On Dialogue

Thinking honestly, these are probably among my favourite lines of dialogue ever;

"The nominees are "The Gay Divorcee," 

"Here Comes the Navy," "The Barrets 

of Wimpole Street," "One Night of 

Love," "The Thin Man," "Cleopatra" --"

"Overrated!"

         "You are going to miss your plane"
         "I know"

         "Birdy Edwards is hear. I am Birdy Edwards"


What do these snippets have in common? None of them are in themselves particularly funny, brilliant or memorable. I don't you find any of them in books such as '1001 Memorable Movie Quotations' or hear them on 'Channel Four's 100 Words From Movies that Stuart Marconie likes'. No one would endlessly parrot them at parties. And this is what I love about them. None of them have any relevance outside their own context; but in their own context, all are immensely powerful.

Take the first snippet. It is said by a woman to herself when she is working late at night and listening to the Oscars on the radio. However, the line's power comes from the fact that earlier in the film; this woman lost her only son almost certainly to a serial killer and then been falsely imprisoned in a mental asylum for refusing to accept a homeless boy as her son. The line tells us that the woman has not only come through the ordeal; but is still able to take an interest in trivia again...in other words we have a woman no longer content to define herself as victim, which is nearly a rarity in these 'true life tales'

The second snippet comes from the end of the utterly heartbreaking/warming duo of films 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset'. It's hard to express just how much it encapsulates the culmination of the emotional journeys of the two leads, while the third snippet is from the Sherlock Holmes novel 'The Valley of Fear' and is probably the most thrilling line of dialogue I have ever read in a novel.

What I am trying to say is that dialogue is simultaneously overrated and underrated at the same time. Overrated because of the immense importance reviewers tend to put on single lines as witnessed by the way they will take a single line and use it as to point to the failure of a film as a whole. For example, Peter Bradshaw took the fact that the film of "The Fellowship of the Ring' featured the line 'By night these hills will be swarming with orcs' as showing the film was a failure. Yet without context this proved nothing; after all surely the success of a film is not dependent on whether it contains such a line but how the line is placed; how it is said; what leads up to it and down from it. There is nothing in itself wrong with the line 'Lisa, you are tearing me apart'.

And yet we consistently underrate dialogue that we simply don't notice because it is doing its job. We notice the funny lines; the dramatic lines; the melodramatic lines even. We don't notice the lines that just do their job and do not stick because they are so in character and so natural.

Stewart Lee writes of his desire to produce a piece of stand-up that simply does not work in the page because every single word and sentence is dependent on context and performance for its meaning. Which is not a bad goal to aim for.

More good advice on the writing process

More excellent advice on the writing process and on the responsibilities of the writer to the reader.

Sort of Review - Impro by Keith Johstone

 I can remember an incident from primary school. We had all been given an outline picture of two hands shaking and asked to colour them in. Most of the class coloured their pictures in various shades of pink, yellow or brown. I coloured the two hands in red and green because....well why not? I liked strong primary colours. The teacher congratulated everyone on the class for the work but I was told off for being stupid because 'no-one has red or green hands' (The fact that no-one has hands that just float by themselves in the ether didn't occur to her. There was a lot of this at my primary school. A later teacher expressed her opinion that speech bubbles in strip cartoons were stupid because people didn't have big bubbles containing their words in real life, conveniently ignoring all the other non-naturalistic aspects of strip cartoons)* 

I don't want to trace my complete lack of any visual artistic ability whatsoever is as a direct result of this incident; it may be that I am just one of those people who are naturally shite. However, I am always irresistibly reminded of this incident everytime I read Keith Johnstone's book, 'Impro' and his short section on his art teacher Anthony Stirling

"Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child and it wasn't something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is good, this is bad...' "

Johnstone's argument all through his book is that too often education is a destructive process which crushes creativity and destroys spontaneity and his aim throughout his book is to try and discover this spontaneity.

"Most schools encourage children to be unimaginative. The research so far shows that imaginative children are disliked by their children. Torrance gives an eye-witness account of an 'exceptionally creative boy' who questioned one of the rules in the textbook...She was also upset when the boy finished the problems she set almost as quickly as it took to read them"

Much of his book discusses games his uses with his students to try and restore this lost creativity. It is a fascinating process; upon presenting a box to a student and asking her to describe its contents; he notes that she goes to say 'orange' but pauses and says 'cabbage' instead feeling that 'orange is too ordinary.'. Too often, people asked to say an object are scared of what this may reveal about them and resort to the safe and the ordinary. Much of the improvisation process is devoted to trying to remove this self-censorship and get people to trust in their instincts.

I've been thinking of this in connection with the writing process. Much of my problem with the process seems to stem from exactly this self-censorship. This is, I suppose, why games are so useful to the struggling writer; as well as sparking inspiration, they also absolve you from the blame. "The random sentences I drew out MADE me do a story about a secret service officer importuning a journalist in a dark alley. It wasn't me". One of the most interesting passages in Johnstone's book is the section where he gets a supposedly uncreative student to produce a post-apocalyptic story about giant ants destroying buildings - all the while convinced that the story was coming from outside of her.

Later on in this blog, I may well review the hilarious book "How not to write a novel" which sets out a number of rules that any beginning novelists (or writer of any description) would be wise to follow. Does it contradict what I've said above about spontaneity? No, and if you're very good I may even explain why not.

For anyone interested in improvisation, writing or even just human nature; Keith Johnstone's Impro is a must buy.






















* If this story seems vaguely familiar to you, it may because it turns up in a modified form in 'Bed of Crimson Joy'. Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief etc. v