Thank you, the fleabag scene was very realistically portrayed. They said just enough. As I watched it on my phone, accidentally my TV rainy night screensaver came on. It blended so well with the dialoge, I could not help but think that a light drizzle would have been a perfect directorial fit as the priest walked away into the night.
Ooh I love this "found" addition. In fact, so much of the larger patterning of dialogue (its rhythms & how/why it succeeds) comes down to, honestly, sound design! Think about space filled with the cozy pitter-patter of rain VERSUS absolute blank silent. I'd argue the first is more "life is a constant deluge of melancholy, but all will be okay" versus blank silence's inherent, stark DRAMA (much more somber!). So the details of the scene's sound are part of how we aid and abet our dialogue writing—and this is equally true in fiction and screenwriting, I think. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Cathryn! I hope you'll continue with the course—we'll be getting deeper in subtext, as well as how to reverse-engineer it, do fun free-writes together, and more. :-)
I’m obsessed with the false floors breakdown. Thank you for bringing it to my life.
After I got over the feeling like an absolute creep, I embraced the urban safari. I found a photographer/videographer and a real estate agent in their natural habitat of the hippest coffee shop in the particular area of town I was in. I was able to deduce who they were within very few exchanges. I imagine the relationship between them is professional, but he seemed to want it to be more, as some of his advice and offers to help seemed to go above and beyond. She didn’t’ seem interested and kept responses quite short and vague. He dominated the conversation 85% to her 15%. It may not be amusing to everyone, but I found it unintentionally amusing that they were decrying the use of AI in their professions and how deceptive it was, but then turned around and talked about content that they were planning that was based on lies. “I’m going to lie and say..." As for genre, I’m going with dry indie emo that I will pass on seeing.
Hi Sarah! If you're not feeling like an outright creepoid, you're not ... creating!? Let's make that the new rule! :-) THANK YOU for sharing this instrinsically comedic eavesdropped convo! (Sidenote: Can't tell you how many conversations I've overheard where the men are doing 85% of the talking. Including countless Tinder/Hinge/Bumble dates!)
What you're touching on is that SO much of what's happening in conversations (especially between people who know each other less) is *performance*. This is adjacent to, but a little different from, the gleaming tile floor that covers subtext. Performance is more about bravado and power moves: trying to make the other person see them a certain way, trying to drive the conversation, trying to seduce/charm/ingratiate.
Also: You know how people HATE to hear their own voice on a recording? Part of that is for sure just being confronted with your own visceral reality, and the weird-ick of it all, but I have a theory that a LOT of that is that when we hear ourselves speaking we're suddenly aware of how much bullshit performance we're doing ourselves—how disingenuous or conniving (it's not a "bad person" thing, just a human thing). Which is to say: I bet you if these people overheard themselves as you heard them, they would also cringe. :-)
I'd invite you to copy & paste this comment into Lesson #2 (now live!), because people will be exploring their eavesdropped gems there. And thank you for sharing!!
This is such a filmic set-up, I could imagine it perfectly. (Also the genre description and the hard pass hahaa!)
Such a good point that you could deduce who they were within a few 'lines' - exactly what we're hoping to achieve with the kind of dialogue that introduces new characters.
While searching for tips on eavesdropping, I found TalkBank.org where participants were paid to have 1/2 hour telephone conversations recorded. Some start off a little stilted but they get pretty natural-sounding.
Not a Fleabagger - I've never even heard of it - but I could pick up on the subtlety and hidden depths of it. But maybe that's part of my own experience of life where I have had to pick up on subtle cues and understand how to navigate my next steps. Also, I am a bit of an avid reader and have read a lot of good and bad dialogue. With your explanation, I could see how the floors were laid down. I am looking forward to small-town eavesdropping and partaking in my own dialogue scripting. I think sometimes it is hard to know when to go for layers and when it's okay to hit the reader.
Hi Makeila! Can’t wait to see what juicy eavesdropping you stumble across! Please do share. 🤗 Yes, to your point, we’re all actually subtext experts already because this is the “code” we understand each other with. There is a built-in sense that language can be disingenuous—the most boring version of this being the performative “frenemy.” But even when there are no I’ll intentions between speakers, we’ve all experienced not being able to say what we really mean—because we’re scared to, don’t want to hurt someone, the transactional nature of the exchange supersedes, etc etc etc!
Yes, she does a fantastic job of keeping it real and finding beauty/jeopardy/stakes in “ordinary” talk. She’s called it a “tennis match” and it sounds like she really loves writing it (her lack of quotation marks is also interesting!!). I haven’t read a ton of Rooney so I may be off here, but my only small criticism is I’m not sure she’s great at voice differentiation. This may be a controversial opinion! I think sometimes her characters are speaking in one big meta-voice meant to represent a certain kind of thinker, similar to her.
Proper snort-laughed at all the examples of over-egged, badly-pitched dialogue. And now I kinda want to write something deliberately stylised to be 'bad'!
As for Fleabag — that "it'll pass" line is such an OOF moment. Exactly what you DON'T want someone to say when you've just confessed your love for them, but also full of layers of reassurance, too, which is just perfect from a spiritual guidance figure: i.e. all this hurt and pain and uncertainty will pass, too. Gah, such clever, sparse writing.
And re: eavesdropping/borrowing real conversations, I wish I had the backhanded skill of a friend of mine who recently commented on a mutual acquaintance's artistic skills by saying: "Well, a lot of people think she's very good, she gets good reviews, she's won a few awards, so, y'know, I'm sure she's very capable..." It should have been the bitchiest thing you've ever heard but it was said in such a gentle, matter-of-fact way that I only realised he'd been massively passive-aggressive afterwards.
I’m thrilled to see this breakdown. I read so many books that expose the wooden floor (some seem to be missing a tile level). The author hits the reader over the head with what a character means ad nauseam. It’s clear from some of the popular books out there nowadays that readers expect to be spoon fed the deeper meaning because they can’t seem to grasp anything below surface level.
I love real conversation. Sometimes I wonder what was said right before or after, because I’ve only heard a portion of something interesting while waiting in line, in a waiting room, at a cafe, at work, etc. I’ve jotted them down and later wondered how wonderful it would have been had I known what else was said.
Thank you for this incredible detail of how we use the subfloors in our communication. That helps me understand how to write two people who aren’t connecting, when one is communicating at the soil level and the other only talks at the tile level, and the other is missing what they truly mean/need/want. It reminds me of a lot of people I know who say, “That’s not what you said. Why didn’t you just tell me what you meant?”
Yes exactly! This is a great comment! Very often (see: all the works of Chekhov!) two characters simply aren't hearing each other. It's two concurrent monologues—"all talk," no communications. But as you point out, sometimes the *additional* mess of what's happening is that one character is talking at a very superficial level (the tile level)—perhaps because that's where they feel safest—and one character is down in the subfloor, picking around at the muck of their relationship. One character won't engage.
So the "false floors" analogy (and any deep understanding of subtext) is first and foremost meant to help you understand what's REALLY being said in a conversation with emotional undercurrent/history, and understand how communication "tunnels" and hides. But it also (as you point out) offers a key for evaluating what disparate levels characters are speaking to each other from, *within the same conversation*. So the permutations are endless.
Re: "what were they talking about before and after??"—yes! This boosts our writing when we ask ourselves to imagine for our scene/within our fiction writing ...
But it's ALSO a great generative technique to apply to your Urban Safari eavesdropping! I hope you'll do that exercise this week, and I look forward to reading what everyone found out in the public wilds!
Thank you so much for this. Your comment about how communication “tunnels” and hides opens a whole new world of possibilities for writing conversations; there are endless opportunities for misunderstandings.
LOVED IT! This is such a fun course already. I love the homework, and I can’t wait to go watch my own, private showing of Real Housewives Smalltown Grocery Store.
Your opening example is so sparse, yet so rich. Good for illustrating how much there is in those subfloors even when the dialog seems thin on the surface. I LOVED Fleabag, and of course there was a LOT we fans already knew to use as x-ray glasses on the scene. I wonder about your other subscribers initial takes on that dialog if they knew nothing about Fleabag. I could feel those subfloors that you excavated so well—I wonder if they were more of a surprise to non-Fleabaggers. Maybe there are no non-Fleabaggers here! So I guess I’m setting up to ask about the importance of reader-knowledge set-up to dialog, keeping track of that, and avoiding (my personal bugaboo) of using dialog as an info dump. I’m writing/reading sci-fi right now and it’s rife with it, but seems hard to completely avoid unless you go w/ a narrative info-dump—which ain’t that good either.
Non-Fleabagger. I’d never heard of the show, but I don’t watch television, so it’s no surprise. We have no streaming services, no cable. I was surprised by the floor levels because I had no idea what the show was about. (The upper ones; once I read those, the lower ones were pretty much a given). After reading this newsletter, I read about the show, and then the subfloors made sense. In case you were interested in a non-Fleabagger’s perspective.
Yes, I tried to choose an easy example (heartbreak, at a literal point of departure) for any non-FLEABAGers. :-) If you do ever watch the show, a head's up that Season 2 (in my humble perspective) is the stronger writing and the more heart-tugging. But Season 1 helps you get cozy with the big ensemble cast.
Hello there! :-) I’ve never seen Fleabag, and watching this scene makes me really, really, really want to.
Here to report that I did pick up on most of the subtext, but I questioned whether the priest saying “I love you” back came from him having feelings for her and denying them for his loyalty to God.
I tried to figure it out with the body language as the scene played out. For a second it almost seemed like he was close to kissing her and then turned his head the other way to stop himself. And his emotion when he said he loved her too made me wonder.
Those are my initial takes — a case study if you were at all interested. It wasn’t totally clear to me, but I guess that’s the good thing about our books: our readers aren’t just dropped into the ending. They’ve been studying our characters the whole time. If we’ve done a good job of dropping breadcrumbs of subtext all throughout, our character arcs can prove delicious!
Ooh that's such an interesting point about body language also — how that might affect what your character is saying and how it comes across. Layers, layers layers...
Definitely! I think the way to think about it in a script is: the dialogue informs the acting/body language when its subtext is clear & accessible to the actor (and actors are geniuses at decoding this stuff—that’s their job). The writer can write gestures, turns towards or away, and basic physicality into a script, but the general wisdom is you don’t want to give the actor too much direction around small movements. That’s really the actors domain and choice. So I think the BEST way to accomplish a dynamic convo that incorporates the additional layering of body language is to work *within the dialogue* to make the scene *move* in all the ways it can move. With physicality, eyeliners avoided, eye contact, drooped heads, etc. By acing the dialogue and knowing your subtext.
In fiction, it’s a bit different of course. We have more space & permission in prose to write physicality into the conversation (because the HOW of how we write it in can add beauty & poignance or wit—whereas that’s not the goal in the screenplay.)
Yes! I do think the scene is a fascinating case study even if someone hasn't seen the show, but to give some supportive backstory: the Hot Priest *definitely* loves her. They have fallen in love. Here he is stepping into his decision to keep god above any one person ... so he *NOW* must love her, as he loves all humans, with his allegiance to god at the helm.
When he says (ugh, dagger through the heart!) "it'll pass" he's talking to himself too.
I saw some but not all of Fleabag, but I still can't see the priest without also seeing Moriarty from Sherlock (played by the same actor) which somehow heavily undermines my ability to believe anything the priest character says and, I think, detracted from my ability to appreciate Fleabag.
OK, trust the reader (multiple repeats, like a mantra). I do like to drop folks into the middle of the convo, but then I worry I’ll drown somebody—usually in my reading group, where I can hear them calling for help (sounds like whining to me.) I’ll stay strong and throw them a lifeline, maybe in a later scene.
Yes, like a mantra!! Remember, they don’t need ALL the info at the same time. You can pass it out, piece by piece, like Halloween candy. Yes, see you here next week. 😁
I'd venture a bet that we are mostly FLEABAG-ers here! :-)
Ah yes, exposition is the devil. And a particularly tormenting one for the screenwriter, who doesn't have the luxury of prose to communicate with the viewer. Getting good at screenwriting is largely about getting sneaky as hell about subtly layering in information drop after information drop—both through context (scene, setting, design, other characters) and through dialogue.
But in BOTH prose & screenplays, I'd offer this same advice: Drop your audience into the middle of the fucking conversation, and let them learn how to swim.
Why? When the audience has to tune in at a micro-level to just make sense of what's happening in the convo, they are suddenly: INVESTED! UNDISTRACTED! SEEING MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SUBTEXT & THE MACHINATIONS OF ITS DISGUISE. It's a way to engross *while* presenting dialogue authentically (as most real life convos start with both participants already knowing their own backstory!).
To your point: I don't think you need to set dialogue up—good dialogue does the work itself. Not only by (if its effective) engrossing its audience (reader or viewer), but by asking the reader to become a *participant,* to read between the lines, and infer. That's a true delight for a reader/viewer—then the *story itself* takes over, the engine of the narrative kicks on, and all that follows fills in any holes.
That was excellent. I haven't been to confession in many years, but you did make me want to go and record the priest's comments on my sins, so I could consider that a sin, and go again. Just for the dialogue, of course.
Thank you, the fleabag scene was very realistically portrayed. They said just enough. As I watched it on my phone, accidentally my TV rainy night screensaver came on. It blended so well with the dialoge, I could not help but think that a light drizzle would have been a perfect directorial fit as the priest walked away into the night.
Ooh I love this "found" addition. In fact, so much of the larger patterning of dialogue (its rhythms & how/why it succeeds) comes down to, honestly, sound design! Think about space filled with the cozy pitter-patter of rain VERSUS absolute blank silent. I'd argue the first is more "life is a constant deluge of melancholy, but all will be okay" versus blank silence's inherent, stark DRAMA (much more somber!). So the details of the scene's sound are part of how we aid and abet our dialogue writing—and this is equally true in fiction and screenwriting, I think. Thanks for sharing!
Superb article! Subtext is so important in dialogue--without it, dialogue is completely boring.
Also love your analogy.
Thanks!
Thanks Cathryn! I hope you'll continue with the course—we'll be getting deeper in subtext, as well as how to reverse-engineer it, do fun free-writes together, and more. :-)
I’m obsessed with the false floors breakdown. Thank you for bringing it to my life.
After I got over the feeling like an absolute creep, I embraced the urban safari. I found a photographer/videographer and a real estate agent in their natural habitat of the hippest coffee shop in the particular area of town I was in. I was able to deduce who they were within very few exchanges. I imagine the relationship between them is professional, but he seemed to want it to be more, as some of his advice and offers to help seemed to go above and beyond. She didn’t’ seem interested and kept responses quite short and vague. He dominated the conversation 85% to her 15%. It may not be amusing to everyone, but I found it unintentionally amusing that they were decrying the use of AI in their professions and how deceptive it was, but then turned around and talked about content that they were planning that was based on lies. “I’m going to lie and say..." As for genre, I’m going with dry indie emo that I will pass on seeing.
Hi Sarah! If you're not feeling like an outright creepoid, you're not ... creating!? Let's make that the new rule! :-) THANK YOU for sharing this instrinsically comedic eavesdropped convo! (Sidenote: Can't tell you how many conversations I've overheard where the men are doing 85% of the talking. Including countless Tinder/Hinge/Bumble dates!)
What you're touching on is that SO much of what's happening in conversations (especially between people who know each other less) is *performance*. This is adjacent to, but a little different from, the gleaming tile floor that covers subtext. Performance is more about bravado and power moves: trying to make the other person see them a certain way, trying to drive the conversation, trying to seduce/charm/ingratiate.
Also: You know how people HATE to hear their own voice on a recording? Part of that is for sure just being confronted with your own visceral reality, and the weird-ick of it all, but I have a theory that a LOT of that is that when we hear ourselves speaking we're suddenly aware of how much bullshit performance we're doing ourselves—how disingenuous or conniving (it's not a "bad person" thing, just a human thing). Which is to say: I bet you if these people overheard themselves as you heard them, they would also cringe. :-)
I'd invite you to copy & paste this comment into Lesson #2 (now live!), because people will be exploring their eavesdropped gems there. And thank you for sharing!!
Oh gosh - yes! He was full on performance mode. I will copy it over now. Thanks.
This is such a filmic set-up, I could imagine it perfectly. (Also the genre description and the hard pass hahaa!)
Such a good point that you could deduce who they were within a few 'lines' - exactly what we're hoping to achieve with the kind of dialogue that introduces new characters.
While searching for tips on eavesdropping, I found TalkBank.org where participants were paid to have 1/2 hour telephone conversations recorded. Some start off a little stilted but they get pretty natural-sounding.
How wild! And how cool—thank you for sharing!
Oh wow that sounds like an incredible resource, thanks for sharing!
Not a Fleabagger - I've never even heard of it - but I could pick up on the subtlety and hidden depths of it. But maybe that's part of my own experience of life where I have had to pick up on subtle cues and understand how to navigate my next steps. Also, I am a bit of an avid reader and have read a lot of good and bad dialogue. With your explanation, I could see how the floors were laid down. I am looking forward to small-town eavesdropping and partaking in my own dialogue scripting. I think sometimes it is hard to know when to go for layers and when it's okay to hit the reader.
Hi Makeila! Can’t wait to see what juicy eavesdropping you stumble across! Please do share. 🤗 Yes, to your point, we’re all actually subtext experts already because this is the “code” we understand each other with. There is a built-in sense that language can be disingenuous—the most boring version of this being the performative “frenemy.” But even when there are no I’ll intentions between speakers, we’ve all experienced not being able to say what we really mean—because we’re scared to, don’t want to hurt someone, the transactional nature of the exchange supersedes, etc etc etc!
This is so useful and came in divine timing. Thank you!
Yay! So glad it was helpful! 🤗
I'm reading Sally Rooney's INTERMEZZO right now. She's fantastic with dialogue.
Yes, she does a fantastic job of keeping it real and finding beauty/jeopardy/stakes in “ordinary” talk. She’s called it a “tennis match” and it sounds like she really loves writing it (her lack of quotation marks is also interesting!!). I haven’t read a ton of Rooney so I may be off here, but my only small criticism is I’m not sure she’s great at voice differentiation. This may be a controversial opinion! I think sometimes her characters are speaking in one big meta-voice meant to represent a certain kind of thinker, similar to her.
Proper snort-laughed at all the examples of over-egged, badly-pitched dialogue. And now I kinda want to write something deliberately stylised to be 'bad'!
As for Fleabag — that "it'll pass" line is such an OOF moment. Exactly what you DON'T want someone to say when you've just confessed your love for them, but also full of layers of reassurance, too, which is just perfect from a spiritual guidance figure: i.e. all this hurt and pain and uncertainty will pass, too. Gah, such clever, sparse writing.
And re: eavesdropping/borrowing real conversations, I wish I had the backhanded skill of a friend of mine who recently commented on a mutual acquaintance's artistic skills by saying: "Well, a lot of people think she's very good, she gets good reviews, she's won a few awards, so, y'know, I'm sure she's very capable..." It should have been the bitchiest thing you've ever heard but it was said in such a gentle, matter-of-fact way that I only realised he'd been massively passive-aggressive afterwards.
I’m thrilled to see this breakdown. I read so many books that expose the wooden floor (some seem to be missing a tile level). The author hits the reader over the head with what a character means ad nauseam. It’s clear from some of the popular books out there nowadays that readers expect to be spoon fed the deeper meaning because they can’t seem to grasp anything below surface level.
I love real conversation. Sometimes I wonder what was said right before or after, because I’ve only heard a portion of something interesting while waiting in line, in a waiting room, at a cafe, at work, etc. I’ve jotted them down and later wondered how wonderful it would have been had I known what else was said.
Thank you for this incredible detail of how we use the subfloors in our communication. That helps me understand how to write two people who aren’t connecting, when one is communicating at the soil level and the other only talks at the tile level, and the other is missing what they truly mean/need/want. It reminds me of a lot of people I know who say, “That’s not what you said. Why didn’t you just tell me what you meant?”
Yes exactly! This is a great comment! Very often (see: all the works of Chekhov!) two characters simply aren't hearing each other. It's two concurrent monologues—"all talk," no communications. But as you point out, sometimes the *additional* mess of what's happening is that one character is talking at a very superficial level (the tile level)—perhaps because that's where they feel safest—and one character is down in the subfloor, picking around at the muck of their relationship. One character won't engage.
So the "false floors" analogy (and any deep understanding of subtext) is first and foremost meant to help you understand what's REALLY being said in a conversation with emotional undercurrent/history, and understand how communication "tunnels" and hides. But it also (as you point out) offers a key for evaluating what disparate levels characters are speaking to each other from, *within the same conversation*. So the permutations are endless.
Re: "what were they talking about before and after??"—yes! This boosts our writing when we ask ourselves to imagine for our scene/within our fiction writing ...
But it's ALSO a great generative technique to apply to your Urban Safari eavesdropping! I hope you'll do that exercise this week, and I look forward to reading what everyone found out in the public wilds!
Thank you so much for this. Your comment about how communication “tunnels” and hides opens a whole new world of possibilities for writing conversations; there are endless opportunities for misunderstandings.
Absolutely! Which is why real life is such a mess! 😅
(Apologies for a confusing typos in my response! Fixed now.)
LOVED IT! This is such a fun course already. I love the homework, and I can’t wait to go watch my own, private showing of Real Housewives Smalltown Grocery Store.
Amazing! I can't wait to read what you stumble into!! Grocery stores are generative treasure maps! Ditto, cafes. :-)
Thanks you!
Your opening example is so sparse, yet so rich. Good for illustrating how much there is in those subfloors even when the dialog seems thin on the surface. I LOVED Fleabag, and of course there was a LOT we fans already knew to use as x-ray glasses on the scene. I wonder about your other subscribers initial takes on that dialog if they knew nothing about Fleabag. I could feel those subfloors that you excavated so well—I wonder if they were more of a surprise to non-Fleabaggers. Maybe there are no non-Fleabaggers here! So I guess I’m setting up to ask about the importance of reader-knowledge set-up to dialog, keeping track of that, and avoiding (my personal bugaboo) of using dialog as an info dump. I’m writing/reading sci-fi right now and it’s rife with it, but seems hard to completely avoid unless you go w/ a narrative info-dump—which ain’t that good either.
Non-Fleabagger. I’d never heard of the show, but I don’t watch television, so it’s no surprise. We have no streaming services, no cable. I was surprised by the floor levels because I had no idea what the show was about. (The upper ones; once I read those, the lower ones were pretty much a given). After reading this newsletter, I read about the show, and then the subfloors made sense. In case you were interested in a non-Fleabagger’s perspective.
Yes, I tried to choose an easy example (heartbreak, at a literal point of departure) for any non-FLEABAGers. :-) If you do ever watch the show, a head's up that Season 2 (in my humble perspective) is the stronger writing and the more heart-tugging. But Season 1 helps you get cozy with the big ensemble cast.
Thanks for this note!
Hello there! :-) I’ve never seen Fleabag, and watching this scene makes me really, really, really want to.
Here to report that I did pick up on most of the subtext, but I questioned whether the priest saying “I love you” back came from him having feelings for her and denying them for his loyalty to God.
I tried to figure it out with the body language as the scene played out. For a second it almost seemed like he was close to kissing her and then turned his head the other way to stop himself. And his emotion when he said he loved her too made me wonder.
Those are my initial takes — a case study if you were at all interested. It wasn’t totally clear to me, but I guess that’s the good thing about our books: our readers aren’t just dropped into the ending. They’ve been studying our characters the whole time. If we’ve done a good job of dropping breadcrumbs of subtext all throughout, our character arcs can prove delicious!
Ooh that's such an interesting point about body language also — how that might affect what your character is saying and how it comes across. Layers, layers layers...
Definitely! I think the way to think about it in a script is: the dialogue informs the acting/body language when its subtext is clear & accessible to the actor (and actors are geniuses at decoding this stuff—that’s their job). The writer can write gestures, turns towards or away, and basic physicality into a script, but the general wisdom is you don’t want to give the actor too much direction around small movements. That’s really the actors domain and choice. So I think the BEST way to accomplish a dynamic convo that incorporates the additional layering of body language is to work *within the dialogue* to make the scene *move* in all the ways it can move. With physicality, eyeliners avoided, eye contact, drooped heads, etc. By acing the dialogue and knowing your subtext.
In fiction, it’s a bit different of course. We have more space & permission in prose to write physicality into the conversation (because the HOW of how we write it in can add beauty & poignance or wit—whereas that’s not the goal in the screenplay.)
Yes! I do think the scene is a fascinating case study even if someone hasn't seen the show, but to give some supportive backstory: the Hot Priest *definitely* loves her. They have fallen in love. Here he is stepping into his decision to keep god above any one person ... so he *NOW* must love her, as he loves all humans, with his allegiance to god at the helm.
When he says (ugh, dagger through the heart!) "it'll pass" he's talking to himself too.
Sorry for my spoilers!!!
I saw some but not all of Fleabag, but I still can't see the priest without also seeing Moriarty from Sherlock (played by the same actor) which somehow heavily undermines my ability to believe anything the priest character says and, I think, detracted from my ability to appreciate Fleabag.
Thanks for the response!
OK, trust the reader (multiple repeats, like a mantra). I do like to drop folks into the middle of the convo, but then I worry I’ll drown somebody—usually in my reading group, where I can hear them calling for help (sounds like whining to me.) I’ll stay strong and throw them a lifeline, maybe in a later scene.
Looking for ward to the next installment.
Yes, like a mantra!! Remember, they don’t need ALL the info at the same time. You can pass it out, piece by piece, like Halloween candy. Yes, see you here next week. 😁
I'd venture a bet that we are mostly FLEABAG-ers here! :-)
Ah yes, exposition is the devil. And a particularly tormenting one for the screenwriter, who doesn't have the luxury of prose to communicate with the viewer. Getting good at screenwriting is largely about getting sneaky as hell about subtly layering in information drop after information drop—both through context (scene, setting, design, other characters) and through dialogue.
But in BOTH prose & screenplays, I'd offer this same advice: Drop your audience into the middle of the fucking conversation, and let them learn how to swim.
Why? When the audience has to tune in at a micro-level to just make sense of what's happening in the convo, they are suddenly: INVESTED! UNDISTRACTED! SEEING MORE DEEPLY INTO THE SUBTEXT & THE MACHINATIONS OF ITS DISGUISE. It's a way to engross *while* presenting dialogue authentically (as most real life convos start with both participants already knowing their own backstory!).
To your point: I don't think you need to set dialogue up—good dialogue does the work itself. Not only by (if its effective) engrossing its audience (reader or viewer), but by asking the reader to become a *participant,* to read between the lines, and infer. That's a true delight for a reader/viewer—then the *story itself* takes over, the engine of the narrative kicks on, and all that follows fills in any holes.
That was excellent. I haven't been to confession in many years, but you did make me want to go and record the priest's comments on my sins, so I could consider that a sin, and go again. Just for the dialogue, of course.
Just for the dialogue & the excellent subtext! Of course. 😉
Thank you, thank you!