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FOUR CASE STUDIES
THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR
Consider this setup: Senator A is powerful and popular. The envious Senator B wants the respected Senator C to join forces against Senator A. So Senator B pulls Senator C aside to persuade him:
SENATOR B
Senator A is so popular and so powerful that compared to him, we’re nobodies.
Senator B states the obvious in passive and opaque language. His dialogue couldn’t be less persuasive, less imaginative, less interesting. The comparison he makes might irritate Senator C, but Senator B’s words have no imagery to give them life; no subtext to give them depth. His complaint is so bland, Senator C could easily shrug it aside.
Here’s how history’s greatest dialogue artist rendered the moment in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2:
CASSIUS
(to Brutus)
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Shakespeare’s Cassius hugely overstates the case, which, of course, is what people do when trying to wheedle their way inside someone else’s head. They use the techniques of rhetoric to distort, exaggerate, or manipulate.
The Colossus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. More than one hundred feet tall, this bronze statue of the sun god Helios stood astride the harbor at Rhodes with ships sailing in and out of port under its legs. Cassius compares Caesar to an awesome, imaginary colossus that would have one foot in Spain, the other in Syria, and the whole Mediterranean world between its legs.
And yet, note that Shakespeare gives Cassius this phrase: “the narrow world.” The instinctive, off-the-top-of-the-head phrase would be “the wide world.” So, why “narrow”?
Because Shakespeare (I suspect) wrote in-character. He slipped his imagination into the mind of Cassius, so he could work from Cassius’s subjective point of view. He was then able to see the world the way Cassius saw it and write imagistic dialogue for the eye: “the narrow world.”
As Roman senators, Cassius and Brutus would have imperial maps spread across their desks. Every week they receive strategic reports from all corners of the empire. These men know exactly how wide the world is: the width of all things Roman. To the naive, the world may seem wide, but to these urbane politicos, it’s narrow. So slender, in fact, a single man—the ambitious Caesar—could seize it and rule it alone.
While immersing himself in his characters, Shakespeare must have imagined, even researched, their childhoods, for it was in their educations that he found his inspiration for crafting the play’s unique dialogue.
Aristocratic Roman schoolchildren were rigorously trained as orators, as future politicians skilled in the arts of declamation, persuasion, and rhetoric. And the guiding tenet of public speaking is, “Think as a wise man but speak as a common man.” Speak, in other words, in the plain, monosyllabic manner of the street.
So note that of the twenty-eight words in Cassius’s sentence, only two have more than two syllables.
Shakespeare knew that seasoned orators string short words together to create the effect of casual, artless, sincere ease while at the same time showing off their verbal ingenuity. For it takes skill to deliver monosyllables in a natural, pleasing rhythm. And Cassius is very clever. In fact, all of the play’s characters have a way with simple words. The dialogue style throughout The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is almost exclusively monosyllabic, with some of Shakespeare’s passages stringing thirty or more monosyllables in a row.1
What’s more, as patrician senators, Cassius and Brutus have immense pride in their aristocratic heritage. The notion of seeming “petty,” of “peeping about” in search of a “dishonorable” grave repels the noble Brutus. With these biting images, Cassius seduces him to assassinate Caesar.
In terms of the modal side of dialogue, because Cassius is a bold, hard-thinking man on a mission, he uses direct action verbs: bestride, walk, peep. He does not modify his predicates. If he did, it might read like this:
CASSIUS
It seems to me as if mighty Caesar could bestride the narrow world like some kind of gigantic Colossus, so we poor men would have to walk carefully around under his huge legs, and try to peep about to maybe, should we get really lucky, someday find ourselves disgusting, dishonorable graves.
This Cassius, as I’ve rewritten him, becomes weak and nervous. He’s so preoccupied with what’s possible and not possible, what’s permitted and not permitted, what’s sure and unsure, that he surrounds his verbs with “could,” “would,” “should,” and other cautious supplementary phrases.
Lastly, very importantly, consider the background desires that surround Cassius and the gentlemanly restraints that shape his behavior. He knows that Brutus is a very private man, taciturn yet perceptive. Both men have been raised in an elite society in which cultured men do not bare their souls to each other. Therefore, to write in-character, Shakespeare must have given thought and feeling to what his character would not say. For example, the refined Cassius would not speak on-the-nose:
CASSIUS
I loathe that power-grabbing Caesar, and I know you hate the bastard, too. So before we end up begging on our knees, kissing his tyrant’s ass, let’s murder the son of a bitch.
With the exception of hip-hop lyrics, the twenty-first century seems poetry-lite. Shakespearean iambic pentameter may feel out of reach; nonetheless, we want our scenes to play with an intensity that matches the emotional lives of our characters and, in turn, moves the reader/audience. To achieve this, we take inspiration from Shakespeare to enrich our dialogue with imagery. First, we visualize the scene from our character’s subjective point of view, and then find language from within his nature and experience to create his character-specific dialogue.
OUT OF SIGHT
Consider this setup: During a prison break, a criminal forces a federal agent into the trunk of her car and climbs in with her. His partner takes the wheel and drives off. While sardined in the pitch-dark trunk, crook and cop are irresistibly attracted. After the getaway, neither can stop thinking about the other. Eventually she tracks him to a hotel where, despite their antagonistic roles, their mutual passion moves them to declare a truce and spend a romantic evening together.
INT. LUXURY HOTEL ROOM—NIGHT
Candlelight glints off the dewy eyes of the handsome Criminal and beautiful Federal Agent as they gaze longingly at each other.
FEDERAL AGENT
I’m confused and scared.
CRIMINAL
Same here, but I’m trying to be cool.
FEDERAL AGENT
Me, too, but I’m afraid that you might rape me.
CRIMINAL
Never. My only hope is to have a nice romantic night together.
FEDERAL AGENT
Good. Because underneath your tough exterior I suspect there’s a really loving guy. But still I can’t be certain. Maybe you’re trying to seduce me so I’ll help you escape the law.
CRIMINAL
No, I understand you’re still a federal agent and I’m still a bank robber and you have your job to do. It’s just that you’re so beautiful, I can’t stop thinking about how it was when we met.
They sigh and take a sad sip of champagne.
I’ve written this scene in the paralytic language of people saying exactly and completely what they think and feel. The result? A flattened wreck no actor could salvage. Explicit dialogue that turns a character’s inner life into words turns an actor to wood.
In contrast to the scene I sketched above, here is how Elmore Leonard, one of the finest writers of dialogue in the modern novel, rendered the cop/criminal tryst:
In Chapter Twenty of Out of Sight, escaped bank robber Jack Foley invites US Marshal Karen Sisco to a hotel suite overlooking the Detroit waterfront. They drink and reminisce about the prison break and their dangerous, yet erotic encounter in the trunk of her car:
She said, “Remember how talkative you were?”
He said, “I was nervous,” lighting her cigarette and then his own.
“Yeah, but you didn’t show it. You were a pretty cool guy. But then when you got in the trunk… I thought you’d try to tear my clothes off.”
“It never entered my mind. Well, not until—remember we were talking about Faye Dunaway?… I told you I liked that movie Three Days of the Condor, and you said yeah, you loved the lines? Like the next morning, after they’d slept together, he says he’ll need her help and she says…”
“Have I ever denied you anything?”
“I thought for a couple of seconds there, the way you said it, you were coming on to me.”
“Maybe I was and didn’t know it… Before they ever go to bed she accused him of getting rough. He says, ‘What? Have I raped you?’ And she says, ‘The night is young.’ I thought, Come on—what is she doing, giving him ideas?”
“You know you kept touching me, feeling my thigh.”
“Yeah, but in a nice way.”
“You called me your zoo-zoo.”
“That’s candy, inside, something sweet.”
In this deceptively simple but complex scene, Leonard’s dialogue creates multiple layers of textual imagery over a double layer of implied images. The first two layers are set up in the previous pages:
Layer 1. The image of the setting: For his long-fantasized rendezvous with Karen, Foley chooses a posh hotel suite that commands a panorama of the city at night under a gentle snowfall. Soft lights, soft music. They’re posed like a chic couple on a Crown Royal whisky billboard. Leonard delights in setting up this glitzy cliché so that he can ironize and undercut it again and again.
Layer 2. The all-too-familiar image of the situation: Their romance is “illegal.” Foley is a felon on the run; Sisco is the law. But this has been done many times before: McQueen and Dunaway in THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, Bogie and Bacall in DARK PASSAGE, Grant and Hepburn in CHARADE. It’s not just any cliché; it’s a movie cliché.
And then the dialogue takes over to add more facets.
Layer 3. Escape from “reality”: Over their movie scene Foley and Sisco superimpose yet another movie—THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR. They chat about their favorite moments from the film because they’re fully aware that they’re living in a virtual film. As a result, the reader blends the famous faces of Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway with the fictional faces of Foley and Sisco, coating the whole episode with Hollywood gloss.
Layer 4. The memory: The lovers replay their intimate adventure in her car trunk. This takes us back to the mini-movie that ran through our head when we read the prison break scene in the opening chapters.
Now four layers of images are superimposed on the reader’s mind: The hotel setting, the cop/criminal situation, the Hollywood version, and the burnished nostalgia of how they met. But that’s only the surface.
Beneath this, Leonard creates his characters’ inner lives of unspoken needs and dreams.
Leonard uses a pair of third things: THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR and the memory of their first adventure. These play back-to-back to create interlocking trialogues. As I laid out in Part Two, working a scene through a third thing helps keep dialogue off-the-nose.
Layer 5. The subtext: Under the lines, we sense Jack and Karen’s desire to put aside their cop/criminal roles, to take time out from life, so they can indulge this rush of romance. We can well imagine their sexual fantasies clashing with the realization that their intimacy is tabooed. This in turn makes their sensual desires dangerous, even lethal, and so all the more erotic. Could either of them name what they’re feeling? No. No one could and still feel it. To name a feeling is to kill it.
The present is so razor sharp, Leonard has them sidestep it by reminiscing about how they met. But as they do, everything they say about the past betrays a subtext of what they’re feeling in the now.
They kid about the heart-pounding jailbreak and how they played it cool, but for all Karen knows she’s sitting on a sofa with a smooth-talking rapist, and for all Jack knows there’s a SWAT team with a battering ram outside the door. They tease offhandedly about the sexy tension they felt in the trunk of her car, while the heat of the moment blisters the hotel room. And, very importantly, they hide all this behind witty quotes from THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR.
It’s at this fifth layer of the unspoken that Leonard unites Karen and Jack. We realize that although they’re on opposite sides of the law, at heart they’re a matched pair of die-hard romantics hooked on old movies.
Layer 6. Dreams: This subtextual insight leads us to imagine the wistful daydreams of Foley and Sisco. While he hopes that she will play Faye Dunaway to his Robert Redford and somehow rescue him, he knows that in fact that will never happen. Sisco can see herself as Dunaway acting out that scenario; it’s her wish, too. But like Foley, she knows it’s an impossible fantasy.
Leonard must have loved dialogue or he couldn’t have written it with such skill. So note that his characters also love dialogue. When he has them remember THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, they don’t recall looks or gestures; they quote lines verbatim—lines that must have struck Leonard’s ear when he saw the film.
What is the payoff to the deep insight this scene gives the reader?
Enormous suspense: Will they make love? Will she forget she’s a cop and let him escape? Will she arrest him? Will she have to shoot him? Will he be forced to kill her? This seemingly casual talk between forbidden lovers expresses all of the above and more.
30 ROCK
Season 5, Episode 1, “The Fabian Strategy”
This half-hour comedy series takes place in the offices and studios of NBC in New York’s Rockefeller Center.
John Francis “Jack” Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) serves as vice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming for General Electric. Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) works for Jack as producer and head writer of a prime-time variety show. Avery (Elizabeth Banks) is Jack’s fiancée.
The passages below sample Jack’s verbal style. The phrases and words in bold signal his unique characterization and hint at his true character.
On his first morning back from summer vacation, Jack calls Liz on the phone:
JACK
Oh, Lemon, Avery and I just got back from the most amazing vacation on Paul Allen’s yacht. Sheer bliss. Avery is the most perfect woman ever created. Like a young Bo Derek stuffed with a Barry Goldwater. (pause) But it’s back to reality. No more making love on the beach surrounded by a privacy circle of English-trained butlers.
(Note: Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft.)
In a meeting later that day with Liz and her show’s producers, Jack fears that the network’s weak performance will jeopardize an all-important merger:
JACK
In order for our merger to stay attractive to our friends at Kabletown, we have to seem like a sexy, profitable company, and we’re almost pulling it off. The Harry Potter Theme Park is a huge hit with both anglophiles and pedophiles. The movie division has a James Cameron movie the whole world will see whether they like it or not. Only NBC continues to be the engorged whitehead on the otherwise flawless face of Universal Media.
As their workday ends, Liz confesses that she suffers relationship problems, so Jack gives her this advice:
JACK
You can’t just do the vacation part. At some point you have to go home to the same house, unpack your dirty laundry, and have a life together. And one of you says, “We should redecorate.” And the other says, “Please, Avery, I’m using the commode right now.”
LIZ
Oh, she wants to redecorate? She just moved in.
JACK
Avery has opinions. I love her for that. Unfortunately, she wants to repaint the upstairs hallway in a striae faux finish called “Husk.” I prefer the color that’s already there, a reddish brown shade called “Elk Tongue.”
LIZ
So tell her “No.” It’s your house.
JACK
This is how I know you’ve never had an adult relationship. If I say “No,” then I will be required to say “Yes” to something else in the future and the stakes in the future might be higher.
LIZ
Then say “Yes.”
JACK
If I give in, then I’m no longer the alpha in my house. Before you know it, she’ll have me wearing jeans and reading fiction.
JACK
For most men, sure, but there is a third option—the Fabian Strategy… The Fabian Strategy derives its name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. He ran away, Lemon. Rather than engage in battle, he would retreat and retreat until the enemy grew fatigued and eventually made a mistake. Although I abhor it as a military strategy, it is the basis for all my personal relationships.
Jack’s handsome face, tailored suits, and $150 haircuts suggest who he might be, but beyond his physical appearance, the writers draw on terms such as “sheer bliss,” “flawless,” “Bo Derek,” “a sexy, profitable company,” “privacy circle,” “commode,” “Husk,” “Elk Tongue,” “prefer,” and “abhor” to nail his characterization. Modal phrases such as “no more,” “like it or not,” “you can’t,” “you have to,” and “if/then” signal Jack’s sense of power over others. The word and phrase choices in these speeches attest to Jack’s command of popular culture, his excellent education, his identification with the upper class, his capitalist ethos, his controlling executive leadership style, and, most of all, his supercilious, egoistic snobbery. Together, these traits etch the outer self he shows the world—his characterization.
But vocabulary and syntax also throw light on character dimension.
A dimension is a contradiction that underpins a character’s nature. These psychological stanchions come in two kinds: 1) Contradictions that play characterization against true character. Namely, conflicts between a character’s outer traits and his inner truths, between the persona of his visible behavior and the person he hides behind the mask. 2) Contradictions that play self against self. These dimensions link the warring forces within true, deep character—most often desires from the conscious self at odds with opposite impulses from the subconscious self.2
Jack’s speech style reveals seven such dimensions: He’s 1) socially sophisticated (Paul Allen’s yacht/English-trained butlers) yet privately primal (the alpha in my house/engorged whitehead), 2) unscrupulous (The movie division has a James Cameron movie the whole world will see whether they like it or not) yet guilt-ridden (I will be required to say “Yes”), 3) fiscally conservative (Barry Goldwater) yet risk taking (The Harry Potter Theme Park is a huge hit with both anglophiles and pedophiles), 4) well educated (General Quintus Fabius Maximus invented his guerrilla strategy during the Second Punic War in 218 BC) yet self-deceived (the basis for all my personal relationships), and 5) intellectually pompous (a striae faux finish) yet factually informed (a striae faux finish). Jack 6) uses devious tactics to navigate his personal life (retreat until the enemy grows fatigued and eventually makes a mistake), yet idealizes his relationships with women (most perfect woman ever created). He 7) is a realist (You can’t just do the vacation part), yet a dreamer (a life together). The show’s directors constantly posed Jack in a close-up, staring into space, imagining his idealized future.
Multidimensional as he is, Jack Donaghy is not, however, a dramatic character; he is, at heart, a comic character, driven by a blind obsession.
Both dramatic and comic characters seek an object of desire. In that they are the same. Their core difference, however, is awareness. As a dramatic character pursues his quest, he has sense enough to step back and realize that his struggle could get him killed. Not the comic character: His core desire blinds him. His self-deluded mind fixates on his desire and pursues it, wildly unaware. This lifelong mania influences, if not controls, his every choice.3
Jack Donaghy blithely obsesses on an aristocratic lifestyle more suited to the 1920s than today. “Made love on a beach surrounded by a privacy circle of English-trained butlers” sounds like a diary entry by Wallis Simpson before she became Duchess of Windsor. Vacationing on yachts recalls scenes from F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. The love of his life, a fellow aristocrat named Avery, graduated from Choate and Yale. Jack, like the Princeton alumnus he is, disdains jeans and only reads nonfiction.
His syntactically balanced sentences roll out rounded with relative clauses: “In order for our merger to stay attractive to our friends at Kabletown, we have to seem like a sexy, profitable company, and we’re almost pulling it off,” and “If I say ‘No,’ then I will be required to say ‘Yes’ to something else in the future, and the stakes in the future might be higher.” His dialogue sounds like a tuxedoed businessman talking shop in a penthouse cocktail party. The tuxedo, in fact, is Jack’s eveningwear of choice. In Season 1, Liz asks him why he’s wearing a tux in his office and he explains, “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”
Like the clothes they wear, vocabulary and syntax dress characters inside and out.
SIDEWAYS
Rex Pickett writes both novels and films. In addition to his first novel Sideways, and a second novel, La Purisima, he wrote the screenplay for the 2000 Oscar-winning short film MY MOTHER DREAMS THE SATAN’S DISCIPLES IN NEW YORK.
Screenwriters Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne earned writers’ credit on the best-written episode of the Jurassic Park franchise, JURASSIC PARK III. In addition, they have collaborated with great success on CITIZEN RUTH, ELECTION, ABOUT SCHMIDT, and SIDEWAYS. More recently, Payne wrote and directed THE DESCENDANTS (2011) and directed NEBRASKA (2013).
SIDEWAYS, which Payne directed from their adaptation of Pickett’s novel, has won a long list of international nominations and awards, including an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. As their choice of subject matter suggests, these writers are attracted to life’s losers and their futile, often comic struggles to win.
SIDEWAYS is, by genre, an education plot. Four simple conventions define this very difficult genre:
1. The protagonist begins the story with a life-denying mindset. He finds no meaning in the world around him or himself in it.
2. The story will arc the protagonist’s downbeat point of view to a positive, life-affirming stance.
3. A “teacher” character will help guide the protagonist’s revolution in attitude.
4. The story’s greatest source of conflict will come from the protagonist’s beliefs, emotions, habits, and attitudes—in other words, from an inner conflict with his own self-destructive nature.
The education plot is a natural genre for a novel because prose allows the writer to directly invade a character’s deepest thoughts and feelings. In Pickett’s first-person novel, for example, his protagonist whispers his secret fears and doubts directly into the reader’s ear. Onscreen, however, this literary form becomes extremely difficult, requiring superb dialogue to imply within a character what the novelist can explicitly state on page.
The screenplay’s protagonist, Miles, is a pudgy, divorced, failed novelist who teaches junior high school English. Although no one makes the accusation onscreen, he’s clearly an alcoholic who hides his dependency behind the mask of (in Miles’s words from the novel) a wine cognoscente. The title SIDEWAYS is never explained in the film, but in the novel “sideways” is slang for drunk. To “go sideways” means to get very, very drunk.
The “teacher” role is filled by the intelligent and beautiful Maya, who’s also divorced, also a wine lover. Midway through the film, Miles and Maya spend an evening with Miles’s pal, Jack, and Maya’s friend, Stephanie. They all end up at Stephanie’s house. When Jack and Stephanie retire to the bedroom, Miles and Maya sit in the living room sipping a wine from Stephanie’s excellent collection. At first they chat about how they met (he was a customer in a restaurant where she waits tables), then the subject turns first to Miles (his novel), then to Maya (her MA in agrology), and, finally, to their mutual love of wine.
Miles smiles wistfully at the question. He searches for the answer in his glass and begins slowly.
MILES
I don’t know. It’s a hard grape to grow. As you know. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet that can grow and thrive anywhere… and withstand neglect. Pinot’s only happy in specific little corners of the world, and it needs a lot of doting. Only the patient and faithful and caring growers can do it, can access Pinot’s fragile, achingly beautiful qualities. It doesn’t come to you. You have to come to it, see? It takes the right combination of soil and sun… and love to coax it into its fullest expression. Then, and only then, its flavors are the most thrilling and brilliant and haunting on the planet.
Maya has found this answer revealing and moving.
MILES
(CONT’D)
I mean, Cabernets can be powerful and exalting, but they seem prosaic to me for some reason. By comparison. How about you, why do you like wine so much?
MAYA
I suppose I got really into wine originally through my ex-husband. He had a big, kind of show-off cellar. But then I found out that I have a really sharp palate, and the more I drank, the more I liked what it made me think about.
MILES
Yeah? Like what?
MAYA
I started to appreciate the life of wine, that it’s a living thing, that it connects you more to life. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing. I like to think about how the sun was shining that summer and what the weather was like. I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle the wine will taste different than if I had uncorked it on any other day, or at any other moment. A bottle of wine is like life itself—it grows up, evolves and gains complexity. Then it peaks—like your ’61—and begins its steady, inexorable decline. And it tastes so fucking good.
Now it’s Miles’s turn to be swept away. Maya’s face tells us the moment is right, but Miles remains frozen. He needs another sign, and Maya is bold enough to offer it: she reaches out and places one hand atop his.
MILES
But I like a lot of wines besides Pinot too. Lately I’ve really been into Rieslings. Do you like Rieslings?
She nods, a Mona Lisa smile on her lips.
MILES
(pointing)
Bathroom over there?
MAYA
Yeah.
Miles gets up and walks out. Maya sighs and gets an American Spirit out of her purse.
Like the scene from Leonard’s Out of Sight, this is a seduction, but in this case between two very sensitive people—the sage earth mother, Maya, and the emotional wallflower, Miles. Like the scene from LOST IN TRANSLATION below, it’s an exchange of revelations. But they are not confessing personal failures; rather, the underlying actions of both characters are bragging and promising. Miles and Maya try hard to sell their virtues to each other.
In the subtext of Miles’s big speech, he invites Maya to come to him, and in the subtext of her reply she does, and brilliantly. So that she leaves no doubt about her desire for him, she even touches his hand and smiles a “Mona Lisa” come-on. But Miles chickens out, bolts for the toilet, and leaves her in frustration.
Once again, note how the scene is designed around a trialogue. Wine becomes the third thing under which the subtext pulses.
Now I’ll rewrite their speeches on-the-nose, pulling the bragging and promising from the subtext and putting it directly into the text by eliminating the third thing.
MILES
I’m a hard guy to get to know. I’m thin-skinned and temperamental. I’m not tough, not a hard-hearted survivor. I need a cozy, safe little world and a woman who will dote on me. But if you are patient and faithful and caring, you will bring out my beautiful qualities. I cannot come to you. You must come to me. Do you understand? With the right kind of coaxing love I will turn into the most thrilling and brilliant man you could ever have the luck to know.
MAYA
I am a woman with a passion for life. Hour after hour, day after day, season after season, I thrive in the golden light of time, savoring its every precious spell. I am in my prime—old enough to have learned from mistakes, young enough to grow and evolve, so that with every passing day I will become ever more complex, ever more amazing. When I peak, and believe me, I am peaking at this very moment with you, I will taste good, oh so very, very good. Please fuck me.
A person might feel such feelings, might even think such thoughts in some vague way, but no one would ever say these embarrassingly painful things aloud. This bald language becomes impossibly corny when put directly into a living room chat about ideas and yearnings. Fine actors would choke on it.
Yet these are exactly the actions that Taylor and Payne want their characters to take: To put themselves in the very best light and to promise the moon in an effort to win the love of the other with seductive boasts and promises. So, how to write these beats of action into dialogue? Let them converse.
How do people converse? By using what they know as a third thing. And what do these characters know? Miles and Maya are experts on two subjects: wine and themselves. They have extensive, practical knowledge of the former and romanticized, idealized knowledge of the latter. So using the nature of wine and its cultivation as metaphor for their own natures, they each campaign to win the esteem of the other.
As I laid out in the beginning of this section, the key is vocabulary. Character-specific dialogue originates in a character’s unspoken desires and the actions he takes to satisfy those desires. Actions become talk that translates the character’s implicit thoughts and feelings into explicit words—the precise words that only that specific character would use at that specific moment taking that specific action.
Drawing on Pickett’s novel, Payne and Taylor have added their knowledge and insight to Miles and Maya and given each a character-specific voice and vocabulary. In order to seduce, Miles and Maya describe themselves in the language of wine. Compare, for example, Miles’s modal language, his sensitive adjectives and adverbs, to Maya’s bold naming, her nouns and verbs.
Miles: “Thin-skinned,” “temperamental,” “doting,” “faithful,” “caring,” “fragile,” “have to come to,” “achingly beautiful,” “thrilling,” “brilliant,” “haunting,” “really been into…”
Maya: “Life,” “living thing,” “connects to life,” “life itself,” “sun,” “shining,” “summer,” “evolves,” “gains,” “peaks,” “tastes so fucking good…”
These writers have an ear for their characters.