Chapter 10 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

Dialogue - The Heart of Playwriting

NOBODY SHOULD EMBARK ON THE DANGEROUS PATH OF PLAYWRITING UNTIL THEY HAVE SPENT AT LEAST SIX MONTHS DRINKING COFFEE IN A BUSY CAFE.  PREFERABLY ONE YOU HAVE TO CATCH A BUS TO GET TO. 

Skidmore:            I’ll do this. (nods to counter)

Steve:                   Eh?

Skidmore:            Watchawan?

Steve:                   (Purses lips.  Makes bubbly noise.)  You come up on the dogs? 

Skidmore:            (Pulls lips back over teeth. sighs) Uh?

Steve:                   Cheers (Sucks teeth.) Uhhhh...

Skidmore:            (To barista) (makes despairing look) Capuccino. (Gestures to Steve)

Steve:                   Nah.

Skidmore:            My treat. I said. (Closes eyes)

Steve:                   Had one here. Last week. Came in to see… (Makes grimace.  Laughs out loud for no apparent reason)

Skidmore:            Hurry up. (Nods to Queue.)

Steve:                   (Puffs air. Tuts. Shrugs.  Nods)  I don’t think… Milk. (Grimace again.  Mouths) Fridge.

Skidmore:            (Raises eyebrows)  Eh?

Steve:                   I d’no.  Americano then.

Skidmore:            (To barista) No milk

Steve:                   Cheers.

Barista:                Anything else?

(Skidmore looks at Steve. Steve shakes his head)

Barista:                That’s five pounds exactly.

(Skidmore looks hard at Steve)

Steve:                   Eh?

(Skidmore shrugs.  Studies shelves behind counter. Steve pays.)

Barista:                I’ll bring them over.

Steve:                   Cheers

I’m not being entirely whimsical.  The idea is that as a play wright, as any sort of writer, you should listen to people talking. As much and as often as possible.  You need to listen closely and at some length as you sip your americano.  You also need to blow the dust off your notebook and write down what they say and, most important, the way they say it.  Until you have spent hours and hours doing this and have acquired some understanding of the way people speak to each other; the speech patterns and rhythms, then you cannot begin to write plays.  Because the stuff of plays is made up of the interactions and interplays of characters.   If you can’t get that, then you can’t write a play.  Anybody can write a play that depends on situation or plot but to write a play that depends on character requires an understanding of how to build a character and how that character develops within and around a plot.  Indeed, how the character and the plot are inextricably linked.  What happens in a play can only happen because of that character and that character drives what happens.  And we reveal that character by the way they speak.

There are no rules about getting a character to speak.  Indeed, you will find out very quickly as you listen, that there are absolutely no rules to conversation at all.  Trying to record and reproduce is virtually impossible.  Conversational speech is broken, halting, discursive, unsettled.  Entirely without grammar or syntax as described in the conventional manuals.  Sentences have no verbs.  They do not link one to another.  They are made up partly of words, partly of sounds and partly of gestures.

What’s more, dialogues have very little logic.  It is quite possible for one person to espouse several quite contradictory ideas at one time.  Sometimes our interlocuters speak in other voices (the actual meaning of “irony” by the way).  Most of the time conversation does not follow the neat ordered pattern of question and response we would expect as writers.  Most of the time people will only talk about themselves.  Each question or statement being answered or interrupted by their own experience. As a student of conversation, I sometimes feel that the whole purpose of 90% of conversations is entirely existential.  That is, we are reaching out into the void merely to say “I am here”.

Yet, somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some sort of exchange does take place.  It may be indirect and convoluted but eventually some idea may be conveyed to the other party.

So what do we playwrights learn from this?  Firstly, that our characters need to be freed from the conventions of written speech.  This gives us the opportunities to learn about the reality of our characters.  Our character can grow with our discovery of their little tics and irregularities.  And I don’t mean that that gives us licence to write in some sort of ridiculous Dick Van Dyke cockney voice.  I mean that we can discover the outward signs of the inward workings of a character though their speech.  And as we write it we need to speak it out loud. We are trying to record a spoken interchange so it only exists in some bare notation as words on a page.  In writing dialogue it is, perhaps, useful to think of the words on the page as a sort of code that reveals your intentions for the characters. 

Secondly, we need to remember that most conversations are about anything but the subject in hand. This is especially true about complex and deep subjects. Previously I mentioned our inbuilt willingness to suspend our disbelief.  If you ally that with our need to co-operate and collaborate in social situations you can begin to see how inevitable it is that we will say things in a conversation that we may not believe in an attempt to maintain the interaction.  As playwrights we need to understand and to embrace these apparent lies.

 It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the real feelings of our character are flushed out.  This is what makes the process of play watching so enjoyable.  The audience are voyeurs trying to understand something from the snippets of half formed conversation they are allowed to overhear.  As in real life in any coffee bar, we try to work out from these snippets, what is going on in their lives.  What sort of people they are. And, of course, our characters are often unreliable witnesses.  They lie, they prevaricate, they say the very opposite of what they really think and feel.  But as the watchers begin to know and understand they begin to get more and more drawn in and engaged.

Thirdly, we need to avoid the need for stage directions.  If you’ve got the voice right then there is no need to interject (humorously) or (bitterly) it must be there in the speech itself.  If you find you have to resort to stage directions than you need to recast the speech. I would never present a play for performance as written above.  It’s for the actor to discover the little gestures and informal sounds that carry the character through that interchange. Similarly, as a director, I get annoyed by writers who write detailed character descriptions in the stage directions but do not carry them through into their actual speech and actions.  It is not good enough to describe a character as “Young dynamic and ambitious” You need to show those attributes.  You need to demonstrate how that ambition is manifested or hidden through what they say and the choices they make in conversation.

Fourthly, plot needs to correlate with the characters you are drawing.  If you are beating your characters into a particular plot twist or situation then you have either got the plot wrong or the character or, most likely, both.  The actions that a character takes are the ones that define that character and are defined by that character.  If there is a surprising plot or character twist you need to ask yourself whether you have buried that possibility deep within the psyche of the character you are working with. You need to ask yourself “does it contradict anything that has already been laid down?”

Quantum thinking and speaking

In an article from New Scientist Of September 2011, Mark Buchanan tries to relate the mathematics of the quantum world to human interaction.  An explanation, in effect, of our fuzzy way of going about things.  It casts an interesting light on the puzzle I have as a playwright - the sheer impossibility of capturing or reproducing human speech in all its wide, broken rambling, halting form but while still managing to convey some sort of meaning.  I have never managed to find a way of notating speech in anything resembling a realistic, believable way.  Pinter arguably came the closest to making this work but he still had to resort to a rather mannered "pinteresque" approach.  Of course, a playwright does not necessarily want to reproduce everyday speech exactly.  It would be massively tedious to the audience, and probably totally incomprehensible but there is an inbuilt urge towards getting closer than we have managed up to now.  The reason being that we may wish to describe in our plays a more realistic way of describing the trains of thought of our characters.  And those are inexorably linked to the way they speak.  I need to read the article several more times to get some deeper insight but I like its drift.

The Playwright's Craft - Character

Nobody should embark on the dangerous path of playwriting until they have spent at least six months drinking coffee in a busy cafe.  Preferably one you have to catch a bus to get to. 

I’m not being entirely whimsical.  The idea is that as a play wright, as any sort of writer, you should listen to people talking. As much and as often as possible.  You need to listen closely and at some length as you sip your americano.  You also need to get your notbook out and write down what they say and, most important, the way they say it.  Until you have spent hours and hours doing this and have acquired some understanding of the way people speak to each other; the speech patterns and rhythms, then you cannot begin to write plays.  Because the stuff of plays is made up of the interactions and interplays of characters.   If you can’t get that, then you can’t write a play.  Anybody can write a play that depends on situation or plot but to write a play that depends on character requires an understanding of how to build a character and how that character develops within and around a plot.  Indeed how the character and the plot are inextricably linked.  What happens in a play can only happen because of that character and that character drives what happens.

There are no rules about getting a character to speak.  Indeed, you will find out very quickly as you listen, that there are absolutely no rules to conversation at all.  Trying to record and reproduce is virtually impossible.  Conversational speech is broken, halting, discursive, unsettled.  Entirely without grammar or syntax as described in the conventional manuals.  Sentences have no verbs.  They do not link one to another.  They are made up partly of words, partly of sounds and partly of gestures.

What’s more, dialogues have very little logic.  It is quite possible for one person to espouse several quite contradictory ideas at one time.  Sometimes our interlocuters speak in other voices (the actual meaning of “irony” by the way).  Most of the time conversation does not follow the neat ordered pattern of question and response we would expect as writers.  Most of the time people will only talk about themselves.  Each question or statement being answered or interrupted by their own experience.

Yet, somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some sort of exchange takes place.  It may be indirect and convoluted but eventually some idea may be conveyed to the other party.

So what do we playwrights learn from this?  Firstly, that our characters need to be freed from the conventions of written speech.  This gives us the opportunities to learn about the reality of our characters.  Our character can grow with our discovery of their little tics and irregularities.  And I don’t mean that that gives us licence to write in some sort of ridiculous Dick Van Dyke cockney voice.  I mean that we can discover the outward signs of the inward workings of a character though their speech.  And as we write it we need to speak it out loud. We are trying to record a spoken interchange so it only exists in some bare notation as words on a page.

Secondly, we need to remember that most conversations are about anything but the subject in hand.  This is especially true about complex and deep subjects.  It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the real feelings of our character is flushed out.  This is what makes the process of play watching so enjoyable.  The audience are voyeurs trying to understand something from the snippets of half formed conversation they are allowed to overhear.  And, of course, our characters are often unreliable witnesses.  They lie, they prevaricate, they say the very opposite of what they really think and feel.  But as the watchers begin to know and understand they begin to get more and more drawn in and engaged.

Thirdly, we need to avoid the need for stage directions.  If you’ve got the voice right then there is no need to interject (humorously) or (bitterly) it must be there in the speech itslef.  If you find you have to resort to stage directions than you need to recast the speech. Similarly, as a director, I get annoyed by writers who write detailed character descriptions in the stage directions but do not carry them through into their actual speech and actions.  It is not good enough to describe a character as “Young dynamic and ambitious” You need to show that.  You need to show how that ambition is manifested or hidden.

Fourthly, plot needs to correlate with the characters you are drawing.  If you are beating your characters into a particular plot twist or situation then you have either got the plot wrong or the character or, most likely, both.  The actions that a character takes are the ones that define that character and are defined by that character.  If there is a surprising plot or character twist you need to ask yourself whether you have buried that possibility deep within the psyche of the character you are working with. You need to ask yourself “does it contradict anything that has already been laid down?”

The Playwright's Craft - Dialogue

The English language as we know it came in to being so that our Norman overlords could converse with their Anglo-Saxon underlings.  It is not very much use being a conqueror if you cannot get your peasantry to go out and about ploughing your fields and reaping your harvests or fighting your battles for you.  Consequently all the fripperies of grammar that beset the parent tongues were excised and we are now blessed with a language that is so simple in construction that it has become a lingua franca (an amusing and ironic description) for trade, commerce and general communication round the world.  This stripped down form of speech means that someone from the forests of Papua New Guinea can make themselves understood to a francophone from Montreal.  English is a sort of Lego language in which simple elements can be assembled using any bits and pieces of vocabulary from any other language the speaker can lay his or her tongue to. Consequently, it is unafraid of importing any vocabulary from any other language that might prove useful.  If we don’t have a word for an item or an idea we import it. Or we just fabricate something vaguely appropriate rather than trying to make it up according to some arcane set of rules as is the practice in France.

And so, the English language outside the needs of basic communication becomes complex in vocabulary and a minefield for those who are unwary in its application.  Because of all the imports and coinages words slip and differentiate in barely perceptible shades.  And above all, the true English speaker will use words in a subtle, almost poetic fashion in which basic words assume indirect, elliptical, cryptic colouring calling up a world of strange hidden meanings and images. The writer of English must always assume the mantel of a poet and the writer of dialogue in English drama must become something of a magician weaving strange incantations and spells together.  (It is no coincidence that the word “spell”is of exactly the same root as “spelling” meaning to assemble a word correctly.  The two concepts of controlling unseen powers are directly linked).

So to record speech in English one must be aware at all times that what is said contains drifts of meaning far beyond what the words themselves convey.  The unseen and unspoken topics that are never uttered are usually to do with staus and emotional engagement.  Intentions in these ideas must never be referred to directly. Thus:

Andrew visits Barry.  Barry asks “Would you like a cup of tea?” Andrew must never reply “Yes” or “No”.  These are forceful, closing words which represent a status assertion and, as such, serve to reduce one’s o own status.  (The answer “yes” Implying something like: “You are too stupid to recognise that is why I am here” and “No” implying “I wouldn’t drink that gnat’s piss you served up last time.”) Thus Andrew must reply with a status neutral question: “Are you making one for yourself?” and so throwing the status problem back to Barry who must reply with a further question: “Do you prefer Earl Grey or Typhoo?” Answer: “Can you still get Typhoo?” (Careful, that’s nearly a status assertion in itself) “I may have some in the back of the cupboard.” And the final:  I’ll have some of that then.” 

This is typical of a complex status interaction in which both speakers are fencing to an unwritten but well  understood set of rules.  There are similar rules to follow in interactions concerning the weather which are really coded for one’s emotional engagement with the world and must be kept carefully guarded at all times.

It used to be axiomatic that in polite society one avoided conversing about religion, sex and politics.  In our dialogue here, of course, these are the only safe topics of conversation as Andrew would not be visiting Barry if he did not appear to agree with his host in these matters whatever he might think in private.