–There are two nuns walking….
–So, there’s these two nuns, right?
–A couple of penguins is hoofing it down the street….
–Yo, check it out, right, there’s these two nuns
–Two sacred vessels of God shining in glory
–Ha ha, nuns, look! Where they think they’re goin’?
I had the good fortune when I first began to study acting to take classes with Michael Beckett. His approach was always very individual, but one of the lessons that resonated in my mind was a class in which he insisted that “words don’t mean anything.” There were mutterings about the class — “that’s not true,” “How can you know anything about a play if the words don’t mean anything…” etc.
Michael then proceeded to scream “I love you” at someone, then he said the words again as if he were mocking the person to whom he was speaking and then again as if the idea that he would love the person at whom he’d directed the phrase was the most ludicrous thing in the world (the subtext was along the lines of “yeah, right, like anybody would love you”). It was suddenly clear that the phrase “I love you” could mean multiple things and that much of it depended on context. He went on through several more variations, but not one of them meant “I love you.”
In other words, something that David Mamet made me think of: People never say what they mean, but they always mean what they mean.
I was also lucky enough a few years after that to translate Fabio Rubio’s Mosca from Spanish into English for a production that included a Spanish director and several Spanish speaking performers. One of the trickier elements was finding English language equivalents — not just for the words that were spoken, but for the manner in which each character spoke. The play is an retelling of Titus Andronicus and each character is very distinct: Aaron the Moor is blunt and brutal, Chiron comes across as the idiot son of Tamara while the elder son, Demetrius is aristocratic and dainty. Tito has the aura of a no-nonsense woodsman and his daughter Lavinia has been very affected by her years of illness (there are traces of it in her speech).
One of the items I exploited in translation was the multiple meanings of various verbs (one of the things that translators begrudge is lost in translation). For example, the verb espantar can be translated as “to astonish” or “to frighten.” Might one character mean “to frighten” and another to “astonish”? Next, one tries to add multiple layers in English to words that are written the same in Spanish, i.e. the phrase “Por fin, llegamos” could simply be translated “At last, we’re here.” For Demetrius, however, I would translate “Finally, we’ve arrived.” For each character, I tried to find a distinct way of speaking so that the actors would have more room to create variety (and to feel what was in the original). Oddly, the Spanish speaking actors were the most demonstrative against such liberties (“It simply means ‘we’re here!”). However, the director backed me on this.
If one looks at the list with which I began, it is clear that each line is a repetition of the same phrase said — not just in a different manner, but by a different sort of character. One of the more difficult things for a writer to do is to hear voices other than his or her own. I love East of Eden — one of my top ten books simply for its wisdom and compassion — however, most of the main characters sound like they’re the same person speaking through the mouth of a differently named character. I’m not saying every writer has to imitate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with the varieties of dialects and phonetic spellings, but there is an advantage to paying attention to things like rhythm, word choice and sub-text when writing dialogue:
Rhythm: people speak in different rhythms. I knew a man once who kept winding one story into the next. I wanted to move on to another conversation at the party, but he seemed to begin each new story without taking a normal break. Once I started paying attention, I noticed that he would break for breath mid-sentence. I had been anticipating a story would end with a breath-pause; it never happened. I had an “American Renaissance” professor who spoke like train — wheels running down a track at medium speed. Clack-e-ta-clack-e-ta, he never broke stride, never hurried, never slowed, never paused. There were no emphatics, no points of humor. My notes from his class would leave a long streak that trailed off the bottom of the paper; I’d fallen asleep mid sentence and the pen slid down the page. There is no way to write rhythms without hearing them. If one lives in a city, it is easier — one can hang out in a part of town with a different ethnicity. The rhythms there are always different — and more easily heard. Sometimes I sit in a crowded place and simply try to hear voices like music — as sound only, so that the rhythmic quality of the voices comes through.
Word choice: I had a classmate in high school who, while everyone else was saying “that’s cool,” coined the phrase “that’s casual.” Someone I knew in college called women either “beauteous” or “hideous.” There was nothing in between. He also would walk into my room, pick up a cup (or pen or anything, really) and say, “what have you got here? A little cup-de dup?” He’d rub his hand on his belly while expelling air between his lips and add, “I seen betta in Maine.” My son and his classmates are now in the habit of calling anything excellent “o.p.” (over-powering). I had another friend who continually modified one description by a second — “She’s cute, in a big nose kind of way.” “It’s good, in a stinky kind of way.” There are people who always phrase things as questions. I acted with a model who always attributed her ideas to someone else (“I read in a book that….”; I also used this in a play). When you add to the mix people who speak English as a second language, it gets more interesting. Spanish speaking people frequently mix up “to make” and “to do” — thus the phrase “I have to make my homework.” (In Spanish, it’s the same verb, hacer.) A Japanese student once explained to me that “a dream has a lot of wish.”
Screenwriters who work in cityscapes have many choices to diversify their character content, not just in stereotypical ways (i.e. Pakistani cab driver) but in power-broker circles as well: club owners, grad students, library researchers, etc. can be given extravagant rhythms of speech by thinking about word choice and rhythm.
Sub-text: This goes back to my Mamet inspired statement about people not saying what they mean. Most of us are dishonest. We make allowances for people who can advance our careers that we’d never make for family. We bypass honesty to be expedient. But we still try to get what we want! Couples break up over the minor issues, never the major ones — if one is a profligate spender, the confrontation with the spouse is about some stupid six dollar object, not the repeated pattern of spending. How many times does a spouse say “You could have called me!” But what is she or he really saying? Possible answers: you don’t respect me. I think you’re cheating on me. I want out of this stinking marriage. It’s important that the screenwriter never employ those last three sentences in such a context unless the character who speaks them is ready to step off a cliff. We never say those things, not because they’re true, but because they seem irrevocable. Once we’ve crossed into that turf, there’s no going back. No, we much prefer to blame things on the other person, push them to leave or stay, push them to make any decision. Right now, we’re too emotional to think clearly at all.
I was engaged many years ago to a woman in Ecuador from a very wealthy family. Naturally, she didn’t want to leave Ecuador and insisted I go there to live. I told her that I wanted to be sure that if I wasn’t happy in Ecuador, we could look at other places to live — i.e., I wanted to marry her, not Ecuador. She cancelled the wedding. I had already surrendered my apartment and my assistant professorship (tenured) and spent several days trying to get each back. I succeeded. In my summer job, I received a call from the young woman who had rented my apartment and had it taken back (via a real estate agent). She told me she wanted to bring her mother by the place, as co-signer, to give the mother some idea of the places the woman was looking at. I told her I needed to run, but she could come by around 8 p.m.
At this point, I was still numb. It had only been a couple of days and I had been in constant motion to repair my life. I hadn’t cried or even thought about the loss all that much. It truly was just numbness. I got back at 6, went for a run, and beat the woman back to the apartment by 10 minutes. I was still breathing a little heavy from running up the stairs when they buzzed. I let them look around. The girl asked a few questions, showed her mother. We made some small chat. She was in her early twenties, dark-haired, willowy and simply dressed in jeans and a flowing blouse.
“I really just wanted to make sure the real-estate agent wasn’t pulling a fast one.”
“What?”
“I mean, you’re really going to stay?”
I don’t know whether it was the innocence of the question, the long run, the possibility that I’d let down my guard because these people had nothing to do with my life, my lost fiance…. Suddenly I was bawling. Full out, body convulsively bawling. The women felt awful. They backed away, apologizing — “oh my god, I’m so sorry. So sorry.” They couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
As a writer and actor, I always remember — that is truth. It is the emotion that seeps out when we least expect it — and it almost never comes from the words you would expect. Sub-text is emotion. It is truth. It is what we really mean or feel when we’re busy saying something else.
The Magic Lantern 