Creating Unforgettable Characters (23 page)

Robin Cook says, "Whenever I write any dialogue I read it aloud. I'm looking for similitude. I want it to sound like two people talking together. It's so obvious to me when I read a book in which the dialogue isn't realistic. One of the amazing parts of really good dialogue is that it gives you the impression of being in the vernacular without being in the vernacular."

According to Shelley Lowenkopf, "Dialogue in a novel was never intended to be an exact representation of speech; it represents the attitude of the characters. You should be able to tell who is speaking by what he or she wants. So dialogue should be an outpouring of the secret part of the character. Part of constructing good dialogue is to think through and understand what a character wants to keep secret."

Leonard Tourney adds: "Realistic dialogue is not real talk, it is an artifice. Dialogue should characterize, be very compressed. It gives the flavor of reality."

There are exercises and processes that writers can do to help them write good dialogue.

Treva Silverman begins by talking into a tape recorder and then listens to it the next day. "By that time I've forgotten 90 percent of what I've said, and I can listen to it as if I'm hearing it for the first time. The thing that I'm looking for at that point is some sort of hint of what the character sounds like. Once I get the voice, I can relax, but it's hell until that happens. It's much easier with the tape recorder, less intimidating. I'm not staring at a blank sheet of paper, I'm not staring at an empty screen."

Robert Anderson says, "Many writers start writing dialogue first, rather than last. Neil Simon once told me he works that way. They say they discover the characters and the story line of the play as they go along. After trying this a number of times as a young man (after all, I loved dialogue, not story) I found I came a cropper too many times after forty pages. Dead end. I had discovered nothing. In writing the dialogue I can discover things I didn't know about myself, things I didn't know I knew, but I can't seem to discover story. I have to know my ending.

"If you have the wrong situation the dialogue won't flow. Unless you have people in an interesting situation, interesting in terms of progression of the scene, it's deadly

"The playwright John Van Druten said sometimes he couldn't get a character to speak properly until he changed the name. I've sometimes said that. I've said a Laura will speak differently from a Hazel, and until you get the right name—it won't work.

"I used to give my students dialogue exercises. With one exercise, I said somebody had found a ten-dollar bill in the street and he argues at the kitchen table over how that ten dollars is going to be spent. The movement of the scene is who's going to spend the ten dollars and how, but the entire subtext can illuminate the tensions in the whole family.

"In my play You
Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running,
there's a scene where two middle-aged people discuss whether they're going to buy twin beds or keep the old double bed. Ostensibly they're arguing about the beds but the entire marriage is revealed in that argument. The subtext is about what has happened to their life and their love and middle age."

When Jules Feiffer taught a playwriting class at the Yale drama school, he helped students improve dialogue by "getting rid of self-indulgence and other conceits, deciding what the point of the scene is, and cutting out everything but the point. Cutting out those flourishes that particularly young writers like to put in to prove how brilliant they are."

The key to writing good dialogue begins with learning to listen for rhythms and nuances.

"The most important thing," Robert Anderson says, "is to develop a voice. It's not just in dialogue, but in attitude. If you have a voice, the dialogue is going to come out right."

A CASE STUDY: JULES FEIFFER

Many of us are familiar with Jules Feiffer's work through his weekly cartoons. His film (and later the play) of
Carnal Knowledge
has often been discussed in terms of its brilliant dialogue. He also adapted
Popeye
for the film, wrote
Little Murders
and
Elliott Loves.
His comments about dialogue are relevant to all fiction forms, with many of those on cartoon characters particularly relevant to the advertising field.

In this interview, he talks about the difference of writing dialogue for each medium.

"When I moved from cartoons to theatre and later to film I learned that the dialogue in each is very, very different. In theatre and in film, when you're dealing with relationships, you have to show the beginning, the middle, and the end stages, and not just the end, which is what I do in the comics. What people say to each other in cartoon form is very elliptical and very short. It has to be because of the circumstances of space. Particularly on the stage, you can afford more nuance, a lot more indirectness. Stage dialogue can be fuller and more expository—and more ego gratifying—than film dialogue. On film you can afford a lot more nonverbal communication—eye exchanges, physical movement, etc."

I asked Jules about the process by which he creates dialogue.

"First of all, I don't think in terms of dialogue. Dialogue is something that comes naturally after you get the character and after you put the character in the situation. Once you put two or more people together in some sort of situation, and have already decided who and what they are, they're going to automatically say certain kinds of things. One thing will lead to the other and you're going to discover along with your audience what it is they're talking about. I've often been surprised at what my characters have had to say to each other. You get them going and they take off on their own, which is when it really becomes fun. I find that if I follow an outline, I'm not going to get anything very interesting and very lively, and a lot of what characters have to say to each other provides the energy for the piece. Energy is what's important in terms of relationships. Even if the situation is essentially a passive one, there's got to be some real presence of energy.

"This energy
comes
from the subtext. This is the underlying conflict which is at war with the surface of the piece, so the only real conflict may be between this character and himself or herself. Working with subtext is not a matter of working it out with notes on it. It's a matter of understanding perfectly what's really going on, what's not going on and why it's not, and how much of it will show on the surface. And the struggle of the piece is how to disguise it until very late in the day when all sorts of things will start topping out and will create the dramatic climaxes.

"At some point the subtext will rise to the surface, but if it rises totally to the surface I don't think you're doing yourself a service. Some part of it has to rise, but you can't give away all your secrets. You have to leave some of those for the audience to work out for itself. I want the audience to be another character in the movie, to be actively involved. If you cross every
t
and dot every
i,
and treat the audience like a couch potato, then there is no energy that goes between what happens onstage or on film and the audience sitting there registering. I know that I as a member of an audience always love to be forced to think and be challenged by the work I'm presented with and I like to do the same in my work.

"If the cartoon is personal rather than political, it will often deal with subtext. If it's political, it may be more to the point; but, even then, since it's almost always ironical, it will have to do with subtext. At least in my work, most of the people who talk are in the business of not relating. People often, whether in their public lives or private lives, will say the opposite of what they mean or disguise their meaning in all sorts of labels. That's been the focus of my work since the very beginning. To strip those labels and show what the point really is.

"If I had trouble getting into a scene, I often found it helpful to begin with dialogue such as, 'Hello, how are you. I'm fine. What are you doing today? Not much. Well, I have this problem . . . ,' and going on for pages of meaningless blabbering until I got into the scene. Other times I've entered the scene from the very middle, then backed up. At times I've been stuck for days and even weeks. One play took me six years because I couldn't get the hang of where I was going.

"If you can grasp the sense of that thought process and put it into the ordinary language you speak, you've gone a long way. Then in the next draft, revise it with different conversational or speech flourishes to denote certain characters. In too many plays and too many screenplays, everybody sounds alike. I like my characters to be so individual that their names aren't necessarily on the page for the reader—they know who's speaking. You have to train yourself to hear behavioral tics in conversation, but more than that you have to hear your own inner voice."

APPLICATION

Dialogue is key to writing for the theatre, but it is essential to any kind of fiction writing, whether drama, novel, or short story.

As you look at your own characters, ask yourself:

■ Have I defined character through speech rhythms, vocabulary, accent (if necessary), and even length of sentences?

■ Is there conflict within the dialogue? Does the dialogue contrast attitudes of the various characters?

■ Does my dialogue contain subtext? Have I addressed what my characters are really saying, versus what they do say?

■ Can I tell from the dialogue the cultural or ethnic background of the character? The educational level? The age of the character?

■ If I didn't see the names of the characters above their dialogue, would I be able to tell that different characters were talking? Does the dialogue differentiate the character?

SUMMARY

A writer is always in training. Learning to write dialogue includes listening, reading, and speaking good dialogue to internalize the sounds and rhythms. Some scriptwriters take acting classes to further understand what the actor needs from them.

Dialogue is the music of fiction writing, the rhythms and melodies. It is possible for any writer to develop an ear for it—and to write dialogue that conveys attitude and emotions, and that expresses the many intricacies and complexities of character.

So far, we've been discussing realistic characters—characters who are like us. We identify with them because they share our same flaws, our same desires and goals. They are not superheroes, nor do they have subhuman characteristics or exaggerated faults.

But the world of fiction is also filled with nonrealistic characters. Think about the broad range of characters who come from a special world of the imagination—E.T., Mr. Ed, mermaids and swamp things and killer tomatoes, Superman and Batman, King Kong, Bambi and Dumbo, the Jolly Green Giant, and the California Raisins.

In this chapter, we will look at four different types of non-realistic characters that you, as a writer, might create. They are the symbolic character, the nonhuman character, the fantasy character, and the mythic character. The characters within each category are determined by their limits, by their context, and by the associations and responses that the audience brings to each.

THE SYMBOLIC CHARACTER

Realistic characters are the most dimensional, defined by consistency and paradoxes, by complex psychology, attitudes, values, and emotions. If you were to write down the number of qualities possessed by a dimensional character, you would end up with a very long list.

Symbolic characters are one-dimensional. They are not meant to be dimensional. They personify one quality, usually based on an idea such as love, wisdom, mercy, or justice. They work best in nonrealistic stories, in myths, fantasies, or even within an exaggerated comic-book style such as the superhero stories.

The roots of the symbolic character are found in Greek and Roman tragedies. The gods and goddesses were generally defined by one attribute. Athena/Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, Aphrodite/Venus the goddess of love, Hades/Pluto the god of the underworld, Poseidon/Neptune the god of the sea, Dionysus/Bacchus the god of wine, Artemis/Diana the goddess of wild things.

Although limited in their dimensionality, they are not necessarily bland or uninteresting, since the one quality implies a number of related qualities.