by John Hough
It usually happens the opposite way, of course—book first, then the movie based on it. When the book is good—The Maltese Falcon, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Lonesome Dove—the screenplay writer alters the story little, if at all, and helps himself liberally to the dialogue.
My point? Good dialogue in fiction, as in To Kill a Mockingbird or Eddie Coyle, translates effectively to the screen. It can’t be improved upon, whether read or spoken. But you wouldn’t watch To Kill a Mockingbird to help you with the dialogue in your novel; you’d read Harper Lee’s great book. Better to read No Country For Old Men than to watch it, for instruction in writing dialogue; there’s more of it, for one thing, and how it works on the page is your concern.
You won’t learn how to write good dialogue by watching movies.
But should you watch a film from an original screenplay to help you with the dialogue in your novel? I’m going to challenge a widely held assumption and say no. I’ll put it this way: listen to people talk in the movies the same way you listen in real life, noting the useful term, expression, or turn of phrase. You won’t learn how to write good dialogue by watching movies any more than you will by listening to the conversation at dinner tonight.
Screenplay writers have it a lot easier than we novelists do. For one thing, they have directors and cameramen to spell out action for them—to tell a character how to move, how to stand. For another, they have actors speaking their lines. Actors are their intermediaries, positioned to interpret the dialogue—to give it tone, texture, color, nuance—as they choose, or are told to do. A good actor can turn a bland line pungent. He can inject humor into a line that isn’t intrinsically funny. He can turn a banal line sorrowful. Actors use their voices, and—in film, especially—their faces, and screenplay writers, naturally, rely on them. Think of Marlon Brando as the motorcycle rebel in The Wild Ones, or the mafia don, Vito Corleone, in The Godfather—of the eloquence in his face as he speaks.
I think it’s safe to say that On the Waterfront, the film, is better than the novel it became, Waterfront. A lot better, actually. Today the novel is largely forgotten, but the movie remains a classic, rated the eighth best American film of all time by the American Film Institute.
One of its best known scenes takes place in the dark back seat of a car, a conversation between the mobster, Charley “the Gent” Malloy, played by Rod Steiger, and his younger brother Terry, the ex-prizefighter, played by Brando. Charley has been ordered by his boss to dissuade Terry, by threat or the inducement of a cushy job, from testifying against the syndicate. Terry balks, and Charley, desperate, pulls a gun on his brother. From the novel:
When Terry saw the gun in the folds of the overcoat, he was not frightened; the shock of this final gesture seemed to carry him beyond fear into a state of stunned, intuitive compassion he had never known before.
“Charley . . .” he said sadly, embarrassed for both of them. He reached out and gently turned the barrel to one side.
Charley leaned back against the seat and lowered the gun into his lap. He pushed his hat back to let his forehead breathe. He took an initialed handkerchief out of his breast pocket and mopped his face.
“Please take it,” Charley whispered. “Please take that job.”
Terry had pulled away into his corner of the back seat. He was still shaking his head in shock and disappointment. “Charley—oh, Charley.” A deep sigh welled out of him that said, “Wow . . .”
Charley’s line here is pretty good—you can hear the agony in it; not for himself but for Terry—but Terry’s lines, which come straight from the movie, might better have been left there. Charley—oh, Charley—there’s “shock” and “disappointment” in the line only because Schulberg tells us there is. Without the author’s direction, the line could be read in a variety of ways. It could be spoken lovingly. It’s a line that doesn’t speak for itself; it needs help. Rewrite Terry’s line as an exercise. Write a line that creates shock and disappointment, makes them visible in the speaker’s face.
Terry then sighs, and it isn’t quite clear whether he says, “Wow,” as he does, memorably, in the movie, or whether “Wow” is only the sigh’s import, a translation of it. Either way, with all due respect to Budd Schulberg, I would advise you to be circumspect, at the very least, about using “wow” in your dialogue. Its commonness works against it, for one thing, and its multiple inspirations in real life. A child might say it at a circus, or a husband upon seeing his wife in a new evening dress. You might say it in reaction to a long jump shot or a fifty-yard pass. It’s a generic interjection that isn’t likely to surprise the reader. It’s hard to imagine McCarthy, Haruf, Higgins, Didion, or Dorothy Parker using it. It’s impossible to imagine one of Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s characters saying “wow.”
And yet the word, coming after Charley—oh, Charley, comprises one of filmdom’s most memorable lines. The difference, of course, is Marlon Brando. Brando turns those four ordinary words, ending with Wow, into a soft wail of anguish, using his face and his voice, cramming the line with emotion called straight from Terry Malloy’s breaking heart.
There’s no better illustration than this of the difference between dialogue in film and fiction. The screenplay writer has actors, and you never do. You don’t have Brando, Paul Newman, or Meryl Streep to give visible eloquence to your dialogue, to interpret it for you. It’s up to you. Your dialogue should evoke a character physically, as I’ve said, and it should convey, as well, the look on his or her face as the lines are spoken. The emotion in the dialogue should find expression in the face. Pain, joy, wonderment, disgust: we should see them.
Here are two prime examples of expressive dialogue:
John Grady Cole, in Cities of the Plain, asks Billy Parham to do him a surprising favor. The conversation goes on awhile, and you can pick it up anywhere and watch the two boys’ faces as they talk, sitting alone in the rear of a bar in the afternoon quiet:
Let me see if I got this straight. You want me to go to a whorehouse in Juarez Mexico and buy this whore cash money and bring her back across the river to the ranch. Is that about the size of it?
John Grady nodded.
Shit, said Billy. Smile or somethin, will you? Goddamn. Tell me you ain’t gone completely crazy.
I ain’t gone completely crazy.
The hell you ain’t.
I’m in love with her, Billy.
Billy slumped back in his chair. His arms hung uselessly by his side. Aw goddamn, he said. Goddamn.
I cant help what it sounds like.
My own damn fault. I never should of took you down there. Never in this world. It’s my fault. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m complainin about.
He leaned and took his lighted cigarette from the tin ashtray where he’d put it and took a pull on it and blew the smoke across the table. Tell me this, he said.
All right.
What in the goddamn hell would you do with her if you did get her away from down there? Which you ai’nt.
Marry her.
Billy paused with the cigarette half way to his mouth. He put it down again.
Well, that’s it, he said. That’s it. I’m havin your ass committed.
John Grady’s expression, which we see in his short, quiet answers, never changes. We see his gaze, downcast or averted. Billy’s face is animated. Another writer might tell us that his eyes widen, or that he grimaces, or scrunches his face (avoid this last one). McCarthy uses only dialogue, and we see a kaleidoscope of emotions in the young cowboy’s sunbrowned face: incredulity, worry, exasperation, and, at times, a blend of all three. You can’t bring all of that to a character’s face except with dialogue.
The human face doesn’t get any more stricken than Nat Turner’s and his friend Hark’s on the searing next-to-last page of William Styron’s masterful historical novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Nat was the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, and we are now in the drafty little jail where Nat and Hark have spent their fin
al days:
In a long drawn-out breath Hark’s wail dies away. Now I hear a hurried sound of snapping ropes as they tie him into the chair. Then the white men whisper and grunt while they strain beneath the weight of their burden and lift Hark out into the hallway. Shadows leap up and quiver in the lantern’s brassy radiance. The white men shuffle in furious labor, gasping with the effort. Hark’s bound and seated shape, like the silhouette of some marvelous black potentate borne in stately procession toward his throne, passes slowly by my door. I reach out as if to touch him, feel nothing, clutch only a handful of air.
“Dis yere some way to go,” I hear Hark say. “Good-bye, ole Nat!” he calls.
“Good-bye, Hark,” I whisper, “good-bye, good-bye.”
“Hit gwine be all right, Nat,” he cries out to me, the voice fading. “Ev’ythin gwine be all right! Dis yere ain’t nothin’, Nat, nothin’ atall. Good-bye, ole Nat, good-bye.”
Exclamation points granted, and no actor needed.
5
CHOREOGRAPHY AND DESCRIPTION AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO DIALOGUE
Good dialogue conveys facial expression, but what about the speaker’s posture, movements, gestures—the choreography? What is he doing while he’s talking, and how important is it that the reader sees him doing it?
It depends, of course, on the circumstances. A dinner conversation needs little choreography, and there isn’t much available—a glass lifted, a waiter summoned, food pushed around on a plate. There isn’t much Charley and Terry Malloy can do, sitting in the back seat of the car with their arms folded. There’s more freedom, say, on a park bench; your two characters might lean forward, or slump back, as they talk. They might watch a woman go by, or look up into the trees. If your characters are standing on the field at Yankee Stadium during batting practice, they’re paying at least some attention to what’s going on around them as they talk. Their gazes are going to shift. They might hear a shout from the grandstand and glance over there. If they’re in a bar, they’re drinking, and the reader should see them doing it. Does she gingerly raise a stemmed martini glass? Is he slugging beer out of the bottle?
There are two reasons, which often coincide, to interrupt your dialogue with a gesture or action. The first is to hold on to the character visually—to keep him or her clearly in front of us. The second is to create a pause, to clarify the moment or enhance its dramatic effect.
INTERRUPTING DIALOGUE TO KEEP A CHARACTER’S PHYSICAL APPEARANCE FRONT AND CENTER
This can be important when the character is unusual physically—when physical makeup is crucial to who the character is. Ahab, with his hard-set, weathered face and wooden leg, is an example of this, and Melville keeps his image before us. Fitzgerald flashes constantly on Daisy Buchanan, whose character and sprightly beauty are inextricable. No one can forget, for a moment, what Ahab and Daisy look like. Powerhouse, the obese pianist and protagonist of Eudora Welty’s brilliant short story of the same name, is noteworthy in his appearance, to put it mildly:
He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard’s, but big glowing eyes when they’re open . . . There he is with his great head, fat stomach, and little round piston legs, and long yellow-sectioned strong big fingers, at rest about the size of bananas.
The story gathers around Powerhouse as he performs in a roadhouse, then goes across the street with his band during intermission to drink a beer. His dialogue is compulsive and incessant, and amounts to a second narrative voice, and Welty keeps reminding us, as he talks, how emphatically this immense and compelling figure fills space. He is conversing with his musicians as they play at the white dance in this small Mississippi town far from their home:
“Aaaaaaaaa!” shouts Powerhouse, flinging out both powerful arms for three whole beats to flex his muscles, then kneading a dough of bass notes. His eyes glitter. He plays the piano like a drum sometimes—why not?
“Gypsy? Such a dancer?”
“Why you don’t hear it straight from your agent? Why it ain’t come from headquarters? What you been doing, getting telegrams in the corridor, signed nobody?”
They all laugh. End of that chorus.
“What time is it?” Powerhouse calls. “What the hell place is this? Where is my watch and chain?”
“I hang it on you,” whimpers Valentine. “It still there.”
There it rides on Powerhouse’s great stomach, down where he can never see it.
“Sure did hear some clock striking twelve while ago. Must be midnight.”
“It going to be intermission,” Powerhouse declares, lifting up his finger with the signet ring.
Powerhouse is a special case. His face and physique demand to be seen; they are who he is, in a sense, like Ahab’s wooden leg and Daisy’s beauty. This changes when your characters are less striking physically. The reader knows what they look like, no need to emphasize it. Only an occasional camera shot is necessary. Think, as you write their dialogue, when it might be useful to the reader to see them gesture, move, or shift their gaze.
Visuals—camera shots—become more useful, and even necessary, in the midst of dialogue when two characters are sexually attracted to each other. Hemingway, advising a young writer, said, “Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader will see it too and have the same feeling that you had.” In other words, create emotion in the reader by showing him, making him see, what prompts the emotion in your character. (This technique does away with the need for pounding hearts, tingling scalps, gasps, eyes bugging out, and so on; if you can make the reader feel what your character is feeling, she will experience these sensations in her imagination.) When two characters are lovers, or would like to be, show us why. Reinforce the sexual tension of the dialogue with the timely visual.
With this in mind, I made the female protagonist of The Last Summer, Claire Malek, a smoker. (Claire’s background is blue collar and the year is 1968, so the fact that she smokes doesn’t call attention to itself.) The novel is a love story, and I wanted to give Claire a cigarette in certain scenes as a prop. She’s sitting at a drugstore counter beside Lane Hillman, the younger man who is falling in love with her:
“Are you dating anybody?” he said.
She smiled again and opened her purse. He took the matches from her as before and struck one and lifted it to her cigarette. She turned and blew smoke down away from him, and again regarded him with a slow half smile.
“Not at the moment,” she said.
A pretty woman on a drugstore stool, turning, tucking her head down near her shoulder to blow smoke, then swinging her gaze around again, struck me as an alluring visual and prelude to her cagey answer to Lane’s question. Later they’re in bed together:
She raised herself on her elbow. “Lane, honey there’s a few things you have to learn.”
“I know,” he said.
“Not about sex. About women.”
“What?” he said.
She smiled and didn’t answer. She leaned in and kissed him, then got up and moved around the room and found her purse. She dug out a cigarette and came back and smoked it sitting up beside him with one leg out straight and the other cocked.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
Lane’s view of the bare cocked leg preempts conversation for the moment. He’s stirred by it, and declares his love. The visual has sent the dialogue in a new direction.
Lee Smith likes to keep her characters in view, especially lovers. In her epistolary novel, Fair and Tender Ladies, protagonist Ivy Rowe follows the beekeeper, Honey Breeding—another of Smith’s charmers—up the mountain behind her home:
“Did you go to the war?” I asked.
“I sure did,” Honey said. His voice floated back to me over his shoulder. He pulled his shirttail up out of his pants.
“Where did you go?” I asked.
“First I went to Germany,” Honey said, “and then I went to France.”
W
e walked on. “I had another older brother that died,” I said, “and then a little one that died young. And also I’ve got another one, Johnny, that I have not seen in a while that plays the piano, and yet one more that is making a preacher.”
I couldn’t believe I was talking so much, to a perfect stranger!
“See that rock?” I said. “My momma used to come up here and sit on it and cry.”
“What did she cry for?” Honey asked.
“Because my daddy was sick, I reckon, and things had not worked out like she thought.”
“They never do,” Honey said. He walked on before me, up the path. His white shirt flapped in the wind, so white it was dazzling.
Honey is fair and pale-blond, and the snow-white shirt adds to his physical brightness, his glow. He untucks it as he walks, and we see the shirt, and the action, when the wind snatches it. It isn’t much—two sentences—but the two brief visuals keep him in sight as he talks. They add a degree of heat to the already-charged dialogue; Ivy is mesmerized, and Smith shows us why.
INTERRUPTING DIALOGUE TO CREATE A NEEDED PAUSE
When there’s little reason to inject a visual, the interruption by an action or gesture can give you a needed pause in your dialogue. The pause might be due to uncertainty or nervousness in the speaker, or the speaker might pause knowingly, for dramatic effect, as we often do in real life. Willie Stark, the Machiavellian visionary in Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 political classic, All The King’s Men, is running for governor. Speaking to the crowd at a Sunday barbeque, he finds his political voice and sets his rise to power in motion. He has just realized he’s being used by an opponent, Harrison, a revelation that first shocks, then galvanizes Willie Stark. He disregards his written speech and extemporizes, referring to himself in the third person:
