Worrying About Dialogue Last
Polishing a story with Robert McKee's "DIALOGUE"
Just as I was about to polish my story for the third draft, I read "Dialogue," the final book in Robert McKee's storytelling trilogy that I hadn't yet read. The reason I waited until the end was that I was being faithful to my mentor McKee's advice to “think about dialogue last,” and also simply because I was worried about my living expenses to the point of hesitating to buy the book.
Buying the whole trilogy costs nearly 10,000 yen.Because they are such masterpieces, their resale value rarely drops.
I can guarantee that these books have the power to help you complete your storytelling by drawing out everything an amateur might be thinking into 350,000 characters. By learning early on that storytelling consists of the three elements of "story," "dialogue," and "character," I was able to focus on what I wanted to express without getting lost in methodology.
Can a textbook on screenwriting be reinterpreted for novels?
McKee's "Story" is written about how to construct storytelling, and "Character" is literally about character design.
“Wait a minute... there's no lecture on narrative prose for novels...”
I would say the answer to that question is in "Dialogue." After all, storytelling can be boiled down to the author's long narration, the art of storytelling, and the transcription of internal dialogue onto paper. Conversely, one could say that it is only with "Dialogue" that we finally touch upon the topic of "how to write."
"Dialogue" naturally does not include discussions on Japanese grammar. Much like the urban legend that "if you have junior high level English, talking to a native speaker is a breeze," if you have a basic understanding of grammar, you can create a story that communicates to others, and in fact, creating new language is one of the joys of literature. If anything, it feels like I used grammar to master such a hard and long book as McKee's.
Common worries about dialogue
Thanks to McKee explicitly stating “think about dialogue last,” I was able to finish writing without stopping even when I felt a line of dialogue was subpar, until the entire story was assembled.
While writing, I inserted placeholder conversations with the intention that “I want a conversation that creates this kind of flow here.” I was able to isolate the task of “focusing on the details of the conversation” as a single, distinct task.
Naturally, some placeholder conversations remained until the final draft, and while I thought some were brilliantly expressive when I first came up with them, I sometimes ended up cutting them if they didn't serve the purpose of the scene. Naturally, there were also lines newly incorporated at the final stage.
Common worries about dialogue can perhaps be broadly divided into two categories
Worries about content: "Why" write it, "what" to write, and "how" to write it
How to manage conversation and how to organize dialogue between multiple people
Worries about content
I think the strength of McKee's methodology is that “why does this line need to be spoken here?” regarding the “significance of dialogue's existence,” can be naturally assembled while working through the early stages of story design.
Once the "why" is established, I think in most cases, "what and how to write" will naturally emerge.
Perhaps fewer people get stuck on "how to write dialogue" itself before that point. People who want to create stories already have a fair amount they want to say built up in their hearts, and the act of having characters or descriptions speak for them is, in essence, writing a novel.
Therefore, there must be people who view the task of writing dialogue as a dessert or a main dish, in a sense.
Conversely, people who are bad at real-world conversation might find the conversations in their stories to be awkward. Even so, novels that use monologic techniques naturally exist.
Such is the freedom of the literary world.
How to manage conversation and how to organize dialogue between multiple people
When it comes to the worries surrounding lines and dialogue, the ones that surface are about how to make them exist naturally within the text, so it is no wonder that discussion tends to focus on this, as it is easy to see.
In other words, when Taro, Jiro, Saburo, and Shiro are characters, the discussion is about how to make it clear to the reader which line is spoken by Taro, which is Jiro's, and what to do when Saburo or Shiro interrupts, all while making it look natural as a writing style.
I feel that the Japanese language has both advantages and disadvantages in character-driven literature.
The advantage is that you can imply a character by adding just a few characters.
In short, if there is a line like "wakatta" (understood), just by changing it to "wakatta wa," you can imply that a woman is speaking.
But what if this were English? The word "got it" does not have an obvious gendered tone, so you would have to supplement it or create context to show who said it.
The disadvantage is, because of this, might one fall into the laziness of distinguishing characters simply by whether or not one or two characters are added? Also, assuming that as long as the character's personality stands out, distinguishing them becomes easy, is it enough to think about specializing their personality?
For example, like saying that if you add "pepo" to the end of a sentence, it always points to a certain character.
This is an amateur's unnecessary worry that it might become a superficial trick regardless of which way it goes.
Once I think about it by pushing it to the limit like this, I reach the conclusion that, even if there are pros and cons, character design and dialogue can be linked precisely; since I have gone to the trouble of designing them, why not make great use of this?
In other words, even if you don't go as far as making them say "I'm hungry, pepo," characters who refer to lunch as "chushoku," "hiruge," "hirumeshi," "lunch," or "ohirugohan" should each have a different design.
Masculine/Feminine
Intellectual/Sensory
Eccentric/Taciturn
Complex speech/Simple
If you construct dialogue in connection with character design like this, you can write them differently even in large group conversations, and I feel that the amount of explanation in the narrative text about who said what can be kept to a minimum.
I would like it to be called a technique to slip that in without it being thought of as simplistic.
There is so much that is not written
That said, I am still in the situation of sorting out what I have written myself, what I have learned while writing, and what I have thought about while writing, so I do not clearly know how accurate my assessment is.
However, the desire to aim for inevitable expressions that are stripped down as much as possible after firmly constructing the structure is something I continue to hold even after I have finished creating it.
While creating conversations, I investigated how predecessors handle dialogue and how precisely they describe things. Unexpectedly, I discovered that things I thought I had "seen" were actually not written at all.
In other words, I thought, "The two of them must have exchanged awkward greetings here," but that wasn't written. It was just something I was made to imagine. Even though I thought a landscape with such breadth that flowers were flying and the air had a scent was depicted in my imagination, the written text is very concise.
Also, there might be a conversation battle between four people, but while there are four people in the scene, the axis is a dialogue between a character with speaking power and a character who opposes them, and the other two are just decoration. The idea that such scenes should be complex is just me superimposing what I saw in dramas and movies, and in novels, they are often written in a simplified way.
I feel there are techniques that can be learned by consciously separating what is written from what is evoked from it.
I want to encounter the richness that text generously provides as a reader, and I want to be able to provide it as an author.
I am compiling all the efforts I, an ordinary woman in her late 30s, made to complete a 350,000-character story into a magazine. If you find it even slightly interesting, I would be happy if you could like and follow.