Thirty-One
Dialogue Continued

Still More Left to Say

We’ve discussed Aristotle’s biggest insights when it comes to good dialogue, that it’s always in the service of a character’s immediate goal and that it therefore has subtext.

But there remain a few more important points to make:

1. I always bristle when I hear a student say he has a great line of dialogue, but he just doesn’t know which character to give it to. Guess what? That is not a great line of dialogue. Dialogue only works when it is precisely what a specific character would say in a specific situation to achieve a specific goal.

   So create the scene’s circumstances first, then figure out what a character would believably say in them, according to what is possible and pertinent. Never work the other way around, coming up with a bit of dialogue and then trying to find a scene to justify it.

2. How a character speaks is unique to each character. In fact, a character’s individual VOICE is one of the key ways to reveal their inner life. It gives an indication of where they come from, their occupation, ethnic background, economic class, level of education, etc. It can even give insight into the character’s psychology, revealing how they think, what they value, and how they see the world.

   So use your characters’ backstories to make decisions about specific speech patterns, dialects, slang, argot, and idiom. You want every character in your screenplay to speak consistently and uniquely, and as the goal is mimesis, AUTHENTICALLY.

3. Keeping in mind that film is a visual medium and that what we see communicates far more than what we hear, when crafting dialogue, just as in description, be economical. LESS IS MORE.

   In most good screenplays, it’s rare to find a speech that stretches more than a few lines. Monologues are primarily theatrical devices and can weigh a scene down, or worse, remind the audience that they are just watching a movie. So if you are going to have a lengthy speech, make darn sure it’s warranted, that the character’s goal requires a story be told.

   And always bear in mind Aristotle’s admonition on diction, that when choosing words we must strike a balance between the common and the ornamental. That applies to dialogue as well as description. We don’t want speech to be too clear—that’s where subtext comes in—but we also don’t want to be too obscure. Nor do we want it to be over-wrought with affect or embellishment, unless of course, such verbiage is specific to the character’s voice.

4. As discussed earlier, avoid dialogue that simply states FACTS, whether about emotion or about expositional information. It always reads as On the Nose, as dialogue for the audience’s benefit, not the character’s, since it has no subtext.

   So a character would never simply state: “I’m mad at you.” They’d say: “Did you get the dry cleaning? No, of course you didn’t.” And the subtext is “I’m mad at you.”

   Similarly, they’d never say: “I was bored to death in Professor Price’s class.” They’d say, dripping with sarcasm: “Yeah, Price’s class. What a party.”

   But what if you desperately need a character to express a fact? What if the Writer’s Intention of a particular scene is to reveal some bit of information or backstory that can only be expressed through dialogue?

   Ah, well that’s where Aristotle’s Guiding Precept #17 comes in.

   When you need to reveal exposition, which is just a fancy word for info the audience needs in order to understand the story, you must DISGUISE it by making it a consequence of the character’s pursuit of their immediate goal.

   For example, you might have a scene where you want to reveal that Ben and Sarah had a father who left them when they were very little.

   You could have Ben say: “Sarah, when we were young, dad left us.”

   And yes, that bit of dialogue would suck. It’s completely On the Nose, just a recitation of an expositional fact with no subtext. It may be a TRUTH, but it falls flat since there is no reason for Ben to say it, given that his sister clearly already knows that fact, no reason other than to give US the info. And as I’ve said, characters don’t know we exist.

   So while the line might accomplish the Writer’s Intention, it doesn’t work unless it is said to accomplish the Scene Protagonist’s immediate goal.

   What circumstance would create a goal for Ben that would lead him to say this line AND accomplish our own goal for the scene?

   Well, maybe Sarah said something to Ben’s girlfriend in a previous scene, something that revealed a secret he wanted kept hidden. That might motivate Ben to want to hurt his sister in this scene. To hurt is a goal, a good, motivated goal in the context of the circumstances.

   So now Ben might say: “Sarah, you know YOU were the reason that dad left all those years ago.”

   Bingo. What just happened? Ben tried to hurt Sarah. To accomplish that, he said something that would achieve that EFFECT. To hurt. And in the process, he revealed a bit of expository information.

   That’s how you disguise exposition, with CONFLICT, by making it not for our benefit, but for the character’s, in pursuit of their goal.

5. And one final thought when it comes to dialogue. As with description, never get in the way of it. You should be invisible.

   By that I mean, don’t use dialogue to advance your own personal agenda, philosophies, or worldviews. We’ll see right through that. Dialogue is neither a polemic, nor a soapbox for the writer. Similarly, it is not a canvas to reveal how witty or clever you are with a turn of phrase. The key is to not draw attention to yourself at all.

   So let the characters speak for themselves, as themselves, to get what they want. We want dialogue to sound real and to advance the story and our understanding of character. We don’t want it to make us stop and think about how clever you are. Because if we do, you aren’t.

So to sum up:

Characters have immediate goals, the result of their moral disposition and their reasoning when faced with particular circumstances. And they speak in clear, simple speeches, with distinct but consistent voices, to achieve those goals.

And while they never prosaically state what they think, mean, or feel, they reveal that inner life through subtext, not by what is said, but by what is meant, by the thought motivating the speech.

And that is dialogue.

Now before we put everything together, what we’ve learned about scenes, description, and dialogue, we have to discuss one final element of the modern screenplay, one about which Aristotle has virtually nothing to say. Formatting.