Elements of Fiction III — Dialogue

Elements of Fiction: III Dialogue 210204

Dialogue is how characters talk, or don’t, to themselves or other characters. It’s not just replicating what people say in real life. It has the sound of speech, but is not just speech transcribed.

Famous lines of dialogue are: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” said by Roy Schneider in Jaws; “You can’t fight here, this is the war room,” said by Peter Sellers, who plays at least 3 parts in Dr. Strangelove; and the most famous of all famous lines of dialogue, Clark Gable giving Rhett Butler’s response to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” which scandalized Hollywood at the time. I’m told that an acting class was given the assignment of coming up with as good a line as that and no one could.

Full disclosure: dialogue is my favorite thing. I love crafting it. Listening to it. Thinking about it. Hearing different speech patterns and trying to understand what people mean by what they say. That’s why I’m a playwright. I can have a character say all kinds of outrageous things that I would never say. Diaalogue has two functions: deepening character and moving story.

Let’s see what dialogue can do for the first half of our nursery rhyme staring Jack and Jill.

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack ran in hopes that Jill wouldn’t be able to catch up. When she did, Jack asked,   

“Why you have to come along anyway?”

“You think I want to spend time with a stupid little piss-ant dork like you?”

“I can do this all by myself, you know.”

“Mom made me, so there!”

 This may not be the most perfect dialogue ever crafted, but it was fun to write, and it communicates a sense of how they feel about each other without actually talking to each other. The italicized words are stressed words.

 Dialogue is a lot harder to write than you may think. One source of great dialogue is a really good movie, like Moonstruck, or a good television series, like The Closer, or The Sopranos. The Closer is being rerun now, but who knows how long it will be. The Sopranos, maybe that’s somewhere.

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s wonderful indictment of the capitalist system, Willy Loman, who’s a salesman on the downslope of life, wants to maintain the fiction that he isn’t. He and his son are talking about another competitor. Willy says something like, “He’s known, but not widely known. Miller pulls this off by contrasting how Willy is really doing with how he evaluates how he is doing. He doesn’t say, “I’m failing, and I’m going to put off the inevitable until I finally kick the bucket.“ It shines through in his dialogue. Arthur Miller is my favorite playwright. Every time I see or read one of his plays, he comes alive for me.

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