere. If we cannot find our place in personal relationships, if we cannot find self-worth in professional achievement, what’s left? We must look inside and find a life of value within our being.

  The dilemma at the heart of LOST IN TRANSLATION creates an existential crisis. Bob and Charlotte have no visible reason to be unhappy. They seem well educated, well off, well married, and surrounded by friends—in Bob’s case, by a world of fans. No, Bob and Charlotte are not lonely; they are lost.

  The difference is this: You’re lonely when you have something to share but no one to share it with. You’re lost when you have nothing to share, no matter with whom you live. Of course, you can be both lonely and lost, but of the two, lost inflicts the greater pain.

  Below are the beat by beat gerunds of action/reaction with the value charges they cause. Overall, the positive charges of isolation/intimacy alternate with the negative charges of lost/found to pace the scene dynamically without repetition:

  BEAT 1: Impressing/Pretending

  Intimacy/Isolation (-)

  BEAT 2: Seating her/Fitting in

  Intimacy/Isolation (-)

  BEAT 3: Attending/Testing

  Intimacy/Isolation (-)

  BEAT 4: Welcoming/Joining/Endorsing

  Intimacy/Isolation (+)

  BEAT 5: Inviting/Confessing/Concealing

  Lost/Found Life (--)

  BEAT 6: Soothing/Sympathizing

  Intimacy/Isolation (+)

  BEAT 7: Inviting/Confessing

  Lost/Found Life (--)

  BEAT 8: Readying/Preparing/Making a pass

  Intimacy/Isolation (--)

  BEAT 9: Foiling/Complimenting

  Intimacy/Isolation (+)

  BEAT 10: Offering hope/Confessing/Complimenting

  Lost/Found Life (--)

  BEAT 11: Inviting/Confessing

  Lost/Found Life (--)

  BEAT 12: Offering false hope/Laughing it off

  Intimacy/Isolation (+)

  Lost/Found Life (-)

  BEAT 13: Offering false hope/Shrugging it off

  Intimacy/Isolation (++)

  Lost/Found Life (--)

  BEAT 14: Celebrating/Celebrating

  Intimacy/Isolation (+++)

  BEAT 15: Confessing/Confessing

  Lost/Found Life (---)

  Intimacy/Isolation (++++)

  The personal revelations of losses in Beats 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13 continually top each other in terms of the damage to their lives. In Beats 10 through 12, the characters’ confessions become all the more honest and all the more sad. When Charlotte and Bob toast the wreckage in Beats 13 and 14, their newfound intimacy lifts the mood for an instant, but it turns sharply into the powerful irony of Beat 15.

  In the pause that follows their third and most painful confession (“I wish I could sleep”/”Me, too”), each suddenly recognizes a kindred spirit. Their immediate desire is realized in Beat 15 as their lives shift from Isolation (-) to Intimacy (++++). With irony, of course: They can’t sleep (--), but they can talk (++); they’re lost souls (---) who connect with a mirror soul (++++).

  When you survey the gerunds that name their actions, notice how Charlotte and Bob mirror each other. When two people sit at a bar, unconsciously imitating each other’s posture and gestures, then echoing each other’s subtextual actions, they connect with an intimacy they themselves may not realize.

  The scene climaxes on an overall positive irony and a glimmer of hope. This quiet but surprisingly dynamic scene arcs from easy rapport to bleak loss to the possibility of love. The last beat hooks strong suspense for the rest of the film: Now that Bob and Charlotte have joined forces, will they grow into lives found?

  19

  MASTERING THE CRAFT

  LISTEN

  To master the technique of saying little but expressing much, first train your eye to see into the depths of the unsaid and the unsayable inside the people around you, then train your ear to hear the said. William Goldman, perhaps the finest writer of dialogue in film history, has often been complimented for having “the best ear in Hollywood.” If you think about it, however, the expression “an ear for dialogue” seems odd.

  The phrase conveys an image of a writer with reportorial or stenographic gifts riding on buses and listening to the people around him talking, and then writing down what they say quickly and accurately. Well, I know William Goldman, and it has been a long time since he got around New York on buses. But wherever Goldman finds himself, he listens in a writer’s way, in depth, and so he hears far more than words said.

  Listen to life. From infanthood on, the future writer actively listens to real-world voices—their rhythms, tones, and jargons. No matter where you are, now and then eavesdrop on people, take mental notes, or jot down interesting turns of phrase and what they imply.

  Talking is doing. So like William Goldman, listen to people on two levels: text versus subtext, what they say versus what they do. Listen to their word choices and grammar, to the way they shape their talk. Listen to the way people use words not to reveal but to conceal their actions. When you sense the unspoken, you discover the subtle tactics people take. Listen deeper yet to the unsayable, to the drives and desires that move beneath awareness and motivate actions. Listen for strategy, for talk as a social ploy. Listen to the way one person uses words to cause another person to react in a way that furthers the speaker’s desires.

  When you put your ear to the wall of society, you soon learn that although dialogue is far more economical than talk, it’s talk that builds your vocabulary. Our Internet-driven world forges marvelous new words by the minute. Terms like “tweet,” “hashtag,” “selfie,” and “narcisstick” (a stick to lengthen your selfie reach) are inspired by technology. But compound puns like manspreading (splaying your legs to keep other people from sitting next to you on the bus), lumbersexual (a fashionably rugged guy), budtender (a server in a pot shop), and linguisticky (a difficult word) are born out of the natural love of talk. Listen for such words around you or make them up yourself, and then put them to work in your storytelling.

  Second, read the good and rewrite the bad. Working writers spend much of their non-writing time nose-deep in a book. They read novels and plays, screen and television scripts. They watch and listen to dialogue performed onstage and onscreen, big and small. They develop an ear for dialogue as a by-product of all the stories they’ve read and seen, colored by all the living talk that’s passed through their days.

  Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue strikes a brilliant balance between a natural sound and high expressivity. No one in reality has ever spoken the way Tarantino’s characters talk, but audiences believe the patter as if it were recorded off the street. The imagistic dialogue of Tennessee Williams flows like wine from a decanter. No one can match novelist Elmore Leonard for creating high-styled repartee between lowlife characters. The dialogue of these renowned writers fits the ear like everyday talk, yet at the same time, expresses authentic characters with unique voices.

  If, on the other hand, you find yourself reading a badly written script or book, don’t dismiss the writer and toss his pages aside. Go back and rewrite him. Scratch out his words and insert your own. Rewriting bad dialogue is the fastest, most efficient way I know to train your talents.

  WRITE IN-CHARACTER

  Scenes can be imagined from two possible angles: outside in or inside out.

  When an author writes from the outside in, she sits as if in an audience of one, tenth row center of her characters’ lives, observing her own imagination at work, watching scenes, overhearing dialogue. Given free rein to improvise, this technique can generate unlimited variations on every possible event. The writer sorts through these choices, tes
ting them by trial and error until she finds an ideal sequence of beats that shapes her scene to and around its turning point.

  This objective method, open-minded and elastic as it is, risks superficiality. If the writer always stays on the outside, always imagines her characters “over there,” her perceptions may shallow out and lose touch with the emotional currents that run through her characters’ inner lives, driving them to action, and then from action to talk. As a result, her dialogue will fall victim to the many flaws of content and form.

  For this reason, a writer also works from the inside out. She places herself at the center of her character’s being, that irreducible core of humanity that answers to the name “Me.” From this inner angle, she sees life through her character’s eyes; she experiences her imaginary events.

  In other words, the writer is the character’s first actor. Writers are improvisationists who enter all of their characters—man, woman, child, beast—to shape them from the inside out. She becomes her character, alive in the now, struggling to get what she wants, emotions and urges surging, taking action after action against the forces that thwart her desires. She feels what her character feels, her pulse pounding apace with her character’s heart. This subjective method of creating dialogue I call writing in-character.

  To write in-character, use the legendary acting coach Constantin Stanislavski’s concept of the “Magic If.” Do not ask, “If my character were in this situation, what would my character do?” because that puts you outside the role looking in. Do not ask, “If I were in this situation, what would I do?” because you are not the character. What you might feel, do, or say in any situation may have little or nothing to do with your character’s behaviors. Instead, ask: “If I were my character in this situation, what would I do?” Create out of your own being, but not as yourself, as your characters.

  In fact, when we look into the background of famous playwrights from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Molière to Harold Pinter, we discover that they all began as actors. Acting, even for prose writers, may be the best preparation for the writing of dialogue.

  In her biography of her father, Mamie Dickens describes watching her father, Charles Dickens, at work:

  I was lying on the sofa endeavoring to keep perfectly quiet, while my father wrote busily and rapidly at his desk, when he suddenly jumped from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he was making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror. The facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward, but evidently not seeing, me, he began talking rapidly in a low voice. Ceasing this soon, however, he returned once more to his desk, where he remained silently writing until luncheon time. It was a most curious experience for me, and one of which, I did not until later years, fully appreciate the purport. Then I knew that with his natural intensity he had thrown himself completely into the character that he was creating, and that for the time being he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually became in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen.1

  To encourage your character to speak in a manner true to her nature, do as Dickens did: act her out. Let her thoughts flood your mind, and then shape her language in all the contours of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, diction, trope, phrasing, phonetics, idiom, and pace. Pay close attention to verbal details and create a one-of-a-kind voice that catches the audience’s ear and lasts in its memory.

  If, after that, you still find yourself mired in clichés, I have another suggestion. Turn your computer off and go take improvisation classes. If you can invent dialogue on your feet in front of a class, you can certainly do it sitting alone at your desk.

  Once you have created a scene from the inside out, reimagine it from the outside in. To fully develop your craft, alternate imagining scenes from both angles. Lastly, sit back as if you were a first-time reader or audience and let the scene go to work on you.

  Develop your dialogue skill by crafting words as an inner action that becomes an outer activity, and in those hours when your work flows smoothly from imagination to page, when you sense the rightness of your words, do not pause for analysis. Just keep moving. But if your scenes war with your senses, if confusion stifles creativity, what to do? Ask questions.

  KEY QUESTIONS

  During the crafting of dialogue, doubts naturally stream through the mind. For which sense do I write? The eye or the ear? Too much description may stall into portraiture; too much dialogue may drone into recitations. How much is too much? Too little?

  Debates over design and purpose: What does this line do for my character? For the beat? The scene? My story? Like Lady Justice, blindfolded and poised with a sword in one hand and a scale in the other, every author weighs the balance of image versus word, of word versus silence, in every scene she judges.

  Creativity isn’t learning the right answers but asking the strongest questions. To take your newfound knowledge of scene and dialogue design into creative practice, I’ve laid out a list of questions to guide your writing and rewriting into the furthest depths and breadths your talents can reach. Whenever you are stuck, get back on track by posing the questions below from each and every character’s point of view. Clear answers will not only renew momentum but also liberate your talent.

  The answers to the following questions create the subtext that makes powerful dialogue possible:

  Background desires: What complex of background desires surrounds the character’s situation in life and his relationships with other characters? How do the background desires limit and control his choices of action and his use of language? What actions can he not take, at least not yet? What words can he not use, at least not yet?

  Objects of desire: What does the character tell himself he wants in order to restore life’s balance? Looking into the subtext, does he also have a subconscious desire? If so, how do these two desires contradict each other?

  Super-intention: What need drives the character down his spine of action? Is it conscious only, or does another desire from his subconscious mind oppose him? Is he his own worst enemy?

  Scene intentions: At this moment, what is the character’s scene intention? What does he seem to want? For complex, multidimensional characters, also ask: What does he really want? What is his subconscious scene intention? Is his scene intention a step in his pursuit of his super-intention? In other words, does this scene make sense in light of the overall story arc?

  Motivation: Why does this character want what he wants?

  Scene driver: Who drives this scene and makes it happen?

  Forces of antagonism: What are the sources of conflict in the scene? Do they come from within the character? Other characters? The setting?

  Scene value(s): What value(s) is at stake in the character’s life in this scene? What is the opening charge of the value(s)? The closing charge of value(s)?

  Subtext: Beneath what the character seems to be doing, what is he actually doing? What tactics might the character use to pursue his scene intention?

  Beats: What specific action does the character take in the subtext of each line? What reactions might these actions cause? On which side of the beat does this line play? Is it an action or a reaction?

  Progression: How do the beats progress my scene? Do they progressively top each other?

  Tactics: With these words, said in this way, what specific tactic is the character taking? What effect is he trying to cause?

  Turning point: How does the scene’s value(s) move in a positive/negative dynamic? Where is the scene’s turning point? In what precise beat of behavior does the value(s) change to the final charge?

  Deep character: How do the choices of action in this scene reveal the truth about my characters?

  Scene progression: How does this scene progress my story?

  These questions guide the final step:

  Text: Outwardly, what would my character sa
y in order to get what he wants? What words and phrases might the character use to help him carry out his tactics, actions, and reactions?

  Exposition: What facts of history, society, and biography does this line contain? Are they dramatized invisibly or narratized explicitly? Do they come in too soon, too late, or at just the right moment?

  Characterization: Do the characters’ verbal styles match their particular personalities, backgrounds, and traits of characterization?

  Ask and answer these questions on every beat. When in the middle of writing the scene’s dialogue, ask and answer these questions again. After you’ve written the scene, ask and answer these questions for a third time. The best questions create the best answers.

  LAST WORDS

  The technique of writing in-character may, at first, seem daunting. But instinctively you’ve done this all your life. After every confrontation you’ve ever had with another person, what have you done? You’ve rerun the scene through your imagination, re-creating it and rewriting it the way it should have gone down. You’ve put yourself inside your own head and the head of your antagonist, and then imaginatively reinvented the conflict beat by beat. And I’ll bet that your rewrites of life are always vivid, always effective. To write dialogue, you essentially do the same thing you do when you rewrite life.

  To create character-specific dialogue, you need to gather knowledge of human behavior through close observations of people around you and through reading both fiction and nonfiction. On the balance, however, the source of all fine character writing is rooted in self-knowledge. As Anton Chekhov said: “Everything I know about human nature I learned from me.”