Dialogue

1

THE FULL DEFINITION OF DIALOGUE

Tradition defines dialogue as talk between characters. I believe, however, that an all-encompassing, in-depth study of dialogue begins by stepping back to the widest possible view of storytelling. From that angle, the first thing I notice is that character talk runs along three distinctly different tracks: said to others, said to oneself, and said to the reader or audience.

I place these three modes of talk under the term "dialogue" for two reasons: First, no matter when, where, and to whom a character speaks, the writer must personalize the role with a unique, character-specific voice worded in the text. Second, whether mental or vocal, whether thought inside the mind or said out into the world, all speech is an outward execution of an inner action. All talk responds to a need, engages a purpose, and performs an action. No matter how seemingly vague and airy a speech may be, no character ever talks to anyone, even to himself, for no reason, to do nothing. Therefore, beneath every line of character talk, the writer must create a desire, intent, and action. That action then becomes the verbal tactic we call dialogue.

Let's survey the three tracks of dialogue:

One, talk to others. The accurate term for two-way talk is duologue. Three characters in conversation would generate a trialogue. A family of a dozen souls gathered for Thanksgiving Day dinner might be called a multilogue, if such a term existed.

Two, talk within oneself. Screenwriters seldom ask characters to talk to themselves; playwrights, on the other hand, often do. As for prose writers, mental talk is the stuff and substance of their art. Prose has the power to invade a character's mind and project inner conflict across the landscape of thought. Whenever an author tells his story in a first-person or second-person voice, that voice belongs to a character. Prose, therefore, often fills with reflexive, self-to-self dialogue that the reader, as it were, overhears.

Three, talk to readers and audiences. In the theatre, the conventions of soliloquy and aside allow characters to turn directly to the audience and talk in confidence. In television and film, this convention usually puts the character offscreen to talk voice-over, but occasionally calls for the character to turn to the camera in direct address. In prose, this is the essence of first-person prose—the character tells his tale to the reader.

The etymology of the word "dialogue" traces back to two Greek terms: dia-, meaning "through," and legein, referring to "speech." These two terms translated directly into English become the compound noun "through-speech"—an action taken through words as opposed to deeds. Every line a character speaks, whether spoken aloud to others or silently in the mind, is, in J. L. Austin's term, a performative: words that perform a task.¹

To say something is to do something, and for that reason, I have expanded my redefinition of dialogue to name any and all words said by a character to herself, to others, or to the reader/audience as an action taken to satisfy a need or desire. In all three cases, when a character speaks, she acts verbally as opposed to physically, and each of her through-speech actions moves the scene she's in from one beat to the next, while at the same time, it dynamically propels her closer to (positive) or further from (negative) the satisfaction of her core desire. Dialogue-as-action is the foundation principle of this book.

Dialogue carries out its actions in one of two ways: dramatized or narratized.

DRAMATIZED DIALOGUE

Dramatized means acted out in scenes. Whether the tone is comic or tragic, dramatized dialogue sends lines back and forth between characters in conflict. Each line contains an action with a specific intention and causes a reaction somewhere within the scene.

This is true even in one-character scenes. When someone says, "I'm mad at myself," who is mad at whom? Just as you see your image in a mirror, you can see yourself in your imagination. To argue within yourself, your mind creates a second self and talks to it as if it were another person. A character's inner dialogue becomes a dynamically dramatized scene between two conflicted selves of the same person, one of which may or may not win the argument. Therefore, strictly defined, all monologues are in fact dialogues. Whenever a character talks, she is always talking to someone, even if it's her other side.

NARRATIZED DIALOGUE

Narratized means spoken outside the scene. In these cases, the so-called fourth wall of realism vanishes, and a character steps out of the story's dramatizations. Once again, strictly speaking, narratized speeches are not monologues but dialogues in which the character takes vocal action to talk directly to the reader, audience, or self.

In terms of desire, a first-person narrator in prose or a character narrating from the stage or screen may simply want to bring the reader/audience up to date on past events and arouse their curiosity about future events. She may use narratized dialogue to act out this straightforward ambition and no more.

In more complex situations, however, she might, for example, use words to arm-twist the reader/audience into forgiving her past misdeeds while prejudicing them to see her enemies from her biased point of view. From story to story, the possible desires that might move a character to action and the tactics she uses while talking to the reader/audience seem unlimited.

The same applies to a character who turns inside her mind to talk to herself. She may be pursuing any purpose: rerunning a memory for pleasure, puzzling out whether or not she can trust her lover's love, building her hopes by fantasizing about life to come, and so on, as her thoughts roam the past, present, and possible futures, real and imagined.

To demonstrate how the same content could be expressed in the three different modes of dialogue, I'll work with a passage from the novel Doctor Glas, written in 1905 by the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg.

The book takes the form of a diary kept by the eponymous protagonist. A real-life diary records the closet conversations of a diarist talking to himself; a fictional diary, therefore, must be written so the reader feels that he somehow overhears these secret inner dialogues.

In Söderberg's novel, Dr. Glas wants to save one of his patients (a woman he secretly loves) from her sexually abusive husband. Day after day his mind wages moral arguments for and against killing the man; in nightmare after nightmare he commits the murder. (Later in the book he in fact poisons the husband.) In an entry dated August 7, a nightmare wakes him in a cold sweat. Listen in on his rambling narratized dialogue as Glas tries to convince himself that his horrid dream is not a prophecy:

In the first line, Glas speaks to a proverb floating in his mind as if the idea had a mind of its own. Then he turns to argue with his silent, dark immoral side, a self that roils with murderous desire. By the last sentence, Glas thinks his better self has won the argument… at least for the moment. Notice how the sentences roll out in the lengthy, cumulative shapes of rumination.

Now suppose Söderberg had written this passage as narratized dialogue said by Dr. Glas directly to the reader. To write in a voice Glas might use when talking to another person, Söderberg might give Glas that authoritative voice that doctors often use when prescribing to a patient. The sentences might shorten and turn into imperatives. Do's, don'ts, and buts might be added to give ideas a sharp twist:

As a third choice, Söderberg, who also wrote plays, may have chosen to dramatize these ideas onstage. He could have split the doctor into two characters: Glas and Markel. In the novel, the journalist Markel is Glas's best friend. In a play, Markel might personify the morally righteous side of Glas, while Glas could play the tormented side that's tempted toward murder.

In the subtext of the scene below, Glas seeks Markel's help to cure his troubling dreams. Sensing this, Markel makes positive moral statements in answer to the doctor's questions. The text retains the novel's imagery (the theatre in fact encourages figurative language), but it changes line design from cumulative to periodic to aid the actors' cueing. (See Chapter Five for studies in line design.)

These three versions contain the same essential content, but when what's said changes direction from told to self, to told to the reader, to told to another character, language radically changes shape, diction, tonality, and texture. The three fundamental dialogue modes require three sharply contrasted writing styles.

DIALOGUE AND THE MAJOR MEDIA

All dialogue, dramatized and narratized, performs in the grand symphony of story, but from stage to screen to page, its instruments and arrangements vary considerably. For that reason, a writer's choice of medium greatly influences the composition of dialogue—its quantities and qualities.

The theatre, for example, is primarily an auditory medium. It prompts audience members to listen more intently than they watch. As a result, the stage favors voice over image.

Cinema reverses that. Film is primarily a visual medium. It prompts the audience to watch more intently than it listens. For that reason, screenplays favor image over voice.

The aesthetics of television float between the theatre and cinema. Teleplays tend to balance voice and image, inviting us to look and listen more or less equally.

Prose is a mental medium. Whereas stories performed onstage and onscreen strike the audience's ears and eyes directly, literature takes an indirect path through the reader's mind. The reader must first interpret the language, then imagine the sights and sounds it describes (every reader's imaginings are her own), and, finally, allow herself to react to what she envisions. What's more, because literary characters are actorless, their author is free to use as much or as little dialogue, as dramatized or narratized, as he sees fit.

So let's look at how a story's medium shapes its dialogue.

DIALOGUE ONSTAGE

Dramatized Dialogue

The scene is the basic unit of story structure in all four major story media. In the theatre, the majority of talk plays out as dramatized dialogue, performed by characters in scenes with other characters.

The one-character play is no exception. When a lone character paces the stage, he creates scenes of inner dramatized dialogue by splitting himself in two, as it were, and pitting his warring selves against each other. If the character sits back to air his thoughts, these memories, fantasies, and philosophies play best as inner actions, motivated by a desire and taken with a purpose. No matter how passive and aimless such musings may seem on the surface, they are in fact dramatized dialogue, said within a scene by a conflicted character struggling within himself to understand himself or forget the past or sell himself on a lie—or any other inner action a playwright might invent. Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape stands as a brilliant example of dramatized dialogue in the one-character play.

Narratized Dialogue

In keeping with the theatre's ancient conventions, a playwright may employ narratized dialogue by stepping his character out of the flux of scenes and turning him to the audience to speak in soliloquy, or if very brief, in an aside.³ What's revealed is often a confession, a secret, or a revelation of what a character genuinely thinks, feels, or wants to do but could never say aloud to another character. For example, the painful contritions of Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

In one-person performances like The Year of Magical Thinking, Mark Twain Tonight, and I Am My Own Wife, the soliloquy becomes an entire play. These works often stage adaptations of biographies or autobiographies, and so the actor plays a well-known contemporary (Joan Didion) or a personage from the past (Mark Twain). In the course of the evening, the actor may use all three forms of character talk. For the most part, however, he will confess his story to the audience in narratized dialogue. Now and then, he might impersonate other characters and act out scenes from the past in dramatized dialogue.

Modern stand-up comedy came of age when comics moved from joke telling to narratized dialogue. A stand-up comedian must either invent a character to play (Stephen Colbert) or perform a selected, characterized version of himself (Louis C.K.) for this reason: No one can step onstage as the exact same self that got out of bed that morning. It takes a persona to perform.

Onstage, the line between dramatized and narratized dialogue can shift, depending on the actor's interpretation. When Hamlet, for example, questions his continued existence, does he aim the phrase "To be or not to be" at the audience or at himself? It's the actor's choice.

Narration

On those occasions when a play's story encompasses a large cast over decades of time, a playwright may stand a narrator at the side of the stage. These non-characters perform any number of tasks: They relate historical exposition, introduce characters, or counterpoint the action with ideas or interpretations that could not be directly dramatized in scenes.

Examples: In Donald Hall's An Evening's Frost (an enactment of the life of poet Robert Frost) and Erwin Piscator's epic theatre adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace, onstage narrators bring a godlike knowledge of history and personae to the audience, but they have no personal desires. They stand above the drama, facilitating the storytelling. By contrast, in Our Town, playwright Thornton Wilder's narrator, known as the Stage Manager, mixes functions. He narrates exposition, guides the audience's attitudes, but from time to time, he steps into dramatized scenes to play some small parts.

DIALOGUE ONSCREEN

Dramatized Dialogue

Like the theatre, the majority of onscreen talk is dramatized dialogue, spoken in-character on-camera in live action or voiced off-camera in animation.

Narratized Dialogue

Screen characters narratize dialogue in one of two modes: either off-camera voice-over over the images, or direct to camera in cinematic soliloquy.