My WIP has 2 female protagonists - I'm intentionally hiding the full identity of one for an important narrative reveal. She's under a spell that only gives her brief moments of consciousness for the first two-thirds of the story, so her narrative is mostly told in fragments through the emotional states of terror, confusion, despair & regret. She isn't really hiding anything (other than her original identity for a time), but her cloudy memory & brief moments "on stage" create narrative tension. She wants not to die, & for some miracle to break the spell.
The main protagonist is young - whisked away from her family & village to a remote Castle (it's a reimagined fairy tale, after all) with no one for company but her new husband, a silent, creepy butler & 3 ravens. Her top layers are all sweetness and hope - oh so much hope! Her tendency to think well of everyone has guided her decision to marry a man with a shady history & even shadier beard (!). Beneath the sweet and naive layers is the yearning to better her position. The youngest of 4 sisters, she's tired of always being in their shadow - she yearns to do something "singular & remarkable". So, in accepting the hand of the man her sisters spurned for superficial reasons, she's managed to marry up (way up) & marry first - before any of her sisters.
When interacting with hubby, she seeks to mostly please, appease, flatter and charm. She wants love, the perfect marriage, to be the adored and perfect wife. But underneath those layers, after only a few days with her husband, doubt & unease is seeded. She's afraid in her "gamble", she's made a grave mistake. I'm following the original tale's element of confrontation with her husband's vile and murderous nature via the "bloody chamber" as a crucial turning-point. Unlike the original, It's not idle curiosity that leads her there, but intuition & survial instincts - also she's partly "enchanted". After this discovery, she wants only to survive and escape. In the scene when her husband returns and discovers the bloody key, she'll do a lot of hiding in the dialogue. The husband hides less now, but still veils the bloodlusting aspect of his nature: he pretends he kills because the wives disobey him, but of course this IS his modus operandi - creating the catalyst to act on his desires as a femicidist - the torture & murder of women. I haven't written that part yet, so I'll be referring to ths workshop to help with the layering. The "denoument" will be very different to the original.
WHOA, you had me at "three ravens"! This sounds so incredible and rich and layered. Abuse (on both ends) is of course one of the deepest and most natural subtext chasms. It's almost like there are no "subfloors" (if you read Lesson #1), and only a fathoms-deep gaping wound. Empty air. Because how much goes unsaid in the face of heart-stopping, mortal fear—and none of us can comprehend our own death, right? It feels quite actually "unspeakable." Please do reach out here again if you run into anything you want support parsing as you nail the voice of these exquisitely drawn characters! Sounds like you're on the right track though!
In my WIP, I explore grief and the way that 2 different characters express it: one avoids feeling anything by staying busy (Kieran), the other (Gillian) is oddly at peace with her widowhood until she discovers the reason:
Unbeknownst to her, her deceased husband returned to her doorstep the day after his funeral as a stray cat, so she’s never been alone (fairy magic is involved). Subtext is the really the driving force around their friendship: both are being visited by fairies but don’t tell the other, both begin developing feelings for each other, but hesitate. I’ve taken lots of notes on your dialogue sessions because I absolutely need to go back and strategically add in body language and carefully chosen words as subtext. This is going to make my story better. Oh, and I alternate 3rd person POV between the characters (each gets a chapter), so we get a glimpse into what Kieran considers as the story moves along then in the next chapter we get the end of the scene and what Gillian considers. However, as in real life, neither is self aware enough to understand their true motive all of the time, so the reader must sort through their true motives.
I do love a multiple-POV story — makes it so interesting when you get to see how different people interpret the same situation. Also their different methods of dealing with grief and all that unspoken emotion under the surface. Lovely stuff.
My general approach with dialogue is minimalist - the bare bones of what can't be conveyed through description & narrative. But I also like the occasional monologue - sometimes transformed to a diary entry or dream scene.
Because I have a theatre background as both director & actor, I'm often able to picture what my characters are doing as they speak, so much of my subtext comes from the tension between what characters say & what they're doing / not doing. Or the use of non-verbal cues like sighs, blinks, silences, hesitations & the half-finished sentence. You explore those aspects rigorously in bringing a play to life on stage, so they're ingrained in my story-telling habits, I suppose. I also like dialogue / phrases / words that can be understood in at least 2 different ways. By the characters, but also the readers - & they can be two different things ie you can signal a different meaning to the reader than the character being addressed. For example - if they don't see the body language or notice the hesitation.
I confess I haven't been following the lessons yet, but this Community Corner has lured me out of MY corner (picture a writer standing facing a corner, hemmed in by both sides & unable to move in any direction) - 'cos that's how my writer's block has been feeling for about 6 months now. And I've opened my WIP draft to ponder my use of dialogue. Teeny tiny steps ... :)
Hi Melissa! Welcome to "How REAL People Talk," and you can dive in at any point! You'll have (as you do above) fascinating insight into some of the aspects we're discussing, as a playwright. On the stage, those gestures and indicators, absolutely account for much of the meatier "communication" (to your point: to the audience, to the other characters, and often these are different arrows). Next week's lesson dives into monologues—so I hope you'll share your take on writing them there!
Thank you, Lauren! Oh, I'm not a playwright - I'm a former theatre director & actor, although I have written a few stage monologues and text for stage - prose & poetry was always more my thing! But as a director, I was always reminding my actors in rehearsal that they weren't just "talking heads". And as an actor, I (slowly) discovered embodying the text is crucial to character development & a compelling performance. Finding the individual character's rhythm and pace of speech, for example. But also, finding the onstage actions that made the dialogue come alive.
I have some time this long weekend (in Australia), so I'm hoping to dive into a lesson or two! And yes, looking forward to the lesson on monologues. :)
Hi Melissa! Love the theatre insights and all those non-verbal forms of communication. And so glad to hear the Community Corner lured you out of writer's block...! Glad to have you here.
Thanks for creating this space, Jo! Been diving into my WIP tonight - it's a feminist fairy tale reimagining at about 9K & with a storyboard (thank God - otherwise I'd now have no clue about my original intentions for the unwritten scenes). My initial memory was right - minimalist dialogue, maximilist interiority pov. Told in 1st person from 2 pov's and one other "omniscient" voice. It is Gothic in tone, so the interiority fits. And 2 of the MC 's spend much of their storylines alone in an isolated castle - but I think I may be avoiding dialogue a teensy bit too much so far - lol! Still at least a third of the scenes to write - so look forward to what this workshop brings to enhance the talky bits. My male character is a thinly-veiled villain - so he definitely does a lot of masking / hiding / misdirecting.
I'll see if I can find a scene that doesn't give away too many of my particular reimagining elements (I think many writing this genre tend to hold their "pathways in" close) to share how my dialogue's shaping up so far - or not. ;)
I am on what I hope is a final draft of a (5,000 word) 3-part section of a memoir (creative nonfiction) to submit to a Feb 2 deadline. It spans ages 9-12 and my evolving relationship with my mother after my dad's sudden death (as she moved me and my sisters from Hong Kong to Texas). The piece involves a lot of (wide-eyed kid) interiority/instability of memory. There is very little dialogue, and what there is, is deliberately sparse. My challenge (despite not remembering exact conversations that happened when I was 10!) is that the dialogue involves: a nanny figure who does not speak fluent English, an American woman friend whose husband is about to have an affair with my mother, and my mother whose emotions are all over the place, who is hoping for this affair AND who evolves from inscrutable Englishwoman to sloppy alcoholic. I (MC) only hear/report her dialogue in parts one and two. By part three, however, I had become my mother's drinking buddy/soundboard. We have a mean but routine exchange (her drunken subtext is that she has been left by three significant men in a row and is lost (Literally. In Texas). Mine is layered this way: smartass, on top of trauma, on top of fear (she says she has a gun), on top of immovable love). The memoir isn't likely to be super-talky, so I am hoping the times it does happen it does as much as possible without being fake, floral, or full of exposition.
This sounds incredible! Thank you for sharing. Agree with Jo that the fundamental interiority of this story (and the interiority of seeing the world through a child's eyes) sounds like it won't need to lean much on dialogue. That said, because you have such disparate voices, I wonder if you'll find next week's lesson (we talk monologue, but also voice differentiation) helpful. Sending you all the best mojo to meet the deadline. :-)
Wow, you've got layers and layers of subtext going on there — and I can totally see how the 'wide-eyed kid' POV would give an incredibly vulnerable, fragmented perspective on it all. And since you're working with prose rather than a screenplay it makes sense to lean more heavily on that interiority — which will probably make the sparse dialogue hit even harder when it's inevitably at odds with what's going on inside...
I have 3 different MCs that I'm working with right now, all in the same story. And they are all hiding so much, especially from themselves. One of them is concealing regret- or, not even regret necessarily, but the possibility of it. She doesn't want to ask herself if she's happy because she doesn't know what she would do with the answer if it's negative. And yet, dissatisfaction still bubbles to the surface.
Another is concealing her struggles- not so much from herself, but from others. She feels so much guilt and she is afraid that someone will see it and believe that she is right to feel that way. She's unsure of what she's doing but feels compelled to put on a mask of certainty. From herself, she's hiding that maybe she doesn't have to feel this way, maybe she is actually doing her best- but she can't admit that because she doesn't feel like it would be right to let herself off the hook.
And the final (and most interesting, to me) is hiding EVERYTHING from the rest of the world, and it's eating away at her, but at least she's honest with herself about this concealment- something huge is happening inside her, something that will end everything for everyone, and she isn't conflicted about keeping this secret- but she won't let herself feel anything about it. Or, rather, she won't let herself acknowledge her feelings about it. Because it is inevitable, so she sees no point in dwelling. But deep down, she is terrified. And she feels so guilty. And she's not sure if she's right to feel this way.
Wow, amazing job getting clear on your characters' inner-workings and stickiness (with the world at large, but also with themselves!). So compelling. I'm curious, how have you found writing/disguising this subtext into your WIP dialogue so far?
I'm still writing the first draft, so for now I would say it's a lot of either really explicit or really mundane that I'm hoping to sort of mash together. We are also very close to the characters' thoughts, so there's a lot to play with with the difference between what they think and what they say. And for hiding things from themselves, I try to bring them very close to the truth, but stubbornly avoid it.
Nikita, I think that writer's instinct you're having ("bring them very close to the truth, but stubbornly avoid it) is EXACTLY IT! Because this is what we fucked-up humans do in real life. We want to be free, we want to be happy ... we're so scared to do the hard stuff; confront the hard stuff.
my MC, Bentley, is hiding how scared he’s been ever since his dad went missing. he lacquers himself in protective layers of machismo and competence to avoid admitting that he once needed comfort and has been deformed by the lack of it.
so when the worst possible choice for a bf smashes into him and is protective of his emotions and while taking at face value his tough exterior, it’s game over for him. poor guy doesn’t stand a chance.
Ach, poor Bentley. Even in this short summary there's a tonne of sympathy to be found there. And conflict — esp if his outward act is taken at face value. What medium are you writing in? Novel/screenplay/short story? And how are you managing to showing the contrast between those exterior and inner layers?
What most people cover up - frailty, fear of failure, of being vulnerable. Any of those and anything else that society judges as imperfect.
The traumatic. And the trauma. Like the albatross, they (characters) are knowing, acknowledged or not, but WE see it. And the Reader sees it too. It becomes interpretation. I tell people that on occasion, I write more like a reporter than I realize at the time. Know what I mean?
Oof yeah I love it when the reader sees more than the characters in a story (as we get to watch them slowly come to those realisations about themselves).
I reckon a lot of the stuff we 'hide' behind dialogue tends to be fear-based, for sure. Even if it's unfounded.
I am a very literal-minded person who tends to only say exactly what I mean (the exception being when there is a pun or some sort of word-play that can be made then I am compelled to make it.) To me, to speak in sub-text is either lying or being passive aggressive (childhood trauma, anyone?). Because of this, I often miss-read subtext both in real life and in fiction. I tend take what people say at face value. No wonder so many stories I write are about robots or aliens!
In my current WIP, my protagonist has lived a bit of a sheltered life and I've given her this trait. Since the story is in first person from her POV, I explore her realizations that people don't always say what they mean and sometimes are outright lying. Writing the dialogue for the character who is lying to her is definitely a challenge, though!
Robots?! Aliens?! Hell yeah. In my little sci-fi universe (still expanding at the moment), I pit humans against machines. And with machines, there no subtext, they're not hiding anything because there's nothing there to hide - just one simple task - and they're not shy about it. Nothing new about that concept. The fun comes when machines are juxtaposed against the extremely complex nature of the human condition, of 'character', of being alive.
But you can project subtext onto a a machine, or an alien. For instance, my machines have lots of trouble with doors, but they'll never ever cop to it.
"my machines have lots of trouble with doors, but they'll never ever cop to it." HA! Love it!
Ironically, my robots tend to have more empathy than the humans. I think I was heavily influenced by a movie I watched as a kid called ELECTRIC DREAMS. This guy's PC becomes self aware and falls in love with the guy's girlfriend. I was rooting for the computer!
Oh this is great utilisation of 'writing what you know'! I love that you're putting the reader into that exact perspective and exploring subtext (or lack thereof) in this way. I imagine doing lots of eavesdropping and harvesting real life conversations (as suggested by the wonderful Lauren in the workshops) might help with the other characters, too. Also recommend Impro by Keith Johnstone purely for the chapter on 'status play' which talks all about how people manipulate language to one-up and persuade others of their perceived status. Fascinating psychological stuff for us robots ;)
I came back to that list of what dialogue does several times last week for my WIP! What I find is that I kind of have to write one of the "bottom layers" on a rough draft. And the "floors" only come out for me on revision. My current WIP is really tricky because the main character is a stuffed animal (lol) but another thing I found that helps is making sure the character a really strong voice. One you find their voice, you get a better handle on how they disguise: whether they resort to cruelty, humor, bossing someone around, changing the subject, etc. That's what helped me to think about, anyway!
I thought of this example from a story I wrote last year: (I hope it's okay to share)
MC and her boyfriend are sitting on a roof watching/marking UFOs for Project Blue Book, on one of his last nights before he leaves for training for Vietnam. The first few drafts of the scene, they were talking about how she wants him to dodge, and he staunchly refuses bc of "honor". And it was a fine scene, emotional, but very much on the nose, all out in the open. Nothing special, basically. And I kept feeling like, MC doesn't talk like this. She keeps her feelings, especially fear, buried so far down she doesn't fully understand them. Even though she loves this guy she would not just come out and say it. And she can't just like, gain a new personality in his presence.
What happened on subsequent drafts was that she kept saying she sees a UFO to annoy him, and he keeps patiently explaining it's not truly a UFO, UFOs aren't actually real, they're cargo planes or something that the Air Force tracks. But the whole scene took on this new, dreamlike dynamic where both of them are desperately trying to mask their terror of his departure: her bc she doesn't want to be alone, and him bc he feels he needs to go in order to do something worthy of her. And the UFOs they discussed became something more elusive in the scene: it became hope for their future, love. So at the end of the scene, when he says he thinks the UFO they missed might be real, it *hits*. At least for my own personal entertainment, lol.
Anyway I know that wasn't my WIP but I don't think I had the full grasp of how subtext works when I wrote that story, and now I feel I can go back and see *why* it worked. And where I might push it more. Sorry for talking about myself here but I hope someone finds that example helpful!
Thank you so much for sharing this — so many thoughtful and insightful points there. Especially about *knowing* your characters before you can start delving for subtext and how each person tackles NOT saying what they mean... I love the sound of this scene also. Always an emotional punch when an 'argument' is rooted in both characters caring for each other but not able to say what's actually bothering them.
Ooh this is such a great share—thanks Mandy! And YES, 100%, the way we usually want to do it (only a savant can dive right in with a 4-layer construction at the ready!), per the lesson, really is to (just as you are) start with the broad truth of the situation—i.e., write out the subtext. Then, through all your revisions, you're basically scaffolding on to HIDE. More and more intricately each time you take a pass. You can write "right on top" of the real subtext with the "new tile layer" as you go. Transforming each subtext line into an increasingly disguised stand-in. The PERFORMANCE of relationships. I love that your UFO edit made it feel "dreamy!" It sounds fantastic.
Great realizations, Mandy. Using the UFO's to represent love & hope in the scene is powerful & very Chekhovian! From reading your share, they could also represent absence, uncertainty, intangibility, impossibility - shadow aspects of love & relationship. I also think writing the more literal / straightforward version of dialogue in early drafts & then layering with more allusions / disguising etc is a valid approach. You're essentially "bookmarking" what needs to be covered per scene first. Hmm ... in a sense, the literal is gradually transformed into the subtextual with this approach!
Yes! Those shadow aspects were exactly what I was going for.
And that’s a good point about literal transformed into subtext. I think the Fleabag example form the lesson about the “bus” was really perfect, but it’s like… how do we craft our characters into situations/settings where that subtext can really pop?? For me it only happens accidentally right now—lol!! Because when there is so much to think about/connect/wrap together, it can feel a whole lot easier to let the story sit and rot than try to wrangle it all… but such is the labor of storytelling, right?? I hope it gets easier with practice.
Yes, when drafting, it's like you're trying to do so much at the same time - some conscious, some of it unconscious. But I think when you accept the idea that your WIP will undergo multiple drafts, you can relax about not getting it all right in one fevered, frenzied write! Right? ;) TBH, I haven't had a chance to even look at these lessons yet - but the idea of connecting more with other writers about their process appealed as a potential kickstarter to pulling out my WIP - which is a feminist fairytale reimagining at (I think) novella-length.
So I'm firing up the other laptop where my draft lives & seeing what I can apply to evaluate / improve / vary my approach, so I'll see if I feel like sharing a section here with thoughts!
Curious if you did the Forever novel workshop, Mandy from late last year?
Thanks for being a bit of a catalyst! :) Which lesson was the "floors" concept laid out (get it)? Maybe I should start there.
I would start with Lesson 1, but all of them have been great! I haven't done any of the full Forever workshops before, but I really liked the free lessons and went for the full deal this year. So I think I saw a few lessons of the novel one but not the whole thing! Perhaps I'll see if I can check it out.
Your novella sounds amazing. Wishing you all the best of luck!!
Yeah, I dipped in & out of a few of them last year - but was feeling pretty burnt out creatively by about September - so I completely missed the novel workshop. Also, the spec fic one, which sounds like it might have some gems for you if your MC is a stuffed toy!
Question: Who's point of view did you write the story from? Or was it omniscient? I ask, because it seems to me that for subtext to work the characters must know each other very well, so well they can tell when the other person is hiding something and even exactly what they are hiding. Either that, or the characters don't care or are willing to take the risk that the other person will understand the subtext or not. And then will the reader understand?!
The POV here is the teenage girl! By no means am I doing this perfectly lol. But I put a lot of work into crafting her as someone who uses humor/sarcasm to deflect her emotion before this scene, whereas the boyfriend is masking his fear of war more than his actual feelings for her. He’s pretty up front about his feelings but she’s not, though she feels them strongly.
I think your point here is excellent though. How do you get characters to develop that understanding of one another? Do they need to, or is it enough for the reader to get it?
My scene above is a flashback scene so I could kind of start them at that point where they knew each other well enough, maybe not to see through all the subtext, but understand that false floors/subtext is there. The idea was to make this the scene she internally decides to let her guard down and fully trust him with her heart. But showing that shift in dynamic, rather than slapping an “I love you” onto the scene ended up being much more swoony/heartbreaking, especially when it’s revealed he (spoiler alert) dies.
This is something I am going to have to think of a lot more! My novel idea has a romance arc and I would really like to write it banter-y and well. :) so thinking of clever ways to get characters to be vulnerable (while still hiding) is really key!
A.C, hi! I'll try to take a stab at answering your question here if that's okay. I'd offer: be careful not to conflate *subtext* with a *goal*. Usually the concealing of the REAL meaning/subtext is not about that character cleverly getting what they want without speaking directly, it's about all the things that drive social & emotional behavior: attachment, politeness, the performance of gender, fear, spite, avoidance.
All of which is to say, the other speaker in the conversation does not need to understand the subtext or understand even that there IS subtext. More typically, they are too caught up in their own experience to really NOTICE the other person's deeper meaning or deeper experience. If you go back to this week's Lesson #3 and watch the "LADY BIRD" scene again, you'll see a fantastic example of this obliviousness. Lady Bird definitely does not feel like her mom feels inadequate & is scared of losing her daughter—she only thinks her mom hates her.
This is an excellent point, about the other person being caught up in their own subtext. I think that’s where I was running into trouble with my WIP last week, assuming the characters were understanding each other’s subtext, when they actually needed to speak through the filter of their individual attitudes/experiences. Separating that from their “goal” in my mind helps a lot. Thank you for clarifying this!
My WIP has 2 female protagonists - I'm intentionally hiding the full identity of one for an important narrative reveal. She's under a spell that only gives her brief moments of consciousness for the first two-thirds of the story, so her narrative is mostly told in fragments through the emotional states of terror, confusion, despair & regret. She isn't really hiding anything (other than her original identity for a time), but her cloudy memory & brief moments "on stage" create narrative tension. She wants not to die, & for some miracle to break the spell.
The main protagonist is young - whisked away from her family & village to a remote Castle (it's a reimagined fairy tale, after all) with no one for company but her new husband, a silent, creepy butler & 3 ravens. Her top layers are all sweetness and hope - oh so much hope! Her tendency to think well of everyone has guided her decision to marry a man with a shady history & even shadier beard (!). Beneath the sweet and naive layers is the yearning to better her position. The youngest of 4 sisters, she's tired of always being in their shadow - she yearns to do something "singular & remarkable". So, in accepting the hand of the man her sisters spurned for superficial reasons, she's managed to marry up (way up) & marry first - before any of her sisters.
When interacting with hubby, she seeks to mostly please, appease, flatter and charm. She wants love, the perfect marriage, to be the adored and perfect wife. But underneath those layers, after only a few days with her husband, doubt & unease is seeded. She's afraid in her "gamble", she's made a grave mistake. I'm following the original tale's element of confrontation with her husband's vile and murderous nature via the "bloody chamber" as a crucial turning-point. Unlike the original, It's not idle curiosity that leads her there, but intuition & survial instincts - also she's partly "enchanted". After this discovery, she wants only to survive and escape. In the scene when her husband returns and discovers the bloody key, she'll do a lot of hiding in the dialogue. The husband hides less now, but still veils the bloodlusting aspect of his nature: he pretends he kills because the wives disobey him, but of course this IS his modus operandi - creating the catalyst to act on his desires as a femicidist - the torture & murder of women. I haven't written that part yet, so I'll be referring to ths workshop to help with the layering. The "denoument" will be very different to the original.
WHOA, you had me at "three ravens"! This sounds so incredible and rich and layered. Abuse (on both ends) is of course one of the deepest and most natural subtext chasms. It's almost like there are no "subfloors" (if you read Lesson #1), and only a fathoms-deep gaping wound. Empty air. Because how much goes unsaid in the face of heart-stopping, mortal fear—and none of us can comprehend our own death, right? It feels quite actually "unspeakable." Please do reach out here again if you run into anything you want support parsing as you nail the voice of these exquisitely drawn characters! Sounds like you're on the right track though!
In my WIP, I explore grief and the way that 2 different characters express it: one avoids feeling anything by staying busy (Kieran), the other (Gillian) is oddly at peace with her widowhood until she discovers the reason:
Unbeknownst to her, her deceased husband returned to her doorstep the day after his funeral as a stray cat, so she’s never been alone (fairy magic is involved). Subtext is the really the driving force around their friendship: both are being visited by fairies but don’t tell the other, both begin developing feelings for each other, but hesitate. I’ve taken lots of notes on your dialogue sessions because I absolutely need to go back and strategically add in body language and carefully chosen words as subtext. This is going to make my story better. Oh, and I alternate 3rd person POV between the characters (each gets a chapter), so we get a glimpse into what Kieran considers as the story moves along then in the next chapter we get the end of the scene and what Gillian considers. However, as in real life, neither is self aware enough to understand their true motive all of the time, so the reader must sort through their true motives.
This sounds magical! I'm so glad you're taking the course. :-)
I do love a multiple-POV story — makes it so interesting when you get to see how different people interpret the same situation. Also their different methods of dealing with grief and all that unspoken emotion under the surface. Lovely stuff.
My general approach with dialogue is minimalist - the bare bones of what can't be conveyed through description & narrative. But I also like the occasional monologue - sometimes transformed to a diary entry or dream scene.
Because I have a theatre background as both director & actor, I'm often able to picture what my characters are doing as they speak, so much of my subtext comes from the tension between what characters say & what they're doing / not doing. Or the use of non-verbal cues like sighs, blinks, silences, hesitations & the half-finished sentence. You explore those aspects rigorously in bringing a play to life on stage, so they're ingrained in my story-telling habits, I suppose. I also like dialogue / phrases / words that can be understood in at least 2 different ways. By the characters, but also the readers - & they can be two different things ie you can signal a different meaning to the reader than the character being addressed. For example - if they don't see the body language or notice the hesitation.
I confess I haven't been following the lessons yet, but this Community Corner has lured me out of MY corner (picture a writer standing facing a corner, hemmed in by both sides & unable to move in any direction) - 'cos that's how my writer's block has been feeling for about 6 months now. And I've opened my WIP draft to ponder my use of dialogue. Teeny tiny steps ... :)
Hi Melissa! Welcome to "How REAL People Talk," and you can dive in at any point! You'll have (as you do above) fascinating insight into some of the aspects we're discussing, as a playwright. On the stage, those gestures and indicators, absolutely account for much of the meatier "communication" (to your point: to the audience, to the other characters, and often these are different arrows). Next week's lesson dives into monologues—so I hope you'll share your take on writing them there!
Thank you, Lauren! Oh, I'm not a playwright - I'm a former theatre director & actor, although I have written a few stage monologues and text for stage - prose & poetry was always more my thing! But as a director, I was always reminding my actors in rehearsal that they weren't just "talking heads". And as an actor, I (slowly) discovered embodying the text is crucial to character development & a compelling performance. Finding the individual character's rhythm and pace of speech, for example. But also, finding the onstage actions that made the dialogue come alive.
I have some time this long weekend (in Australia), so I'm hoping to dive into a lesson or two! And yes, looking forward to the lesson on monologues. :)
Hi Melissa! Love the theatre insights and all those non-verbal forms of communication. And so glad to hear the Community Corner lured you out of writer's block...! Glad to have you here.
Thanks for creating this space, Jo! Been diving into my WIP tonight - it's a feminist fairy tale reimagining at about 9K & with a storyboard (thank God - otherwise I'd now have no clue about my original intentions for the unwritten scenes). My initial memory was right - minimalist dialogue, maximilist interiority pov. Told in 1st person from 2 pov's and one other "omniscient" voice. It is Gothic in tone, so the interiority fits. And 2 of the MC 's spend much of their storylines alone in an isolated castle - but I think I may be avoiding dialogue a teensy bit too much so far - lol! Still at least a third of the scenes to write - so look forward to what this workshop brings to enhance the talky bits. My male character is a thinly-veiled villain - so he definitely does a lot of masking / hiding / misdirecting.
I'll see if I can find a scene that doesn't give away too many of my particular reimagining elements (I think many writing this genre tend to hold their "pathways in" close) to share how my dialogue's shaping up so far - or not. ;)
I am on what I hope is a final draft of a (5,000 word) 3-part section of a memoir (creative nonfiction) to submit to a Feb 2 deadline. It spans ages 9-12 and my evolving relationship with my mother after my dad's sudden death (as she moved me and my sisters from Hong Kong to Texas). The piece involves a lot of (wide-eyed kid) interiority/instability of memory. There is very little dialogue, and what there is, is deliberately sparse. My challenge (despite not remembering exact conversations that happened when I was 10!) is that the dialogue involves: a nanny figure who does not speak fluent English, an American woman friend whose husband is about to have an affair with my mother, and my mother whose emotions are all over the place, who is hoping for this affair AND who evolves from inscrutable Englishwoman to sloppy alcoholic. I (MC) only hear/report her dialogue in parts one and two. By part three, however, I had become my mother's drinking buddy/soundboard. We have a mean but routine exchange (her drunken subtext is that she has been left by three significant men in a row and is lost (Literally. In Texas). Mine is layered this way: smartass, on top of trauma, on top of fear (she says she has a gun), on top of immovable love). The memoir isn't likely to be super-talky, so I am hoping the times it does happen it does as much as possible without being fake, floral, or full of exposition.
This sounds incredible! Thank you for sharing. Agree with Jo that the fundamental interiority of this story (and the interiority of seeing the world through a child's eyes) sounds like it won't need to lean much on dialogue. That said, because you have such disparate voices, I wonder if you'll find next week's lesson (we talk monologue, but also voice differentiation) helpful. Sending you all the best mojo to meet the deadline. :-)
Wow, you've got layers and layers of subtext going on there — and I can totally see how the 'wide-eyed kid' POV would give an incredibly vulnerable, fragmented perspective on it all. And since you're working with prose rather than a screenplay it makes sense to lean more heavily on that interiority — which will probably make the sparse dialogue hit even harder when it's inevitably at odds with what's going on inside...
I have 3 different MCs that I'm working with right now, all in the same story. And they are all hiding so much, especially from themselves. One of them is concealing regret- or, not even regret necessarily, but the possibility of it. She doesn't want to ask herself if she's happy because she doesn't know what she would do with the answer if it's negative. And yet, dissatisfaction still bubbles to the surface.
Another is concealing her struggles- not so much from herself, but from others. She feels so much guilt and she is afraid that someone will see it and believe that she is right to feel that way. She's unsure of what she's doing but feels compelled to put on a mask of certainty. From herself, she's hiding that maybe she doesn't have to feel this way, maybe she is actually doing her best- but she can't admit that because she doesn't feel like it would be right to let herself off the hook.
And the final (and most interesting, to me) is hiding EVERYTHING from the rest of the world, and it's eating away at her, but at least she's honest with herself about this concealment- something huge is happening inside her, something that will end everything for everyone, and she isn't conflicted about keeping this secret- but she won't let herself feel anything about it. Or, rather, she won't let herself acknowledge her feelings about it. Because it is inevitable, so she sees no point in dwelling. But deep down, she is terrified. And she feels so guilty. And she's not sure if she's right to feel this way.
Wow, amazing job getting clear on your characters' inner-workings and stickiness (with the world at large, but also with themselves!). So compelling. I'm curious, how have you found writing/disguising this subtext into your WIP dialogue so far?
I'm still writing the first draft, so for now I would say it's a lot of either really explicit or really mundane that I'm hoping to sort of mash together. We are also very close to the characters' thoughts, so there's a lot to play with with the difference between what they think and what they say. And for hiding things from themselves, I try to bring them very close to the truth, but stubbornly avoid it.
Nikita, I think that writer's instinct you're having ("bring them very close to the truth, but stubbornly avoid it) is EXACTLY IT! Because this is what we fucked-up humans do in real life. We want to be free, we want to be happy ... we're so scared to do the hard stuff; confront the hard stuff.
great prompt.
my MC, Bentley, is hiding how scared he’s been ever since his dad went missing. he lacquers himself in protective layers of machismo and competence to avoid admitting that he once needed comfort and has been deformed by the lack of it.
so when the worst possible choice for a bf smashes into him and is protective of his emotions and while taking at face value his tough exterior, it’s game over for him. poor guy doesn’t stand a chance.
Ach, poor Bentley. Even in this short summary there's a tonne of sympathy to be found there. And conflict — esp if his outward act is taken at face value. What medium are you writing in? Novel/screenplay/short story? And how are you managing to showing the contrast between those exterior and inner layers?
What most people cover up - frailty, fear of failure, of being vulnerable. Any of those and anything else that society judges as imperfect.
The traumatic. And the trauma. Like the albatross, they (characters) are knowing, acknowledged or not, but WE see it. And the Reader sees it too. It becomes interpretation. I tell people that on occasion, I write more like a reporter than I realize at the time. Know what I mean?
Oof yeah I love it when the reader sees more than the characters in a story (as we get to watch them slowly come to those realisations about themselves).
I reckon a lot of the stuff we 'hide' behind dialogue tends to be fear-based, for sure. Even if it's unfounded.
I am a very literal-minded person who tends to only say exactly what I mean (the exception being when there is a pun or some sort of word-play that can be made then I am compelled to make it.) To me, to speak in sub-text is either lying or being passive aggressive (childhood trauma, anyone?). Because of this, I often miss-read subtext both in real life and in fiction. I tend take what people say at face value. No wonder so many stories I write are about robots or aliens!
In my current WIP, my protagonist has lived a bit of a sheltered life and I've given her this trait. Since the story is in first person from her POV, I explore her realizations that people don't always say what they mean and sometimes are outright lying. Writing the dialogue for the character who is lying to her is definitely a challenge, though!
Robots?! Aliens?! Hell yeah. In my little sci-fi universe (still expanding at the moment), I pit humans against machines. And with machines, there no subtext, they're not hiding anything because there's nothing there to hide - just one simple task - and they're not shy about it. Nothing new about that concept. The fun comes when machines are juxtaposed against the extremely complex nature of the human condition, of 'character', of being alive.
But you can project subtext onto a a machine, or an alien. For instance, my machines have lots of trouble with doors, but they'll never ever cop to it.
"my machines have lots of trouble with doors, but they'll never ever cop to it." HA! Love it!
Ironically, my robots tend to have more empathy than the humans. I think I was heavily influenced by a movie I watched as a kid called ELECTRIC DREAMS. This guy's PC becomes self aware and falls in love with the guy's girlfriend. I was rooting for the computer!
Oh this is great utilisation of 'writing what you know'! I love that you're putting the reader into that exact perspective and exploring subtext (or lack thereof) in this way. I imagine doing lots of eavesdropping and harvesting real life conversations (as suggested by the wonderful Lauren in the workshops) might help with the other characters, too. Also recommend Impro by Keith Johnstone purely for the chapter on 'status play' which talks all about how people manipulate language to one-up and persuade others of their perceived status. Fascinating psychological stuff for us robots ;)
I work at a public library and have many awesome opportunities for eavesdropping. The kids are the best!
"Impro" is fantastic to explore / understand status play - a staple text on my bookshelf! I second this recommendation, Tom. :)
I came back to that list of what dialogue does several times last week for my WIP! What I find is that I kind of have to write one of the "bottom layers" on a rough draft. And the "floors" only come out for me on revision. My current WIP is really tricky because the main character is a stuffed animal (lol) but another thing I found that helps is making sure the character a really strong voice. One you find their voice, you get a better handle on how they disguise: whether they resort to cruelty, humor, bossing someone around, changing the subject, etc. That's what helped me to think about, anyway!
I thought of this example from a story I wrote last year: (I hope it's okay to share)
MC and her boyfriend are sitting on a roof watching/marking UFOs for Project Blue Book, on one of his last nights before he leaves for training for Vietnam. The first few drafts of the scene, they were talking about how she wants him to dodge, and he staunchly refuses bc of "honor". And it was a fine scene, emotional, but very much on the nose, all out in the open. Nothing special, basically. And I kept feeling like, MC doesn't talk like this. She keeps her feelings, especially fear, buried so far down she doesn't fully understand them. Even though she loves this guy she would not just come out and say it. And she can't just like, gain a new personality in his presence.
What happened on subsequent drafts was that she kept saying she sees a UFO to annoy him, and he keeps patiently explaining it's not truly a UFO, UFOs aren't actually real, they're cargo planes or something that the Air Force tracks. But the whole scene took on this new, dreamlike dynamic where both of them are desperately trying to mask their terror of his departure: her bc she doesn't want to be alone, and him bc he feels he needs to go in order to do something worthy of her. And the UFOs they discussed became something more elusive in the scene: it became hope for their future, love. So at the end of the scene, when he says he thinks the UFO they missed might be real, it *hits*. At least for my own personal entertainment, lol.
Anyway I know that wasn't my WIP but I don't think I had the full grasp of how subtext works when I wrote that story, and now I feel I can go back and see *why* it worked. And where I might push it more. Sorry for talking about myself here but I hope someone finds that example helpful!
Thank you so much for sharing this — so many thoughtful and insightful points there. Especially about *knowing* your characters before you can start delving for subtext and how each person tackles NOT saying what they mean... I love the sound of this scene also. Always an emotional punch when an 'argument' is rooted in both characters caring for each other but not able to say what's actually bothering them.
Ooh this is such a great share—thanks Mandy! And YES, 100%, the way we usually want to do it (only a savant can dive right in with a 4-layer construction at the ready!), per the lesson, really is to (just as you are) start with the broad truth of the situation—i.e., write out the subtext. Then, through all your revisions, you're basically scaffolding on to HIDE. More and more intricately each time you take a pass. You can write "right on top" of the real subtext with the "new tile layer" as you go. Transforming each subtext line into an increasingly disguised stand-in. The PERFORMANCE of relationships. I love that your UFO edit made it feel "dreamy!" It sounds fantastic.
Great realizations, Mandy. Using the UFO's to represent love & hope in the scene is powerful & very Chekhovian! From reading your share, they could also represent absence, uncertainty, intangibility, impossibility - shadow aspects of love & relationship. I also think writing the more literal / straightforward version of dialogue in early drafts & then layering with more allusions / disguising etc is a valid approach. You're essentially "bookmarking" what needs to be covered per scene first. Hmm ... in a sense, the literal is gradually transformed into the subtextual with this approach!
Yes! Those shadow aspects were exactly what I was going for.
And that’s a good point about literal transformed into subtext. I think the Fleabag example form the lesson about the “bus” was really perfect, but it’s like… how do we craft our characters into situations/settings where that subtext can really pop?? For me it only happens accidentally right now—lol!! Because when there is so much to think about/connect/wrap together, it can feel a whole lot easier to let the story sit and rot than try to wrangle it all… but such is the labor of storytelling, right?? I hope it gets easier with practice.
Yes, when drafting, it's like you're trying to do so much at the same time - some conscious, some of it unconscious. But I think when you accept the idea that your WIP will undergo multiple drafts, you can relax about not getting it all right in one fevered, frenzied write! Right? ;) TBH, I haven't had a chance to even look at these lessons yet - but the idea of connecting more with other writers about their process appealed as a potential kickstarter to pulling out my WIP - which is a feminist fairytale reimagining at (I think) novella-length.
So I'm firing up the other laptop where my draft lives & seeing what I can apply to evaluate / improve / vary my approach, so I'll see if I feel like sharing a section here with thoughts!
Curious if you did the Forever novel workshop, Mandy from late last year?
Thanks for being a bit of a catalyst! :) Which lesson was the "floors" concept laid out (get it)? Maybe I should start there.
I would start with Lesson 1, but all of them have been great! I haven't done any of the full Forever workshops before, but I really liked the free lessons and went for the full deal this year. So I think I saw a few lessons of the novel one but not the whole thing! Perhaps I'll see if I can check it out.
Your novella sounds amazing. Wishing you all the best of luck!!
Yeah, I dipped in & out of a few of them last year - but was feeling pretty burnt out creatively by about September - so I completely missed the novel workshop. Also, the spec fic one, which sounds like it might have some gems for you if your MC is a stuffed toy!
Thank you - & good luck to you, too! :)
That story sounds lovely!
Question: Who's point of view did you write the story from? Or was it omniscient? I ask, because it seems to me that for subtext to work the characters must know each other very well, so well they can tell when the other person is hiding something and even exactly what they are hiding. Either that, or the characters don't care or are willing to take the risk that the other person will understand the subtext or not. And then will the reader understand?!
I struggle with this a lot!
The POV here is the teenage girl! By no means am I doing this perfectly lol. But I put a lot of work into crafting her as someone who uses humor/sarcasm to deflect her emotion before this scene, whereas the boyfriend is masking his fear of war more than his actual feelings for her. He’s pretty up front about his feelings but she’s not, though she feels them strongly.
I think your point here is excellent though. How do you get characters to develop that understanding of one another? Do they need to, or is it enough for the reader to get it?
My scene above is a flashback scene so I could kind of start them at that point where they knew each other well enough, maybe not to see through all the subtext, but understand that false floors/subtext is there. The idea was to make this the scene she internally decides to let her guard down and fully trust him with her heart. But showing that shift in dynamic, rather than slapping an “I love you” onto the scene ended up being much more swoony/heartbreaking, especially when it’s revealed he (spoiler alert) dies.
This is something I am going to have to think of a lot more! My novel idea has a romance arc and I would really like to write it banter-y and well. :) so thinking of clever ways to get characters to be vulnerable (while still hiding) is really key!
A.C, hi! I'll try to take a stab at answering your question here if that's okay. I'd offer: be careful not to conflate *subtext* with a *goal*. Usually the concealing of the REAL meaning/subtext is not about that character cleverly getting what they want without speaking directly, it's about all the things that drive social & emotional behavior: attachment, politeness, the performance of gender, fear, spite, avoidance.
All of which is to say, the other speaker in the conversation does not need to understand the subtext or understand even that there IS subtext. More typically, they are too caught up in their own experience to really NOTICE the other person's deeper meaning or deeper experience. If you go back to this week's Lesson #3 and watch the "LADY BIRD" scene again, you'll see a fantastic example of this obliviousness. Lady Bird definitely does not feel like her mom feels inadequate & is scared of losing her daughter—she only thinks her mom hates her.
This is an excellent point, about the other person being caught up in their own subtext. I think that’s where I was running into trouble with my WIP last week, assuming the characters were understanding each other’s subtext, when they actually needed to speak through the filter of their individual attitudes/experiences. Separating that from their “goal” in my mind helps a lot. Thank you for clarifying this!