Archive for the 'Dialogue' Category
Avoid On the Nose Writing by Being Pinteresque
After refilling the dialogue inspiration well, I fired up good old Wikipedia and dialed in David Mamet just to see what they had to say about him, in the hopes maybe they could shed some light on his process for writing snappy banter.
Here are some things they had to say:
“He often uses italics and quotation marks to highlight particular words and to draw attention to his characters’ frequent manipulation and deceitful use of language. His characters frequently interrupt one another, their sentences trail off unfinished, and their dialogue overlaps.”
Colorful and realistic, if perhaps hyperreal. The quick comebacks and witty nature of every character is somewhat superhuman. Where is the much more realistic example of someone being insulted and only thinking of a good response after the situation as passed? Ah, but yes… reality is boring. And we still haven’t learned much, so I perused some more;
“Mamet dedicated Glengarry Glen Ross to Harold Pinter, who was instrumental in its being first staged at the Royal National Theatre, in 1983, and whom Mamet has acknowledged as an influence on its success, and on his other work.”
Ok, so I felt it necessary to fire up Harold Pinter in the search;
“Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter’s drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as ‘comedy of menace’, a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.”
To write on the nose dialogue is to have one of your characters say, “I’m angry.” I remember reading about one of the tricks Donald Westlake uses, which is to “write around the emotion without actually stating it.”
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