Dialogue (II): Melody, Harmony, Repetition and Variation and Leitmotif, John Truby, The Anatomy of Story, p. 376–380
Track 1: Story Dialogue — Melody
Story dialogue, like melody in music, is the story expressed through talk. It is talk about what the characters are doing. We tend to think of dialogue as being opposed to action: “Action speak louder than words”, we say. But talk is a form of action. We use story dialogue when characters talk about the main action line. And dialogue can even carry the story, at least for short periods of time.
You write story dialogue the same way you construct a scene:
a. Character 1, who is the lead character of the scene (and not necessarily the hero of the story), states his desire. As the writer, you should know the endpoint of that desire, because this gives you the line on which the dialogue of the scene (the spine) will hang.
b. Character 2 speaks against the desire.
c. Character 1 responds with dialogue that uses a direct or indirect plan to get what he wants.
d. Conversation between the two becomes more heated as the scene progresses, ending with some final words of anger or resolution.
An advanced dialogue technique is to have the scene progress from dialogue about action to dialogue about being. Or to put it another way, it goes from dialogue about what the characters are doing to dialogue about who the characters really are. When the scene reaches the hottest point, one of the characters says some form of the words “You are…” He then gives details of what he thinks about the other person, such as “You are a liar” or “You are a no-good, sleazy…” or “You are a winner”.
Notice that this shift immediately deepens the scene because the characters are suddenly talking about how their actions define who they essentially are as human beings. The character making the claim “You are…” is not necessarily right. But just the simple statement makes the audience sum up what they think of these characters so far in the story. This technique is a kind of self-revelation within the scene, and it often includes talk about values (see Track 2, moral dialogue). This shift from action to being is not present in most scenes, but it is usually present in key scenes. Let’s look at an example of this shift in a scene from “The Verdict”.
THE VERDICT
In this scene, Mr. Doneghy, brother-in-law of the victim, accosts attorney Frank Galvin for turning down a settlement offer without consulting him first. We come in about halfway through the scene:
INT. COURTHOUSE CORRIDOR — DAY
DONEGHY
… Four years… my wife’s been crying to sleep what they, what they did to her sister.
GALVIN
I swear to you I wouldn’t have turned the offer down unless I thought I could win the case…
DONEGHY
What you thought!? What you thought… I’m a working man, I’m trying to get my wife out of town, we hired you, we’re paying you, I got to find out from the other side they offered two hundred…
GALVIN
I’m going to win this case… Mist… Mr. Doneghy… I’m going to the jury with a solid case, a famous doctor as an expert witness, and I’m going to win eight hundred thousand dollars.
DONEGHY
You guys, you guys, you’re all the same. The doctors at the hospital, you… it’s “What I’m goingo to do for you”; but you screw up it’s “We did the best that we could. I’m dreadfully sorry…” And people like me live with your mistakes the rest of our lives.
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Track 2: Moral Dialogue — Harmony
Moral dialogue is talk about right and wrong action, and about values, or what makes a valuable life. Its equivalent in music is harmony, in that it provides depth, texture, and scope to the melody line. In other words, moral dialogue story events. It’s about the characters’ attitudes toward those events.
Here’s the sequence in moral dialogue:
a. Character 1 proposes or takes a course of action.
b. Character 2 opposes that action on the grounds that it is hurting someone.
c. The scene continues as each attacks and defends, with each giving reasons to support his position.
During moral dialogue, characters invariably express their values, their likes or dislikes. Remember, a character’s values are actually expressions of a deeper vision of the right way to live. Moral dialogue allows you, at the most advanced level, to compare in argument not just two or more actions but two or more ways of life.
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Track 3: Key Words, Phrases, Taglines, and Sounds — Repetition, Variation, and Leitmotif
Key words, phrases, taglines, and sounds are the third track of dialogue. These are words with the potential to carry special meaning, symbolically or thematically, the way a symphony uses certain instruments, such as the triangle, here and there for emphasis. The trick to building this meaning is to have your characters say the word many more times than normal. The repetition, especially in multiple contexts, has a cumulative effect on the audience.
A tagline is a single line of dialogue that you repeat many times over the course of the story. Every time you use it, it gains new meaning until it becomes a kind of signature line of the story. The tagline is primarily a technique for expressing theme. Some classic taglines are “Round up the usual suspects”, “I stick my neck out for nobody”, and “Here’s looking at you, kid”, from Casablanca. From Star Wars: “May the force be with you”. From Field of Dreams: “If you build it, he will come”. The Godfather uses two taglines: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” and “It’s not personal; it’s business”.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shows us a textbook example of how to use the tagline. When the line is first uttered, it has no special meaning. After robbing a train, Butch and Sundance can’t shake a posse. Butch looks back at the men way off in the distance and says, “Who are those guys?” A while later, the posse is even closer, and Sundance repeats the line, this time with a hint of desperation. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Butch and Sundance’s main task is to figure out the identity of “those guys”. Those guys aren’t just another posse our heroes can easily lose. They are the future stage of society. They are all-star lawmen, from all over the American West, hired by a corporate boss back East that Butch, Sundance, and the audience never even meet. But if Butch and Sundance don’t figure out who those guys are in time, they will die.
