8
CONTENT FLAWS
WRITING ON-THE-NOSE
Writing on-the-nose means putting a character’s fullest thoughts and deepest emotions directly and fully into what she says out loud. Of the many varieties of inept dialogue, writing on-the-nose is by far the most common and most ruinous. It flattens characters into cardboard and trivializes scenes into melodrama and sentimentality. To understand the damaging effect of on-the-nose writing, let’s study this flaw in depth.
The axiom “Nothing is what it seems” bears witness to life’s duality: What seems is the surface of life—what strikes the eye and ear, the things people say and do… outwardly. What is is the actual life of thought and feeling that flows inwardly beneath the things said and done.
As we noted in Chapter Three, a person’s life moves simultaneously through three levels corresponding to the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable: outwardly what people say and do, personally and socially, to get through their day (text); inwardly what they privately think and feel while they carry out these tasks (conscious subtext); and deepest yet, the massive realm of subconscious urges and primal miens that drive their inner energies (subconscious subtext).
It is, therefore, categorically impossible for a human being to say and do what she is fully thinking and feeling for the obvious reason: The vast majority of her thoughts and feelings run below her awareness. These thoughts cannot, by their nature, rise to the surface of the said. No matter how hard we may try to be absolutely open and honest, how we try to put the subtext of truth into the text of our behavior, our subconscious self haunts every word and deed. As in life, so in story: Every text condenses a subtext.
Suppose, for example, you were in mid-session with your psychiatrist, pouring out your darkest confession of the worst thing you’ve ever done to another human being. Tears filling your eyes, pain doubling you in two on the chaise, you choke out the words. And what’s your psychiatrist doing? Taking notes. And what’s in those notes? What you are not saying. What you cannot say.
A psychiatrist is not a stenographer, there to take down your exposés. He is trained to see through the text of you to the unsayable subtext, to those things you cannot say because you cannot consciously think them.
On-the-nose writing eliminates subtext by erasing conscious, unsaid thoughts and desires, along with subconscious, unsayable longings and energies, and leaving only spoken words, delivered in blatant, explicit, hollow-sounding speeches. Or, to put it another way, on-the-nose dialogue rewrites the subtext into a text, so that characters proclaim exactly and fully what they think and feel, and therefore, speak in ways no human being has ever spoken.
For example, this scene: Two attractive people sit across from each other in a secluded corner of a graceful restaurant. The light glints off the crystal and the dewy eyes of the lovers. Beautiful music plays in the background; gentle breezes billow the curtains. The lovers reach across the table, touch fingertips, look longingly in each other’s eyes, simultaneously say, “I love you, I love you,” and actually mean it.
This scene, if produced, would die like a squashed dog in the road. It is simply unactable.
By unactable I mean this: Actors are not marionettes hired to mouth your words and mime your actions. These artists give life to your cast by first discovering their character’s true desire hidden in the subtext. They then ignite this inner energy and with it build ineffable layers of complexity from the inside out that finally surface in the character’s actions, expressed in gestures, facial expressions, and words. But the scene, as I described it, is void of subtext and therefore, by definition, unactable.
The page, stage, and screen are not opaque surfaces. Each storytelling medium creates a transparency that allows us to glimpse the unsaid or unsayable in other human beings. When we watch a television series, a film, or play, or turn pages of prose, our eye does not stop at the words on the page or the actor onstage or onscreen. Our eye travels through the text to the subtext, to the deepest stirrings within the character. When you experience a quality story, don’t you have the constant impression that you are reading minds, reading emotions? Don’t you often think to yourself, “I know what that character’s really thinking, feeling, and doing. I can see what’s going on inside him better than he can, because he’s blinded by his immediate problem”? The combined creativity of writer and actor gives us what we want from any story: to be a fly on the wall of life and see through the surface to the truth.
If I were an actor forced to act this candlelit cliché, my first ambition would be to protect my career. I would not let a bad writer make me look like a bad actor. I would put a subtext under that scene, even if it had nothing to do with the story.
My approach might go like this: Why has this couple gone out of their way to create a movie scene for themselves? What’s with all the candlelight and soft music? Why don’t they take their pasta to the TV set like normal people? What’s wrong with this relationship?
Isn’t that the truth? When do the candles come out in life? When things are fine? No. When things are fine, we take our pasta to the TV set like normal people. When there’s a problem, that’s when the candles come out.
So, taking that insight to heart, I could act the scene in such a way that the audience would see to the truth: “Yes, he says he loves her. But look, he’s desperate he’s losing her.” That subtextual action adds substance as the scene deepens into a man’s desperate attempt to rekindle the romance. Or the audience might think, “Yes, he says he loves her, but look, he’s setting her up to dump her.” That implied action stirs our fascination as we watch a man let a woman down gently with a last romantic dinner because, in truth, he’s walking out.
With rare exceptions, a scene should never be outwardly and entirely about what it seems to be about. Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext. In the two variations above, the subtextual motivations and tactics are conscious but unspoken. As the audience/reader perceives the unsaid tactic beneath the surface of behavior, the inner action gives the scene a depth that enriches the reader/audience with insight. An ever-present subtext is the guiding principle of realism.
Nonrealism, on the other hand, is the great exception. Nonrealism employs on-the-nose dialogue in all its genres and subgenres: myth and fairy tale, science fiction and time travel, animation, the musical, the supernatural, Theatre of the Absurd, action/adventure, farce, horror, allegory, magical realism, postmodernism, dieselpunk retrofuturism, and the like.
In nonrealism, characters become more archetypical and less dimensional. Stories set in imaginary or exaggerated worlds move toward allegorical event designs. Pixar’s INSIDE OUT, for example. As a result, subtext tends to atrophy as dialogue becomes less complex, more explanatory, more on-the-nose. In a work such as THE LORD OF THE RINGS, no hidden or double meaning plays under lines such as “Those who venture there never return.” If an actor were to layer that line with irony, it might prompt a laugh and kill the moment.
At some point during the fiction-writing process, every writer must answer that troublesome question: Exactly what kind of story am I telling? Two grand visions define the storyteller’s approach to reality: the mimetic and the symbolic.
Mimetic stories reflect or imitate life as lived and sort themselves into the various genres of realism. Symbolic stories exaggerate or abstract life as lived and fall into one of the many genres of nonrealism. Neither approach has a greater claim on faithfulness to the truth. All stories are metaphors for existence, and the degree of realism versus nonrealism is simply a writer’s choice in his strategy to persuade and involve the reader/audience while he expresses his vision.
Nonetheless, one of the key differences between nonrealism and realism is subtext. Nonrealism tends to diminish or eliminate it; realism can’t exist without it.
Why?
Because to clarify and purify a character’s symbolic nature—virtue, villainy, love, greed, innocence, and such—nonrealistic genres eliminate the subconscious and with that, psychological complexity.
Whereas, the first premise of realism is that the majority of what a person thinks and feels is unconscious to her, and for that reason, the full content of her thoughts and feelings can never be expressed directly, literally, or completely. Therefore, to dimensionalize, complicate, and ironize the psychology of the role, mimetic genres clash desires arising from the subconscious against conscious willpower.
The psychological and social complexity of realism demands a subtext under virtually every line of dialogue. To avoid these distracting intricacies, nonrealism discourages subtext.
THE MONOLOGUE FALLACY
Every consequential moment in life pivots around a dynamic of action/reaction. In the physical realm, reactions are equal, opposite, and predictable in obedience to Newton’s third law of motion; in the human sphere, the unforeseen rules. Whenever we take an important step, our world reacts—but almost never in the way we expect. From within us or around us come reactions we cannot and do not see coming. For no matter how much we rehearse life’s big moments, when they finally arrive, they never seem to work out quite the way we thought, hoped, or planned. The drama of life is an endless improvisation.
For this reason, when a character sits alone staring at a wall, his flow of thought is an inner dialogue, not a monologue. This inner flux often becomes the stuff and substance of the modern novel. Prose writers can take us inside their characters’ heads, bouncing inner actions back and forth between a thinking self and his doubting, applauding, criticizing, arguing, forgiving, listening, ever-reacting selves. This purpose-filled give-and-take is dialogue that takes the form of thought rather than talk.
A true monologue would provoke no response as it pours out long, uninterrupted, inactive, unreactive passages to no one in particular, turning characters into mouthpieces for their author’s philosophy. Whether voiced aloud or thought from within, any speech that runs on for too long without change in value charge risks lifelessness, artificiality, and tedium.
How long is too long? The average speaking rate ranges between two to three words per second. At that pace, a two-minute speech could contain three hundred words. Onstage or onscreen, that’s a lot of talk without someone or something reacting. In a novel, three hundred words is a full page. Pages of first-person musing or memory, unbroken by the crisscross of counterpointing inner reactions, would severely test the reader’s patience.
On the other hand, suppose you were writing a two-character scene and feel that Character A talks throughout, while Character B sits in silence. In that case, long speeches become natural and necessary. As you write them, however, remember that even if Character A has rehearsed her confrontation with Character B, as she begins to tell him what’s on her mind, the scene will not play out the way she expected.
Let’s say, for example, that Character A expected Character B to defend himself against her accusations and so she memorized a long list of stinging retorts. But instead of arguing, he sits there in dead silence. His stone-faced reaction destroys her prepared speech. This unexpected turn forces her to improvise, and as we noted earlier, life is always an improvisation, always action/reaction.
On the page, therefore, insert Character A’s nonverbal reactions to Character B’s enigma. Into her column of talk, interlace her looks, gestures, pauses, stumbling phrases, and the like. Break her scene-long speech into beats of action/reaction within her and between her and the silent Character B.
Imagine another example: Let’s say your character is reading a well-prepared sermon to her church’s congregation. As her eyes move down the page, might she glance up, now and then, to check the congregation for expressions of interest or lack thereof? Suppose some people look bored, what would she do? Might not thoughts bounce through her mind, inspecting her voice, her gestures, the nervous energy in her belly, telling her to breathe, to relax, to smile, to make one adjustment after another as she performs her sermon? Her sermon may seem like a monologue, but her inner life is a dynamic dialogue.
Let’s take the action/reaction principle a step further: Suppose that your character talks at length by nature. Consider Meryl Streep’s Violet Weston in the film AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY. Long speeches drive her behavior as she dominates all conversation and never reacts to what people think or feel. Such a character may bore other characters, but you can’t allow her to bore the audience. Therefore, like playwright Tracy Letts, create the impression of long-windedness without actually going on and on. Watch the film and notice how Letts propels Violet’s speeches, then builds each scene around the reactions of her word-weary relatives who have no choice but to suffer the talkaholic.
In 1889, playwright August Strindberg wrote The Stronger. The play is set in a café and dramatizes an hour-long scene that pits Mrs. X, a wife, against her husband’s mistress, Miss Y. Mrs. X carries all the dialogue, but when performed, the silent Miss Y becomes the star role.
THE DUELOGUE
Think of the thousands of hours of bad film, television, and theatre you have suffered through. I suspect that more often than not, the shallow, tinny acting was not the fault of the actors but of the unactable duelogues that writers and their directors forced them to recite. Duelogue is my term for face-to-face confrontations in which two characters talk directly, explicitly, and emotionally about their immediate problem. Duelogues have the resonance of a brick because every line is on-the-nose, nothing left unsaid.
For example, this scene from the film GLADIATOR. The Emperor Commodus has imprisoned his rival Maximus Decimus Meridius. That night Maximus discovers Lucilla, Commodus’s sister, waiting in his cell.
INT. DUNGEON—NIGHT
Guards take Maximus to an empty cell and chain him to the wall. As they leave, Lucilla steps out of the shadows.
LUCILLA
Rich matrons pay well to be pleasured by the bravest champions.
MAXIMUS
I knew your brother would send assassins. I didn’t think he would send his best.
LUCILLA
Maximus… he doesn’t know.
MAXIMUS
My family was burned and crucified while they were still alive.
LUCILLA
I knew nothing—
MAXIMUS
(shouting)
—Don’t lie to me.
MAXIMUS
As you wept for your father?
(grabbing her by the throat)
As you wept for your father?
LUCILLA
I have been living in a prison of fear since that day. To be unable to mourn your father for fear of your brother. To live in terror every moment of every day because your son is heir to the throne. Oh, I’ve wept.
MAXIMUS
My son… was innocent.
LUCILLA
So… is… mine.
(pause)
Must my son die too before you will trust me?
MAXIMUS
What does it matter whether I trust you or not?
LUCILLA
The gods have spared you. Don’t you understand? Today I saw a slave become more powerful than the emperor of Rome.
MAXIMUS
The gods spared me? I am at their mercy, with the power only to amuse the mob.
LUCILLA
That is power. The mob is Rome, and while Commodus controls them, he controls everything.
(pause)
Listen to me, my brother has enemies, most of all in the senate. But while the people follow him, no one would dare stand up to him until you.
MAXIMUS
They oppose him yet they do nothing.
LUCILLA
There are some politicians who have dedicated their lives to Rome. One man above all. If I can arrange it, will you meet him?
MAXIMUS
Do you not understand, I may die in this cell tonight, or in the arena tomorrow. I am a slave. What possible difference can I make?
MAXIMUS
(shouting)
Then have him kill Commodus.
LUCILLA
I knew a man once, a noble man, a man of principle who loved my father and my father loved him. This man served Rome well.
MAXIMUS
That man is gone. Your brother did his work well.
LUCILLA
Let me help you.
MAXIMUS
Yes, you can help me. Forget you ever knew me and never come here again.
(calling out)
Guard. The lady is finished with me.
Lucilla, in tears, leaves.
In Chapter Four of The Poetics, Aristotle argues that the deepest pleasure of theatregoing is learning, the sensation of seeing through the surface of behavior to the human truth beneath. Therefore, if you use dialogue to turn your characters’ unspoken needs and emotions into conscious pronouncements as in the scene above, if, in other words, you write the scene about what the scene is actually about, you block that insight and deprive the reader/audience of their rightful pleasure. Worse yet, you falsify life.
In the give-and-take of life, we circle around problems, instinctively employing pretexts and tactics that skirt the painful, unspeakable truths that lurk in our subconscious. We rarely talk face-to-face, openly and directly, about our truest needs or desires. Instead, we try to get what we want from another person by navigating our way through a third thing.
Therefore, you will find the fix for on-the-nose writing in something outside the immediate conflict, a third thing that diverts a duelogue into a trialogue.
THE TRIALOGUE
Trialogue, as I redefine the term, names the triangular relationship between two characters in conflict and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle.
Four examples:
In his novel Legs, William Kennedy tells the story of the gangster, Jack “Legs” Diamond. In Chapter Three, as Jack comes into his house, his wife Alice confronts him. Jack’s men, Oxie and Fogarty, have told her that Jack nicknamed one of their canaries Marion because the bird reminds him of his mistress. In the scene that follows, two canaries act as the third thing. The narrator is Jack’s lawyer:
We were hardly inside the house when Alice called out to Jack, “Will you come here please?” She was on the front porch, with Oxie and Fogarty still on the sofa. They were not moving, not speaking, not looking at Alice or at Jack or at me either when we got there. They both stared out toward the road.
Alice opened the canary cage and said to Jack, “Which one do you call Marion?”
Jack quickly turned to Fogarty and Oxie.
“Don’t look at them, they didn’t tell me,” Alice said. “I just heard them talking. Is it the one with the black spot on its head?”
Jack didn’t answer, didn’t move. Alice grabbed the bird with the black spot and held it in her fist.
“You don’t have to tell me—the black spot’s for her black hair. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
When Jack said nothing, Alice wrung the bird’s neck and threw it back in the cage. “That’s how much I love you,” she said and started past Jack, toward the living room, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. He reached for the second bird and squeezed it to death with one hand, then shoved the twitching, eye-bleeding corpse down the crevice of Alice’s breasts. “I love you too,” he said.
That solved everything for the canaries.
When Vince Gilligan pitched his long-form series BREAKING BAD to the network, his logline was “Mr. Chips goes Scarface.” The protagonist, Walter White, faces multiple conflicts on all levels of life in dozens of directions, surrounded by a large cast of antagonists. Although building a drug empire seems to be Walter’s super-intention, Gilligan casts the shadow of Heisenberg, Walter’s doppelgänger, over all his scenes. From the very first episode, Walter’s desires and dreads, his actions and reactions, are simply manifestations of Heisenberg’s struggle to take over Walter and achieve the ultimate triumph of his genius. Heisenberg is BREAKING BAD’s third thing.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is an allegorical novel whose protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is telepathic. But the third thing that modulates the novel’s conflicts is not paranormal. Rather, Rushdie runs Sinai’s every conflict through the cultural gap between India and Europe. By foregrounding what would normally be a background desire and painting every scene with a shade of East versus West, Rushdie colors his novel with an all-constant third thing.
For many readers and theatregoers, Samuel Beckett was the greatest writer of the twentieth century and his masterpiece is Waiting for Godot. The play shuttles a massive trialogue between Estragon and Vladimir (two homeless tramps) and Godot (the eponymous character named after the French slang for God). As the title implies, the two men spend the entire play waiting, hoping, arguing about, and preparing for “he who will never appear.” The waiting seems futile, but it gives the tramps a reason, as they put it, “for going on.”
In other words, Godot, Beckett’s third thing, symbolizes the persistent belief that life will ultimately make beautiful and meaningful sense, once we find that transcendent, mysterious something that awaits us somewhere… somehow… out there…