ENGL7516 Chap.7 Dialogue and Things Left Unsaid
Dialogue and Things Left Unsaid
Why so many scripts
The eighth topic pairs dialogue with the things left unsaid, and most of its primary readings are screenplay or teleplay excerpts. The choice is practical.
A script has no narrator, so every feeling must travel through speech, silence or action, and reading one exposes the techniques by which dialogue carries more than its surface topic.
Devices in the scripts
In the excerpt from Raging Bull, a broken television gives a husband a pretext to circle an accusation, and a slip in which one speaker includes himself among the suspects becomes the turning point.
In the excerpt from Punch-Drunk Love, a man meets his sister's pressure with the same short reply until speech gives way to a sudden act. The opening of The Royal Tenenbaums shows children questioning a father whose answers give away what they try to hide. A teleplay scene plants a family lie and pays it off years later as proof of loyalty.
The unsaid in prose
The week also includes three prose readings.
In Hemingway's Soldier's Home, a returned soldier who no longer wants to lie about the war faces his mother's questions at breakfast while looking at his plate. In Monica Ali's Dinner with Dr Azad, a young wife speaks one sentence at a dinner her husband dominates, and an understanding with the guest passes in a look.
In an excerpt from Chris Abani's The Secret History of Las Vegas, an ordinary object in a list turns out to carry the scene's threat.
The craft principle
McKee's chapter from the second week describes a rewrite of a key scene in Chinatown in which a long explanatory passage was cut and replaced with a brief question and a silent answer.
The tail of Prose's chapter on dialogue adds that a line should be speech that could come from only one character. Together they give the rule: let each speaker's own words carry what they will not say.
Applying it
Draft a difficult scene first as a script, with no narration. Whatever feeling survives is carried by speech and action; what disappears shows where the prose had been explaining.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why scripts teach subtext
- 02
Pretext objects that let characters argue about something else
- 03
Repetition under rising pressure
- 04
The slip of the tongue as a turning point
- 05
Answers that reveal what they conceal
- 06
Hospitality and politeness as menace
- 07
Looking away as the answer
- 08
Cutting exposition in revision
Worked example · free
Give an argument a pretext
- 2Choose a pretext object and explain what it stands for.
- 2Write the repeated line and show how its pressure rises.
- 2Describe the action that replaces speech at the end.
Key terms
- Subtext
- The meaning carried beneath what characters actually say, including their wants, fears and knowledge, which the reader infers rather than hears.
- Pretext Object
- An ordinary object or topic that characters argue about in place of the real subject of their conflict.
- Expository Dialogue
- Speech written mainly to deliver information to the reader, often between characters who already know it. It is a common weakness in first drafts.
- Parenthetical
- In a script, a brief direction beneath a character's name indicating how a line is delivered or to whom it is spoken.
- Slugline
- The heading of a script scene naming whether it is interior or exterior, the location and the time of day.
- Displacement
- A technique in which a character's attention, gaze or action is directed away from the emotional centre of a scene, signalling what cannot be faced.
Dialogue and Things Left Unsaid FAQ
What is subtext and how do I write it?
Subtext is what a line carries beneath its literal meaning. Write it by deciding first what each speaker wants and cannot say, then giving them lines about something else: an object, a practical matter, a question that stands in for another. The reader infers the real subject because the pressure has to go somewhere.
Why are there so many screenplays on a prose writing course?
Because scripts remove the narrator, they isolate what dialogue and action alone can carry. Reading them trains you to notice when your own prose is explaining a feeling the scene could have delivered, and drafting a scene in script form is a quick diagnostic for over-explanation.
How do I punctuate dialogue in a story submission?
Follow one consistent convention for quotation marks, tags and paragraphing, starting a new paragraph for each change of speaker. Some of the set readings drop quotation marks deliberately, which is a stylistic choice you may make, but it must be consistent and it will be read as a choice.
Is it ever right to state a character's feeling directly?
Occasionally, when the statement itself is a surprise or an evasion, but in most drafts direct statement weakens the scene. The prose readings for the week report precisely what characters do and where they look, and leave the interpretation to the reader, who then owns the feeling.
Assessment move
Choose one script excerpt from the week and, for each exchange, write in the margin what the speaker wants and cannot say. Then take a dialogue scene of your own and do the same, deleting any line that already says what should have been in the margin. Repeat until at least one line in the scene is carrying its opposite.
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