TBT #53: Our Conversations

                            JANE
		I think you’re the Devil.

				AARON
		No.  You know that I’m not.

				JANE
		How?

				AARON
		Because we have the kind of
		relationship where if I were the
		Devil, you’d be the only one I
		told.

	She’s briefly impressed.  He has a point.

				JANE
		You were quick enough to get
		Tom’s help when…

				AARON
		Yes, yes.  I know.  Right.  And
		if it had gone well for me tonight,
		maybe I’d be keeping quiet about all
		this…I grant you everything but
		give me this…he does personify
		everything you’ve been fighting
		against…And I’m in love with you.
			(realizing)
		How do you like that? — I buried
		the lead.

	He pauses to catch his breath — breathing deeply through his
	nose.

				AARON
			(an aside)
		I’ve got to not say that aloud;
		it takes too much out of me.

				JANE
			(thawing)
		Sit down, stop.

	Aaron slumps down — it’s been a long round.

				AARON
		I’ve never fought for anyone before.
		Does anybody win one of these things?

Writing Dialogue

For today’s writer — or wannabe writer — dialogue is one of the most important elements of crafting prose. It’s not like the old days of writing, when dialogue was a literary tool differing from narration only at a very superficial level. You didn’t see a lot of worrying about what has become our golden calf of dialogue writing: realism. Instead, all those dead writers used dialogue to essentially just move along the plot. Today you have to jump through hoops to avoid writing dialogue that uses too much exposition or complex sentences that don’t fit with the established characters, but back then? Fuck it, exposit away! Have characters address each other by their full names multiple times! Give a little recap of something that just happened! There was no need for little back-and-forths like you see with today’s modern dialogue; instead, characters spoke for four or five — or even twelve! — lines at a time. It made things much more economical and allowed them to tell their stories in a relatively short period of time.

Even the so-called “Epics” that are relatively long even by today’s standards would have been untold pages longer had they adhered to today’s “realistic” dialogue. Take Dante’s Dante’s Inferno (by Dante), a work that, even by modern standards, isn’t exactly short — especially if you factor in all the cash-in sequels that followed — but would undoubtedly have been nearly double the current size had the dialogue been modern. In the modernized Inferno, a section like:

When I beheld him in the desert vast,
“Have pity on me,” unto him I cried,
“Whiche’er thou art, or shade or real man!”

He answered me: “Not man; man once I was,
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
And Mantuans by country both of them.

‘Sub Julio’ was I born, though it was late,
And lived at Rome under the good Augustus,
During the time of false and lying gods.

A poet was I, and I sang that just
Son of Anchises, who came forth from Troy,
After that Ilion the superb was burned.

But thou, why goest thou back to such annoyance?
Why climb’st thou not the Mount Delectable,
Which is the source and cause of every joy?”

Would become:

“Oh god,” I yelled. “Where am I?”

“Err,” said the man, “Well, you might be… –”

“Oh god, is that FIRE?!”

“Where?”

“Over there!”

“What?”

“Everything behind you is on fire!”

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah it is.”

“Oh god, seriously, where are we?”

“Hell.”

“Hell?”

“Hell.”

“We’re in hell?”

“Yes. Hell.”

“Wow. Hell.”

And he hasn’t even started introducing himself! You’d be 50 pages in before he revealed himself as Virgil, the guy who ripped off Homer with his poems in Rome. Dante would have had to cut out half of the levels in the original, or else printing costs would have made this book completely unaffordable. And that would have been ridiculous.

                            MAX

                It’s a happy ending, Diana.

                Wayward husband comes to his senses,

                returns to his wife with whom he

                has built a long and sustaining love.

                Heartless young woman left alone

                in her arctic desolation.  Music

                up with a swell.  Final commercial.

                And here are a few scenes from

                next week’s show.

The types of dialogue

Admittedly, that sort of writing is actually a very new thing. It was sort of taken into the mainstream by David Mamet and then taken to an utterly absurd level with Aaron Sorkin, who absolutely adores the statement-question-statement-question style of dialogue. Only time will tell if this sort of writing is anything more than a trend, but it can’t be denied that it’s led to some really fucking good shows and movies (Sports Night, The West Wing, Glengarry Glenross, State and Main, and so on). It’s had an influence on my own stuff, as well, as I have criticized a couple of times for writing characters that stutter, stammer, interrupt each other and speak in cloying, short sentences way too often.

But I don’t care. Because, god dammit, I’m in vogue.

Prior to all of this, different writers did different things with their dialogue.

• Chaucer, for example, wrote dialogue that didn’t make any fucking sense. This was probably a wise choice on his part, as the rest of his writing didn’t make any fucking sense either, so the dialogue fit. It’s widely believed today that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was written in a kind of “Old English” that can be interpreted given careful study. This is probably bullshit. Like we’re supposed to believe somebody was writing intricate slapstick comedy involving sex and farting in the goddamn 13th century, when the official pastime of Europe was two guys dressing up in metal and wailing on each other with big sticks.
• Shakespeare and other playwrights of his day (all of whom may have actually been Shakespeare as — if I’m understanding things correctly — Shakespeare either didn’t write his own plays because he did not exist or because he was too busy writing the King James version of the Bible or quite possibly because he was totally gay and had no time for the theatre what with all his gaiety) wrote dialogue that was totally unrealistic. They just didn’t give a shit. Hey, have a character turn to the audience (breaking the fourth wall) and ramble on for 50 lines while all the other characters stand around like they can’t fucking hear him. Not to mention this “talking while stabbed” stuff. Seriously, that sort of oh-god-I’m-going-to-die-in-a-second-but-first-let-me-read-this-beautiful-poetry stuff would never fly in today’s media, theatre or no. The audience would find it as unrealistic as Watto.
• Then you got guys like Tolstoy and the Russian writers who wrote dialogue that was all complete sentences, delicately crafted and free from grammatical error. And, yes, I am sure that has a lot to do with the translation into English, but honestly I can’t imagine 19th-century Russians peasants ever speaking sentences longer than “Jesus, it’s cold” and “Did you hear about the thing with the horse?” It is just not believable. It should be noted that, despite this style of dialogue, many Russian writers managed to write books that are very long. This is because they apparently got paid by the character or something. Either that or Russian book editors were fond of saying things like “I like this one character struggling with poverty, his existence and the existence of God, but you know what would make him better? Eight of him.”

                                     PENNY
                         You make me laugh.  I think I’m gonna
                         cry.

                                     WILLIAM
                             (continuing)
                         I thought we were going to Morocco!
                         There’s no Morocco.  There’s never been
                         a Morocco.  There’s not even a Penny
                         Lane.  I don’teven know your real
                         name.

                                     PENNY
                         If I ever met a guy in the real world,
                         who looked at me the way you just looked
                         at me…

                                     WILLIAM
                         When and where does the real world
                         occur?  I am really… confused here.
                         Fuck!  All these Rules And all these
                         sayings… and nicknames…

                                     PENNY
                         You know — you’re too sweet for rock
                         and roll.

                                     WILLIAM
                         Where do you get off… where do you
                         get “sweet?”  I’m not sweet.  I’m dark
                         and mysterious and pissed-off and I
                         could be very dangerous to all of you…
                         I’m not sweet, and you should know
                         that about me!  I am The Enemy.

                                     PENNY
                         You’re not any of those things and
                         that’s what I love about you.

               William stands there in disbelief, unable to look at her.

                                     WILLIAM
                         You fall in love to keep from falling
                         in love.

Types of dialogue (continued!)

• I have to include a special note for Joseph Conrad, whose uses the main character in Heart of Darkness as the narrator for the story. Most of the book is Marlowe telling a bunch of guys in the hold of a ship about this whole adventure he went on. The whole thing is dialogue! And the only interrupt two or three times! And it’s never interruptions along the lines of “Hey, great story, but did you have to spend 25 minutes describing the African woman’s necklace in such poetic detail?” or “Holy shit, that Kurtz guy is fucked!” Which would have made sense.
• There’s also James Joyce, who begins Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with his characters talking with (relatively) realistic dialogue but by the end has them engaging in passionate debate about the didactic nature of art and whether aesthetics are the true measure of creative talent. And then he just sort of gives up and finishes the book in point form. It’s really funny. Not to mention in his later works he sort of gives up on semi-realistic dialogue and starts writing Chaucer-esque exchanges where the characters speak entirely without vowels. Which may be realistic for Irish people; I don’t know.
• In the twentieth century, it became popular to give characters with thick accents phonetic dialogue. Some people might like this — I haven’t done a survey or anything — but I generally find it pretty annoying. I think Steinbeck did it okay in Of Mice and Men but it’s led to some pretty terrible stuff like British writers trying to write a streetwise English accent and having it come out like “wotsay guvna tip t’a m’te, ‘innit?” or Stephen King being… well, Stephen King with his southern accents. (Dolores Claiborne is particularly bad for this.)

                                DONNIE 
                      I confuse melancholy and depression sometimes….

                                THURSTON 
                      Mmm.Hmm. 

                                DONNIE
                      You see? 

                                THURSTON 
                      Why don’t you run along now friend,
                      your dessert is getting cold. 

                                DONNIE
                      I’m sick. 

                                THURSTON
                      Stay that way. 

                                DONNIE 
                      I’m sick and I’m in love. 

                                THURSTON 
                      You seem the sort of person who confuses the two. 

                                DONNIE
                      That’s right.  That’s the first time
                      you’re right.  I CONFUSE THE TWO
                      AND I DON’T CARE. 

Modern Dialogue and What It Means

I don’t want to give the impression that I dislike any of the writers I listed. In fact, odds are I mentioned them because I DO like them. Or possibly only because I had a good joke about them. It’s hard to say! But regardless, most of these writers wrote very good stories and are critically acclaimed and remembered for a reason. And I don’t mean to sum up their dialogue in such a succinct way as if to imply that my snide little comments are true of all their work. Or, really, true at all.

I will say this, however: I am not sure of the real value of what we’d call ‘good’ dialogue. It is something that, while immediately noticeable in contemporary work, can definitely not save a bad idea or a poorly-developed plot. The inverse of that, however, is not true. Bad dialogue does not always ruin a good plot or a creative idea. Even if the dialogue is tremendously clunky, if the characters and the plot are strong, the quality will shine through.

And, while you’re thinking about all of these half-formed ideas, think about this: if you really listen, and were to try and transcribe, all of our conversations, you’d end up with a tangled mess of sentences that don’t entirely make sense. Because they don’t. We mangle sentences, mispronounce words, stumble and trip over ourselves and say entirely the wrong thing more often that it would be possible to reflect in writing. Read the raw transcript of an interview to see just how true that is. We don’t, in a lot of ways, make any sense. And we’re certainly not as witty and quick as the characters we write.

So it’s almost with a bit of a grin that we note that, with writing, like with life, it is not what the characters say so much as what they do. It is not the spoken words but rather the actions that make a character, or a story, good.

                  MR. BLUME 

                                    Max? 

Max looks up. There is quite a sadness about him and
his voice has lost all feeling of possibility. 

                     MAX 

                         Hi, Mr. Blume. 

Mr. Blume stands there in silence. 

                MR. BLUME 

                       You wanted to meet? 

                     MAX 

                      When? 

                     MR. BLUME 

                     Right now. You said you wanted to meet
                     to put an end to this nonsense. 

                     MAX 

                   Oh. Yeah. I was going to try and have that
                   oak tree fall on you. 

Max jerks him thumb over his shoulder. Mr. Blume looks
at a massive oak tree hanging precariously by the roots. 

                    MR. BLUME 

                   That big one? That would have really
                  pancaked me. 

(pause) 

                   What stopped you? 

                  MAX 

                 (shrugs) 

                What’s the use? She loves you. 

Max gets up. They look at each other in silence. 

                     MAX 

                    So long Mr. Blume. 

Max starts to walk away. Mr. Blume calls after him. 

                   MR. BLUME 

                   She’s my Rushmore, Max. 

                  MAX 

                 (without stopping) 

                Yeah, I know. She was mine, too. 

Max leaves the cemetery. Mr. Blume stands alone.
He goes over to the tree and taps it. It comes crashing down.

Some sort of conclusion

I don’t really have any big conclusion to make. I set out to write something that would allow me to include excerpts from movie scripts, because that’s what I’ve been reading lately. And do you know why I read them? Because I think they’re a good way to improve your dialogue. Or that’s what I thought, anyway. But as I’ve been writing this — and I really have been making it up as I go — I’ve started to think that what I’m really learning from these scripts (and if you can name all five, I’ll give you a prize of some kind — it’s not hard) is not dialogue in the rat-a-tat-tat Aaron Sorkin sense, but character. Good dialogue isn’t realistic or unrealistic or anything else, but instead unique to the character. In all of the examples I’ve given, you get a sense of who the characters are from what they say, even if it’s only a few short lines. And that’s something special, you know? That’s not only the mark of good dialogue, but good character.

It’s what our conversations reveal. We don’t — perhaps regrettably — learn about one another by exchanging pre-written biographies, but rather through conversing. Through exchange. Through dialogue. That is how we define ourselves to the world. And that is how we learn about characters in our stories. The world of fiction is often so very close to our own world, with perhaps the only difference being that our fictional characters are so much quicker, wittier and well-spoken than we are.

They’re generally handsomer, too, come to think about it. And they get laid more. God dammit.

Matt