Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014

Equally essential nonverbal sound
The believable one-act play
Short-form genres

As important as dialogue is, it’s not the only variety of sound your one-act play requires. In fact, nonverbal sound can be just as important—and sometimes more.

How something is expressed could carry more significance and weight than what is said (the words themselves). Accompanied by a smile or a frown, or said with a loud, scolding voice or a gentle, easy one, the contents of our communications are framed by our perceptions of their context. Those sending the messages may learn to understand themselves better as well as learn to exert some greater consciousness about their manner of speech. Those receiving the messages may learn to better understand their own intuitive responses—sometimes in contrast to what it seems reasonable to think.

Part of our culture involves an unspoken rule that people should ignore these nonverbal elements, as if the injunction were, “Hear what I say, and don’t notice the way I say it.” These elements are often ignored in school or overridden by parents, so the task of incorporating conscious sensitivity to nonverbal communications is made more difficult for audiences to recognize in plays. In fact, getting it across is often going to come down to the quality of the actor, no matter how well you wrote it. Still, some terms and methods can help you give your character the best shot at conveying a nonverbal message.

Nonverbal communication occurs not only between people, but also internally. People grimace, stand in certain postures, and behave in other ways to reinforce certain positions, attitudes, and implicit beliefs. Unconsciously, they suggest to themselves the role they choose to play, submissive or dominant, trusting or wary, controlled or spontaneous.

Personal space

Several types of nonverbal sound and communication can help you in your thinking and writing. One is the idea of personal space. This refers to the distance people feel comfortable approaching others or having others approach them.

People from certain countries, such as parts of Latin America or the Middle East, often feel comfortable standing closer to each other, while persons of Northern European descent tend to prefer a relatively greater distance.

Different distances are also intuitively assigned for situations involving intimate relations, ordinary personal relationships (such as friends), social relations (co-workers or salespeople), or in public places (in parks, in restaurants, or on the street.

Eye contact

Not unrelated to personal space is eye contact. For instance, Spanish women in the nineteenth century combined eye language with the use of a fan to express what wasn’t permissible to explicitly say verbally.

In addition, eye contact modifies the meaning of other nonverbal behaviors. For example, people on elevators or crowds can adjust their sense of personal space if they agree to limit eye contact. Modern American business culture values a fair degree of eye contact in interpersonal relations, and looking away is sensed as avoidance or even deviousness. However, some cultures raise children to minimize eye contact, especially with authority figures, lest one be perceived as arrogant or “uppity.” When cultures interact, this inhibition of gaze may be misinterpreted as passive aggressive, or worse.

Position and posture

Position and posture also augment the idea of bodily space. The position one takes in relation to others speaks to the overall interpersonal relationship. A person’s bodily stance also communicates a rich variety of messages and carries emotional effects.

Tone of voice

Moving to the mouth, a playwright should never underestimate the power of tone of voice. Dialect, for example, can suggest class, age, sophistication, etc. How a person uses the language—too snooty, too low-class, too regional—can indicate unconscious associations and possible prejudices.

There’s also the problem of understandability, which applies not only to people from other cultures or nations, but also intergenerationally. On some television programs, the characters speak so rapidly and often softly that folks of an older generation can hardly hear or keep up—even with the volume turned up.

Facial expressions

If you pull back from the mouth to the face, you might be surprised to know that the human face is more highly developed as an organ of expression than in any other animal. In fact, some people’s expressions become quite habitual, almost fixed into the chronic muscular structure of the face. Using facial expressions is a great way to identify characters without writing or relating anything else. An example is the squint of people who live in the sun a lot.

More transient expressions often reveal feelings that a person isn’t intending to communicate or is even aware of. These also are great tools for revealing how a character is feeling.

Gestures and movements

Gestures can have many different meanings in different cultures, and what may be friendly in one country or region can be an insult in another. Moreover, how one person touches another communicates a great deal of information: is a grip gentle or firm, and does one hold the other person on the back of the upper arm, on the shoulder, or in the middle of the back? Is the gesture a push or a tug? Is the touch closer to a pat, a rub, or a grabbing?

People have different areas of personal intimacy, and this refers not only to the sexual dimension, but also the dimension of self-control. Even the angle of one’s holding another’s hand might suggest a hurrying or coercive implicit attitude or, on the other hand, a respectful, gentle, permission-giving approach.

Physical movement in general communicates a great deal, as well as affecting the feelings of the person doing the moving. Does your main character mostly slink or stride? Does he or she pace?

A related variable is the time it takes to react to a stimulus. Some people seem to react to questions, interact in conversations, or are slower or faster on the uptake than others.

WRITING PROMPT

Again, take two people you know very well who do not know each other, and based on that intimate knowledge, construct communication using only nonverbal sounds and actions between them. Once again, you might find portions of it useful later for your fictional characters.

People react both to the unspoken and nonverbal sound, as much (if not more) to how something is said. Misunderstandings can often be clarified if the people involved have the ability to notice and comment on the nonverbal communications in an interaction. Writers benefit from learning the range of nonverbal behaviors and sounds in order to clarify the often-subtle dynamics of the situations they find themselves portraying. For example, in a marriage, sometimes the other person gets irritated by some mysterious event: exploring what the problem was could lead to an awareness that the way something was said communicated an unintended meaning. By making the nonverbal communication more clear, conflicts can be both portrayed and resolved.

The least you need to know

·  When planning and writing your set, be sure it’s well organized and well managed.

·  Dramatists render action by transmitting feelings and thoughts through activity.

·  Verbal sound is essential to dramatic action.

·  Nonverbal sound allows for action and communication that dialogue cannot convey.