Blood and Bones Part 12: Dialogue

Plays are not literature

Skidmore:         Suppose I’d better get you a coffee (nods to counter)

Me:                   (Raises eyebrow in astonishment) Uh?

Skidmore:         Yes? (nods to counter again)

Me:                   (Purses lips.  Makes bubbly noise. Shrugs)  Yeah. What you …?

Skidmore:         (Pulls lips back over teeth. sighs) Cmon.

Me:                   (Sucks teeth.)  errr…

Skidmore:         (To barista) (makes despairing look) Capuccino. (Gestures to me)

Me:                   Yeah Nah.

Skidmore:         (Closes eyes)

Me:                   You know. (Makes grimace) Last week. (Poses laugh)

Skidmore:         You’re such a…

Me:                   What?

Skidmore:         (Frowns) People… (Nods to Queue.)

Me:                   (Puffs air. Tuts.) Oh.. pfff.  Yeah. Americano then.

Barista:              Hot milk, Sir?

Skidmore:         (Raises eyebrows)

Me:                   (Raises eyebrows, narrows eyes.  Looks sideways)  Uhhh..

Skidmore:         (Raises eyebrows)

Me:                   (Raises eyebrows in desperation) Black then.

Skidmore:         No milk

Me:                   Yeah. Cheers.

Barista:              One cappuccino, One Americano, black. That’s five pounds sixty. I’ll bring them over.

(Skidmore makes hunting through pockets gestures.)

(I hand the barista the money)

Barista:              I’ll bring them over.

(We sit down)

Me:                   I should’ve asked for a cappuccino.

Skidmore:         Whatever.

I’d like to make it quite clear that is an attempt to record an actual conversation.  Not how I’d present it for a script. I certainly wouldn’t include all the gestures and so on. I’d write the dialogue and then leave it to the actors to find all the unwritten stuff, deducing it from their own interpretation of the character and what they find works.

But my general point is that as a playwright, as any sort of writer, you should start by listening to people talking. As much and as often as possible. Or so I said to my young friend Skidmore as he was complaining about his latest 500 word exercise that he had been given for his part time course at the Uni .  The café or the bus is an ideal place to do it.  Listen closely and at some length to other people’s conversations as you sip your capuccino.  Blow the dust off your notebook and write down what they say and, most important, the way they say it.   When I started out as a playwright I couldn’t do dialogue.  I worked with a co-writer and I did the situations and funny bits and he wrote the dialogue.  My attempts to do dialogue sounded stilted and unrealistic.  Anybody can write a play that depends on situation or plot but to write a play that depends on character requires an understanding of how to build that character and how that character develops within and around a plot. And how that character develops is conveyed by what that character says and does.  In other words how they speak.

So I spent years drinking coffee trying to acquire this skill.  And  I’m still baffled by the complexities of conversation. There seem to be no rules Or rather, the rules are not instantly discernible.  But I’ll keep drinking Americanos and trying to understand what I’m working for.

NOBODY SHOULD EMBARK ON THE DANGEROUS PATH OF PLAYWRITING UNTIL THEY HAVE SPENT AT LEAST SIX MONTHS DRINKING COFFEE IN A BUSY CAFE.  PREFERABLY ONE YOU HAVE TO CATCH A BUS TO GET TO. 

Conversational speech is broken, halting, discursive, unsettled.  Entirely without grammar or syntax as described in the conventional manuals.  Sentences have no verbs.  They do not link one to another.  They are made up partly of words, partly of sounds and partly of gestures.

One of the problems we have is that we have been firmly schooled in the art of cinema.  Here dialogue is terse and to the point.  And as little as possible.  In real life we tend to overspeak. We repeat the same point over and over again, We do not listen to the person we are speaking at and we wander off into unrelated byways at the drop of a hat.  By following the rules of film making on stage we lose much of this richness and layering of normal human interaction that is so needed in a piece for the stage. We can lose the poetry of real speech..

I tried to explain all this in Part 11 about the make up of language itself.  The language we use can only obliquely refer to the subjects we feel we want to discuss.  Thus dialogues have very little logic.  It is quite possible for one person to espouse several quite contradictory ideas at one time.  Sometimes our interlocuters speak in other voices (the actual meaning of “irony” by the way).  Most of the time conversation does not follow the neat ordered pattern of question and response we would expect as writers.  Most of the time people will only talk about themselves.  Each question or statement being answered or interrupted by their own experience.

Yet, somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some sort of exchange does takes place.  It may be indirect, convoluted and metaphorical but eventually some idea may be conveyed to the other party. Let us recall Professor Pinker’s idea from my previous episode that language is a form of grooming.  It is a way to synchronise our feelings with others.  So that it is the very act of conversation that conveys meaning rather than the words used or what is said.

So what do we playwrights learn from this?  Firstly, that our characters need to be freed from the conventions of literary, written speech.  This gives us the opportunities to learn about the reality of our characters.  Our character can grow with our discovery of their little tics and irregularities.  And I don’t mean that that gives us licence to write in some sort of ridiculous Dick Van Dyke cockney voice.  I mean that we can discover the outward signs of the inward workings of a character though their speech.  And as we write it we need to speak it out loud. We are trying to record a spoken interchange so it only exists in some bare notation as words on a page.  In writing dialogue it is, perhaps, useful to think of the words on the page as a sort of code that reveals your intentions for the characters. 

Secondly, we need to remember that most conversations are about anything but the subject in hand. This is especially true about complex and deep subjects. Previously I mentioned our inbuilt willingness to suspend our disbelief.  If you ally that with our need to co-operate and collaborate in social situations you can begin to see how inevitable it is that we will say things in a conversation that we may not believe in an attempt to maintain the interaction.  It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the real feelings of our character are flushed out.  This is what makes the process of play watching so enjoyable.  The audience are voyeurs trying to understand something from the snippets of half formed conversation they are allowed to overhear.  And, of course, our characters are often unreliable witnesses.  They lie, they prevaricate, they say the very opposite of what they really think and feel. I’ll tackle this in the next episode about Internal dialogue. But as the watchers begin to know and understand they begin to get more and more drawn in and engaged.  We create an empathy if not understanding.

Thirdly, on a practical level, I think it wise to avoid using stage directions.  If you’ve got the voice and the tone of the exchange right then there is no need to interject (humorously) or (bitterly) it must be there in the speech itself.  I usually think that if I’ve had to resort to stage directions than I need to recast the speech. I try to do the actor who is co-operating with my words, the courtesy of being able to bring their knowledge and expertise to bear. Similarly, as a director, I get annoyed by writers who write detailed character descriptions in the stage directions but do not carry them through into their actual speech and actions.  It is not good enough to describe a character as “Young dynamic and ambitious” You need to show those attributes.  You need to demonstrate how that ambition is manifested or hidden through what they say and the choices they make in conversation.

Yet somehow the playwright needs to convey some sort of meaning to an audience.  A playwright does not necessarily want to reproduce everyday speech exactly.  It would be massively tedious to the audience, and probably totally incomprehensible but for me there is an inbuilt urge towards getting closer than I have managed up to now. As I’ve mentioned before we need to convey an impression of verisimilitude rather than precise actuality.   In the end, Every writer will have to arrive at his or her own method of notating speech in a realistic, believable way while maintaining an engaging controlled style.  We only have to Think of writers like Pinter who arguably came the closest to making this work but he still had to resort to a rather mannered "pinteresque" approach.