Essential verbal sound - The believable one-act play - Short-form genres

Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Essential verbal sound
The believable one-act play
Short-form genres

The action-propelling interaction between characters discussed in the previous section includes whatever they might say to each other. Speech is an essential part of human behavior, and when one person addresses another, typically it prompts the second person to reply. Indeed, dialogue is our most basic form of dramatic action.

But what if the second person does not speak? What if she turns her back and walks away? That behavior, too, is dramatic action, because it was prompted by the first person’s speech.

But now on to verbal sound. There’s a myth that the ability to write great dialogue, to make your characters sound real, is a gift that can’t be learned and can’t be taught. Either you’re born with it, or you’ll never have it. One version of the myth goes something like this: you have to have an ear for dialogue to be able to reproduce realistic, believable, crisp, vocal sound on the page.

Fortunately, writing great dialogue doesn’t have to come from having an ear for it. It also doesn’t need to come from having some innate gift or talent for writing dialogue. It comes from knowing your characters so well, you know what they’ll say and how they’ll say it when faced with specific people, situations, or events.

Now that might seem overly simple, and in a way it is; given the same character and same situation, two writers of very different abilities will create greater or lesser dialogue. But I firmly believe that if two writers know their characters equally well, if both writers develop those characters fully, and if both writers know the other characters in a scene equally well, both sets of dialogue will be of a high quality.

Taking this a step further, when you know not only some of the things your characters might say, but the only thing they’d say at various times, you’re onto something truly special. When a specific piece of dialogue is the only dialogue that could be spoken in a given situation by a given character to another given character, that dialogue can seem brilliant. And it doesn’t have to be eloquent dialogue, as long as it’s the exactly right dialogue.

“I coulda been a contender,” lamented by Marlon Brando’s character, Terry, in the 1954 film On the Waterfront, resonates through the decades, and even today can be considered brilliant dialogue for its poignancy and for the fact that it was exactly the right thing for Terry to say to Charley in the particular setting and circumstance they were in at that time. What Brando said was so perfect, so believable, given the character he was, where he was, who he was in relationship with, and whom he was saying it to, that it comes across as brilliant. Could anyone write dialogue that brilliant? Perhaps not, but still, the elements that lead up to that scene and that dialogue are all there for us to see, and they are all based on the authors’ complete, profound knowledge of who their characters are.

There’s another factor in writing great dramatic dialogue. It draws on the fact—echoing the prior section in this chapter—that essentially dialogue is just another event. It’s caused by characters and, in turn, causes other events and affects other characters. It’s something that happens, that takes place in space and time, and it’s both a result and cause, just like an event is.

WATCH OUT!

When characters speak, they’re doing something, performing an act. But how does that help you improve your dialogue? Think of it this way: what happens when an event in a story occurs that has nothing to do with the rest of the story? It sticks out, doesn’t it? That’s what happens with dialogue that has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

Remember to make your dialogue relevant to the play. More than just this, however, you have to be aware of the cause and effect of that dialogue just as you’re aware of the cause and effect of an incident.

If a guy in your play waves his hands around in an unusual way and nothing comes of it, the audience is left wondering why he did that. However, if they find out that the reason he’s waving his hands around oddly is because he’s schizophrenic and thinks he has magical powers. If they know he thinks that, with a wave of his hands, he can make his enemy disappear or make a beautiful woman appear, you begin to see the relevance of that odd waving and flailing about.

If you take this a step further and have a beautiful woman witness the odd waving and recognize it as the gesture that accompanies a magical spell, the odd gesture has an effect on another character, and maybe on the story as a whole. Maybe the beautiful woman, believing the delusional guy is a sorcerer, befriends him and takes him on a wild adventure with her because she believes he can actually use his powers to help her.

So now the event works. The audience understands why the event occurs (the guy is schizophrenic with delusions of being a sorcerer), and they understand what effect the event has (it leads to a grand misunderstanding and an even grander adventure). You’ve connected the event to both the past and the future. You must do the same thing to your dialogue—all of it.

For brilliant dialogue, make what you put on the page the only dialogue your character can possibly say, given who he or she is, where he or she is, and to whom he or she is saying it. Then be sure every event leading up to the dialogue is believable and every event after the dialogues at least partly a result of that dialogue. Finally, make the audience care about the character so they’ve got a vested interest in what he or she is saying, and in the results of what he or she says. Do these things, and you’ll find people responding to your dialogue deeply and excitedly.

WRITING PROMPT

Take two people you know very well who do not know each other and, based on that intimate knowledge, construct a fictional conversation between them. You might find portions of it useful later for your fictional characters.