By Chris Mathews
One important way to put more drama in your writing is to
understand the language of drama, dialogue. Fiction and non-fiction can be written
without dialogue; drama cannot. We know
the story of a play through what the characters say and do on stage.
In prose, the writer has the advantage of being able to
describe the characters’ motivations, but this can also be a pitfall. Description can deaden writing when it usurps
action or tells the reader too much. Dialogue has the advantage of actively engaging the auditor. There are no intermediaries with
dialogue. In fact, the reader is the audience in any quality writing,
actively supplying the missing pieces of the story. Stories in which the reader is told what
happens but not allowed to experience the story first-hand can easily become
literary dry-gulches.
I based my one-act Gargoyles (published by Baker’s Plays in
2005) on an actual event, a high-school Halloween play banned by a school board
in a small mountain town. A preacher in
the town provided the major push to ban the play Bats in the Belfry, decrying
Halloween as “a pagan ritual.” The
actual play was a comedy, in my opinion about as innocuous as Bewitched, but
deemed “satanic” because it contained a warlock.
To tell this story, I decided to create characters that
could comment on the play-within-the- play (which I renamed Raising Spirits) and
lighten up this controversy. I chose
gargoyles as my dual narrators because of their traditional role as
guardians-of-the-Church. As I wrote I
realized the gargoyles were becoming a kind of medieval Siskel and Ebert,
speaking in Latin-sounding phrases. Through their banter, I was able to both create a gothic atmosphere and
comic repartee. In the opening scene, the gargoyles define themselves, setting
themselves up as observers of humankind.
Here is the opening dialogue of the play:
As the lights come up, two gargoyles are perched on a platform flanking a
large, gothic door. Ornate medieval
music is playing.
FIRST GARGOYLE. Stone silence…
SECOND GARGOYLE. …Mocks mankind’s folly.
FIRST GARGOYLE. Demons dwell in eaves…
SECOND GARGOYLE. …Caught in granite guffaws
FIRST GARGOYLE. We
outlast your short time
SECOND GARGOYLE. Withstand your orangutan rantings…
FIRST GARGOYLE. …Your
humanegomania.
SECOND GARGOYLE. Your acid haze
FIRST GARGOYLE. Corrodes our veins
SECOND GARGOYLE. So
permit us
FIRST GARGOYLE. From our lofty perches
SECOND GARGOYLE. To
comment
FIRST GARGOYLE. To
criticize
SECOND GARGOYLE. To
cajole
FIRST GARGOYLE. To
view from afar
SECOND GARGOYLE. To scrutinize with a looking-glass
FIRST GARGOYLE. To provide comic relief
SECOND GARGOYLE. Though these humans provide their own quite
well.
FIRST GARGOYLE. We will be their funhouse mirror.
SECOND GARGOYLE. –Grotesques.
FIRST GARGOYLE. It
takes a grotesque to know a grotesque.
If your
characters know what they want and
listen to each other(unless you want them to ignore each other), dialogue often
writes itself. In the
next writing, I will look at how conflict works in dialogue.
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