Flaws

SIX DIALOGUE TASKS

Effective dialogue executes six tasks simultaneously:

1. Each verbal expression takes an inner action.
2. Each beat of action/reaction intensifies the scene, building to and around its turning point.
3. Statements and allusions within the lines convey exposition.
4. A unique verbal style characterizes each role.
5. The flow of progressive beats captivates the reader/audience, carrying them on a wave of narrative drive, unaware of the passage of time.
6. The language strikes the reader/audience as authentic in its setting and true to character, thus maintaining belief in the story’s fictional reality.

EMPTY TALK

When a character speaks, the reader/audience looks into the subtext for a motivation to make sense out of the lines, a cause to explain the effect. If they find none, the dialogue sounds phony and the scene with it. The most commonplace example: one character telling another character something they both already know to satisfy the author’s expositional exigencies. Also:

• OVERLY EMOTIVE TALK
• OVERLY KNOWING TALK
• OVERLY PERCEPTIVE TALK

EXCUSES MISTAKEN FOR MOTIVATION

Create honest motivation for behavior. In an effort to match a character’s over-the-top action with a cause, writers often backtrack to the character’s childhood, insert a trauma, and pass it off as motivation

Motivations (hunger, sleep, sex, power, shelter, love, self-love, etc.) are needs that drive human nature and compel behavior.1 More often than not, these subconscious drives go unrecognized, and as often as not, cause more trouble than they cure. Unwilling to face the truth of why they do what they do, human beings invent excuses.

In most cases, false dialogue is not the signature of an overly confident, overly knowledgeable writer, but the opposite: a nervous, unschooled writer. Anxiety is the natural by-product of ignorance. If you don’t know your character beyond his name, if you cannot imagine how he reacts, if you cannot hear his voice, if you write in bewilderment, your hand will scratch out nothing but bogus dialogue. In the fog of not knowing, you have no other choice.

Therefore, do the hard work. Surround your character with all the knowledge and imagining you can. Test his traits against the people around him and, most importantly, yourself. For at the end of the day, you are the touchstone of truth. Ask yourself: “If I were my character in this situation, what would I say?” Then listen with your most truth-sensitive ear for the honest, credible answer.

MELODRAMA

Melodramatic dialogue, therefore, is not a matter of word choices. Human beings are capable of doing anything and saying anything while they do it. If you can imagine your character talking in a passionate, pleading, profane, or even violent way, then lift his motivation to match his action. Once you have behavior balanced with desire, take it a step further and ask yourself: “Would my character state or understate his action?”

• CLICHÉS
• CHARACTER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE-Character-neutral dialogue substitutes generality for specificity.
• OSTENTATIOUS LANGUAGE- Joyce’s analogy advocates a writing method that so harmonizes characters and events, the telling seems authorless. Applied to dialogue, the Joycean ideal becomes talk so true to the vocal personalities that any hint of string pulling vanishes. Rather, each spoken word draws us deeper and deeper into the storytelling, holding us spellbound to the end.
• ARID LANGUAGE- The opposite of ostentation is desert-dry, Latinate, polysyllabic language composed into long sentences strung out over long speeches. The suggestions below help avoid arid speech in favor of natural, unaffected, seemingly spontaneous dialogue. But always bear in mind that these points (like all else in this book) are guidelines, not imperatives. Every writer has to find her own way.
• PREFER THE CONCRETE TO THE ABSTRACT
• PREFER THE FAMILIAR TO THE EXOTIC
• PREFER SHORT WORDS TO LONG WORDS

1. The more emotional people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more rational people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.
2. The more active and direct people become, the shorter the words and sentences they use; the more passive and reflective people become, the longer the words and sentences they use.
3. The more intelligent the person, the more complex his sentences; the less intelligent, the briefer his sentences.
4. The more well read the person, the larger his vocabulary and the longer his words; the less read, the smaller his vocabulary and the shorter his words.

• PREFER DIRECT PHRASES TO CIRCUMLOCUTION
• PREFER AN ACTIVE TO A PASSIVE VOICE
• PREFER SHORT SPEECHES TO LONG
• PREFER EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE TO MIMICRY-Dialogue should sound like character talk, but its content must be way above normal. Fine writers listen to the world but rarely copy what they hear, word for word, to the page.
• ELIMINATE CLUTTER-By clutter, I mean exchanges such as “Hi, how ya doing?” “Oh, I’m fine.”

CONTENT FLAWS

WRITING ON-THE-NOSE

Writing on-the-nose means putting a character’s fullest thoughts and deepest emotions directly and fully into what she says out loud. Of the many varieties of inept dialogue, writing on-the-nose is by far the most common and most ruinous. It flattens characters into cardboard and trivializes scenes into melodrama and sentimentality. To understand the damaging effect of on-the-nose writing, let’s study this flaw in depth.

As we noted in Chapter Three, a person’s life moves simultaneously through three levels corresponding to the said, the unsaid, and the unsayable: outwardly what people say and do, personally and socially, to get through their day (text); inwardly what they privately think and feel while they carry out these tasks (conscious subtext); and deepest yet, the massive realm of subconscious urges and primal miens that drive their inner energies (subconscious subtext).

It is, therefore, categorically impossible for a human being to say and do what she is fully thinking and feeling for the obvious reason: The vast majority of her thoughts and feelings run below her awareness. These thoughts cannot, by their nature, rise to the surface of the said. No matter how hard we may try to be absolutely open and honest, how we try to put the subtext of truth into the text of our behavior, our subconscious self haunts every word and deed. As in life, so in story: Every text condenses a subtext.

On-the-nose writing eliminates subtext by erasing conscious, unsaid thoughts and desires, along with subconscious, unsayable longings and energies, and leaving only spoken words, delivered in blatant, explicit, hollow-sounding speeches. Or, to put it another way, on-the-nose dialogue rewrites the subtext into a text, so that characters proclaim exactly and fully what they think and feel, and therefore, speak in ways no human being has ever spoken.

With rare exceptions, a scene should never be outwardly and entirely about what it seems to be about. Dialogue should imply, not explain, its subtext. In the two variations above, the subtextual motivations and tactics are conscious but unspoken. As the audience/reader perceives the unsaid tactic beneath the surface of behavior, the inner action gives the scene a depth that enriches the reader/audience with insight. An ever-present subtext is the guiding principle of realism.

Realism and Subtext

Nonetheless, one of the key differences between nonrealism and realism is subtext. Nonrealism tends to diminish or eliminate it; realism can’t exist without it.

Why?

Because to clarify and purify a character’s symbolic nature—virtue, villainy, love, greed, innocence, and such—nonrealistic genres eliminate the subconscious and with that, psychological complexity.

Whereas, the first premise of realism is that the majority of what a person thinks and feels is unconscious to her, and for that reason, the full content of her thoughts and feelings can never be expressed directly, literally, or completely. Therefore, to dimensionalize, complicate, and ironize the psychology of the role, mimetic genres clash desires arising from the subconscious against conscious willpower.

Breaking the Monologue

On the page, therefore, insert Character A’s nonverbal reactions to Character B’s enigma. Into her column of talk, interlace her looks, gestures, pauses, stumbling phrases, and the like. Break her scene-long speech into beats of action/reaction within her and between her and the silent Character B.

THE TRIALOGUE and DUELOGUE-

Don't write the Scene as What it is Actually About

In Chapter Four of The Poetics, Aristotle argues that the deepest pleasure of theatregoing is learning, the sensation of seeing through the surface of behavior to the human truth beneath. Therefore, if you use dialogue to turn your characters’ unspoken needs and emotions into conscious pronouncements as in the scene above, if, in other words, you write the scene about what the scene is actually about, you block that insight and deprive the reader/audience of their rightful pleasure. Worse yet, you falsify life

Trialogue

Trialogue, as I redefine the term, names the triangular relationship between two characters in conflict and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle.

DESIGN FLAWS

Repitition

1) Accidental echoes-audible - “They’re moving their car over there”

2) Repetitious beats

MISSHAPEN LINES

Blurred Meaning

Mistimed Meaning

The instant a speech makes sense, its reader or audience absorbs the line’s action and leaps ahead to witness the reaction from the other side of the scene. Lines that mistime their meaning disrupt this action/reaction rhythm.

Mistimed Cues

A scene finds its natural rhythm of action/reaction in the give-and-take of meaning. Until a character has some sense of what was just said, of what just happened, he waits in limbo. But the instant Character A senses (or thinks he senses) what Character B is saying or doing, he reacts. Although most reactions seem instinctive, spontaneous, and instantaneous, they are in fact triggered by a glimpse of meaning. Character A may completely misinterpret the moment and overreact, underreact, or react off-the-wall. Nonetheless, his reaction, indeed every reaction, needs an action to prompt it.

Therefore, ideally, the last word or phrase of each speech is the core word that seals meaning and cues a reaction from the other side of the scene. On page, mistiming the core word is a relatively minor problem, but in the theatre or on a soundstage, it can break scenic rhythm and ruin performances

MISSHAPEN SCENES

Faulty designs may also infect scenes. Like a misshapen line that mistimes its core word, a misshapen scene can mistime its turning point, bringing it in too soon or too late or not at all. A well-shaped scene pivots around its turning point in just the right way at just the right moment. From story to story, the “right” moment for any scene’s turning point is unpredictable and idiosyncratic. Nonetheless, when timing misfires, the reader/audience feels it.

• Repetitious beats of dialogue prattle on far too long until, sometime after the audience has lost interest, the turning point finally arrives., or
• "I saw this coming ten minutes ago.”
• . None of the scene’s beats executes a turning point. The beats may zigzag in conflict, but the scene still has no shape, no arc, because the charge of its core value at the end of the scene is exactly what it was at the beginning of the scene. If nothing changes, nothing happens. The scene is a repetitious nonevent, leaving the audience to sit in wonder, asking, “What was the point of all that talk?”

SPLINTERED SCENES

Scenes flow with life when the reader/audience senses a unity between the characters’ inner motivations and outer tactics. No matter how subtle, indirect, or disguised their maneuvers may be, somehow what the characters say and do links back to their underlying desires. Scenes splinter and die for the converse reason: We sense a breakdown between what drives the scene from the subtext and what is said and done on the text, a disconnect between inner intentions and outer behaviors. As a result, the scene strikes us as false.

1) The inner desires are fully motivated, but the dialogue is too bland, and so the scene falls flat.

2) The inner wishes are weakly motivated, but the dialogue is overwrought, and so the scene feels melodramatic.

3) The inner intentions and outer actions seem irrelevant to one another, and so the scene makes no sense and dialogue ricochets into non sequitur.

4) The characters’ desires run side by side, never crossing in conflict. Without conflict, the scene has no turning point and so nothing changes; without change, dialogue thickens with exposition, the scene flattens into a nonevent, and we sit bored at best, confused at worst.

Inside-Outside

To reshape a faulty scene, start at either level, subtext or text. You could work from the outside of it by rewriting the line and then backtracking to create an inner action to fit. Or you could work from the inside out by going down into the inner life of your characters and layer by layer rebuild their deep psychologies and desires from the subtext outward into the scene’s actions and reactions, sayings and doings. This process demands hard work and time, but because the inside-out method is more difficult, its successes are more powerful.

THE PARAPHRASING TRAP

Novice writers want to believe that writing problems are word problems, so when they sense the need to rewrite, they start by paraphrasing faulty dialogue, over and over. The more they rephrase, the more on-the-nose their language becomes, until subtext vanishes and the scene is irredeemably dull and false.

Design

LOCUTION AND CHARACTERIZATION

Character-specific locutions depend on both sides of a sentence, subject and predicate. Subject (what or whom the sentence is about) and predicate (something about the subject) combine to create a line of dialogue that helps express two primary dimensions of characterization: knowledge and personality. One aspect of the line tends to convey the former, and the other, the latter.

Although characterization can be expressed through dialogue in a variety of ways, a character’s knowledge tends to be expressed in the names of things, nouns and verbs, while a character’s personality tends to be expressed in the modifiers that color those nouns and verbs.ign

Adjective, Adverbs, Voice, Modality

Fourth, modals. Modal verbs (could, can, may, might, must, ought, shall, should, will, would) attach to core verbs to add qualities of modality: ability, possibility, obligation, permission, and the like. Modal phrases convey:

1. A character’s sense of self and the world around him.
2. His feelings for his place in society and the interplay of relationships.
3. His view to the past, present, and future.
4. His attitudes toward what is possible, what is permitted, and what is necessary.

Layers

Layer 1. The image of the setting:

Layer 2. The all-too-familiar image of the situation

Layer 3. Escape from “reality”: (talk of a story within the story)

Layer 4. The memory ( back story becomes real as discussed in the present)

Layer 5. The subtext: Under the lines, we sense Jack and Karen’s desire to put aside their cop/criminal roles, to take time out from life, so they can indulge this rush of romance. We can well imagine their sexual fantasies clashing with the realization that their intimacy is tabooed. This in turn makes their sensual desires dangerous, even lethal, and so all the more erotic. Could either of them name what they’re feeling? No. No one could and still feel it. To name a feeling is to kill it.

Layer 6. Dreams: This subtextual insight leads us to imagine the wistful daydreams of Foley and Sisco. While he hopes that she will play Faye Dunaway to his Robert Redford and somehow rescue him, he knows that in fact that will never happen. Sisco can see herself as Dunaway acting out that scenario; it’s her wish, too. But like Foley, she knows it’s an impossible fantasy.

Character Dimension

But vocabulary and syntax also throw light on character dimension.

A dimension is a contradiction that underpins a character’s nature. These psychological stanchions come in two kinds: 1) Contradictions that play characterization against true character. Namely, conflicts between a character’s outer traits and his inner truths, between the persona of his visible behavior and the person he hides behind the mask. 2) Contradictions that play self against self. These dimensions link the warring forces within true, deep character—most often desires from the conscious self at odds with opposite impulses from the subconscious self.

Design

INCITING INCIDENT

At the opening of a story, the central character’s life rests in a state of relative balance. She has her ups and downs. Who doesn’t? Nonetheless, the protagonist holds reasonable sovereignty over her existence—until something happens that radically upsets that equilibrium. We call this event the inciting incident.

To incite means to start; “incident” means “event.” This first major event starts the story by throwing the protagonist’s life out of kilter. The inciting incident could happen by decision (she decides to quit her job and open her own business) or by coincidence (lightning strikes her store and she loses her business). The inciting incident could move her life powerfully to the positive (she invents a brilliant new product) or to the negative (a business rival steals her invention). The inciting incident could be a massive social event (her corporation goes bankrupt) or a quiet inner event (she comes to realize in her heart of hearts that she hates her career).1

STORY VALUES

The impact of the inciting incident decisively changes the charge of the value at stake in the character’s life. Story values are binaries of positive/negative charge such as life/death, courage/cowardice, truth/lie, meaningfulness/meaninglessness, maturity/immaturity, hope/despair, justice/injustice, to name but a few. A story may incorporate any number, variety, and possible combinations of story values, but it anchors its content in an irreplaceable core value.

THE COMPLEX OF DESIRE

Everyone wants reasonable sovereignty over existence. By throwing life out of balance, the inciting incident arouses the natural human desire to restore balance. Essentially, therefore, all stories dramatize the human struggle to move life from chaos to order, from imbalance to equilibrium.

Characters act because needs demand deeds, but the complexity of life swirls through a labyrinth of desires. Ultimately the art of storytelling merges and organizes many streams of desire into a flow of events. The storyteller picks and chooses only those desires he wishes to express in the specific scenes that progress his story from beginning to end. To understand this process, we need to examine the components of desire and how they propel storytelling.

Desire is a figure in five dimensions:

1. Object of desire
2. Super-intention
3. Motivation
4. Scene intention
5. Background desires

1. Object of Desire-what

In the wake of the inciting incident, the protagonist conceives of an object of desire, that which he feels he must have in order to put his life back on an even keel. This object could be something physical, like a stash of money; or situational, like revenge for an injustice; or ideational, like a faith to live b

2. Super-Intention-what

The super-intention motivates a character to pursue the object of desire. This phrase restates the protagonist’s conscious desire in terms of his deepest need. For example, the object of desire above (victory in the workplace) rephrased as the super-intention becomes: to gain inner peace through a public triumph.

In other words, the object of desire is objective, whereas the super-intention is subjective: what the protagonist wants versus the emotional hunger that drives him. The former term gives the writer a clear view of the crisis scene that waits at the end of the story when the protagonist will get or fail to get his object of desire. The latter term connects the writer to the feelings within the protagonist, the inner need that drives the telling.

3. Motivation-Why

Do not confuse either object of desire or super-intention with motivation. The first two answer “what” questions: What does the character consciously want? What does he subconsciously need? Motivation answers “why.” Why does a character need what he feels he needs? Why does he want his particular object of desire? And if he gets what he wants, will this success actually satisfy his need?

The roots of motivation reach deep into childhood and, for that reason, are often irrational. How much you understand the whys of your character’s needs and wants is up to you. Some writers, like Tennessee Williams, obsess on motivation; some writers, like Shakespeare, ignore it. Either way, what’s essential to the writing of scenes and their dialogue is an understanding of the characters’ conscious and subconscious desires.

4. Scene Intention-following the Object of Desire

A scene shapes a character’s moment-by-moment struggle toward his ultimate life goal. Scene intention names what a character immediately wants as a step in the long-term effort of the super-intention. As a result, the actions he takes and the reactions he gets in each scene will either take him closer to or bend him farther away from his object of desire.

5. Background Desires

A character’s background desires limit his choices of action. Each of us is constantly aware of the state of the relationship between ourselves and every person and every object we encounter in life—

Relationships become desires in this way: Once created, relationships form the foundation of our existence; they create the system that gives us our sense of identity and security in life. Our well-being depends on them. We try to eliminate relationships of negative value, while at the same time maintaining, if not improving, positive relationships. At the very least, we want relationships of either kind kept within reasonable control.

In principle, the more relationships of positive value a character accumulates in life, the more restrained, the more “civilized” his behavior. The reverse is also true: When a character has nothing to lose… he’s capable of anything.

FORCES OF ANTAGONISM

The term forces of antagonism does not necessarily refer to an antagonist or villain. Villains inhabit certain genres, and in his proper place an arch-villain, such as the Terminator, can be a fascinating antagonist. But by forces of antagonism I mean opposing forces from any or all of the four levels of conflict:

The term forces of antagonism does not necessarily refer to an antagonist or villain. Villains inhabit certain genres, and in his proper place an arch-villain, such as the Terminator, can be a fascinating antagonist. But by forces of antagonism I mean opposing forces from any or all of the four levels of conflict:

1. Physical conflict: The titanic forces of time, space, and every object in the manmade and natural universe. Not enough time to get something done, too far to go to get something, nature’s tumult from tornadoes to viruses. To these natural forces, fantasy genres add supernatural and magical forces of amazing variety and unlimited imaginings.
2. Social conflict: The powerful forces of institutions and the people who run them. All levels of government and the legal systems they enforce, all religions, the military, corporations, schools, hospitals, even charities. Every institution shapes itself into a pyramid of power. How do you gain it? Lose it? How do you move up and down the power pyramid?
3. Personal conflict: The problematic relationships of intimacy between friends, family, and lovers that range from infidelity to divorce to petty squabbles over money.
4. Inner conflict: Contradictory forces within a character’s mind, body, and emotions. How to cope when your memory betrays you, your body breaks down, or your feelings overwhelm your common sense?

Over the progressive dynamics of a story, forces from these various levels build in power and focus, deepening and widening the story. As these complications build, the protagonist reacts by digging deeper and deeper into her willpower as well as her mental, emotional, and physical capacities in an ever-escalating effort to restore life’s balance.6

Spine of Action

A story’s spine of action traces the protagonist’s constant quest for his object of desire. His persistent pursuit, driven by his super-intention, struggling against the story’s forces of antagonism, propels the entire telling from the inciting incident through the story’s progressions to the protagonist’s eventual crisis decision and climactic action, ending in a moment of resolution.

What the protagonist (or any character) does from scene to scene or says from line to line is simply a behavioral tactic. For no matter what happens on the surface, no matter what outer activity catches our eye and ear, the protagonist’s grand, unrelenting spine of action runs under every scene.

Because other people are the most common source of life’s complications, the most common activity taken along the spine of action is talk. And like the five major movements of story (inciting incident, progressive complications, crisis, climax, resolution), talk has its own five stages—desire, sense of antagonism, choice of action, action/reaction, expression.

Of these stages, expression is the activity that carries the character’s action into his world. It’s most often speech, but it may be clenching a fist or planting a kiss, hurling a plate across a room or smiling deceitfully—all the nonverbal activities that may accompany or substitute for dialogue.

STORY PROGRESSION

The scenes along the spine of action not only move dynamically across the positive/negative charges of the story’s values, but they arc along a progression of conflict. As a character struggles toward his object of desire, the forces of antagonism build, calling on greater and greater capacities from within him, generating greater and greater jeopardy in his life, demanding greater and greater willpower to make more and more risk-taking decisions.

Finally, there comes a moment when the protagonist has exhausted all possible actions, save one. Faced with the most powerful and focused conflict of his life, the protagonist must choose one final action in a last effort to put his life back in balance. He makes his crisis decision, chooses a climactic action, and takes it. Out of the climax he either gets what he wants or fails to get it. End of story. A last resolution scene may be needed to tie up any loose ends and let the reader/audience gather their thoughts and recoup their emotions.8

Scene TURNING POINTS

Ideally, every scene contains a turning point. A turning point pivots the instant the value at stake in the scene dynamically changes from positive to negative or negative to positive. This change moves the character either farther from (negative) or closer to (positive) his object of desire than the previous scene’s turning point. Turning points progress the story along its spine of action toward the final satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the protagonist’s desire at story climax.

SCENE PROGRESSION

“Progression” means the continuous topping of previous actions or events. A scene creates a turning point that progresses the storyline by topping the turning point in the previous scene. Each sequence of events causes a moderate change that surpasses the previous in terms of its impact, for better or worse, on the lives of the characters. Each act climax delivers a major impact.

But no matter whether a scene creates a minor, moderate, or major change in the story, the scene progresses within itself by building beats of behavior, so that each action/reaction tops the previous beat to and around the scene’s turning point.10

THE BEAT

Like the physical objects governed by Newton’s third law of motion, every verbal action causes a reaction. The beat is a unit of scene design that contains both an action and a reaction from someone or something somewhere in the setting. Generally, the response comes from another character, but it could come from within the acting character himself.

Beats are best identified by gerunds. A gerund is a noun that names an action by adding “-ing” to a verb. The four possible beats above, for example, could be labeled insulting/ridiculing, insulting/apologizing, insulting/regretting, insulting/greeting. The use of gerunds to name the actions beneath exchanges of dialogue is the best way I know to stop yourself from writing on-the-nose.

FIVE Stages-Steps OF BEHAVIOR om Scene Creation

When characters use what they say to pursue what they want, the rambling activity of conversation turns into the focused action of dialogue. Verbal action, indeed all behavior, moves through five distinct steps from desire to antagonism to choice to action to expression. Because people often act and react in a flash, these steps seem fused together because they fly from first to last in a blur. But that’s life, not writing. No matter how quickly and instinctively things might happen, the five steps are always there. To make the flow of character behavior as clear as possAible, let’s examine these five steps in slow-motion detail:

SACAE

Desire, Sensing Antagonism,Choosing the Action, , Doing the Action, Expression in Dialogue

1. Desire: The moment a character’s life is thrown out of balance (inciting incident), he, in reaction, conceives of (or at least senses) what he must achieve in order to restore life’s balance (object of desire). His overarching purpose to reach the object of desire (super-intention) motivates his active pursuit (spine of action). As he moves along the story’s spine, at each specific moment (scene) he must satisfy an immediate want (scene intention) in order to progress toward his object of desire. The foreground desire of scene intention and underlying pull of the super-intention influence each choice of action he makes and takes. But his background desires limit his choices because they influence what he cannot or will not do.
2. Sense of Antagonism: Before the character can act, however, he must sense or recognize the immediate forces of antagonism that block his way. How much of his understanding is conscious or subconscious, realistic or mistaken, depends on the psychology of the character, the nature of his situation, and the story the author is telling.
3. Choice of Action: The character then chooses to take a specific action in an effort to cause a reaction from his world that will move him toward his scene intention. Again, how deliberate or instantaneous this choice may be is relative to the nature of the character and his situation.
4. Action: The activity the character chooses to carry out his action may be physical or verbal or both. Desire is the source of action, and action is the source of dialogue.
5. Expression: To the extent that the character’s action needs words to carry it out, the writer composes dialogue.

The five stages of character behavior blend in concert to create a progressive subtext that ultimately finds expression in dialogue.

Types of Conflict in Scene Dialogue

• Balanced conflict: In the “Two Tonys” episode from THE SOPRANOS, series creator David Chase and cowriter Terence Winter turn their characters loose in a hard-fought duelogue of equals.
• Comic conflict: The “Author, Author” episode from FRASIER, written by Don Seigel and Jerry Perzigian, exaggerates balanced conflict to its lunatic limits.
• Asymmetric conflict: In A Raisin in the Sun, playwright Lorraine Hansberry sets one character’s aggressive verbal action against another’s quiet resistance.
• Indirect conflict: In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters manipulate each other with words of covert antagonism.
• Reflexive conflict: Chapter Seventeen compares the uses of narratized dialogue in two novels: In Fräulein Else, Arthur Schnitzler uses this technique to wage inner conflict within his protagonist, self against self; whereas in The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s protagonist confesses his inner wars directly to the reader.
• Implied conflict: In LOST IN TRANSLATION, screenwriter Sofia Coppola suspends her characters in depths of inner tension, self versus self, played out in the shadows of conflicts from the past

The Subtext Beat Progression (not repition)

When scenes feel lifeless or false, the cause is rarely found in the language of the dialogue. Rather, flaws fester in the subtext. For that reason, we break a scene into its beats in order to uncover the misshapen subtextual actions and reactions that cause these faults. A skillful analysis then guides the redesign of the scene’s beats and, with that, the re-creation of its dialogue.

No matter how many times a pattern of action/reaction repeats, it constitutes one, and only one, beat. A scene cannot progress unless its beats change, and beats cannot change until the characters change their tactics. Indeed, the most common early warning sign of an ailing scene is repetitious beats—characters using the same tactic to take essentially the same action, again and again, but using different words, speech after speech, to do it. These duplicating beats hide beneath a scene’s verbiage, and it often takes an insightful, beat-by-beat analysis to bring this flaw to light.

Sopranos Beat Progression

Subtextual Progression

Scan the list of subtextual actions below. Note how they progress the scene: Conflict builds through the first four beats, backs off for a moment in Beat 5, then progresses to the climax of Beat 13. Next note how this progression arcs the three values at stake in the scene: 1) Friendship/hatred in the doctor/patient relationship swings from positive to negative. 2) Tony’s comfortable self-deception (positive irony) turns to painful self-awareness (negative irony). 3) Peril/survival for Dr. Melfi pivots from negative to positive.

BEAT 1: Turning on the charm/Gearing up for trouble.

BEAT 2: Propositioning her/Calling him an idiot.

BEAT 3: Claiming his innocence/Avoiding conflict.

BEAT 4: Playing for pity/Blaming him.

BEAT 5: Looking for a way out/Giving him a way out.

BEAT 6: Laying it on the line/Buying time.

BEAT 7: Asking for trouble/Crossing the line.

BEAT 8: Cornering her/Belittling him.

BEAT 9: Daring her to cross him/Denying his worth.

BEAT 10: Asking nice/Giving him a last way out.

BEAT 11: Inviting the worst/Pulling her punch.

BEAT 12: Doubting himself/Firing her first barrel.

BEAT 13: Firing her second barrel/Killing her with words.

Raisin Beat Progression

Let’s look at Hansberry’s sequence of beats and how she designed their progression. She starts with a mini–inciting incident: Walter’s cheerful invitation to talk, followed by Ruth’s hostile, one-word answer, “No.” From Beat 1 to Beat 6, Hansberry builds the beats to the negative. Each exchange tops the previous beat as Ruth and Walter add pain on pain, humiliation on humiliation, putting their love and hope in greater and greater jeopardy.

BEAT 1: Inviting her to talk/Refusing his invitation.

BEAT 2: Calling her a killjoy/Calling their life a misery.

BEAT 3: Insisting she listen/Dismissing his idea.

BEAT 4: Ignoring her/Ridiculing his idea.

BEAT 5: Blaming her/Hiding her guilt.

BEAT 6: Calling her selfish/Giving in.

Ruth surrenders for a moment to listen to what he has to say.

As Walter acts out the “coffee klatch” in Beat 7, the scene takes on a lighter, almost amusing tone. The mood rises toward the positive, and we begin to feel that Ruth might take his side. But when he mentions Bobo, she reacts with suspicion, and the scene swings back toward a deeper negative, building to the turning point at Beat 11.

BEAT 7: Seducing her/Smelling a rat.

BEAT 8: Playing the businessman/Foreseeing disaster.

BEAT 9: Proving his worldliness/Rejecting his folly.

BEAT 10: Placating him/Accusing her of disloyalty.

BEAT 11: Swinging a moral hammer/Coping with defeat.

Beat 11 climaxes Walter’s scene intention. He realizes that Ruth will never help him get his mother’s money. Walter has failed again. This blow silences him for a moment, and the scene takes a breath while Walter gathers his anger and unleashes the scene’s second movement.

First he must somehow bandage his wounded ego. So in Beat 12 he tries pleading for Ruth’s understanding, but then in Beats 13 and 14 he turns on her to blame her and all black women for his failure. Finally she nails him with the truth.

BEAT 12: Begging for sympathy/Ignoring his plea.

BEAT 13: Accusing her of not loving him/Accusing him of living in a fantasy.

BEAT 14: Blaming her for his failure/Blaming him for his failure.

Beat 14 climaxes both the second movement and the scene as Ruth forces Walter to confront his responsibility for his own miserable life.

BEAT 15: Clinging to his lame excuse/Sneering at his self-deception.

BEAT 16: Soothing his wounded ego/Retreating into her fears.

The last two beats are a resolution movement that eases the tension as Walter retreats into self-pity and Ruth retreats into her secret fears about her pregnancy.

A sampling of the gerunds used to name the actions and reactions of husband and wife lays out the scene’s asymmetrical conflict:

Walter’s actions: inviting, insisting, blaming, seducing, proving, accusing, versus Ruth’s reactions: dismissing, hiding, giving in, placating, ignoring, retreating.

A sampling of lines reveals the word choices and modals used to carry out those actions.

Walter’s aggressive accusations:

You still call him a loudmouth?

You wouldn’t do nothing to help, would you?

A man needs a woman to back him up.

I’m choking to death, baby!

Ruth’s passive reactions:

Oh, Walter Lee…

Please leave me alone.

That ain’t none of our money.

I guess I can’t help myself none.

The scene arcs its primary values from positive to negative: hope to despair, security to danger, success to failure, self-respect to self-hatred. As the scene opens, Walter has hope to gain success and with that, self-respect. Ruth clings to her hope for security. But the scene’s ever-escalating beats of action/reaction push Ruth further and further from a secure future, while driving Walter further and further from his immediate goal of financial success, and even further from his life-fulfilling desire for self-respect. What’s more, because we sense that underneath the arguing these two people love each other, the climax of the scene puts their marriage in jeopardy. The scene ends on the deeply negative: Walter’s hope turns to despair; Ruth’s security turns to danger.

To fully appreciate Hansberry’s genius, notice that as she executes her immediate task of arcing the scene around its value changes, she also uses its second movement to set up Walter’s long-term character arc.

A character arc is a profound change, for better or worse, in a character’s moral, psychological, or emotional nature, expressed in values such as optimism/pessimism, maturity/immaturity, criminality/redemption, and the like. The character’s inner nature may arc from the positive (caring) to the negative (cruel), as does Michael in THE GODFATHER PART II, or from the negative (egoist) to the positive (loving), as does Phil in GROUNDHOG DAY.

Therefore, the writer must clearly establish the character at the positive or negative of a value early in the story, so that the audience can understand and feel the arc of change. Walter is the only character in the play that undergoes moral change, and so Hansberry ingeniously uses Beats 12 to 16 to set up his nature and need for change.

In five progressive beats of dialogue, Hansberry expresses Walter’s desperate desire for self-respect and the respect of his family and dramatizes that he has neither. After turning Walter’s super-intention to the negative (wounded pride) in Act 1, Hansberry takes Walter down to an even deeper hell of self-loathing and familial disgust at the Act 2 climax. At last she resurrects Walter when he makes a choice and takes an action that wins him self-respect as well as the love and admiration of his wife and family at the story climax. Walter’s character arc from self-hatred to self-respect lifts A Raisin in the Sun well above conventional social dramas about racial prejudice.

Asymmetric Beats (Daisy, great Gatsby)

TURNING POINT/SCENE CLIMAX

The scene arcs the Buchanan marriage dynamically from positive to negative in eight beats. In the first beat, their marriage seems respectful and faithful. By the last beat, Daisy’s actions reveal a marriage filled with hatred and disrespect as she plots her path back to Gatsby. At the same time, each negative action against the marriage becomes a positive beat for Daisy’s desire for the adventure that Gatsby brings to her life. Daisy’s tactic works: She wins the war against her husband and gives Jordan and Nick the message they will carry to Gatsby.

The eight beat progression takes this shape:

BEAT 1: Revealing/Concealing

ACTION: Jordan revealing that Gatsby lives in West Egg.

REACTION: Daisy concealing her surprise.

BEAT 2: Walking/Planning

ACTION: All walking to the dinner table.

REACTION: Daisy planning to humiliate Tom.

BEAT 3: Destroying/Concealing

ACTION: Daisy destroying her husband’s romantic gesture.

REACTION: Tom concealing his annoyance.

BEAT 4: Opening a subject/Turning the subject to herself

ACTION: Daisy opening a conversational subject.

REACTION: Daisy turning the subject back to herself.

BEAT 5: Wondering aloud/Turning attention to herself

ACTION: Jordan and Daisy wondering aloud to the others.

REACTION: Daisy calling attention to her finger.

BEAT 6: Accusing/Hiding

ACTION: Daisy accusing Tom of injuring her.

REACTION: Tom hiding his reaction in silence.

BEAT 7: Insulting/Ordering

ACTION: Daisy insulting her husband in public.

REACTION: Tom ordering her not to insult him again.

BEAT 8: Attacking/Retreating

ACTION: Daisy attacking him a second time.

REACTION: Tom retreating in silence.

Daisy climaxes the scene by defying her husband’s order and repeating the hated word with emphasis. In reaction, Tom once more falls silent.

Each beat tops the previous beat, progressing to the turning point when Daisy defies her husband’s order and humiliates him—each beat, that is, except Beats 4 and 5. They seem to be a hole in the dialogue’s progression because they are not aimed at Daisy’s scene intention. Indeed they’re not, because Fitzgerald uses them for another, larger purpose related to the novel’s spine of action.

Reflexive Beats

In the art of story, reflexive conflict refers to those inner battles that begin when a character’s effort to resolve an inherent dilemma boomerangs back on herself. By taking her impasse inward, her effort to deal with her crisis becomes a cause that only worsens the effect. Self-contradictions generate ever-more complex sources of antagonism as causes become effects and effects become causes in an ever-deepening whorl until the conflict itself becomes the reason it cannot be solved.

Reflexive conflict translates into dialogue the moment a troubled character starts talking to herself. As I pointed out in Chapter One, the mind, by its very nature, can step back within itself to observe itself as if it were an object. A person temporarily splits in two to develop a relationship, often critical, between her core self and other sides or aspects of herself. She can project images of her past self, her unattractive self, her better self, her future self. She can feel the presence of her conscience, her subconscious, and, above all, her silent, listening self.

Minimal Tension Beats (Lost in Translation)

Below are the beat by beat gerunds of action/reaction with the value charges they cause. Overall, the positive charges of isolation/intimacy alternate with the negative charges of lost/found to pace the scene dynamically without repetition:

BEAT 1: Impressing/Pretending

ACTION: Bob trying to impress the Barman.

REACTION: The Barman pretending he’s impressed.

Intimacy/Isolation (-)

BEAT 2: Seating her/Fitting in

ACTION: The Barman seating her.

REACTION: Charlotte fitting in.

Intimacy/Isolation (-)

BEAT 3: Attending/Testing

ACTION: The Barman attending to her.

REACTION: Charlotte testing her welcome.

Intimacy/Isolation (-)

Again, choices: Charlotte could have ordered her favorite drink immediately. But tensed by the risk she’s taking, she hesitates and gives Bob a chance to react. What he does now tells her whether or not she’s actually welcome.

Intimacy/Isolation (-)

BEAT 4: Welcoming/Joining/Endorsing

ACTION: Bob making her feel at home.

REACTION: Charlotte joining in.

Intimacy/Isolation (+)

BEAT 5: Inviting/Confessing/Concealing

ACTION: Charlotte inviting a conversation.

REACTION: Bob confessing to his three chief failures in life.

REACTION: Charlotte concealing her shock.

Lost/Found Life (--)

BEAT 6: Soothing/Sympathizing

ACTION: Bob soothing her feelings.

REACTION: Charlotte sympathizing.

Intimacy/Isolation (+)

BEAT 7: Inviting/Confessing

ACTION: Bob inviting her confession.

REACTION: Charlotte confessing to an empty, perhaps troubled personal life.

Lost/Found Life (--)

BEAT 8: Readying/Preparing/Making a pass

ACTION: Bob readying his pass.

REACTION: Charlotte preparing to take it.

REACTION: Bob making his pass.

Intimacy/Isolation (--)

BEAT 9: Foiling/Complimenting

ACTION: Charlotte foiling his pass.

REACTION: Bob complimenting her wit.

Intimacy/Isolation (+)

BEAT 10: Offering hope/Confessing/Complimenting

ACTION: Charlotte offering a silver lining.

REACTION: Bob confessing his rocky marriage.

REACTION: Charlotte complimenting his wit.

Lost/Found Life (--)

BEAT 11: Inviting/Confessing

ACTION: Bob inviting her personal story.

REACTION: Charlotte confessing to an unpromising future.

Lost/Found Life (--)

BEAT 12: Offering false hope/Laughing it off

Intimacy/Isolation (+)

Lost/Found Life (-)

BEAT 13: Offering false hope/Shrugging it off

Intimacy/Isolation (++)

Lost/Found Life (--)

BEAT 14: Celebrating/Celebrating

Intimacy/Isolation (+++)

BEAT 15: Confessing/Confessing

ACTION: Charlotte confessing she feels lost within herself.

REACTION: Bob confessing that he, too, feels lost

Lost/Found Life (---)

Intimacy/Isolation (++++)

The lines “I wish I could sleep” and “Me, too” intimate a subtext of suffering as moving as any I can remember.

Sleep restores sanity. Without it, existence becomes a mad, ticking clock. When you toss and turn, unstoppable racing thoughts send worries and fears swirling and churning through the mind. Charlotte and Bob cannot sleep. Why not? Jet lag? Racing thoughts?

In my reading of the subtext, their sleeplessness has a deeper cause. As their confessions reveal, they feel cast off from their marriages, adrift in their working lives, and at sea within themselves. A hollow place has opened up inside both that neither family nor work can fill. Charlotte and Bob have lost their purpose in life.

---

The personal revelations of losses in Beats 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, and 13 continually top each other in terms of the damage to their lives. In Beats 10 through 12, the characters’ confessions become all the more honest and all the more sad. When Charlotte and Bob toast the wreckage in Beats 13 and 14, their newfound intimacy lifts the mood for an instant, but it turns sharply into the powerful irony of Beat 15.

In the pause that follows their third and most painful confession (“I wish I could sleep”/”Me, too”), each suddenly recognizes a kindred spirit. Their immediate desire is realized in Beat 15 as their lives shift from Isolation (-) to Intimacy (++++). With irony, of course: They can’t sleep (--), but they can talk (++); they’re lost souls (---) who connect with a mirror soul (++++).

When you survey the gerunds that name their actions, notice how Charlotte and Bob mirror each other. When two people sit at a bar, unconsciously imitating each other’s posture and gestures, then echoing each other’s subtextual actions, they connect with an intimacy they themselves may not realize.

The scene climaxes on an overall positive irony and a glimmer of hope. This quiet but surprisingly dynamic scene arcs from easy rapport to bleak loss to the possibility of love. The last beat hooks strong suspense for the rest of the film: Now that Bob and Charlotte have joined forces, will they grow into lives found?

A turning point can be created in only one of two ways: by action or revelation. An event turns either by an immediate, direct action, or by the disclosure or discovery of a secret or previously unknown fact. Because dialogue can express both deeds (“I’m leaving for good”) and information (“I married you for your money”), it can turn a scene’s value charge by action, revelation, or both at once. If a scene has no turning point, if the value charge does not change in any kind or degree, then the scene is merely an exposition-filled nonevent. Too many nonevents in a row and a story collapses into tedium.