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THE THREE FUNCTIONS OF DIALOGUE
Dialogue, dramatized and narratized, performs three essential functions: exposition, characterization, action.
EXPOSITION
Exposition is a term of art that names the fictional facts of setting, history, and character that readers and audiences need to absorb at some point so they can follow the story and involve themselves in its outcome. A writer can embed exposition in the telling in only one of two ways: description or dialogue.
Onstage and onscreen, directors and their designers interpret the writer’s descriptions into every expressive element that isn’t dialogue: settings, costumes, lighting, props, sound effects, and the like. Comic book artists and graphic novelists illustrate their stories as they tell them. Prose authors compose literary descriptions that project word-images into the reader’s imagination.
Dialogue can do the same work. For example, picture this: a gilt-gleaming, marbled lobby with business-dressed, fair-haired visitors signing in at a security desk manned by uniformed guards, while in the background busy elevators open and close. The moment we glimpse this image, it instantly denotes a number of expositional facts: Place—an office building in a major city somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Time—a weekday between eight a.m. and six p.m. Society—the professional class of Western culture that hires armed guards to protect the executives on the upper floors from the poverty class on the streets. What’s more, the subtext of this image connotes a commercial, competitive, white-male-dominated world, questing for wealth and power, always on the verge of corruption.
Now picture a high-energy investment broker lunching with a potential client. Listen for the implications beneath his glib double entendre: “Come on up, meet my young hawks. We roost on the seventy-seventh floor and prey on Wall Street.” In fewer graphemes than a tweet, word-pictures can express more dimensions than a camera can see.
Virtually anything expressed in images or explained in narration can be implied in dialogue. Therefore, the first function of dialogue is to pass exposition to the eavesdropping reader/audience. The following precepts guide this difficult work:
Pacing and Timing
Pacing means the rate or frequency with which exposition is spliced into the telling. Timing means choosing the precise scene and the exact line within that scene to reveal a specific fact.
The risks governing the pacing and timing of exposition are these: Give the story-goer too little exposition and he will disengage in confusion. On the other hand, big helpings of static exposition choke interest: The reader puts down the book; audiences shift in their seats, wishing they had bought more popcorn. Therefore, you must pace and time the placement of exposition with care and skill.
To keep interest moving, fine writers parse exposition out, detail by detail, passing on only what the audience member or reader needs to know when she absolutely needs and wants to know it. Not a moment before. They give only the minimal exposition necessary to maintain the flow of curiosity and empathy.
If you give the modern, story-savvy reader/audience too much exposition too soon, not only does their stride shuffle to a crawl, but they also foresee your turning points, including your ending, long before they happen. Annoyed and disappointed, they sit in front of your work thinking, “I saw it coming.” As the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Reade advised: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.”
Lastly, not all expositional facts are of equal value to the telling, and therefore do not deserve equal emphasis. In a separate file, list every fact in your story, and then rank them in order of importance to the reader/audience. As you rewrite and polish your work, you may realize that certain facts need to be stressed and repeated in more than one scene to guarantee that the reader/audience remembers them at a critical future turning point. Other less important facts need only a single hint or gesture.
Showing versus Telling
The axiom “Show, don’t tell” warns against dialogue that substitutes passive explanations for dynamic dramatization. “To show” means to present a scene in an authentic setting, populated with believable characters, struggling toward their desires, taking true-to-the-moment actions while speaking plausible dialogue. “To tell” means to force characters to halt their pursuits and talk instead and at length about their life histories or their thoughts and feelings, or their loves and hates, past and present, for no reason intrinsic to the scene or its characters. Stories are metaphors for life, not theses on psychology, environmental crises, social injustice, or any cause extraneous to the characters’ lives.
Too often, recitations of this kind simply serve the writer’s extrinsic need to opine into the ear of the captive reader/audience, rather than a character’s intrinsic need to take action. What’s worse, telling erases subtext. As a character copes with antagonisms and pursues desires, her vocal reactions and tactics invite readers and audiences to seek her unspoken thoughts and feelings. But when a writer forces unmotivated exposition into a character’s mouth, these opaque lines block the story-goer’s access to the speaker’s inner life. And as the character flattens into a spokesperson for its author’s ideas, interest fades.
Finally, showing speeds involvement and pace; telling discourages curiosity and halts pace. Showing treats readers and audiences like adults, inviting them into the story, encouraging them to open their emotions to the writer’s vision, to look into the heart of things and then forward to future events. Telling treats them like a child who a parent sits on a knee to explain the obvious.
This speech, for example, is telling: As Harry and Charlie unlock the door to their dry-cleaning business, Charlie says:
CHARLIE
Oh, Harry, how long have we known each other now? What, twenty years, maybe even more, ever since we were in school together. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, old friend? Well, how are you this fine morning?
That dialogue has no purpose except to tell the reader/audience that Charlie and Harry have been friends for over twenty years, went to school together, and the day is just beginning.
This speech, on the other hand, shows:
As Charlie unlocks the door to the dry cleaners, an unshaven Harry, dressed in a T-shirt, leans against the jamb, toking on a joint and giggling uncontrollably. Charlie looks over at him and shakes his head.
CHARLIE
Harry, when in hell are you going to grow up? Look at you and your stupid tie-dyed shirts. You’re the same immature ass you were twenty years ago in school and you haven’t changed since. Sober up, Harry, and smell the shit you’re in.
The reader’s imagination or the audience’s eye glances to Harry to capture his reaction to that insult, and invisibly, as it were, they happened to have learned “twenty years” and “school.”
At some point, every vital fictional fact must find its way into the story, timed to arrive at the most effective moment, loaded to deliver a critical insight. These details, and the perceptions they inspire, must pass into the reader/audience’s awareness without distracting them from the flow of events. Somehow the writer must send the reader/audience’s attention in one direction while he smuggles a fact in from another.
This sleight of hand calls upon one of two techniques or both: Narrative drive and exposition as ammunition. The former skill draws on intellectual curiosity, the latter emotional empathy.
Narrative Drive
Narrative drive is a side effect of the mind’s engagement with story. Change and revelations incite the story-goer to wonder, “What’s going to happen next? What’s going to happen after that? How will this turn out?” As pieces of exposition slip out of dialogue and into the background awareness of the reader or audience member, her curiosity reaches ahead with both hands to grab fistfuls of the future to pull her through the telling. She learns what she needs to know when she needs to know it, but she’s never consciously aware of being told anything, because what she learns compels her to look ahead.
Witness, for example, the power of exposition to compel narrative drive in a novel titled after a piece of exposition: Catch-22. The author, Joseph Heller, invented the term to name bureaucratic traps that cage their victims in a vicious circle of logic.
The story takes place on an air force base in the Mediterranean during World War II. In Chapter Five, Captain John Yossarian, the novel’s protagonist, asks Dr. Dan Daneeka, the base physician, about a pilot named Orr:
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”
“That’s all he has to do to be grounded?”
“That’s all. Let him ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Notice how Heller inserted a passage of indirect dialogue into a scene of dramatized dialogue. The prose paragraph’s summary tells us what Daneeka said to Yossarian and how Yossarian whistled in reaction to it. Even though it’s in a third-person voice that adds a touch of authorial commentary, this is showing and not telling for these reasons: 1) It happens within the scene. 2) It furthers the dynamic actions of the scene: Daneeka wants Yossarian to stop pestering him with excuses to get out of combat, and Yossarian suddenly realizes the futility of claiming to be crazy. Daneeka’s revelation becomes a turning point that moves the Yossarian plot to the negative.
In terms of narrative drive, the instant the reader grasps the inescapable logic of Catch-22, her expectations leap ahead. How, if possible, she wonders, will Yossarian, or any of the other characters, escape the vise grip of this absurd military rule? The reader/audience’s constant search for answers to questions aroused by revelations of exposition propels narrative drive.
Exposition as Ammunition
The second technique for passing exposition unnoticed to the reader/audience relies on the story-goer’s emotional involvement. Empathy begins with this thought: “That character is a human being like me. Therefore, I want that character to get whatever the character wants because if I were that character, I’d want the same thing for myself.” The moment a story-goer recognizes a shared humanity between herself and your characters, she not only identifies with them but also transfers her real-life desires onto their fictional desires.
Once this empathetic connection hooks involvement, the technique of exposition as ammunition operates in this way: Your cast has the knowledge of the past, present, themselves, and each other that your readers or audience members will need to know in order to follow events. Therefore, at pivotal moments, let your characters use what they know as ammunition in their struggles to get what they want. These revelations will deliver the pleasure of discovery to the emotionally invested reader/audience as the fact quickly vanishes into the story-goer’s background awareness.
Consider, for example, the original Star Wars trilogy. All three films hinge on one story-fact: Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. The storytelling problem for George Lucas was when and how to deliver that piece of exposition. He could have revealed it at any point in the first film by having C-3PO whisper to R2-D2, “Don’t tell Luke, he’d really be upset to hear this, but Darth’s his dad.” The fact would have reached the audience but with minimum, almost laughable effect. Instead, he employed exposition as ammunition to turn the trilogy’s most famous scene.
At the story climax of the second film, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Luke Skywalker makes a hero’s choice to fight Darth Vader. As lightsabers clash, the arch-villain takes command and the underdog struggles. Empathy for Luke and anxiety about outcome lock the audience into the moment.
In the conventional action climax, the hero finds an unforeseen way to turn the tables on the villain. Instead, in the midst of the duel, George Lucas puts in play a motivation he has hidden in the subtext: Darth Vader wants his estranged son to join him on the infamous dark side, but faces a lesser-of-two-evils dilemma: Kill his own child, or be killed by him. To escape this dilemma, Vader uses one of the most famous pieces of exposition in film history as ammunition to disarm his son: “I am your father.” But, instead of saving his son with his revelation, he drives Luke to attempt suicide.
Suddenly, the truth hidden behind the first two films shocks and moves the audience to compassion for Luke and fear for his future. This biographical fact used as ammunition delivers massive retrospective insight into deep character and past events, floods the audience with feeling, and sets up the trilogy’s final episode.
Revelations
In almost every story told, comedy or drama, the most important expositional facts are secrets, dark truths that characters hide from the world, even from themselves.
And when do secrets come out in life? When a person faces a lesser-of-two-evils dilemma: “If I reveal my secret, I risk losing the respect of those I love” versus “But if I do not reveal my secret, something even worse will happen.” The pressure of this dilemma pries secrets loose, and as they come to light, their impact spins powerful turning points. And where do secrets come from?
Backstory: Past events that propel future events
Backstory is an often misunderstood term, misused to mean “life history.” A character’s biography contains a lifelong interaction of genes and experience. Backstory is a subset of this totality—an excerption of past, usually secret, events that the writer exposes at key moments to propel his story to climax. Because revelations from the backstory often inflict more impact than straightforward actions, they are reserved for major turning points. Below is a famous example of this technique.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
In this play written by Edward Albee in 1962, George and Martha, a middle-aged couple, endure a conflict-filled marriage. For two decades they have fought constantly over every minute aspect of the raising of their son, Jim. After an exhausting, raucous, drink-filled, insult-filled, adulterous party, topped off with a vicious argument about their son in front of their guests, George turns to Martha and says:
GEORGE. We got a little surprise for you, baby. It’s about sunny-Jim.
MARTHA. No more, George….
GEORGE. YES!… Sweetheart, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you… for us, of course. Some rather sad news.
MARTHA. (afraid, suspicious) What is this?
GEORGE. (oh, so patiently) Well, Martha, while you were out of the room… well, the doorbell chimed… and… well, it’s hard to tell you, Martha…
MARTHA. (a strange throaty voice) Tell me.
GEORGE. … and… what it was… it was good old Western Union, some little boy about seventy.
MARTHA. (involved) Crazy Billy?
GEORGE. Yes, Martha, that’s right… Crazy Billy… and he had a telegram, and it was for us, and I have to tell you about it.
MARTHA. (as if from a distance) Why didn’t they phone it? Why did they bring it; why didn’t they telephone it?
GEORGE. Some telegrams you have to deliver, Martha, some telegrams you can’t phone.
MARTHA. (rising) What do you mean?
GEORGE. Martha… I can hardly bring myself to say it… (sighing heavily) Well, Martha… I’m afraid our boy isn’t coming home for his birthday.
MARTHA. Of course he is.
GEORGE. No, Martha.
MARTHA. Of course he is. I say he is!
MARTHA. He is! I say so!
GEORGE. Martha… (long pause)… our son is… dead. (silence) He was… killed… late in the afternoon… (a tiny chuckle)… on a country road, his learner’s permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a…
MARTHA. (rigid fury) YOU… CAN’T… DO… THAT!
GEORGE. … large tree.
MARTHA. YOU CANNOT DO THAT.
GEORGE. (quietly, dispassionately) I thought you should know.
MARTHA. (quivering with rage and loss) NO! NO! YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THAT!
GEORGE. We’ll have to leave around noon, I suppose…
MARTHA. I WILL NOT LET YOU DECIDE THESE THINGS!
GEORGE: … because there’s matters of identifications, naturally, and arrangements to be made…
MARTHA. (leaping at him, but ineffectual) YOU CAN’T DO THIS! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THIS!
GEORGE. You do not seem to understand, Martha; I haven’t done anything. Now pull yourself together. Our son is DEAD! Can you get that into your head?
MARTHA. YOU CAN’T DECIDE THESE THINGS!
GEORGE. Now listen, Martha; listen carefully. We got a telegram; there was a car accident; and he’s dead. POUF! Just like that! Now, how do you like it?
MARTHA. (a howl that weakens into a moan) NOOOOOOoooooo… (pathetic) No; no, he is not dead; he is not dead.
GEORGE. He is dead. Kyrie, eleison. Christie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.
MARTHA. You cannot. You may not decide these things.
GEORGE. That’s right, Martha; I’m not God. I don’t have power over life and death, do I?
MARTHA. YOU CAN’T KILL HIM! YOU CAN’T HAVE HIM DIE!
GEORGE. There was a telegram, Martha.
MARTHA. (up, facing him) Show it to me! Show me the telegram!
GEORGE. (long pause; then, with a straight face) I ate it.
MARTHA. (a pause; then with the greatest disbelief possible, tinged with hysteria) What did you just say to me?
GEORGE. (barely able to stop exploding with laughter) I… ate… it. (Martha stares at him for a long time, then spits in his face) Good for you, Martha.
The climax of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? turns on the revelation of George and Martha’s backstory secret: Jim, their contentious son, is imaginary. They made him up to fill their empty marriage. The use of backstory to turn story is the single most powerful technique in the execution of exposition.
Direct Telling
The admonition to show rather than tell only applies to dramatized dialogue in acted scenes. Skillful, straightforward telling, whether on page, stage, or screen, whether in narratized dialogue or third-person narration, has two vital virtues: speed and counterpoint.
1) Speed. Narration can pack a lot of exposition into a few fast words, plant understanding in the reader/audience, and move on. Inner monologues have the power to turn subtext into text in a blink. A character’s conversations with herself can leap randomly from memory to memory in free association, or flash with images that bob up from her subconscious. Such passages, beautifully written, can move emotion within a sentence. For example, from the Gabriel García Márquez novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This is swift, vivid telling—a complex, concentrated image in a single sentence.
However, all too often, filmic narration becomes a device to pump out bland exposition in the format of “and then… and then… and then.” This practice substitutes the easy work of telling for the arduous task of showing. Dialogue scenes on film and television that dramatize complex characters demand talent, knowledge, and imagination; word-thick narrations need only a keyboard.
To turn narratized exposition into a dramatized scene, call upon one of two techniques:
One, interpolate a scene. Convert the “and then… and then… and then” of telling into a narrated scene of dramatized “I said/(s)he said.” Narrators (whether first person in prose, onstage, or voice-over onscreen) can either act out a scene’s dialogue verbatim from memory or use indirect dialogue to suggest it.
The Netflix series HOUSE OF CARDS, for example, often interpolates scenes of indirect dialogue. Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood frequently turns to the camera and talks to us as if he were a professor and we his students in a course on political tradecraft. In the aside below, Underwood dramatizes exposition by giving us insights into himself as well as a character named Donald. Underwood acts out Donald’s character flaw in this vivid, two-sentence metaphorical scene:
What a martyr craves more than anything is a sword to fall on. So you sharpen the blade, hold it at the right angle, and then 3, 2, 1…
In the next beat, just as Professor Frank predicted, Donald takes the fall for Underwood’s misdeeds.
Two, generate inner conflict. Stage a self-to-self duel in which one side of a narrating character argues with another. Two film examples: Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) in Martin Scorsese’s BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, or the adult Ralphie Parker (Jean Shepherd) in Bob Clark’s A CHRISTMAS STORY.
2) Counterpoint. In my experience, the narration technique that most enriches a story is counterpoint. Rather than using a narrator to tell the tale, some writers fully dramatize their story, then appoint a narrator to contradict or ironize its themes. They may use wit to ridicule the dramatic, or the dramatic to deepen the satire. They may counterpoint the personal with the social, or the social with the personal.
Take, for example, John Fowles’s postmodern, historical, antinovel novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Half the pages dramatize the story of Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman, and his involvement with Sarah Woodruff, a disgraced governess. Interlaced with this tale, however, a narrator with modern knowledge of nineteenth-century culture and class conflicts undercuts the Charles and Sarah romance. Counterpoint after counterpoint, the narrator argues that the nineteenth century offered women without means far more misery than romance.
Other examples: In Y TU MAMÁ TAMBIÉN the voice-over narrator frequently reminds the audience of Mexico’s social suffering as a counterpoint to the coming-of-age drama. Woody Allen’s witty voice-over in ANNIE HALL counterpoints his protagonist’s self-inquisition. In Samuel Beckett’s play Play, a trio of characters, buried to the neck in urns, stare out over the audience and narrate their seemingly random thoughts in a three-way system of counterpoint.
Prose is the natural medium for direct telling. The novelist and short-story writer can foreground exposition as nakedly as they wish, and draw it out for as many pages as they wish, so long as their language captivates and satisfies. Charles Dickens, for example, opens A Tale of Two Cities with a burst of counterpointing exposition that hooks the reader’s curiosity:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…
Notice how Dickens’s omniscient third-person narration uses “we” to put an arm around the reader’s shoulder and draw him into the telling. Compare that to the confrontational first-person, fast-paced voice of “I” that opens Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
In later chapters, both Dickens and Ellison dramatize scenes, but some prose writers never do. Instead, they pave page after page with direct telling narration, never acting out a single event.
Try to imagine how you might dramatize the exposition in the two passages above into scenes of actable dialogue. In theory it could be done. Shakespeare could have managed it, but with what difficulty? When writing for readers, telling works wonders. When writing for actors, the reverse is true.
Ideally, in the performance arts of stage and screen, exposition flows to the audience unnoticed within the spoken words. As we’ve seen, the craft of rendering exposition invisible takes patience, talent, and technique. Lacking those three qualities, impatient and uninspired screenwriters force exposition on the audience and hope to be forgiven.
Forced Exposition
Since the dawn of cinema, filmmakers have inserted shots of newspapers with foot-high headlines announcing events such as “War!” They have walked characters past televisions or radios conveniently tuned to a news broadcast of exactly what the audience needs to know precisely when it needs to know it. Rapidly edited montages and split-screen collages have packed screens with as much information as possible in the briefest possible time. Filmmakers rationalize these devices with the notion that if exposition comes fast and flashy, it won’t bore the audience. They would be wrong.
Similar thinking governs opening films with a title roll, as did STAR WARS (which delivered rapid-fire exposition and a tone of grandiosity), or closing with one, as did A FISH CALLED WANDA (which got laughs and a touch more closure). When thrillers race against time, hopscotching from place to place, they often superimpose location names and dates over establishing shots. In such cases, a little telling goes a long way. With a brief halt for a cogent image or a quick-printed fact, the story stubs its toe but then strides on, and the audience shrugs it off.
But audiences will not forgive a deluge of facts artlessly shoehorned into dialogue for no reason intrinsic to the characters or the scene. When inept writing forces characters to tell each other facts they already know, the pace trips over a high hurdle, falls face-first in the cinders, and may never get up.
For example:
INT. LUXURIOUS GREAT ROOM—DAY
John and Jane sit on a silk-tasseled sofa, sipping martinis.
JOHN
Oh my goodness, darling, how long have we known and loved each other now? Why, it’s over twenty years, isn’t it?
JANE
Yes, ever since we were at the university together, and your fraternity threw a mixer and invited the Women’s Socialist Club. Your house was so rich, we poor girls called Beta Tau Zeta Billions, Trillions, and Zillions.
JOHN
(gazing around their magnificent home)
Yes, and then I lost my inheritance. But we both worked very hard over the years to make our dreams come true. And they did, didn’t they, my little Trotskyite?
This exchange tells the audience seven fictional facts: This couple is rich, they are in their forties, they met within the elite of their university, he was born to a wealthy family, she came up from poverty, they once had opposite political views but no longer, and over the years they’ve developed a banter that’s so sweet it hurts your teeth.
The scene is false and its dialogue tinny because the writing is dishonest. The characters are not doing what they seem to be doing. They seem to be reminiscing, but in fact they’re mouthing exposition so the eavesdropping audience can overhear it.
As mentioned above, prose writers can avoid these fake scenes by sketching a brief marital history that strings facts together with a pleasing style. If they wish, prose writers can, within limits, simply tell their readers what they need to know. Some playwrights and screenwriters ape novelists by resorting to narration, but with rare exceptions, direct address onstage and voice-over onscreen cannot mete out exposition with the intellectual power and emotional impact of fully dramatized dialogue.
To make this point for yourself, do an exercise in exposition as ammunition. Rewrite the scene above so that the two characters use their expositional facts as weapons during a fight in which one character forces the other to do something that he or she does not want to do.
Now do it again. But this time, put the same facts into a seduction scene in which one character uses what he or she knows as ammunition to subtly manipulate the other into doing something the other does not wish to do.
Write the scene so that the exposition becomes invisible and the characters’ behaviors credible. In other words, write it so that the conflict or seduction fascinates the reader/audience, and the exposition they need to know slips unawares, invisibly, as it were, into their minds.
CHARACTERIZATION
The second function of dialogue is the creation and expression of a distinctive characterization for each character in the cast.
Human nature can be usefully divided into two grand aspects: appearance (who the person seems to be) versus reality (who the person actually is). Writers, therefore, design characters around two corresponding parts known as true character and characterization.
True character, as the term implies, names a character’s profound psychological and moral being, a truth that can only be revealed when life backs the character into a pressure-filled corner and forces him to make choices and take actions. The Principle of Choice is foundational to all storytelling, fictional and nonfictional: to wit, a character’s true self can only be expressed through risk-filled choices of action in the pursuit of desire.
Characterization denotes a character’s total appearance, the sum of all surface traits and behaviors. It performs three functions: to intrigue, to individualize, to convince.
1) To intrigue. The reader/audience knows that a character’s appearance is not her reality, that her characterization is a persona, a mask of personality suspended between the world and the true character behind it. When the reader/audience encounters a one-of-a-kind personality, they listen to the character’s words and naturally wonder: “That’s who she seems to be, but who is she really? Is she actually honest or a liar? Loving or cruel? Wise or foolish? Cool or rash? Strong or weak? Good or evil? What is the core identity behind her intriguing characterization? What is her true character?”
Having hooked the reader/audience’s curiosity, the story becomes a series of surprising revelations that answer these questions.
2) To convince. A well-imagined, well-designed characterization assembles capacities (mental, physical) and behaviors (emotional, verbal) that encourage the reader/audience to believe in a fictional character as if she were factual. As the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted two centuries ago, the reader/audience knows that stories and characters are not actual. But they also know that to involve themselves in the telling, they must temporarily believe, or more precisely, they must willingly suspend their disbelief and accept the character’s actions and reactions without doubt, without argument.
If your reader/audience thinks the thought, “I don’t believe a word she says” because they sense your character is a liar, that could be a revelation of true character. But if they think the same thought because they don’t simply believe in your character, then it’s time for a rewrite.
3) To individualize. A well-imagined, well-researched characterization creates a unique combination of biology, upbringing, physicality, mentality, emotionality, education, experience, attitudes, values, tastes, and every possible nuance of cultural influence that has given the character her individuality. Moving through her days, pursuing career, relationships, sexuality, health, happiness, and the like, she gathers behaviors into a one-of-a-kind personality.
And the most important trait of all: talk. She speaks like no one we have ever met before. Her language style not only sets her apart from all other cast members but also, if the writing is masterful, from all other fictional characters. A recent example: Jeanette “Jasmine” Francis (Cate Blanchett) in Woody Allen’s BLUE JASMINE. (Dialogue to characterize will be fully explored in Chapters Ten and Eleven.)
ACTION
Dialogue’s third essential function is to equip characters with the means for action. Stories contain three kinds of action: mental, physical, and verbal.
Mental Action: Words and images compose thoughts, but a thought does not become a mental action until it causes change within a character—change in attitude, belief, expectation, understanding, and the like. A mental action may or may not translate into outer behavior, but even if it stays secret and unexpressed, the character who took the mental action is not quite the same person afterward as she was before. Character change through mental action impels much of modern storytelling.
Physical Action: Physical action comes in two fundamental kinds: gestures and tasks.
By gestures, I mean all varieties of body language: facial expression, hand movements, posture, touch, proxemics, vocalics, kinesics, and the like. These behaviors either modify spoken language or substitute for it, expressing feelings words cannot.1
By tasks, I mean activities that get something done: working, playing, traveling, sleeping, lovemaking, fighting, daydreaming, reading, admiring a sunset, and the like—all those actions that do not require talk.
Verbal Action: As novelist Elizabeth Bowen put it, “Dialogue is what characters do to each other.”2
On the level of outer behavior, a character’s dialogue style melds with his other traits to create his surface characterization, but at the inner level of true character, the actions he takes into the world reveal his humanity or lack of it. What’s more, the greater the pressure in the scene (the more he stands to lose or gain in that moment), the more his actions tell us who he really is.
What a character says, however, only moves the reader/audience if the actions he takes beneath his lines ring true to that specific character in that specific moment. Therefore, before writing a line, ask these questions: What does my character want out of this situation? At this precise moment, what action would he take in an effort to reach that desire? What exact words would he use to carry out that action?
Spoken words suggest what a character thinks and feels; the action he takes beneath his words expresses his identity. To uncover a character’s inner life, seek the subtextual action and label it with an active gerund (“-ing”) phrase. Below are the four dialogue quotes from the preface. Look into the subtext of each, and name the character’s action with a gerund. When done, compare your interpretations to mine.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
—Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world she walks into mine.”
—Rick in CASABLANCA
“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
—Ahab in Moby Dick
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
—Jerry in SEINFELD
All four quotes above imply disgust, but Macbeth, Rick Blaine, Ahab, and Jerry Seinfeld express their disdain in such radically different speech styles that their personalities could not be more unalike. (Dialogue style as the door to characterization will be the focus of Part Three.)
My sense of the deep character under the four speeches suggests these subtextual actions: Macbeth—denouncing existence; Rick Blaine—lamenting lost love; Ahab—blaspheming God’s power; Jerry Seinfeld—ridiculing the political correctness that protects asinine behavior from ridicule. Your interpretations of implied action may differ from mine (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but the purpose of this exercise is to reveal the difference between the activity of talk and the taking of action.
Part Four will further demonstrate this technique by parsing seven scenes beat by beat to separate their outer language from their inner actions and trace how these dynamic designs motivate what’s said as they arc scenes around their turning points.