Choose to Speak: # 9 of my ramble about writing Drama

I start out with a word

And a word elicits a reply

And the reply becomes a dialogue

And the dialogue reveals the characters

And the characters become a situation

And the situation becomes the Drama

Drama is the interaction between two or more characters in a given situation.  That interaction is what we call dialogue.  Or what we refer to in real life as a “conversation”. For a playwright, dialogue is the most difficult thing to get right.  I need to show the characteristics of the protagonists with all their subtleties and nuances.  But I also need to communicate that to the audience in a form that will evoke an emotional engagement with them.

When I started writing plays I was rubbish at writing dialogue.  Luckily, I co-wrote a lot of early stuff with a friend, Jem Barnes, who was good at dialogue whilst I came up with situations and jokes.  But this lack of facility annoyed me so much that it made me spend the next fifty years watching and listening to people speaking in the real world trying to understand how and why dialogue exists. 

Overheard conversations can be difficult to follow if not downright unintelligible. But little by little it dawned on me how they work.

The mistake I made when beginning as a writer was thinking that conversations were exchanges of information.  They most certainly are not. 

The breakthrough to me was realising that Conversations don’t need to make sense.  Not to an outsider, at least. They are spoken in an instinctive code that derives from the people taking part, their relationship, and the situation they find themselves in.  They rarely contain exchanges of information except of the most specific nature. And then often only alluded to rather than expressed outright.  For a particular individual, the interactive code will be different when speaking to different interlocutors.  If you listen in, you can hear how the speakers will adopt each other’s accents, dialect and modes of speech.

This is because the main purpose of conversation is to create an emotional bond for the time that that conversation takes place.  And by “emotional bond” I don’t necessarily mean a positive one but a sort of context within which there is a shared if unspoken, agreement to converse.

The progress of the conversation is a sort of marrying together of experiences and opinions.  The odd effect of this is that someone can, during a short conversation, switch from one opinion to one diametrically opposite without even considering it or feeling odd.

The reason that conversations are so difficult to record is because, actual, intelligible words are only a small part of the interaction.  The conversation is also made up of phatic interjections, sounds, breathing, gestures and, importantly, silences. Conversations dart about pulling in snippets of ideas from other people or from television news broadcasts.  The speakers adopt the voices of others but briefly and apparently out of context:  “I said to doctor, “I’ve got a pain, just here.”  (gestures) Where I was, you know, I told you, didn’t I? carrying the shopping getting off last week - the bus - when I saw you and she’s like: “How bad?” I don’t know. “Take some paracetamol” and I’m like – well you know “ I’m allergic to that…”

From conversations like that it is still possible for the observer to gather information about the relationship of the participants, their real and imagined status and so on.  You’ll also hear how the language codes align.  Someone who normally uses the word “yes” will align if the other one uses “yeah”.  If one speaks with a strong accent the other may end up adopting it as well.

Here is something I wrote in my blog on story-telling:

“In his book ‘Sapiens’ Yuval Noah Harari talks about the central part that gossiping has in human interactions.  It’s an idea first put forward by anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar, who avers that gossiping establishes and reinforces hierarchies and alliances within groups.  He says it builds coalitions and becomes the mechanism for all social interaction and that gossiping is the manifestation in language of our primate instincts. And Professor Stephen Pinker says that language itself is hard wired into our brains so altogether it seems that this is something we just can’t help doing. 

Let me jostle in there with these big guns and suggest that story-telling is gossiping with a point.    And the point is to do with your and my place in the universe.

I’m not a primatologist but it does occur to me when I visit the Ape Rescue centre down the road from here and watch our chimpanzee cousins doing as Harari describes: grooming each other and gossiping whilst doing so, I’m behaving in exactly the same way when I’m telling a story. This Grooming gives the humble and much derided story-teller the means to hold the attention of the wise and powerful silver back for a brief moment.  I am allowed access to the top table merely by dint of being able to spin a good yarn, sometimes avoiding a cuff and sometimes even being rewarded materially for my efforts.” 

(‘My Story Story - Gossiping and Grooming.’)

And here,  I think the word “gossiping” can be translated as “conversing”

As with primate grooming, one of the crucial components of conversation will be that of the relative status of the participants. This can, however, change throughout the conversation.

One of the interesting opening gambits is inviting the other member onto your battleground.  “You’ll never guess who I’ve just been talking to…”  Is not an invitation to begin an actual quiz but to set out a status field.   In other words: “I have information that you do not….”  Thus, putting me, for a little while at least, in a superior position,

The whole of language  itself operates in the same way.  Babies learn by imitating grown ups.  In the trade it’s called babbling.  In babbling the child will imitate the song of certain words and phrases without necessarily attaching particular meaning.  As the child develops, the imitations become more specific and refined but they will still be imitations which will be applied in specific occasions.  And so into adulthood where language is entirely made up of mimicked phrases and cadences in a sort of linguistic lego set. 

Meaning is only an emergent attribute of language.  Meaning can be conveyed without language.  And most language does not contain meaning.

The mistake I made when beginning as a writer was thinking that conversations were exchanges of information.  They most certainly are not.  The interlocuters in a conversation instinctively adopt some sort of engagement separate from the words they use.  They quickly and unconsciously form the rules of this engagement.  How personal it may be;  how private, how serious, In Conversation we are not talking about the subject in hand but about ourselves.

 In recreating this, the practising playwright will, first of all establish an emotional framework and then a language code.  The details of the characters of the speakers will emerge from this.  In an earlier blog I talked about taking characters for a walk and listening to them speak.  Often my characters will develop from conversations I have with them.  And a single phrase will often conjour the whole play.

The real conversation in a drama is a three way engagement between writer, actor and audience

The dialogue that emerges on stage will be substantially more than I have written on the page. I need to remember that I am only part of the process. When I’m writing I need to let my characters take the lead and develop the play as they develop. And, crucially, I need to allow actors the room to listen and learn from the characters I have created. Allowing them space to use their own knowledge and observation to take the characters further and deeper and for meaning to emerge beyond anything I have writen. And, as I have described before, the audience will join the conversation themselves if allowed and contribute their own circles of memories and images to flesh out what I have written into something emotionally meaningful.

Do you listen in to otheer people’s conversations? For a writer, this is a healthy and essential activity. Just don’t get caught at it.