What makes some dialogue sparkle and jump off the page and into an actor’s mouth, where other dialogue is leaden, perhaps even true or authentic, but also dull?
Dialogue that jumps off the page is dialogue that calls attention to itself as dialogue. Dialogue that “sparkles” is sort of like “The Terminator” and the line “I’ll be back” or in “Sudden Impact” when Dirty Harry says “Go ahead. Make my day.” Bits of dialogue that stick in the mind and become repeatable outside of the context of the story. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Dialogue should not “jump off the page.” On the other hand, it should get into the actor’s mouth in the most natural character-specific way.
Where dialogue is leaden, when the reader or an audience has a reaction against dialogue and feels the sensation in the scene is leaden, it simply means they are not involved in the scene anymore and therefore time is passing excruciatingly slow. The dialogue is not interesting to them, they are not involved in the scene. The scene itself and anything being said is boring. That becomes the experience of “leaden.”
There could be a disconnect between truth and authenticity in a scene you find leaden because you’re not involved. You don’t believe whatever it is the characters are doing through what they are saying. Even though it may be colloquial or typical of whatever such a character might say, it’s not authentic or true to what that character should be saying in that scene at that moment.
When you lose interest in a scene and the dialogue calls attention to itself as just a bunch of words you don’t believe, the problem is in the subtext. It’s not necessarily in what the characters are saying. It’s what the characters are doing. When characters speak, they are taking an action and/or reacting to the action of another character in the scene. Underneath what’s being said outwardly, there are actions characters are taking and reactions characters are having. The action-reaction that’s going on underneath the dialogue is where the interest is for the audience. The dialogue is simply the tactic the character is taking outwardly to carry out that inner action.
The cure to leaden dialogue is not necessarily in the words themselves at all, but rather in making certain that by action-reaction, action-reaction, what the characters are doing in a struggle to get what each of them wants out of the scene captures interest. The dialogue becomes tactics characters are using in their struggle to get what they want. When the audience is involved in the give-and-take of the tactics of the characters as they say and do outwardly what they say and do, when the audience is involved in the inner struggles of these characters one against the other, then the dialogue, as you put it, will sparkle.
Writing for subtext sounds easy to the beginner, where the expert knows both how important it can be and how challenging it is. What help can you offer writers who want to write with more resonant subtext?
I’m not certain writing subtext sounds easy to anybody, beginner or not. In fact, I know from experience when I talk about writing for subtext, young writers are paralyzed, they have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t have the first idea about going about doing it.
In my book, DIALOGUE: THE ART OF VERBAL ACTION FOR THE PAGE, STAGE, AND SCREEN, there are six chapters or more where I take various scenes apart to show how the actions in the subtext build a scene progressively as the dialogue is the outer expression of that. The way to create subtext underneath what is being said is to pay attention to what the characters are actually doing and actually thinking and feeling in their desires while they go about doing it.
What the character wants and how the character goes about trying to get it is the inner life of the scene. This includes the motivations that drive that intention, even down to the subconscious mind. The secret, so to speak, of subtext is to just pay attention to it. To realize what’s really going on inside of a character consciously and subconsciously and what they really want at this moment and to identify that with a scene intention. You have to ask “What does this character want at this point in their life?” “What do they want to get in this scene as a step toward their object of desire (i.e. what they want overall in the life of their story)?”
By identifying the desire in the scene, the source of conflict and antagonism against that character’s desire, and step-by-step thinking of what that character would do inwardly that they express outwardly in the dialogue, connecting to the inner actions of the characters in their struggle to get what they want in the scene, creates subtext.
And then, common sense says the characters have tactics, they have strategies. They don’t say out loud fully and completely what they are thinking and feeling. They don’t turn around and say “Look, what I really want from you is that you will show me a sign of love and commitment in our relationship.” Nobody says things like that. Or, if they do, it’s not actually what they want (laughs). It’s just a tactic to get something else.
You have to figure out what the character really wants, why they want it, what’s stopping them from getting it and then what would they outwardly do to cause a reaction in the world that would get them what they inwardly want.
How can we avoid writing clunky dialogue?
You would have to analyze what exactly is “clunkiness.” There are going to be some very simple steps—dialogue is clunky if just has too many words. If it’s taking more words than necessary for the character to express outwardly in dialogue what they are trying to do inwardly in action. It can become clunky because they are using multi-syllabic or poly-syllabic words when a one or two-syllable world will do the same.
For example, I have a pet peeve with people who use the word “utilize.”
“Utilize” is a three-syllable word when the one-syllable word “use” will always substitute. There is no case in which someone uses the word “utilize” in which you couldn’t substitute the word “use.” So they use three syllables when one would do. But I know why they do that, because “utilize’ sounds important. When people want to sound intelligent they add syllables to words and words to sentences and sentences to speeches, they just talk more.
The cure for clunkiness is just a matter of economy and brevity in terms of the number of words you use and the quality of the words you use.
Are there any strategies to rewrite
dialogue that is on the nose?
That goes back to what we were talking about before. On the nose dialogue is dialogue without a subtext.
Of course people try to say out loud what they are fully thinking or talking. Of course they make an effort to speak on the nose. You can write dialogue in which people are trying to say exactly what they are thinking and feeling. I gave that example of somebody with their psychiatrist—the patient does everything they can to say on the nose what they are thinking and feeling to try to help the psychiatrist to understand them. They are not holding anything back; they are paying the psychologist very good money to help them understand themselves. They are being as outwardly honest and frank as they possibly can be. And what’s the psychologist doing? Taking notes. And what’s in those notes? What the patient is not saying. A psychologist is not a stenographer. A psychologist is someone who is trained to look through the on the nose expression of their patients to realize what’s really going on in their subconscious mind and why there is a disconnect between what they think they do in life and what they really do in life.
It’s not as if you can’t write on the nose. If it’s appropriate for the character to say out loud what they are really thinking and feeling, then fine. But there always is a subtext underneath that. And that’s what keeps on the nose writing from seeming on the nose. The ideal of all dialogue is that it is a transparency, that no matter how long a character tries to say out loud what they are exactly thinking and feeling, the audience’s eye travels through the surface of the scene to the real thoughts, even subconscious thoughts and feelings that are going on underneath what the character is saying. That’s what’s the audience finds captivating—they know what’s really going on inside the character better than the character.
It’s not a question of whether or not somebody will say out loud the truth that they deeply believe in, it’s just that it becomes on the nose when there is no subtext. The only time, generally, when we write on the nose dialogue without subtext is in fantasy writing or sci-fi, where characters are allegorical types–hero, villain, etc., allegorical types not to be mistaken for realistic characters. In various forms of symbolic writing we do write on the nose. We eliminate the subconscious mind, because the subconscious, or even the unsaid conscious mind, makes people realistic. In fantasy, you don’t want realism, you want symbolism. In those cases you do write on the nose without a subtext. That is the exception. The strategy to answer that question is to put underneath an awareness, a life underneath the dialogue, conscious/subconscious drives the audience can become aware of that contradicts or contrasts with what the character is actually saying.
Writers often write in their own voice. Are there any tricks writers can use to create more pronounced and contrasting voices for their characters?
The goal of any beautiful cast design or any well-told story is that every character is distinctively different from every other character. How great these differences are between characters depends. But, obviously you do not want redundancy. You do not want two people speaking exactly the same. And you certainly don’t necessarily want them talking in the writer’s voice. You want to distinguish each character and give them an individual speech style.
The reason we create character specific voices, even within the same culture, is to differentiate those characters one from the other in order to tell the story all the better, because you avoid redundancy. If characters react the same, speak the same, do the same things, if two characters are repeating each other, one of them has to be removed from the story to avoid repetitiousness. Fine writing is specific writing.
You have to find not your voice as a writer, but character specific voices and the key to character specific voices is vocabulary. You go into the character’s mind and you look for all of those objects, all of those actions that are unique to this character’s experience that express themself in word choices. There is grammar and sentence constructions that could also be character specific. The place to start is vocabulary. People differentiate themselves by the choice of words and they find their choice of words in their vocabulary, and their vocabulary is the result of the sum total of their cultural experience. Every sporting event they’ve ever attended, every book they’ve ever read, every concert they’ve ever been to, every department store they’ve ever shopped. How they have lived and interacted with their culture in every possible way has given them their specific vocabulary and vocabulary is the most critical step in making dialogue character-specific.
Do you have any tips on editing dialogue so that it lands on the listener with greater weight?
The famous “omit needless words” from Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” (Note for readers: an American English writing style guide) is the guiding principle here. You edit dialogue by eliminating all unnecessary words short of turning dialogue into a telegram (laughs). One of the most important steps is not only economy, but the placement of the key word. Every sentence, generally, has a word or phrase within it that completes its meaning. It could be the verb, it could be the noun, but it’s a word or phrase that if you took it out of that line of dialogue it wouldn’t make any sense.
The key then is where you do you place that key word—at the beginning, in the middle or toward the end? I urge people to use the periodic sentence. It’s the suspense sentence. It’s the sentence you cannot know the meaning of until you hear the very last word. By delaying the meaning until the end of the line the audience then has to listen with curiosity wondering “What is this character saying?” When the last word or phrase lands at the end of the sentence, suddenly the sentence has greater impact. If you do it the other way, if you start the sentence with the key word, then everything after it is a modifier. It risks losing interest.
Now, you can’t have every single line of dialogue end on its key word because that becomes repetitious and it doesn’t sound like conversation. You always mix periodic sentence with cumulative sentences in order to create a conversational tone. Generally speaking, withholding the meaning until the end of the line gives greater weight or impact to every single speech.
Does character determine dialogue or the other way around?
Yes, character determines dialogue. On the other hand, suppose you found a wonderful style of speech that really fascinates you and then it leads you to ask the question, “What kind of person would talk like that?” As a result the inspiration you found in the dialogue urges you to create a character who actually would use that kind of dialogue. In those cases the dialogue creates the character, but they are rare. When you write from the inside out, as I advocate in my teachings, dialogue is the final step, it’s the frosting on the cake. You create characters, you bring them into conflict, out of that you create story and then ultimately you have to find ways for them to speak. Ninety-nine percent of the time as you create the character the character then has to have a true speech style. There are exceptions when dialogue or speech style actually becomes the inspiration for a character, but those are the exceptions.
What advice would you offer a writer starting a redraft, with particular emphasis on dialogue?
First and foremost, eliminate all unnecessary dialogue. Write as lean as you can. At the same time you have to think about the nature of the particular characters and some characters are loquacious, but they have to be loquacious in the most economical way possible. If there’s a fault in writing dialogue that needs to be addressed as you rewrite, it tends to be overwriting. Say the absolute maximum with the fewest possible words and yet retain the specific nature of the characters.
Exactly how much is too much or how little is too little nobody can say. The economy of language is the first piece of advice you give to any writer in a rewrite. The second is—even if the dialogue is very economical—is it character specific? Do the characters tend to sound alike, or worse, do they all sound like you? If so, then you have to go back into the story of these characters and imagine the past lives of these characters and create a vocabulary for them. What has their life experience been like that would add words and particular images in language that these characters would tend to use to get what they want.
The two pieces of advice are economy and specificity: as little as necessary but unique and true to the character by drawing upon their life history and drawing on the world around them and their culture.
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