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Rib Davis
Bloomsbury Academic
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Bloomsbury Academic
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www.bloomsbury.com
Rib Davis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Thanks vi
Note on the text vii
Introduction viii
1 How do we talk? 1
3 Naturalistic dialogue 47
Index 223
THANKS
Terrible traffic, and pouring with rain. And it was getting dark
by now, too. Could hardly make out which was their car.
The traffic was terrible and it was pouring with rain … We could
hardly make out which was their car.
finished speaking, the effect can be a very awkward one – you can
feel almost as though you were being interviewed, or it can seem
that the listener is not interested, or doesn’t understand, or perhaps
is even irritated or bored. So very often the listener will interrupt
with ‘Yes …’, ‘Of course …’, or ‘Exactly the same happened to
me …’ to show at the very least that they are still listening, and
hopefully also that they recognize the truth of what is being said.
The listener may interrupt with ‘No, I don’t think so …’ if he or
she disagrees, but even this interruption is not usually taken to be
rude. Frequently one of these interjections will just be a second
or two of simultaneous speech, with the first speaker continuing,
while at other points in the conversation the interruption will lead
to the new speaker taking over so that the speeches of the two
individuals overlap for a few words. Very often we will anticipate
when another person is coming to the end of what they want
to say and, rather than wait for the very end, we will come in a
second or two early (after all, otherwise the other person might
just carry on speaking!). Usually this does not seem at all impolite;
it is a perfectly normal element of everyday talk. When we write
dialogue, however, this is another element which we might find
ourselves perhaps unconsciously tidying up. Of course, a writer
may have good reasons for doing just that (and more will be said
about this in later chapters), but here we need to recognize that
the raw material – everyday conversation – is more messy than we
had probably appreciated. It is certainly much messier than written
dialogue, and a major reason for this is the interaction between
speakers.
Of course, while much simultaneous speech is not impolite some
of it certainly is. The rudeness of Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of
It is not just a matter of what he says (his very first words in the
series are, ‘No, he’s useless. He’s absolutely useless. He’s as useless
as a marzipan dildo’), but also when he says it – he continually
makes his comments across the speeches of others, when he is both
on and off the phone. But he is not alone – in this series multiple
simultaneous conversations are the norm.
One of the themes of David Mamet’s extraordinary play Oleanna
is the difficulty experienced in genuinely communicating. The play
begins with a phone call:
john (on phone) And what about the land. (Pause) The land.
How do we talk? 5
And what about the land? (Pause) What about it? (Pause) No.
I don’t understand. Well, yes, I’m I’m … no, I’m sure it’s signif
… I’m sure it’s significant. (Pause) Because it’s significant to
mmmmmm … did you call Jerry? (Pause) Because … no, no, no,
no, no. What did they say …? Did you speak to the real estate
… where is she …? Well, well, all right. Where are her notes?
Where are the notes we took with her. (Pause) I thought you
were? No. No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I just thought that
I saw you, when we were there … what …? I thought I saw you
with a pencil. WHY NOW? is what I’m say … well, that’s why I
say ‘call Jerry.’ Well, I can’t right now, be … no, I didn’t schedule
any … Grace: I didn’t … I’m well aware … Look: Look. Did you
call Jerry? Will you call Jerry … ? Because I can’t now. I’ll be
there, I’m sure I’ll be there in fifteen, in twenty. I intend to. No,
we aren’t going to lose the, we aren’t going to lose the house.
Look: Look, I’m not minimizing it. The ‘easement’. Did she
say ‘easement’? (Pause) What did she say; is it a ‘term of art’,
are we bound by it … I’m sorry … (Pause) are: we: yes. Bound
by … Look: (He checks his watch.) before the other side goes
home, all right? ‘a term of art.’ Because: that’s right. (Pause) The
yard for the boy. Well, that’s the whole … Look: I’m going to
meet you there … (He checks his watch.) Is the realtor there?
All right, tell her to show you the basement again. Look at this
because … Bec … I’m leaving in, I’m leaving in ten or fifteen
… Yes. No, no, I’ll meet you at the new … That’s a good. If he
thinks it’s nec … you tell Jerry to meet … All right? We aren’t
going to lose the deposit. All right? I’m sure it’s going to be …
(Pause) I hope so. (Pause) I love you, too. (Pause) I love you,
too. As soon as … I will.
Phone calls are often poorly presented in scripts, with the person
‘at this end’ artificially repeating the unheard speeches for the
benefit of the audience. But not here. Despite only hearing one
side of the conversation we gain the gist of the meaning – and feel
the tension of the situation – at the same time as being aware of
all the general messiness of this verbal interaction. There are the
repetitions, the half-made sentences and even half-made words, the
misunderstandings and rephrasings, the false starts and hesitations
6 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Helping out
Sometimes our interruptions are not made in order to agree or
disagree, nor are they made to change the subject: they are to finish
off someone else’s speech. Some individuals are particularly prone
to this, always trying to anticipate the ending of a sentence and
leaping in just before the speaker has had time to finish. This can
be an extremely irritating character trait – one which can of course
be reproduced in scripted dialogue, often to humorous effect:
Verbal shorthand
Very often, when people speaking together know each other
well, or when the speaker is aware that the listener has a
particular knowledge of the topic under discussion, a type of
verbal shorthand is used. The most obvious example is technical
or professional jargon. At an airport information desk, one
employee might ask a colleague if she knows the ETA of BD148;
overhearing this, we might well know that ETA means Expected
Time of Arrival but would be much less likely to know that
BD148 refers to a flight by British Midland (though we would
probably assume that BD stood for some airline or other). Every
workplace has its jargon and abbreviations, with limited and
varied access for outsiders.
Scriptwriters have always delighted in playing with jargon,
frequently satirizing the pretentiousness of the language and
pointing up the hollowness behind all the impressive-sounding
words. An outstanding modern example is Caryl Churchill’s
Serious Money, set in the money markets of London; but Ben
Jonson, too, was exploring how greed and emptiness can be
wonderfully disguised by jargon-laden language in The Alchemist.
In the following extract, Subtle and his assistant Face are in the
process of fooling Mammon to believe that through a marvellous
knowledge of alchemy they are able to turn base metals into gold,
though Mammon’s friend Surly is not convinced:
Conversational ping-pong
Another way in which we may be tempted to turn the messiness
of dialogue into something neater is by writing what might
be termed ‘conversational ping-pong’. In this form of fictional
dialogue, every topic is clearly introduced (the serve). There is
then a series of speeches, each a logical response to the previous
one (the rally); a new topic is only opened when the previous
point has been finished with (the ball has gone out of play and
there is a new serve). Conversational ping-pong is probably the
most common form of poor dialogue produced by inexperienced
scriptwriters.
So what is wrong with it? In small doses, nothing, but very
often we don’t talk in this way. In normal conversation more than
one topic is frequently being dealt with at the same time (which in
table-tennis terms would mean two balls in play simultaneously!);
any sort of predictable statement-and-response or question-and-
answer pattern is broken up by all the factors already referred
to, as well as a number of others. These include: dealing with
misunderstandings which may arise, or not dealing with them and
having the misunderstandings develop further; the occurrence of
silences within conversation; a speaker going off at a tangent; or
one speaker verbally responding, not to the words of another, but
to some physical action. There is also the particular agenda and
state of mind brought to the scene by each participant (more of
this in the following chapter), which is likely to produce something
even more complicated. In short, then, conversation is complex,
and can rarely be reflected accurately by dialogue of the continual
ping-pong variety.
It should also be pointed out that the pattern and style of
any conversation is not just a product of the circumstances of
that moment and that particular interaction, but is fundamen-
tally affected by the background and individual character traits
of each person present: dialogue is inextricably bound up with
characterization.
12 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Social codes
Our conversations all take place within certain social conven-
tions, and these have a major bearing upon how any piece of
dialogue develops. The conventions are not entirely rigid – they
vary according to class, background and situation – but there are
certain generalizations which can be made. For example, in a group
conversation in a pub, say, or at a dinner party, anecdotes will
often be told in accordance with the unwritten rule that everyone
How do we talk? 15
she is the only one, and in that context there is a continual fasci-
nation in her trying to decode what those around her say, and in
those around her coming to terms with how she expresses herself.
There is a similar linguistic disjunction in The Imitation Game,
in which Alan Turing finds difficulty understanding what others
mean because they hardly ever express themselves directly, whereas
he does, to a painful degree. As Turing comments, language is
in fact a code – just as much as the other codes which come to
fascinate him.
Culture clash
The differences in speech between Tommy in the extract from A Few
Kind Words given above, and the speech of the other characters in
the play (particularly that of his own well-educated daughter, who
has moved further south) reflect major social differences between
them; indeed, these are a very important thematic element of the
play. Yet the differences may be even greater than this when they
are between characters who come from cultures as distinct as, for
example, British African-Caribbean and British Asian, or between
English speakers who were born and live in other countries –
whether Singapore or New Zealand, the USA or India.
Each of these English-speaking cultures has its own vocabulary,
grammar and style of speech. But it goes beyond this. For example,
I have considerable experience of socializing with Latin Americans
who speak English as a second language, and have learned that
their rules of conversation are rather different from ours. When
a new person – a Latin American, say – is brought along to an
English group, that person is introduced to the others but may
then be left to sink or swim – he or she has to some extent to battle
to make space in the conversation, to make a contribution. This
is not seen as rude by the English: the new person is left to accli-
matize to the group, and to pay them too much attention might be
seen as pressurizing, or perhaps patronizing. To a Latin American,
however, being treated in this way seems extremely impolite. Their
social conventions (perhaps mirroring their wider cultural values,
which also differ from ours) dictate that when a new person is
introduced to a group, then much of the talk is directed to that
How do we talk? 17
at other times she does not seem sorry at all – rather, it seems to
mean, ‘Sorry, but I’ve just got to say it anyway and you’ve got to
put up with it.’ The one word encapsulates a major element of the
character, including traits which are both irritating and admirable.
John, on the other hand, endlessly uses variants of ‘as it were’
because he is never happy with his own way of expressing himself
(he writes leader columns for a provincial newspaper, without
conspicuous success); the phrase suggests, too, a more general
uncertainty about his own opinions, and even about whom he feels
himself to be. In the second act of the play the other characters
increasingly use these phrases back at Leslie and John. There is
an open acknowledgement of the use of these pet phrases, and
with it a clearer acknowledgement of exactly what makes these
characters tick.
major characters (and some of the others too) will be given the
opportunity to show the range of registers they use.
And then there is the small matter of emotions. When furious,
for example, we may become positively incoherent, or start to use
rhythm and repetition in a more marked way than at any other
times:
I hate your mum, I hate her house and I hate her ruddy dog!
Word-for-word transcription
All the examples given so far have been invented, either specifically
for this book or for a script. Now we will look at some examples
of people’s actual speech, transcribed from tape recordings. First,
here is Norma, a Scots woman talking about rationing and her
childhood in general. Her parents ran a shop. Here, she is being
formally interviewed:
Here he leaves out ‘Sam’ before ‘Says’, and also the ‘He’ before
‘Wou’n’t’: meaning is more important than grammar, and Dick is
quite happy to leave out the subject of the sentence rather than
slow the story up with extra words. His concern is to dramatize,
to bring his thoughts to life, so he happily mixes the present tense
with the past tense to tell his story – which is very much a story – as
24 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
the present tense helps to make the events of the past feel so much
more immediate:
Well, no comparis’ – see it’d got some guts in it, hadn’t it?
Notes
1 These include Smith, P. (1985) Language, the Sexes and Society,
Oxford: Blackwell and Tannen, D. (1991) You Just Don’t Understand,
London: Virago.
2 Holmes, J. ‘The Role of Compliments in Female–Male Interaction’ in
Maybin and Mercer (eds) (1996) Using English, from Conversation to
Canon, London: Routledge.
26
2
The characters’ agendas
What we want
In Chapter 1 we looked at many of the aspects of how normal
conversation works. In this chapter we will look at one further
aspect – the agendas which each one of us brings to each conver-
sation, and we will examine the effects that these agendas have.
Whenever we begin speaking with someone, we have a personal
agenda. This is some sort of idea of what we want from the conver-
sation. We might want to communicate something specific, or to
find out something. There might be only one item on the agenda
and it may be relatively trivial, such as, ‘I must tell Shirley that the
High Street’s been blocked off.’ In this case the agenda (or at least
the initial agenda, since an agenda may alter as the conversation
evolves) can be dealt with very easily: ‘Oh Shirley, did you know
the High Street’s been blocked off?’ – and that’s it. On another
occasion an agenda might consist of a number of items, none of
which is trivial. For example, a man meeting his partner after a
long separation might have an agenda consisting of the following,
not necessarily in this order: (a) making it clear to her how much
he has missed her; (b) telling her how well he has used the time
while she has been away; (c) the need to sort out major financial
problems. Immediately, it may be seen that there are different
types of items on this agenda: (a) is concerned with emotions; (b)
is also at least partly about emotions, as he is trying to make her
feel more positively towards him by impressing her with his use of
time; (c) is mainly dealing with practicalities, but this item too has
28 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
You know, Shirley, I’m not too keen on the Co-op any more, but
anyway I thought you might like to know that the High Street’s
been blocked off.
Here the speaker also has another item on her agenda – wanting
to impress by mentioning that she is now above shopping at
the Co-op in the High Street (wanting to impress may well be a
permanent agenda item for this individual!). Or the topic might be
dealt with quite differently:
Shirl, did you know the High Street’s been blocked off? But I got
to the Co-op anyway, the back way. Well it’s stupid to spend all
that money at Waitrose isn’t it.
this as ‘old’. It is not so much the insults which give the edge as
their infuriating deniability.
For a writer, it is useful to think of each character’s agenda in
any scene not only in terms of what they want – in terms of what
they want to achieve at this moment – but also in terms of what
they want from the other character(s). It is this – the wanting from
– that is likely to be most productive dramatically. And remember,
what they might want from another character might not be
conscious at all. We might understand it before they do.
Example one
pete Are you going to the disco tonight?
alan Dunno.
pete Julie’ll be there.
alan Julie?
pete You know, the bubbly one, with the legs.
alan Oh Julie.
pete Yeah, Julie.
(slight pause)
alan I got beaten at snooker again last night.
pete Yeah?
alan It’s that Brian – he cheats.
pete Oh. You can’t cheat at snooker. How can you cheat at
snooker?
The characters’ agendas 31
Example two
pete Are you going to the disco?
alan Dunno.
I got beaten at snooker again last night.
pete Yeah?
alan It’s that Brian. He cheats.
pete Oh.
Julie’ll be there. At the disco.
alan Julie?
pete You know, the bubbly one, with the legs.
alan Oh Julie.
pete Yeah, Julie.
(slight pause)
pete You can’t cheat at snooker. How can you cheat at snooker?
alan It’s the adding up.
pete How do you mean?
alan Well, he can do it and I can’t.
pete Ah.
More will be said about this passage later, but here we need only
note how little these characters listen to each other, and thus how
they relate – or fail to relate – to each other. Father is concerned
only to lay down the law about his son’s job, and Mother wishes
only to voice her concerns about the likely pregnancy of Kate,
the maid. Albert – who is in fact affected by both these topics far
more directly than either of his parents – is put in the position of
having to respond and trying to make sense of it all. It is his lack
of control of the agendas that adds much to the humour of the
scene, particularly as we know that he already has a job, and that
he is almost certainly responsible for Kate’s condition. An added
touch of humour is provided by Mother’s ‘What colour?’: she has
listened to Father’s statement but has not attended to the tone – the
humour arises out of the triviality of her question set against the
seriousness of the topic.
anne (laughing) But it’s a bit stupid letting yourself get hit by
the boom, isn’t it?
Status changes
Let us continue the above dialogue a little further. It could go like
this:
Lowering status
Different individuals have different attitudes towards status, some
ruthlessly using it and others doing so much less aggressively.
Sometimes we learn, too, that attempting to use status – or even
unintentionally allowing it to come into a conversation – can have
negative results. For example, a nuclear physicist may have a
friendly, chatty relationship with his or her hairdresser – until the
hairdresser finds out what the customer does for a living. Now
the hairdresser feels ignorant and inhibited in such company,
and clams up completely for fear of looking foolish. The nuclear
physicist changes to another hairdresser, and this time refuses
to be drawn on his or her profession, or perhaps pretends to be
something different altogether – a taxi driver or whatever. The
relationship with this new hairdresser is allowed to continue to be
friendly and chatty, though there is now a different awkwardness
– of the nuclear physicist always having to be careful in order not
to be discovered.
Or let us take another example. A wealthy female psychiatrist has a
daughter who attends a state school where most of the children come
from a very different background. The girl is having some problems,
so the psychiatrist, her mother, visits the (male) headteacher:
subtly hint at this agenda item and that – as they try to get what
they want through each line of the conversation.
Remember, though, that your characters may surprise you.
Through the interaction of their personalities, motivations and
agendas, they may suddenly take your dialogue into quite uncharted
territory – territory that you would never have predicted, and
which you certainly never planned. This might profoundly disturb
even the basis of your plot. It’s a good sign! If the dialogue is
strong, if the characters are truly interacting through it (or truly
‘quasi-interacting’, as in the Stoppard above), then the conflict –
or the fusion – will always lead to new territory. The scriptwriter
must learn to embrace this and to welcome, rather than inhibit, the
apparently dangerous. Only by allowing the dialogue to move in
whatever direction the interaction takes it can the writer allow real
vitality into a scene.
After all, a scene can always be (and almost always should be)
redrafted. It is then, in cool, analytical mode, that the writer has
to make decisions on whether or not to follow up some of the new
leads which have emerged in the scene just written. Quite apart
from making any adjustments to plans for the rest of the script, the
writer may at this point add some lines, alter others, change the
position of yet others and – most important of all – delete those
which are not paying their way. But if in the first instance the writer
has not allowed the dialogue to ‘write itself’ – has not allowed a
genuine element of spontaneity – then it will probably never really
rise above the pedestrian, and as a result may well fail to hold the
audience.
Constant reworking
It is often assumed that revising a script is something that happens
when a first draft has been completed. That is, of course, true, but
it is not the whole truth. The scriptwriter must also rework scenes
while the script is still in the process of being written, rereading and
revising the last scenes that he or she has written before continuing
with the new ones. A writer who simply makes a scene-by-scene
plan for a script and sticks to it rigidly will have no need to make
running revisions, but such a procedure is unlikely to result in work
The characters’ agendas 43
first draft (and any completely new material in later drafts), the
writer should take just as much care to keep separate files of first
versions of individual scenes – those first versions which have been
written by allowing the dialogue to ‘write itself’, before any initial
alterations. As I know to my cost, it really is infuriating to find that
– having changed your mind and then changed it back again about
how a section of dialogue should develop – you kept no copy of
that very first version and now you are having to try to reconstruct
it from memory. Recreating spontaneity is not easy: it is, after all,
a contradiction in terms.
Notes
1 Max Stafford Clarke presents this approach very persuasively in
Letters to George: The Account of a Rehearsal, London, Nick Hern.
2 Keith Johnstone (1979) Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre,
London, Methuen.
46
3
Naturalistic dialogue
September 1946.
Norfolk. A house in the middle of the fields. We see the large
kitchen of the house, the garden, and the end of an old barn.
(dave and ada simmonds are just moving in. Boxes and cases
are strewn around. dave and two removal men are manoeu-
vring a large wardrobe, 1930 type, from a lorry offstage. ada
is unpacking one of the cases. sarah kahn, her mother, is
buttering her bread on a table, and from a portable radio comes
a stirring part of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. ronnie kahn,
Ada’s brother, is standing on a box conducting both the music
and the movement of people back and forth. dave – unlike ada
and ronnie – speaks with a slight cockney accent.)
The first thing to hit us is that the dialogue here is full of life. We are
dropped straight into the middle of the scene, a busy scene – into
the middle of dialogue, the middle of the action. The dialogue feels
generally unforced and pleasingly messy, capturing domesticity
without being in the least bit dull. Even in these few lines we
begin to see the differences in character between Ronnie and Dave
but, importantly, it is the actions – their contributions to the
moving of the furniture and their responses to it – that give us this
opportunity. The dialogue is about doing – there is a genuine need
for it; it is not people sitting around talking for the sake of it. Only
the joke about Ada’s poor hearing feels a little forced – it works too
well, and perhaps we sense the author’s hand. We will return to this
extract in Chapter 4, but for now we should note it as an example
of a certain approach to naturalism, very much of a piece with that
of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and other scripts of that period.
Now let us look at another script which might also be considered
to be written in the style of selective naturalism – Mike Leigh’s film
Secrets and Lies:
hortense Yeah.
roxanne Not on the machines?
hortense (laughing slightly) No.
Naturalistic dialogue 53
Here, too, we have a scene full of life, and we have been dropped
into the middle of it. (Of course the opening stage direction, ‘A
little later’, is aimed at the director, actors and crew – we must
be able to see that the meal has progressed since the previous
scene.) By comparison, even the extract from I’m Talking About
Jerusalem – excellent though it is – seems a little stilted. Leigh
works through improvisation, only producing a script after many
weeks of working with his actors, and developing particularly both
characterization and relationships. This complexity and apparent
spontaneity shows through: each line arises naturally from the
relationships and dynamics of the particular situation, yet there
is an effortlessness about it – none of the lines seems forced. Each
54 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
positioned at one end of the patio and leaves it there, giving a rare
effect of all the conversations having equal prominence.) However,
whereas meaning is always transparent – at least superficially – in
Mike Leigh, in The Bill there is frequent use of police jargon (for
example, ‘My body …’, ‘Sierra Oscar from 181 …’). This is there
partly because it is, on occasions, what the police would say;
but it is also there to add a certain flavour. Very often it is not
particularly important whether the audience actually understands
the jargon: its purpose is to be jargon, to impress upon the
audience that they are being given a glimpse of a separate, enclosed
world with its own language. Often in this sort of series there will
also be an element of ‘clever-cleverness’ in the dialogue, again not
because this is how police officers necessarily talk to each other,
but because this is how we enjoy thinking that they talk to each
other. The dialogue is written to live up to our expectations. Just as
the normal day-to-day activities of police officers (all those forms
to fill in …) are much less exciting than any single episode of The
Bill, so in real life their dialogue is often very dull; in the television
series it invariably has a little added spice. In Secrets and Lies the
dialogue really does reflect much of ordinary conversation – we
are given the opportunity to focus on the verbal limitations of a
number of the characters – while in The Bill nothing is allowed
to stay ordinary for very long. This is a police series which prides
itself upon being true to life (and in many respects, such as the
accuracy of police procedures, it is indeed impressively accurate);
yet certainly, in its dialogue, it presents what is in fact an illusion
of gritty naturalism.
In each of the examples given above there are lines which appear
not to contribute very much at all – the trivia of our verbal inter-
action – yet none of the scenes comes to a halt under the weight of
normality. This is partly because each of these scenes relies heavily
upon action. Things happen. While of course there is a place in
drama for speech set outside a context of action, it is sometimes
hard to keep a momentum in dialogue which is only about itself,
which is only about the subject of the conversation. But in each
of these scenes there is a strong element of business – the physical
moving of furniture into the house, the cooking, serving, eating and
clearing away of the barbecue, the arrival one after the other of a
host of police officers and a suspect.
Naturalistic dialogue 57
already know, just for the benefit of the audience. The subtitle
above – ‘Is that your green-eyed blonde sister crossing the busy
dual carriageway over there?’ – would of course be ridiculous as
a piece of dialogue, but it is not actually much more extreme than
many such nuggets embedded in scripts received by film companies,
television companies and theatres every day. (It has to be said that
radio tends to invite even more of this type of error than do the
other media, as many writers wrongly assume that in radio, not
only must we compensate for the lack of narrator, but also for the
lack of visuals.)
Characters must only tell each other what they feel they need
to tell each other; they must never tell each other what the writer
feels that he or she needs to tell the audience. Any information
to be imparted must be presented in such a way as to meet this
first criterion. Failure in this respect means that a confusion has
arisen between the agendas of the characters and the agenda of
the author.
However, I should add just one rider to this in the case of
radio. On either the small or big screen or on stage, a character
does not cease to be there if he or she is not speaking. Indeed, a
silent character can be the main focus of our attention. On radio,
however, that is virtually what happens; radio creates a picture
in our heads, and that picture changes as the scene moves along.
So, near the start of each new scene, each character should speak,
so that we can include them in the mental picture (if they do not
speak, their presence must at least be referred to – although this
is a less powerful signal than speech). Furthermore, each character
should then say a line or two at fairly regular intervals – about
once per page – or else they will drop out of the mental picture.
Then, if they do speak – after, say, three pages of being silent – the
effect is surreal, as though the character had suddenly shoved his
or her head through the wall to say something. To this extent, then,
the writer does have an agenda which has to be imposed on the
characters somewhat artificially, and carrying this off by always
giving the impression that each character needs to speak each line
is a particular skill of the radio scriptwriter.
Don’t make it work too hard! 65
This is pretty terrible stuff. The two characters are each telling each
other information which the other already knows, with the thinnest
of pretexts, merely to inform the audience; and then Cath invites
the audience to come to a conclusion about their relationship. Of
course, in a more subtle script, Cath’s final speech could be viewed
differently – we might see that they do not in fact have a close
relationship, although Cath believes that they do. Alternatively,
perhaps Cath could be trying to give an impression of closeness to
Alice while not believing it herself, and Alice might or might not be
taken in by this. In the context of this awful dialogue, however, we
are tempted to take everything at face value, as there are no other
signs of subtlety.
Avoid spoon-feeding
So, how might such a piece of dialogue have been better scripted?
There are of course a multitude of ways in which it could be
rewritten, depending upon what the writer wanted to achieve.
Some of the information could be omitted altogether, while other
pieces might remain, but only because the characters are given
credible motivation for mentioning them. Here is one alternative
version:
andy I was in the canteen with her yesterday and she didn’t
make eye contact with me. At all. The whole meal.
bill I’m really sorry.
andy Hold it in position can you.
I know you are. I know.
I’m wondering who she might tell.
bill Nobody. I shouldn’t think she’ll tell anyone.
andy You did.
She will.
You moved it. Can you hold it still? In the same place?
bill I’ll tell her not to.
andy I’m assuming you did that already.
(pause)
I’ve never asked you. Do you think you got your job on
merit?
bill How do you know she knows?
andy Because of how she is with me.
bill So she might not … ?
andy Well I know she knows now don’t I.
(pause)
bill … It wasn’t … I didn’t mean to hurt …
andy What did you mean? What did you intend?
bill Nothing.
andy Nothing? You … you ruin things, but you didn’t intend
anything?
bill I don’t know.
andy You know.
They’re not going to match up. The holes. They’re not going
to match up.
First let us look at that added knife from Andy: ‘I’ve never asked
you. Do you think you got your job on merit?’ This is apparently
unconnected with the rest of the dialogue and elicits no reply, but
it will have been noted by Bill (as well as by us). It is as though
Andy is saying that Bill has not only been useless in letting Angela
know this secret, but has always been useless – he didn’t even get
his job fairly. But the connection is implied rather than stated –
it’s up to us to try to make sense of it. And we suspect that Andy
may come to regret having said it; the payoff has been set up for
later.
Don’t make it work too hard! 73
of the play, while in fact the playwright wants to reserve this for
the following scene, a surprise – the return of Hermione, seemingly
from the dead, in the final scene of the play. Using the dialogue
in the previous scene, then, to tell about the reconciliation rather
than showing it has the effect of downgrading its impact, leaving
the way clear for the real climax.
As these examples show, there is certainly a place for using
dialogue to tell rather than to show, but the positioning of such
dialogue in the script as a whole needs to be considered. There are
notable exceptions (such as the storytelling at the heart of Conor
McPherson’s The Weir – but then this is a play about the telling of
stories), but in general too much telling and not enough showing
can lead members of the audience to feel that they are too far from
the action that really matters.
hearsay – too much telling – and ultimately will not trust this
evidence. We need to be shown things, not merely to be told about
them, if we are to believe them.
I will now give you an example from a radio script of my own.
Betrayers deals with attitudes of British – or more specifically English
– people towards foreigners, and how these attitudes are related to
our treatment of asylum-seekers. Beatrice, a Latin American, is
married to Mike, an Englishman. They seem to function well as a
couple, but we come to realize that their relationship is based upon
his patronizing of her and her acceptance of being patronized. This
all becomes clear when Beatrice’s brother, Esteban, arrives. Esteban
becomes furious at what his sister has come to accept as normal,
turning on both of them:
The problem with the first draft of this play was that we were
almost entirely told about this patronizing; we were shown only
the tiniest glimpses of it. Almost all the evidence for its existence
lay in these speeches of Esteban. Here was dialogue certainly being
made to work too hard. The audience may well have become
impatient: why should they believe all this when they were not
shown it? They were only being given Esteban’s dialogue about it –
which is the courtroom equivalent of hearsay evidence.
84 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
This is bad to the point of being both absurd and funny, but, if
you can face it, you might like to try to pinpoint precisely why it
is so dreadful. Outside of the world of script exercises there are of
course few pieces of dialogue quite as consistently wince-inducing
as this, but an analysis of errors (using the examination of the Cath
and Alice dialogue as a starting point) may nevertheless help to
underscore some of the worst pitfalls to be avoided.
86
5
Beyond the literal
Subtle ambiguities
Good dialogue thrives on subtle ambiguities. Ambiguities invite the
audience in, to try to clarify what exactly is going on, what exactly
is meant, what exactly is felt. At the start of Caryl Churchill’s
haunting play Far Away, for example, the dialogue seems very
straightforward – certainly the language itself is uncomplicated
– and the meanings clear. They are anything but. The girl Joan
88 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
is telling Harper, her aunt, that she saw some strange things the
previous night. She had climbed out of her bedroom window
and watched events from up a tree. But every time Harper gives
a reasonable explanation of what Joan had seen, Joan appears
to accept it and then quietly reveals another piece of information
that shows Harper’s explanation so far to have been untrue. This
happens a number of times, with Harper’s final explanation being
that what Joan had actually seen was a party:
The writer could simply have had Joan declare to Harper what
she had seen, in one unbroken account. This way, though, we
learn about the events almost as Joan sees them, little by little,
trying to piece together what they mean. More importantly, this
way a major ambiguity emerges in the character of Joan. Is she
simply a naïve little girl, telling what she has seen, one thing at
a time, and asking for explanations? Or does she really know –
or at least somehow intuitively sense – what has been going on?
And if so, is the way in which she releases information in fact a
way of enticing Harper into committing herself to more and more
lies? Does Joan at some point believe that a dog was run over,
or even that there was a dog at all? Initially, as she asks about
the animal, it seems that she does believe the story, and even
sympathizes; but then, when she tells her aunt that she saw the
children’s faces with blood on them, it is clear that she knew all
along that there was no dog. Or is it clear? Perhaps, even as the
lies accumulate, she has still been trying as hard as she could to
believe everything she has been told. The ambiguity of meaning
draws us in.
Now let us examine a very different example, from Anthony
Minghella’s wonderful screenplay for the film The English Patient
(based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje). The scenes we will look
at take place during a pre-war Christmas party in North Africa:
we have already seen Almásy picking at a piece of cake, removing
the marzipan icing; Katharine is married to Clifton (also referred
to as Geoffrey).
90 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
So, these are the actions in the scenes. How might we script them?
This is Minghella’s realization:
is?’, but his actual words must immediately remind Almásy that
he has seen Katharine – much more fully than Clifton means –
just a few seconds previously. So here we have dialogue that is
not ambiguous in its intended meaning but which is received
ambiguously by both the other character (Almásy) and by the
audience.
In the following scene, Clifton finds Katharine and we are told
in the stage directions that he ‘wonders briefly how almásy had
missed katharine’. Of course, this stage direction is available only
to readers; as audience we catch this momentary wondering on his
face. Nothing is put into words. The audience is made to do a little
work (‘What is he thinking? Does he suspect anything?’), which
involves them far more than any dialogue would. Then when he
speaks, that very first word ‘Darling’ rams home both to Katharine
and to us the nature of the situation, though Clifton would be
entirely unaware of the poignancy of that word for Katharine (and
for us) at that moment. The lack of dialogue in the love-making
scene is now contrasted with Clifton’s slightly bumbling verbal
ineptitude. ‘You poor sausage’ carries with it just that innocent,
non-sensual, dated, upper-middle-class conventionality which
immediately emphasizes the huge gulf in personality between this
man and Almásy.
The subtle ambiguities continue. Katharine emphasizes that she
is hot rather than ill; we know that her being flushed at this point
is not merely a result of the weather. Clifton then comments, ‘Lady
H said she thought you might be pregnant.’ This too carries various
meanings and associations. There is the literal one – Lady H’s
opinion – and then there is Clifton’s unstated hope that Lady H
might be right; Katharine, meanwhile, has the again unstated,
fervent wish that she is not pregnant by Clifton, and is also
instantly reminded (as are we) that she may indeed be pregnant –
though as a direct result of the immediately preceding events. The
great skill here is in giving Clifton lines which are entirely credible,
absolutely in accordance with his character and the situation, at
the same time as throwing up all these nuances of meaning and
association for the other character and for the audience.
When Clifton suggests taking Katharine home – meaning their
house locally – she immediately re-interprets this as home –
England; ‘close to tears’ she implores him to take her there, saying
how desperately homesick she is. Clifton, of course, is meant to
94 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
not diminish the fact that the dialogue carries the meaning anyway,
almost despite the characters. Here, then, we have a non-literal
meaning that seems to be communicated direct from scriptwriter
to audience without the awareness of either of the characters, yet
at the same time expressed through their lines, which are entirely
convincing and do not for a moment seem forced.
This ‘non-stating’ in the dialogue is not just a matter of
cleverness; nor, in this particular context, does it merely involve the
audience further by making us work; nor is it simply a matter of
reflecting more accurately how people relate to each other. Rather,
the ambiguity hugely increases the tension in what is already a
tremendously tense situation. For the characters – and for us – to
finally know something, without any doubts, releases the tension.
In art as in life, knowing the truth, however terrible, gnaws less at
the soul than being in constant doubt. And a script that genuinely
gnaws at the soul is a strong script, gripping the attention of the
audience. In a script aimed at maintaining tension, elements of doubt
– of ambiguity – can be extremely valuable. The dialogue must not
attempt to clarify characters’ motivations and knowledge but rather
to hint at them. We must be left to try to fathom out the rest.
The scene ends with more straightforward dramatic irony.
Clifton kisses Katharine’s head and asks what she smells of. She
is horrified, and so (identifying with Katharine) are we: he might
guess that it is Almásy she actually smells of. But then he realizes
what it is: ‘Marzipan! I think you’ve got marzipan in your hair!
No wonder you’re homesick.’ Katharine is relieved – it is not the
smell of Almásy after all – but it is only the audience who fully
understand: ironically the marzipan, which Clifton associates with
the very English Christmas cake, is in fact the smell of Almásy; we
have seen him picking marzipan off a piece of cake and it is this
which has found its way into Katharine’s hair (probably without
her being conscious of it). Once again, the dialogue is made to
carry ambiguities of which the characters are only partly aware.
In this example from The English Patient, then, we have a
multitude of non-literal meanings in the dialogue. Some of the
lines are clearly intending to deceive, while others are much more
ambiguous, carrying a number of valid meanings simultaneously
and at times allowing characters to deceive even themselves. The
dialogue is never made to work too hard (in the case of the first
scene quoted, it is not made to work at all!) and yet accomplishes
96 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Dialogue of self-delusion
Dialogue where a character is self-deceiving can be particularly
effective, and this is frequently seen in comedy (although it can be
tremendously powerful in other genres too, as demonstrated by Willy
Loman in Death of a Salesman). Whether it is David Brent in The
Office allowing himself to believe that he is a managerial genius or
Jeremy in Peep Show convincing himself that he really does have the
skills to be a life coach, in their speeches it is not so much the need
to decode subtle subtext that holds us, but rather it is the humour of
the distance between what they genuinely believe about themselves
and what is so patently obvious to us. It is all about the gap.
An excellent example of this occurs in American Hustle. At one
point con-artist Irving’s wife Rosalyn has made a colossal mistake
in telling her boyfriend Pete, a leading mafia figure, that Irving’s
colleague is in fact with the IRS. This almost gets Irving killed.
But when faced with her mistake she simply deludes herself, telling
Irving: ‘I knew it. I have always said, Irving, that you are very,
very hard to motivate. And I knew that Pete was going to go over
there and knock some sense into your head. I’ve been reading this
book, Irving. It’s by Wayne Dyer, about the power of intention.’
The degree of self-delusion is too great for Irving to even attempt
to challenge. But then Rosalyn is a mistress of self-delusion. At
another point in the film Irving gives her a microwave oven, and
tells her not to put metal in it. She puts metal in it. It explodes.
This time – when the fire has been put out – she tells Irving that
she has read somewhere that microwaves take all of the nutrition
out of the food. She goes on, ‘Bring something into our house that’s
going to take all the nutrition out of our food and then light our
house on fire? Thank God for me.’ After all, she can’t have been
wrong. In the world she creates for herself, the fire is the fault of
the microwave. Rosalyn too is a con-artist, but an unwitting one,
and the person she is conning most is herself.
Beyond the literal 97
richness of the ambiguities, and in this case their comic effects, are
felt none the less strongly for that.
Wilde litters his dialogue with the unexpected. Surprises make
us laugh:
jack My brother.
miss prism More shameful debts and extravagance?
chasuble Still leading his life of pleasure?
jack (shaking his head) Dead!
chasuble Your brother Ernest dead?
jack Quite dead.
miss prism What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it.
Here we have dialogue which deliciously mixes the true with the
absurd. Again, there is much of the unexpected, a number of
statements being florid embellishments of precisely the opposite
of what one might reasonably anticipate. Lady Bracknell lauds
ignorance rather than education and praises smoking as though it
were a serious occupation. Yet merely to have a character present
the reverse of that which is normally expressed would be tedious:
what makes this scene arresting – and amusing – is that these
statements do have their roots in real life, real experience. They are
a mixture of gross exaggeration and truths which are expressed
with a shocking honesty.
Lady Bracknell’s first speech in this extract may be a parody of
upper-class attitudes of the time, but we can almost believe that
she would work together with some other dowager. Her use of
the word ‘affectionate’ is particularly choice, since it contains an
element of ambiguity. Surely no truly affectionate mother would
be so calculating, but on the other hand, perhaps this is how such
people genuinely show affection. (We will recognize this ambiguity
– and be all the more amused by it – if, as is invariably the case with
this play, the part is played straight. In this way, the actress implies
that there is no question but that Lady Bracknell believes every
word she says, so leaving the audience to do much of the work.)
The lines about smoking, too, seem absurd, but at the same time
amuse us because they remind us of how pointless, unchallenging
and trifling the lives of many of the upper classes are.
The final paragraph of this extract is a little more complex. Lady
Bracknell’s opinions may at first appear ridiculous, though they are
based on an attitude that does exist. But when she goes on to say
that fortunately in England, education is completely ineffectual,
she is making a point which is much closer to reality (though the
Beyond the literal 101
Consistency of style
It might be objected that this type of dialogue is artificial. Of course
it is artificial. It is not intended to be anything else – though to be
most effective it should be delivered as though it were the most
normal mode of speech in the world. Wilde is not pretending that
this is how people really speak to each other, but nevertheless his
dialogue does bear some relation to the effete upper-class speech
of the period. The writer is indulging his love of word-play at the
same time as parodying the style of speech, as well as the attitudes,
of this class of people. But we don’t listen to it as though we were
listening to the dialogue of The English Patient, or indeed any
number of other scripts which deal in heightened naturalism – if
we do, we will soon become very irritated. We listen to it for what
it is, with its own limitations but with its own delights.
This leads us on to a major consideration for the writer of
dialogue: consistency of style. Any script represents a certain world,
in which certain sorts of things happen. These worlds vary from
writer to writer, and in many cases from script to script within the
output of each writer. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example,
inhabits a magical, innocent world, where there may be misunder-
standings but there is little real malice. Othello, on the other hand,
inhabits a world of worldly cynicism and deceit, where no fairies
may be expected to come to the aid of anyone. Indeed, if fairies
were suddenly to appear to Othello and make clear to him the evil
of Iago and the error of his ways, we would find it totally uncon-
vincing: the world that has been established here has no room for
102 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
vincent
… But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
jules
What?
vincent
It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over
there that we got here, but it’s just, there it’s a little different.
jules
Example?
vincent
Well, you can walk into a movie theatre and buy a beer. And
I don’t mean just, like, in no paper cup. I’m talking about a
glass of beer. And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s.
And, you know what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese
in Paris?
jules
They don’t call it a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese?
vincent
No, man, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t
know what the fuck a Quarter-Pounder is.
jules
What’d they call it?
vincent
They call it a Royale with Cheese.
jules
(repeating)
Royale with Cheese.
vincent
Yeah, that’s right.
Beyond the literal 105
jules
What’d they call a Big Mac?
vincent
Well, Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.
jules
Le Big Mac. What do they call a Whopper?
vincent
I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King. But you know what
they put on French fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
jules
What?
vincent
Mayonnaise.
jules
Goddam!
vincent
I seen ’em do it, man. They fuckin’ drown ’em in that shit.
jules
Yuck!
Is this speech from the blonde what she really might say in an
interview? Would she even speak at this length at this point? The
answer to both is, almost certainly not. What we are hearing is
not what she would say to Hitchcock; rather it is an expression
of her hopes, fears and doubts at that moment, but presented as
dialogue. And Hitchcock is allowed to hear it, since he already
knows what her hopes, fears and doubts are. The speech does not
necessarily represent her conscious thoughts either; hopes, fears
and doubts may be represented in dialogue of this sort even if they
are not conscious. It is more an expression of her state of mind at
that moment. Similarly, would Hitchcock eat a baked custard in
this way during such an interview? Hitchcock was of course both
powerful and eccentric, so it is a possibility, but surely the action
– and his ‘Delicious’ – operate at another level, where she is the
baked custard. This is well beyond straightforward naturalism.
The following is an extract from a television script of my own,
No Further Cause for Concern. Danny is one of a number of
114 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
A scriptwriter’s world
In the context of consistency of style of dialogue, it seems appro-
priate here to say a word about the limits of that style for any one
scriptwriter. Some writers feel entirely comfortable moving from
one type of social world to another, but for many the particular
voice that we associate with their dialogue is only in part a matter
of style itself – it is more a matter of the clearly delineated world
which they tend to inhabit. Ayckbourn is most comfortable with
the middle classes, for example, while John Godber is most at home
with the rough-and-tumble end of working-class life. Stoppard is
almost always at his best when presenting the intelligentsia (indeed,
the dialogue given to the one working-class character to appear in
his play The Real Thing is almost embarrassing).
What are the dangers of a scriptwriter limiting the spread of
types of characters? One risk is simply that the world presented
may feel too small – as audience, we may want to break out of
the confines imposed upon us. If we watch a production full of
the well-off middle classes nattering about second cars and second
homes we may soon start to itch to have a labourer burst in, and
vice-versa. But it is not only that the world presented may seem too
narrow; a further danger is that too many of the characters may
begin to sound very much like each other.
116 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Naturalism in non-naturalism
There are times when a scriptwriter may choose to alter the effect of
dialogue not so much by the words themselves, as by how he or she
chooses to present them. So a section of dialogue which is in essence
naturalistic may be heightened by being presented in a non-natural-
istic way. The words may be ‘normal’, but the context is not.
Let me give some very different examples of this. The first
technique is a common one; the particular example comes from
the film French Kiss. The two central characters are deep in conver-
sation, walking through Paris; they reach a park bench where they
continue talking. We see them first walking in the street, and then
– obviously a minute or two later – seated on the park bench, yet
there is no break in the conversation at all. Here we are not shown
two snippets of a conversation, but rather are presented with one
continuous piece of dialogue despite the fact that there is a jump
of time and place in the middle of it. On the one hand the writer
has wanted to avoid a break in the flow of speech and thought,
and yet on the other he has wanted to imply that the conversation
took place over a lengthy stretch of time. So he has it both ways,
and in effect stretches reality a little. We are not meant to notice
the impossibility of what we see and hear: it is a sleight of hand
(Shakespeare frequently employs similar sleights of hand, particu-
larly through use of two simultaneous and ultimately contradictory
time-schemes). This is a non-naturalism that has no wish to be seen
as such, so the effect is really one of heightened naturalism rather
than of conspicuous artifice.
The second example makes no attempt at concealing its art. In
the film Ocean’s Eleven (writers, Ted Griffin and Steven Soderbergh)
there is a sequence held together by a continuous piece of dialogue,
in which one of the thieves asks another whether they can possibly
succeed in all the tasks necessary to rob the casino. At the same
time, across the conversation, what we actually see is those tasks
being tackled: it is not clear at that moment whether we are seeing
the reality – jumping into the future – or one of the character’s
Heightened naturalism 119
1st girl
(Making noises)
Ugh, he kissed me, he kissed me.
teacher
(Offscreen)
That’s the second time this month!
Step up here!
As the teacher, really glaring now, speaks, alvy rises from his
seat and moves over to her. Angry, she points with her hand
Heightened naturalism 121
while the students turn their heads to watch what will happen
next.
alvy
What’d I do?
teacher
Step up here.
alvy
What’d I do?
teacher
You should be ashamed of yourself.
The students, their heads still turned, look back at alvy, now
an adult, sitting in the last seat of the second row.
alvy (as adult)
(First offscreen, then onscreen as camera moves over to the
back of the classroom)
Why, I was just expressing a healthy sexual curiosity.
teacher
(The younger alvy standing next to her)
Six-year-old boys don’t have girls on their minds.
alvy (as adult)
(Still sitting in the back of the classroom)
I did.
The girl the young Alvy kissed turns to the older Alvy; she
gestures and speaks.
1st girl
For God’s sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.
alvy (as adult)
(Gesturing)
Well, I never had a latency period. I can’t help it.
teacher
(With young Alvy still at her side)
Why couldn’t you have been more like Donald?
(The camera pans over to donald, sitting up tall in his seat,
then back to the teacher)
Now, there was a model boy!
alvy (as child)
(Still standing next to the teacher)
Tell the folks where you are today, Donald.
donald
122 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
to look him in the eye while he stabs him to death. It is only later
that we discover that Batts was all but killed in the first place for
failing to be respectful to Tommy in a bar. More importantly, the
dialogue establishes a tone of camaraderie: the men in the car are
together, and talk in that highly informal, only half-listening and
yet co-operative manner which sets the tone for much of the rest of
the film, for Goodfellas is also the story of one man who is willing
to do almost anything to be accepted – to be one of the ‘goodfellas’.
At the start of Goodfellas, then, the tone of the whole film is set,
together with the tone of the dialogue too (and we very soon realize
that Scorsese and Pileggi have leapt forwards in time in order to
use these opening scenes for just this purpose). The tone of this
dialogue is bound up with the themes and meanings of the film: it
is very hard to disentangle the two – dialogue tone on the one hand,
themes or meanings on the other; perhaps one should not try too
hard to separate them in any case. The scriptwriter must allow the
two to feed each other.
Over recent years there has been a marked increase in multi-
stranded scripts, particularly films. Crash, Traffic and Babel are
good examples. Here, since the strands are connected but also
separate, there are clear opportunities for variation of tone.
However, those opportunities are not always taken. Babel, for
example, has three separate narratives, set in Morocco, the USA
and Japan respectively. Yet despite the contrasts in location, the
three separate casts and the three separate storylines the tone of
the whole piece is pretty uniform: angst. Despite the film’s success
(though one reviewer described it as ‘exasperatingly conceited’) this
seems to have been a missed opportunity.
The start of Lynn Nottage’s wonderful and harrowing play
Ruined establishes a clear tone from the outset. Here are the
opening stage directions:
camera or microphone does this job in other media. But the fact
that it has to be done differently on stage does not mean that we
cannot achieve a comparable effect of slipping from one conver-
sation to another. We do not have to limit our choice of what we
hear or do not hear – we do not have to write the dialogue as a
solid block – simply because this is a script for the stage.
There are two or three basic solutions to the presentation
of party-type dialogue on stage. In film we can move from one
conversation to another; on stage we can, in fact, do the same. A
character can move around the performing area from one conver-
sation to another so that these are the conversations that we hear,
but as there are no microphones to do the selecting for us, the
conversations which are out of focus have to fade to a much lower
level of audibility (a more stylized approach might make use of
freezes). Or, just as in film, instead of following a character from
one conversation to another, certain pieces of dialogue may become
audible and inaudible of their own accord: our attention is drawn
from one conversation to another simply on the basis of what we
can hear most clearly.
Another, rather more conventional, solution – still often used –
is exemplified in the following stage directions at the opening of
Act Two of Chekhov’s Ivanov:
Through all of this we are with Mum and Dad, with Abigail at
some distance from us. It seems that Abigail may be about to
commit suicide. In fact she does not jump, but slips and falls. After
she falls, with the comment, ‘Oh bugger, I’ve fallen off’ we are
taken into her thoughts and memories.
abigail (V.O. running) This morning, before I fell off the top
of our tower block, Billy McCready chased me for two miles
– for my new red retro Nike trainers, that Dad got off Steve
from work, and my cream linen suit, that I started to make,
but me Mum finished. (shouting to billy) You stay back Billy
McCready! You won’t get me or my red retro Nike trainers!
(V.O.) He chased me all the way from the old gas works and the
house that me Mum and Dad used to live in before I was born.
We are then taken back through recent days with her parents,
reliving events, the scenes being regularly punctuated by more of
her voice-overs (there are seven in total) looking back from when
she slipped, until we eventually catch up with the present, the start
of the play. Then we hear the same lines from part of the opening
scene again, but this time we are close to Abigail, not her parents,
hearing only part of what they say from the distance, and this time
hearing some of Abigail’s thoughts:
abigail (V.O.) Up here you can properly see the gas works.
Tone, pace and conflict 133
There’s nothing blocking the view. And I can see Mum and
Dad’s old house. (to mum) Mum, please don’t be mean to
Dad. He’s trying his best.
mum (distant) I’m not being mean to your Dad.
abigail He’s a good person. Be kind to him.
mum Be kind to him?
abigail (V.O.) I can get some proper perspective and I can
finish the painting. (to dad) Blimey, Dad you look terrible.
mum Abi, I’ve seen pictures of people who jump. It’s not nice.
abigail No you haven’t. (V.O.) Why do they think I’m going
to jump?
dad/mum (screaming) Abigail! / Abi!
Pace
Sometimes musical analogies may be useful. In a short piece of
music, or a song, it is often perfectly satisfactory for the pace to be
the same throughout. There is little or no variation needed. If we
enjoy, say, The Beatles’ She Loves You, or Schubert’s Mein!, we
do not complain that there is no change of pace: we do not have
time to get bored. In a piece even a little longer, though – whether
Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody or a Mahler symphony – we need
some variation. This not only avoids monotony but also allows the
pace of one section to bring into stronger relief that of another. And
some sections need to be slow, while others can only really work
if taken at speed.
The same considerations apply in scriptwriting, although they
tend to be less obvious – we don’t write Adagio or Presto for
different parts of a script. We need variation of pace, both in
small scale and in large scale. In the small scale there needs to be
variation within conversations: the most furious row may use-fully
be broken up by a slower, subdued, almost controlled interlude,
134 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
where we know that the full force of the storm must break out
again. In the larger scale there needs to be contrast between whole
sections. In John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, for example, the
cutting, thrusting dialogue is offset by those parts of the play where
we only hear Jimmy playing his trumpet in another room, while
those present are talking things over quietly. Even in a play as full
of quick and quick-witted dialogue as Much Ado About Nothing
there are sections where the audience is allowed time to relax a
little.
Let me quote further from my radio play, A Few Kind Words.
This 45-minute script is divided into three scenes, each one shorter
than the last. The first scene begins slowly, but then works up to
a climax when Jenny refuses her father’s request that she write an
epitaph for her mother’s gravestone. Tommy’s son-in-law Roy is
also present:
there is contrast between this and the preceding scenes and there
is also contrast, both of pace and tone, within this scene, from line
to line.
When it comes to performance, actors and directors will talk
about pace and, quite rightly, they will not be talking merely about
the speed at which the lines themselves are delivered. They will
also be talking about the speed at which cues are picked up – in
other words, the space between one line and another. In the extract
above, none of the lines would be spoken fast, but many of them
would continue without any gap at all from the preceding line.
This is partly a matter of interpretation, but it is also a matter of
you, the scriptwriter, hearing these lines in your head. If you have
heard them well, then they will probably be heard similarly by
talented performers; the meanings will affect the pacing of cues
which the performers give to them. But you can help further, simply
by writing-in pauses if you wish this pace – the pace of the cues –
to be slowed down, or on the other hand writing in overlapping,
cutting in or simultaneous where appropriate (or you can use the
system demonstrated in the extract from Top Girls in Chapter 1).
Remember that silence – pauses – allows the audience an oppor-
tunity to assimilate what has gone before, and thus can be very
important. It is well known that Pinter was fastidious about his
pauses, but so have been many other writers, for the gaps between
lines – in which characters themselves give time or fail to give
time to consider what has gone before – can have a very powerful
influence on the effectiveness of any given piece of dialogue.
Moment-to-moment conflict
The conflicts referred to so far are clearly part of the plot, as well
as being central to the development of characterization. But they
must also be present in the dialogue. They may not necessarily be
directly stated – though sometimes they are precisely that – but
they must be present, in whatever form. The conflicts might be
hinted at or might be displaced on to something else altogether;
nevertheless, they must be there.
These are the big conflicts, the major ones which shape a
whole script, but there must also be minor conflicts right the way
through the dialogue (conflicts of status, of power, of control of the
agenda). These minor conflicts in the dialogue pull us in, just as do
the major ones, calling on us to unravel what is going on and then
inviting us to make choices on behalf of the characters.
If we present dialogue without choices, we give the audience too
little to do. Furthermore, if there are no choices in the dialogue –
within characters or between them (because there are no conflicts)
– this also cuts down the desire of the audience to know what
happens next. If instead the scriptwriter allows the dialogue to flag,
if at any point he or she allows the dialogue to carry the message
that all conflicts have been resolved, then the audience may well
lose interest, deciding either to change channel or to leave the
building.
Tone, pace and conflict 139
Climax
Let us now look at where conflict reaches a climax within a script,
and how the dialogue functions at such points. We turn once more
to Arthur Miller, one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, for
an example. In the first act of Death of A Salesman, Miller presents
us with the Loman family: Willy, Linda, Biff and Happy (along
with a few other characters whom we shall ignore for now). Miller
could simply drop us straight into a scene involving the whole
family, but he chooses not to; instead, he first carefully shows them
to us in pairs and in trios. The dialogue explores these relationships
one after another: Linda and Willy; Biff and Happy; Willy with Biff
and Happy in the past (though as if in the present in Willy’s head);
Linda and Willy again; Willy and Happy; Biff, Happy and Linda.
Only then, at the end of the act, does he allow the four of them to
talk together, and the result is an explosion.
The important element to consider here is form. The form
chosen by Miller has led him to present us with sections of dialogue
which gradually build up to a climax. He really is like a bomb-
maker, using dialogue carefully to add one ingredient after another
until all are present. Then there is only the touchpaper to be lit.
However, the climax here should not be confused with the
element of pace in dialogue. A climax takes place when a certain
Tone, pace and conflict 141
Brechtian dialogue
The term ‘Brechtian’ has come to mean any form of theatre
employing techniques of ‘alienation’. The term is also used, but to
a much lesser extent, in other media. Brecht was aware that the
Highly stylized dialogue 145
An absurd approach
The other major non-naturalistic approach to dialogue in the
twentieth century has come through what is now known as
‘absurd’ or ‘absurdist’ writing. Samuel Beckett is generally accepted
as being the father of this style, while many other major writers
in Britain and abroad (particularly France; Beckett wrote in both
English and French) have adopted a similar approach – Pinter,
Ionesco, N. F. Simpson and Edward Albee among others. Rather
as with Brechtian theatre, while new scripts written in a straight
forwardly absurdist style are a relative rarity these days, the essence
of the style appears to have soaked into the collective subconscious
of the scriptwriting fraternity, so that a writer such as Stoppard can
use many of the techniques of Beckett without ever being labelled
an ‘absurdist’. (After reading the following, the reader might like to
turn again to the extract from Albert’s Bridge on pp. 31–2, noting
there some traces of the style of absurd theatre.)
The following example is from Beckett’s most famous play,
Waiting for Godot. Precisely who – or what – Godot is never
becomes clear; neither is it clear why these characters are waiting
for him. The set consists simply of a country road with a tree.
Poetic dialogue
In general, if scripts using highly stylized dialogue are the hardest
to sell, then scripts using poetic dialogue are the hardest to sell of
the hardest to sell. We may all greatly admire Under Milk Wood
or the work of Tony Harrison or, for that matter, Murder in the
Cathedral, but in our own time there is really hardly any market
for poetic dialogue. In fact, if one were to give a single piece of
advice on how not to have your script accepted, it would be to
write it in poetry.
But again, there are exceptions, particularly on the stage, and
they vary enormously. Tony Harrison has already been mentioned,
but there are others such as the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott,
slipping back and forth from poetry to prose in, for example,
Ti-Jean and His Brothers; or there is the muscular, obscene and
dynamic poetic dialogue of Steven Berkoff in plays like East and
Greek. Clearly in all these scripts, as in the Dylan Thomas play,
there is a real delight in the use of language for its own sake, but
for those determined to write poetic dialogue, the strongest piece of
advice – actually borne out by these scripts – must be not to be self-
indulgent. The poetry, however stunning in itself, must always be
at the service of the drama. Just as in all other forms of dialogue, it
must always be developing character, plot or some other aspect of
the drama (in whatever way – obscure, subtle or otherwise). Words
for their own sake – whether poetry or prose – are not enough. And
when you read these successful poetic scripts you see that every
flourish of rhetoric is, in fact, at the service of some other aspect of
the script; there are no mere words.
Notes
1 Writers, William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, from
the novel by Raymond Chandler.
2 Writers, Phil Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, from the novel by Forrest
Carter.
156
9
The character tells the story
Impersonal narration
These two types of narration produce very different effects. Most of
this chapter will examine the use of narration from within character,
but here we will look just briefly at ‘impersonal’ narration. This is
rarely used now, although a form of it does arise occasionally as
‘chorus’. Sometimes, too, in films (as in Casablanca) there is a brief
use of impersonal narration, particularly at the start – comparable
to the prologue in an Elizabethan stage play – and at the ending,
though these often take the form of on-screen text rather than
voice-over. The problem with the impersonal voice-over is that
it is not, in fact, impersonal in the same way that an impersonal
narrator in a novel might seem. In film or in other script media
we hear a real voice, so it ceases immediately to be impersonal –
we want to know whose voice this is, and perhaps even why it is
making the statement.
There are some successful uses of impersonal narration in
modern script media. For example, in his play The Fire Raisers
Frisch makes effective use of a chorus of unidentifiable individuals
(an inheritance from Greek theatre); in fact, it is immediately
clear that the narration is not truly ‘impersonal’, since the chorus
represents the guardians of the city – and, by extension, of the
civilization. Similarly, the memorable opening to Citizen Kane
(writers, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles) uses what
seems to be an impersonal narrator, but we soon come to identify
the voice and speech style with newsreel used at other points in
the film; the narration is part of a broader quasi-documentary
effect. In the film Jules et Jim (writers, François Truffaut and Jean
Gruault) there is, for once, a genuinely impersonal narrator, giving
at least an impression of cool detachment, a clear view on highly
emotional events. But this is a rarity in the script media; where
there is narration at all it is much more common – and generally
much more successful – for it to come from within character.
Then there are the comic impersonal narrators of the pseudo-
fly-on-the-wall documentary, in for example the television series
2012 and W1A. Here the humour lies mainly in the contrast
between the serious, factual tone of the narration and the banal
absurdities of its content. At one point in W1A, a satire on the
workings of the BBC, the narrator helpfully segues: ‘With the
The character tells the story 159
The character-narrator
In the theatre, there are many examples of character-narration
in Elizabethan and in modern drama. Both the soliloquy and
the short aside are common in the work of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries, while in modern drama that has been even vaguely
influenced by Brecht, character-narration direct to the audience is
an accepted part of the style. The more strictly naturalistic school
tends not to make use of it, however, as it jars somewhat with the
manner of the rest of the production. Where film and television are
concerned, while a character suddenly speaking direct to camera
seems somewhat outrageous and so is not often used, occasionally
it does work well, as in the Carry On films. It may be reserved
for endings, as in the tongue-in-cheek conclusion to Robin Hood,
Prince of Thieves (writers, Pen Densham and John Watson) in which
Friar Tuck in effect asks the audience out for a drink, or the last line
of Devil’s Advocate (writers, Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy) in
160 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
which the Devil (Al Pacino) turns to camera to remark that vanity
really is his favourite sin. Perhaps the technique is so often left for
the end of the film because stylistic consistency would demand that
any earlier use be followed by further usage, which would be very
difficult to accomplish successfully while maintaining an otherwise
essentially naturalistic presentation. However, there are one or
two successful examples of consistent narration to camera, such as
the television series for teenagers As If, or the film High Fidelity
(writers, D. V. DeVincentis and Nick Hornby). In general, though,
contemporary film and television scripts tend to make far more use
of character-narration as voice-over.
So, if we are to pepper our dialogue with voice-over character-
narration, what are its uses, and what are its dangers? We noted
earlier, in Chapter 7, one effect of character-narration: it tends
to increase the audience’s identification with the character who
is narrating. To turn once more to Goodfellas, here we have a
gangster, Henry, narrating his life to us – a life of violence, crime,
selfishness, abuse of his wife and betrayal. Yet the fact that it is
Henry narrating this to us, Henry telling us the story in his own
words, does nevertheless create a bond between audience and
character: we are to some extent on his side, despite everything.
There is something similar in The Opposite of Sex (writer, Don
Roos) where our anti-heroine, Dedee, is really very unpleasant to
all those around her, but her voice-over narration is so wickedly
funny that we find ourselves empathizing with her anyway.
Similarly in The Wolf of Wall Street (writer, Terence Winter,
adapted from the memoirs of Jordan Belfort), Belfort, the central
character, narrates. But he more than narrates – he takes control
of the narrative, just as he does of all those around him, in his
irresistible way. (Despite his appalling behaviour he is an attractive
character. When he tells his employees ‘This is Ellis Island, people.
I don’t care who you are, whether your relatives came over on the
Mayflower or an inner-tube from Haiti. This right here, is the land of
opportunity’, he is espousing a version of the American Dream with
genuine fervour, which many may find endearing.) And the narration
is more than just voice-over; rather, he speaks direct to camera –
there is a brazenness about this delivery of dialogue; it seems there
is nothing he is ashamed of or would wish to hide. At one point
near the start he even decides that his car needs to be a different
colour and – hey presto – the car is instantly transformed. This is a
The character tells the story 161
man who controls everything, even the film itself, and the manner of
presentation of dialogue is an integral part of showing that.
In the film The Usual Suspects (writer, Christopher McQuarrie)
the character Verbal Klint recounts criminal events as voice-over
while we watch them. As we have seen, this is a common use of
voice-over in film: we are in a scene with a character recalling
events from the past; the voice then continues seamlessly as it
becomes voice-over and we see the events themselves rather than
the scene from which the person is speaking (though we usually
return to that scene at the end of the voice-over). In The Usual
Suspects, however, there is an added twist: Verbal Klint is an
intentionally unreliable narrator. The fact that he is given voice-
over while we apparently see real events lends his version of events
credence, and thus it comes as a greater shock when it is revealed
that his version is in fact a lie.
The film The Black Dahlia (writer, Josh Friedman, from the
novel by James Ellroy) offers an interesting example of character-
narration through voice-over. We see almost every event through
the eyes of the central character, the police detective Bucky
Bleichert, and the narration is of course his. But this voice-over
not only provides a commentary on events, with insights into his
thoughts and feelings; it also provides a strong link between this
film, produced in 2006, and the mid-twentieth century film noir.
Indeed, The Black Dahlia (along with other films such as LA
Confidential) is sometimes referred to as being neo-noir. One of the
recurring traits of film noir was voice-over by the central character
(often a detective) and the use of this device in The Black Dahlia
seems in part designed to place it firmly in that tradition.
Let us now look at an extract from early in the film The
Shawshank Redemption (shooting script; writer, Frank Darabont).
Red (Morgan Freeman) has already been in prison for many years.
Now a new delivery of convicts (‘fresh fish’) arrives:
High stone walls topped with snaky concertina wire, set off at
intervals by looming guard towers. Over a hundred cons are
in the yard. Playing catch, shooting crap, jawing at each other,
making deals. Exercise period.
162 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
red (v.o.)
There’s a con like me in every prison in America, I guess. I’m
the guy who can get it for you. Cigarettes, a bag of reefer if
you’re partial, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your kid’s high
school graduation. Damn near anything, within reason.
red (v.o.)
Yes sir, I’m a regular Sears and Roebuck.
two short siren blasts issue from the main tower, drawing
everybody’s attention to the loading dock. The outer gate
swings open … revealing a gray prison bus outside.
red (v.o.)
So when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 and asked me to
smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I told him no
problem. And it wasn’t.
con
Fresh fish! Fresh fish today!
red (v.o.)
Andy came to Shawshank prison in early 1947 for murdering
his wife and the fella she was bangin’.
The character tells the story 163
red (v.o.)
On the outside, he’d been vice-president of a large Portland
bank. Good work for a man as young as he was, when you
consider how conservative banks were back then.
tower guard
All clear!
guards approach the bus with carbines. The door jerks open.
The new fish disembark, chained together single-file, blinking
sourly at their surroundings. Andy stumbles against the man in
front of him, almost drags him down.
her former neighbours, while she now resides in the next world.
A similar position (though with rather more bitterness) is adopted
by Lester, the central character in American Beauty (writer, Alan
Ball), as at the start of the film he introduces us to his family from
his position beyond the grave. In this latter example the narration
not only tells us about the family and setting but also poses the
unstated question, how and why did he die?
There are, then, many different forms of character-narration, in
some of which the narrator is given a reason for narrating, while
in others we simply have to accept that a character is telling us
the story, without any particular reason being given. Sometimes
character-narration arises out of a letter, diary or other document
(this starts up in series four of Mad Men), which is then delivered
in voice-over. As a one-off this hardly constitutes narration, but
when it is used repeatedly then it does take on the characteristics of
narration. A good example occurs in Dances With Wolves (writer,
Michael Blake), in which Dunbar’s journal provides the text for the
voice-over while we watch the events he refers to. There is a reason
for these words: as a military man Dunbar keeps a journal; we are
simply hearing it.
In all of the examples given above the narration is delivered
by one of the central characters. A different and somewhat less
successful approach to character-narration is adopted by Arthur
Miller in his otherwise excellent play A View from the Bridge. The
problem with the character-narrator here, Alfieri, lies in the ratio of
narration to other speech. We simply do not see enough of Alfieri
apart from his role as narrator for him to be firmly established as
a character in his own right. The result is that he appears to be too
much a device rather than a character. Miller has fallen between
two stools: Alfieri is neither an impersonal narrator, outside the
action, nor a convincing character-narrator.
events that took place when he was a child. The important point
here is that it is Alvy as an adult narrating the events of his own
childhood. Looking back on things often has a certain moving
quality (it is the attraction of reminiscence); the past of any
individual can never be recaptured or changed. Yet we want to
capture it again, and we want to change it. We want to be able to
live the wonderful moments once more, and the fact that we never
can – all we can ever have is the memory – is moving. At the same
time, we want to be able to change those things which went badly
wrong, we want to be able to relive our lives in the light of what
we have subsequently found out, but once again this is impossible,
and that impossibility too is moving. So narration from a character
looking back at their own experiences tends to have a very strong
emotional appeal – stronger than that of a narrator concentrating
on the experiences of others. It is therefore important that it is
the adult Alvy looking back at himself. Then, as we noted earlier,
Allen takes this further, having impossible interaction between the
characters of then and now, which is humorous but at the same
time also adds to the pathos (although this is pathos with a light
touch) because we know, of course, that it is precisely this sort of
interaction that is impossible. (The appeal here has something in
common with that of Groundhog Day and Sommersby, both of
which in their very different ways present the possibility of leading
life again, without the mistakes of the past.)
This question of narration and time is a complex one. The script-
writer who decides to use character-narration in the dialogue has to
decide from when the character is narrating. A character can narrate
from the very moment of the action, speaking in the present tense,
so that it becomes a sort of personal running commentary. This
can certainly work well, and indeed Allen himself uses it on more
than one occasion; it is particularly effective later in Annie Hall,
presenting the thoughts – popping up on to the screen as written
words – of two characters while they are out on a first date. But
that is the point: whether as voice-over or as text, this is narration
as thoughts, at the very moment when the events are happening.
Certainly there is a place for this form of narration in dialogue, but
it has its limitations: it does not have that moving quality of looking
back; nor does it afford the opportunity for the narrator to have
thought about these events since they have happened, and therefore
to have come to some conclusions about them.
166 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Multiple narrators
Sometimes there is more than one narrator in a script. In Michael
Frayn’s Copenhagen, for example, the narration shifts fluidly
between the three characters; it is usually the character who is least
directly involved in the action at that moment who takes on the
narration. The play is set after the death of all three characters;
each of them is giving his or her interpretation of the momentous
events of many years ago. So, while sometimes their recollections
and understandings dovetail happily, at other times they do not
tie in at all. The play is about interpretations, of Science and of
History. The multiple narration underscores that the play is not,
ultimately, about facts, but about how these facts are viewed.
There is interesting use of narration in American Hustle (writers,
David O. Russell and Eric Warren Singer). Here we have double
character narration, and a lot of it, from both Irving and his
partner Sydney. For a short time there is even a third narrator, as
the character of Richie takes up the reins. After the initial hook
scene we jump back; Irving narrates his own back-story (a la
Goodfellas) – ‘I took it upon myself to drum up business’ he tells
us, as we see his younger self smashing windows to create more
The character tells the story 167
clients for his father in the window business. But he also narrates
while we watch the younger Sydney: ‘Like me, she’d come from a
place where her options were limited.’ Similarly, Sydney narrates
part of her own back-story – ‘My dream, above anything, was to
become anyone else other than who I was.’ But she also narrates
about him and his past: ‘He was who he was. He didn’t care.’
She even narrates his relationship with his son, which she hasn’t
witnessed. This mixing of who narrates what is a strong indication
of how well they know each other and how much they trust each
other; they both live each other’s stories.
The film is about con-men and fakery. As Sydney remarks, ‘We’re
all conning ourselves one way one another, just to get through life.’
All the hair-dos are fake, particularly those of the leading men. This
is a film of curlers and comb-overs. But the fakery doesn’t extend
to the narration, so for almost the entire centre of the film there is
no narration at all; we are cut adrift. That is because through this
centre of the film we are invited to think that Sydney really does
become alienated from Irving and falls for Richie. If this section
had been narrated, we would probably have learned otherwise, and
the film would have been much the weaker for it. The narration
slips back in towards the end of the film, as what has been fake and
what has not begins to become clearer.
The film The Grand Budapest Hotel (writer, Wes Anderson)
also has two narrators, carefully layered. Let us look at an extract,
beginning partway through a scene between Zero, a hotel lobby
boy, and M Gustav, the concierge.
zero
Were you ever a lobby boy, M Gustav?
m gustav
(bristling but playful)
What do you think?
zero
(speculative)
Well I suppose you had to start –
m gustav
Go light the goddam candle.
mr moustafa
(voice-over)
And so, my life began. Junior lobby boy (in training), Grand
Budapest Hotel, under the strict command of M Gustav H.
I became his pupil, and he was to be my counselor and
guardian.
m gustav
(voice-over, rhetorical)
What is a lobby boy?
Montage:
m gustav
(voice-over)
A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight.
A lobby boy remembers what people hate. A lobby boy
anticipates the client’s needs before the needs are needed. A
lobby boy, above all, is discreet, to a fault.
mr moustafa
(voice-over)
The requirements were always the same. They had to be: rich,
old, insecure, vain, superficial, blonde, needy.
The character tells the story 169
Cut to:
author
Why blonde?
mr moustafa
(after a moment’s reflection)
Because they all were.
A shared experience
We have seen in the previous example that a line may sometimes be
shared by two characters. We saw a very different example (though
not of narration) which also felt like lines shared between two, in
Waiting for Godot. Lines may, in fact, be split between a larger
number of characters.
Let us take a speech that we have decided to give to a character
in a stage play, speaking to the audience:
Dangers in character-narration
So, the use of character-narration certainly opens up opportunities
for the scriptwriter. But there are dangers here, too.
The first danger is that, poorly used, character-narration can
seem opportunistic. It can give the impression that the writer is
stuck; unable to think of any way of communicating a certain
piece of information through dialogue or action, he or she throws
a piece of narration into the mouth of a character. At worst, some
scripts are actually like this, though mercifully, most of them are
not produced!
This tendency is most often seen in radio writing. As we have
noted earlier, many inexperienced writers for radio seem to believe
that it is important for us to be given all the information that
we might receive visually were the script intended for any other
medium. However, they don’t see how it can be done; they don’t
want to stuff the information into ordinary conversation, as it
would sound false. Solution? Have someone simply tell us it all
– throw in a bit of narration. Invariably, though, almost all the
information imparted for this reason is irrelevant; we hardly ever
need to know what people or things look like, for example, since
we would rather imagine them for ourselves. And most other
details, if we really need to know them, we can gather from the
implications of normal dialogue.
Perhaps it is the actual storyline that the radio writer is having
trouble conveying:
going into the kitchen, taking milk out of the fridge and
pouring it.
carol My God, there’s someone in the garden. I’m sure there
is – there’s someone in the garden. There’s someone in the
garden. What do I do? He’s seen me! He must have seen me!
But maybe it’s not … Maybe it’s nobody. Maybe it’s just
shadows … Yeah, there’s nothing there, there’s nothing
there.
the personae of stand-up comedians Ben Elton on the one hand and
Ken Dodd on the other. The comic lines of Elton would cease to
be comic if presented within the persona of Dodd, and vice-versa.
They wouldn’t work. The context in which the lines are presented
is crucial.
The comedy series Catastrophe in fact works very much from
the starting point of developing stand-up personae. There is an
element of story of course, and the two central figures (both
real-life stand-up comedians) certainly have developed personae,
but the series is little more than stand-up turned into drama, with
the dialogue falling back on the old stand-up reliables of sex jokes,
toilet jokes and observational humour, with some elements of
shock and a lot of bad language thrown in. The series has been very
successful, despite what might be seen as its limitations. Humour
is a broad church.
Yet comic dialogue – even in Catastrophe – is not merely a
succession of jokes: in fact, exactly the same line in two different
scripts might come across as funny in one, and as serious in the
other. Let us take, for example, a piece of dialogue which we
looked at when discussing status, in Chapter 2. Here we had three
characters, each subtly attempting to raise their own status at the
expense of that of the others. Our analysis of the passage was
straightforward, and assumed that this was not a particularly comic
piece of dialogue. But here it is again, below, this time with the two
sections printed without a break. When you read it, think of it in a
different context; think of it as comedy. Remember, a comic script
is always read (or heard or seen) with the expectation that it will
be funny – this allows us to hear the lines differently. And for this
passage let us assume that certain exaggerated character traits have
already been established:
MM John is a brainless twit, though a twit with money;
MM Andy always likes to be the centre of attention, and has a
tendency to patronize;
MM Tim is a snob who generally considers himself superior not
only to these two, but to the rest of humanity in general.
outshining him by buying a yacht, so Tim does his best to limit the
damage to his ego. Bearing all this in mind, try reading this as part
of a comic script:
They may not be fully rounded characters, but they work very well;
comedy does not always need fully rounded characters.
Similarly, today, there are many examples of successful comic
creations who have little more than one strong characteristic. The
dialogue then need not strive for a variety of subtle effects – the
recognition of this one characteristic is often enough. In A Fish
Called Wanda (writers, John Cleese and Charles Crichton), Otto
may have other characteristics, but he is amusingly dominated by
his obsessional need not to be called (or thought to be) stupid.
In the television series Red Dwarf, Cat is even more limited: his
dialogue tells us little more than that he is a fashion addict. But we
don’t complain. In this context, it is sufficient.
One word of warning about the use of caricature, however:
the character must always be rooted in reality. I use the term
‘caricature’ here, but the audience must not be aware of caricature,
in the sense of this being a character taken to such an extreme as to
be unrecognizable. Caricature when taken this far may be able to
raise the odd laugh, but this will not be sustainable; indeed, it may
even threaten the credibility of the whole script, as the audience
soon ceases to have much interest in a character so far removed
from reality as to be beyond recognition.
harry
So is he having a nice time, seeing all the canals and that? I
had a lovely time when I was there. All the canals and the old
buildings and that.
ken
When were you there?
harry
When I was seven. Last happy holiday I fucking had.
Have you been on a canal trip yet?
ken
Yeah.
harry
Have you been down, like, all the old cobbled streets and that?
ken
Yeah.
harry
It’s like a fairytale isn’t it, that place.
ken
Yeah.
Comic dialogue 193
harry
With the churches and that.
ken
They’re Gothic.
harry
Yeah.
ken
Is it Gothic?
harry
Yeah.
So he’s having a really nice time?
playful. It also relies on the characters not being aware that there
is anything odd going on. Any acknowledgement by them of what
is happening would kill the humour.
There is something similar at one point in the film The Mummy
Returns (writers, Stephen Sommers and Lloyd Fonvielle). Our
heroes are on a London bus that is being ferociously besieged by
vile-looking mummies. Rick is fighting them off valiantly, turning
attacker after attacker to dust. But then, for one memorable
second, he seems not to find these disgusting creatures a real threat,
but rather only a tedious nuisance. ‘Mummies!’ he says dismiss-
ively, bored with them, as he chops another to pieces. We laugh
because there is an acknowledgement somewhere here that it is
hard for us – the audience – to take all of this too seriously. Rick is
reacting to the creatures much as we are: we have seen enough of
them attacking the bus like this and want to see a different type of
action. The character is almost speaking directly to the audience,
but he is not, and the distinction is vital.
Similarly, in one episode of the television series The New
Adventures of Superman, Perry and Jimmy complain to each other
that they are a little irritated that Lois and Clark seem to get all
the attention: Perry says it feels as if he and Jimmy were secondary
characters in a television series. The humour here arises from the
knowing wink between writer and audience: if the characters
themselves were in on the joke, it would cease to be funny. The
scriptwriter must take great care in the handling of this sort of
irony.
In the examples given so far, the technique has been (in different
ways) to bypass any knowledge possessed by the character – the
joke has gone straight from the writer to the audience, without
the character knowing it (although in The Mummy Returns it is
a close thing). This same technique may be extended to a whole
script. The entire film Airplane (writers, Jim Abrahams, David and
Jerry Zucker) is a ludicrous and hilarious pastiche of the serious
disaster movie, though of course none of the characters is aware of
this. The television series The Detectives adopts a daft version of
cop-show dialogue in order to poke fun at cop shows (as do Police
Squad, Naked Gun and other Leslie Nielsen vehicles), while the
radio (and later television) series People Like Us is a fake version of
a serious radio documentary. In each of these cases the dialogue of
the original has clearly been closely observed, then exaggerated and
Comic dialogue 195
Pathos
A number of the examples we have been looking at are on the edge
of satire, and satire tends not to have great variations of mood. But
in much of comedy it is useful also to work into the dialogue an
element of pathos. Some comedies – particularly those which tend
to be aimed at the lower age-group market – do zip along without
any respite from the jokes. If this is the market you decide to aim for,
then this is the type of dialogue you need to write. But in general,
humorous dialogue does not have to be funny every moment –
some light and shade is desirable. And strangely, an element of
pathos can work not only by acting as a contrast in mood, but also
by feeding into the humour itself, giving it a particular colour and
power. At times One Foot in the Grave (writer, David Renwick)
almost makes us cry as much as laugh, and this certainly applies
to Steptoe and Son. Even the series Absolutely Fabulous has its
sad moments; these characters, for all their attempts to remain
glamorous and to stave off the effects of the years, are funny in
part because they are rather pathetic. We laugh with them and
at them at the same time, and occasionally we are invited not to
laugh at all, but just to appreciate the sadness of them. A comedy
like Groundhog Day (writers, Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis)
certainly has some funny lines, but the humour of the dialogue is
rooted in the negative quality of the central character; he is in fact
a very sad man (in both modern senses of the word), and while
this is a comedy it is at the same time the story of his redemption.
Again, it would have been a mistake for the scriptwriter to try to
get the dialogue to do all the work of the comedy, in the form of
jokes; instead, the pathos feeds the comedy.
we might prefer:
a script can really lift that script. Second, and more important,
keeping almost entirely to the exact words adds tremendous
authenticity to a script. Of course, any script is still the subjective
work of the author; but it does make a difference if a writer can tell
the audience that the words they have heard have almost all been
said or written by the people concerned. This applies particularly
in the flourishing world of community theatre.
mike Well I’ll tell you about … let me tell you about this
particular day. This particular day we’d all been got into
assembly. And in those days of course you couldn’t come in
chatting or any of that – you had to come in in single file,
and you’d all be standing up straight and not saying a word,
’cause that’s how it was in those days, not like it is now.
So anyway, I can see it now, there we all were, standing
up straight, and then when we were told to sit we’d all sit
down, but on the floor, we’d sit on the floor with our legs
crossed, ’cause there wasn’t enough chairs in the hall for
the whole school, or maybe there was, I don’t know, but
anyway we sat down in the hall. And the Headmaster, he
was up the front and the teachers were all the way round,
and usually, but not today for some reason … Normally
he’d just give some little talk – you know, some homily, and
that’s what – some little story, and then a prayer, and then
he’d give some notices – like not to walk on a particular
bit of grass or whatever. Whatever seemed important. But
today he took it into his head, instead of saying the Lord’s
Prayer like he always did with us joining in – ‘Our Father,
which art in heaven …’ – but instead of this, he says, ‘Paul,
come here, and you can recite the Lord’s Prayer.’ Why he
picked on this boy Paul I’ve no idea, but anyway he did, so
Paul looks shocked – remember we were only about nine
204 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
So, how might this be reworked into dialogue for the stage?
Already, as a piece of storytelling it is very effective, but it will need
to be reworked in some ways in order to function well on the stage.
Here is one version:
The process here is relatively simple. There has been some editing
of the original interview speech, and one line – ‘Everything I’ve
ever wanted to know about religion’ – has been repeated, but the
quality of the actual speech has for the most part been retained.
The most important point to note is that as much as possible has in
fact been taken out of speech and put into action, and as much as
possible of what is left in speech has been given to other characters
and shown rather than merely told. It should also be noted that
duplication has been avoided: you either show something or you
tell the audience about it. If you are consciously aiming for a
very specific effect, such as a comic one, the combination of both
showing and telling can have a humorous effect, as in the following
example:
All freeze. This is held for a few moments, and then while the
others stay frozen sheila turns to us.
sheila I don’t remember any screaming, though there may
have been.
Someone may have said ‘Oh God.’ A tyre’d blown.
We just sort of clung on.
210 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Here there is a slight jump in time, with Sheila first telling us how
she and the other women did or did not react. This too increases
the tension – react to what? Only then do we find out.
So, to summarize, the scriptwriter:
MM presents a mixture of characters narrating and speaking to
each other;
MM alters the timing of the release of information;
MM maximizes tension;
MM divides the lines non-naturalistically to emphasize meaning;
MM transforms much of the original into action (which is also
non-naturalistic);
MM takes great care over duplication of telling/showing.
At the brickworks:
boy It brought a bit of extra money into the house didn’t it?
writer must be sensitive, and never have any named and identifiable
character (as opposed to, say, 1st Labourer or 2nd Milliner) speak
a line which was not theirs originally and which they would object
to having attributed to them. This means that contributors should,
where appropriate, have the opportunity to point out where a line
seems false. In practice there are very rarely any problems, as long
as the scriptwriter is true not only as far as possible to the letter
of the sources, but also to the spirit of them. After all, as any
news editor will confirm, it is perfectly possible to quote nothing
but what was actually said, yet to select and present the quotes in
such a way as to put forward something that is a very long way
from the real truth. Documentary drama is just the same, and as
it carries the name ‘documentary’ – referring to the dialogue more
than anything – the responsibility upon the scriptwriter to be true
to the spirit of the material is greater than ever.
Verbatim scripts
Verbatim scripts have become very popular in recent years, particu-
larly in theatre. In verbatim scripts not a single word is altered or
added from the interviews, though of course there is an editing
process – the interviews are not presented in their entirety. At the
furthest extreme there is what is known as ‘recorded delivery’, in
which the actor wears headphones and hears the (edited) interview
extracts; the actor then speaks the words exactly as heard – not
just the exact words with all the hesitations and repetitions, but
with the exact inflections and rhythms. This is presented as being
the most authentic presentation of a script based upon interviews.
Opinion is divided, with some being excited by this attempt at
verisimilitude while others ask why we don’t simply hear the
original voices rather than an actor’s imitation.
Most verbatim scripts, however, are not ‘recorded delivery’ but
do present the exact words from the tape. There are problems,
however. As this form does not allow for any changes to the
original – not even a change of tense – virtually everything is in
the past tense (as the original speaker was talking about events in
the past) and virtually everything is direct address to the audience
(since the interviewee spoke directly to the interviewer) – there is no
214 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Getting unstuck
Before we can rewrite a script it has to be completed. But there
are times when, for whatever reason, we feel blocked, uncertain,
lacking the confidence to continue and finish the piece. There may
be all sorts of reasons for this, one of which may be that we actually
fear completion as this will mean submission and judgement. Or
it might simply be that we don’t feel that some element or other
is working. Of course, if we know what it is we try to fix that
element and move on. But sometimes the solution is not to try to
write the next scene. Instead, take your characters somewhere else,
or to some other time. Invent a scene that does not figure in your
plan for the script, that is not intended to be part of the finished
product. That takes all the pressure off. Now you can simply play
with your characters and their interaction, play with possible or
even wildly improbable scenarios. But this playing can loosen you,
opening up new possibilities. Then when you go back to the script
proper you may well feel yourself suddenly unblocked, full of ideas
of how to make the next part of the script work. It really does pay
to be playful.
216 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS
Give it time
Always wait at least a few weeks before rewriting, and longer if at
all possible. Of course, there may be occasions on which you are
hard up against a deadline and so realize that it is not possible to
put the script aside before returning to it – but that is all the more
reason to avoid finding yourself in this position. (We have all done
it, of course – but our writing has suffered as a result.) You should
always plan your writing to allow for this time gap as well as for
the rewriting itself. This period is needed because when the script
is very fresh in the memory, it is virtually impossible to read it as
others would who are not acquainted with it. When you go back to
your script you want to be as close as you possibly can to reading it
as though for the first time. Ideally, you will feel as a script reader
might on being presented with a new product. Ask yourself: does
the structure work; is a certain surprise in the plot convincing; are
the climaxes correctly placed; is the use of time appropriate? Above
Reworking the dialogue 217
So, there is a lot to be looking out for. Be sure that when you alter
something, you take into account the knock-on effect on other
parts of the dialogue, or other elements of the script: a change in
just one line of dialogue may subtly alter characterization, which in
220 WRITING DIALOGUE FOR SCRIPTS