The Said, the Unsaid and the Unsayable, Robert McKee, Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen, p. 46–49
As you compose dialogue, I think it’s useful to imagine character design as three concentric spheres, one inside th other — a self within a self within a self. This three-tiered complex fills dialogue with content of thought and feeling while shaping expression in gesture and word. The innermost sphere churns with the unsayable; the middle sphere restrains the said; the outer sphere releases the unsaid.
THE SAID
The surface level of things said supports the more or less solid meanings that words, spoken or written, directly express with both denotations and connotations. “Snake”, for example, literally means “a legless reptile”, but in Western culture it also symbolizes treachery and evil. The word “house” connotes more than domicile. It carries overtones of home, hearth, and family, plus undernotes of shack, crash pad, and flophouse.
This is why quotable dialogue such as “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’” (Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION) and “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight” (Emily Charlton in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA) outlive their stories and theuir characters. These sentences express their meaning no matter who says it or when.
Word choices (busy dyin’, stomach flu) naturally enrich the lines with connotations from the culture outside their fictional setting. But because a specific character in a specific situation speaks the lines with a specific purpose, a wholly new and deeper realm comes into play: the character’s intelligence, imagination, and other genetic givens.
By creating an original dialogue style of vocabulary, diction, syntax, grammar, tone, tropes, and accent, the writer characterizes a role. Verbal choices express the character’s education or lack of it, wit or lack of it, his outlook on life, the range of his emotional behavior — all the observable traits that jigsaw into a personality.
THE UNSAID
A second sphere, the unsaid, revolves within a character. From this inner space the self gazes out at the world. As thoughts and feelings form at this level, the self deliberately withholds them. Nonetheless, once the character speaks (text), readers and audiences instinctively look past the words to intuit the unsaid, to glimpse what the character actually thinks and feels (subtext) but chooses not to put into words. The writer, therefore, must hone dialogue so that this is possible, so that the unsaid can be sensed by implication.
When Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) says to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight”, what she does not say, but we knoe she is thinking, might go something like this: “The fashion world forces me to live an anorexic life, but Iwant my career more than my health. Perpetual hunger is a price I’m happy to pay. If you value your job future, you will do the same.”
Novels thrive at the level of the unsaid. In Chapter One of Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love”, a violent accident kills a man. In the next chapter, as Joe Rose stands among the other survivors, surveying the aftermath, he confides to the reader:
“Clarissa came up behind me and looped her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my back. What surprised me was she was already crying (I could feel the wetness on my shirt) whereas to me, sorrow seemed a long way off. Like a self in a dream I was both first and third persons. I acted, and saw myself act. I had my thoughts, and I saw them drift across a screen. As in a dream, my emotional responses were nonexistent or inappropriate. Clarissa’s tears were no more than a fact, but I was pleased by the way my feet were anchored to the ground and set well apart, and the way my arms were folded across my chest. I looked out across the fields and the thought scrolled across: That man is dead. I felt a warmth spreading through me, a kind of self-love, and my folded arms hugged me tight. The corollary seemed to be “And I am alive”. It was a random matter, who was alive or dead at any given time. I happened to be alive.”
THE UNSAYABLE
Deepest yet, concealed beneath the unsaid, the sphere of the unsayable roils with subconscious drives and needs that incite a character’s choices and actions.
A character’s truest nature can only be expressed when, under the pressures of life, he chooses to act in pursuit of a life-defining desire. As antagonistic pressures build greater and greater power, the character’s choices of action reveal his hidden self, until a final choice under the maximum pressure of life exposes the character’s primal, irreducible self. How deliberate versus instinctive the motivations are that propel human choice of action has been debated for centuries. But whatever the case, choices begin in this innermost sphere.
Talk is the foremost vehicle for human action. When a character says something, he is, in fact, doing something. By speaking, he could be comforting a loved one, bribing an enemy, begging for help, refusing to help, obeying authority, defying authority, paying the price, remembering the day, and so on down the limitless list of human actions. Dialogue expresses far more than the meanings of its words. As language, dialogue conveys characterization, but as action, dialogue expresses true character.
Moment by moment, your character struggles in pursuit of her desires; she takes actions and uses her spoken words to carry them out. At the same time, however, her language choices convey her inner life, conscious and subconscious, without annoucing it. Whether read or acted, fine dialogue creates a transparency that allows the reader/audience to gaze through the text of talk. This phenomenon turns the story-goer into a mind reader.
When you read a page of expressive dialogue or watch a fine actor perform a complex scene, your sixth sense invades the character. You become a telepathist, often better aware of what’s going on inside her than she knows herself. Your story-trained sonar traces vibrations down through the character’s subconscious currents, until the actions she takes in the subtext of her lines enunciate her identity and you discover her profound personal dimensions.
If, as some people believe, anything and everything can be expressed in words, we should stop telling stories and write essays instead. But we don’t, because at the rock bottom of being, the unsayable energies in the subconscious mind are real demand expression.
Dialogue unites these realms because the spoken word resonates through all three spheres. Dialogue wields the double power to express the effable (characterization) while it illumines the ineffable (true character) — what can be put into words versus what can only be put into action. Dialogue, therefore, is the writer’s foremost vehicle for character content.
