I began writing for radio drama, so for me, dialogue is everything. Music, sound effects, and silence also contribute to audio plays, but the main ingredient is dialogue. When I read fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I’m attracted by the dialogue because that’s where the heat of the story is, and that’s where I feel closest to the characters. I’m hearing them speak without the narrator in the way. I’m witnessing what characters say and, sometimes more importantly, what they don’t say. I’m listening for subtext, that layer of motivation, feeling, and thinking underneath every piece of dialogue. The subtext invites me to decide for myself both how and why characters say what they do. In this way, dialogue is a most democratic tool of writing.
Well known for Story, Robert McKee, in his second book Dialogue, breaks down dialogue into three elements corresponding to the three concentric spheres around any character, composed of “a self within a self within a self” (Dialogue, 46). I visualize the ring on the outside as what is said and heard; the second ring inside is what is unsaid, the subtext; and the third innermost ring is the unsayable, of which the character may not be aware because it is buried deep within their unconscious. McKee claims that “fine dialogue creates a transparency” (Dialogue, 49), which to me suggests cracks to this hidden space of desire and fear. Noticing them is the joy of reading. As Aristotle says in his Poetics, “to learn is a lively pleasure,” and as McKee notes, “the deepest pleasure of theatregoing is learning, the sensation of seeing through the surface of behavior to the truth beneath” (Dialogue, 127). Dialogue, from its Greek roots, means “through-speech.”
For fiction, poetry, and nonfiction writers, there are many kinds of dialogue in the toolkit. There is dialogue spoken in scene, and there is remembered or recalled speech in the head of the character. Indirect dialogue is reported speech, either in the voice of the narrator or in the voice of a character. Sometimes a character speaks to themselves either silently or out loud in monologue and sometimes directly to the reader. Thought dialogue can also be hypothetical or imagined by a character reflecting on what could have happened or what will happen. Letters, diaries, journals, phone and voicemail, email, and crowd dialogue (mass chanting, call and response, or a series of individual voices) are also forms of dialogue. Dialogue can also contain foreign languages. Signage is a form of dialogue, as are audio or audio-visual broadcast segments.
There are many ways of inscribing dialogue on the page, either with or without quotation marks, using italics or parentheticals. And dialogue is often accompanied by a physical action, or gesture, or pause, or nonverbal sounds. One way of avoiding the repetitive dialogue tag of “she said” is to split a line of dialogue into two and insert that character’s name and what she is doing, which not only identifies the speaker, but also shows the action attached to her spoken word.
“Dialogue is not a conversation,” says Robert McKee. Instead, it is distilled speech, almost like “demi-poetry” (Story, 388). Dialogue is selective, not documentary, “like a painting, not a photo,” says David Hare. “Dialogue is what characters do to each other,” says Elizabeth Bowen. It is an action. Because there is subtext, dialogue is not telling but showing. David Ball says, “A human being talks in order to get what he or she wants” (Backward and Forwards, 27). This desire is a human need, the focus of many play workshop discussions, where I have heard Colleen Murphy say, “Poetry comes out of the need to speak.” Richard van Camp’s comment to me goes even further: “Silence is a lie.” This is because the unsayable, the innermost ring in the character, is always bubbling up the unsaid. Sometimes, with pressure and tension, it shows through the cracks, in what is said, in dialogue.
The many purposes of dialogue include this revelation of character, and of the two engines of action: desire and fear. Age, education, experience, and class are also contained in a character’s diction, as well as their tactics to get what they want and how far they are willing to go. Dialogue raises the stakes, advances plot, action, conflict, and tension. It helps provide the world of the story, through specific character diction, which authenticates it. By temporarily removing author narration, dialogue reduces the distance between reader and character. It shows who is driving the scene and how the power shifts. Great dialogue has past, present, and future embedded within it: the motivation of the past, the present action, and future outcome are all implied. Every line of dialogue contains the story, “like a piece of DNA,” says playwright José Rivera (“36 Assumptions about Writing Plays,” American Theatre, Feb 2003). Dialogue provides pacing and narrative drive. The uneven line lengths of dialogue reduce the cognitive load on the reader, add blank or breathing space to the page, and vary texture. Especially with the use of poetic repetition, dialogue isolates feeling.
Dialogue, like narrative and poetry, needs redrafting as the text develops. Some of the suggestions from my mentors follow: slow down and write the scene moment-to-moment, try for one idea per line of dialogue, avoid clichés and unnecessary repetition, pull the string tighter on the tension, avoid adverbs in character tags because what is said should indicate how it is said. Read each character’s dialogue on its own in separate edits. Every character speaks at a specific pitch and register. Dialogue needs to be cut to its essence. What is already seen does not need to be said. Feel every word and the potential emotional danger that exists in dialogue. In dialogue, deliver the full humanity of your character. Pay attention to their personal diction or idiolect: word choice, rhythm, and word order. Say their lines out loud.
The best way to develop your ear for dialogue is to listen. Eudora Welty says: “your ears are magnets.” She suggests that our memory retains the “way things get said”: “Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don’t know you’ve remembered, but you have” (Paris Review Art of Fiction 47).
Ernest Hemingway gives further advice: “When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling (Selected Letters, 219).
And finally, playwright Marsha Norman adds her technique, of asking characters in her head how they would speak: “I’d get on a bus in the city because buses are filled with Mamas. I’d go to the bus, and I’d have a particular Jessie statement in my mind, and I’d ask this question. Then I would listen to see what the women on the bus would say. You can do this. You can look at someone, ask them a question in your mind, and see what their answer would be” (The Interval, 19 Nov 2014).
In my practice, I’ve discovered many ways of building dialogue skills. Although I have no aspirations to be an actor, an acting lesson helped me understand how an actor must decide on the subtext. I actively eavesdrop. I do talk to strangers. If I have a specific character in mind, I will interview people who are in similar circumstances. I write monologues for the character I wish to write about, to get the rhythm of their voice, and the secrets revealed there. A character diary is also useful, especially for a long-term project, to record the scraps and bits that I hear from my character intermittently. I will also imagine how my character would respond to various situations differently from myself. I ask my character in my mind, “What do you feel? What do you really feel?”
Keep listening to your characters. Trust your ear, and your characters will reveal their heart in their own words for us all, if we let them speak for themselves.
Katherine Koller writes for stage, screen and page. Her books are Voices of the Land (plays), Art Lessons (novel), and Winning Chance (stories), which won a High Plains Book Award, and a second collection of stories, Earthen (upcoming). Stage plays are Coal Valley, The Seed Savers, Last Chance Leduc, and Riverkeeper. Her six-part web series, Sustainable Me, is about young people designing sustainable lifestyles, and audio plays include Cowboy Boots and A Corsage, Abby’s Place, Hope Soup and The Percussionist. Creative nonfiction has appeared in Prairie Journal, WestWord, The Pandemic and Me and is upcoming in Please Don’t Interrupt. Katherine is a founding producer of Edmonton Script Salon, a new play reading series, and a recent member of the Citadel Theatre Playwrights’ Lab. http://www.katherinekoller.ca/
