Dialogue is Action
Summary of "Dialogue" by Robert McKee
📚 Dialogue is a must-read for fiction writers.
🕒 Save time by reading my comprehensive summary.
My summary is broken into four posts:
Part 1: Dialogue is action
Part 2: Understanding the silent language
Here is Part 1:
Dialogue - Any words said by any character to anyone.
These could be words said to:
Others
Oneself
To the reader or audience
There are two types of dialogue:
Dramatized (acted out in a scene)
Narratized (spoken outside the scene)
1. Dramatized Dialogue
Dramatized means acted out in scenes.
These are lines back and forth between characters in conflict. Each line contains an action with a specific intention and causes a reaction somewhere within the scene.
This is true even in scenes with one character. When you argue with yourself, your mind creates a second self and talks to it as if it were another person. A characters’s inner dialogue becomes a dramatized scene where two conflicted selves of the same person argue.
2. Narratized Dialogue
Narratized means spoken outside the scene.
These are cases where the fourth wall is broken. A character takes vocal action to talk directly to the reader, audience, or self. For example, a character may want to bring the reader/audience up to date on past events.
Dialogue is action.
(This is the foundation principle of Dialogue by Robert McKee.)
To say something is to do something.
All speech is an outward execution of an inner action.
No character ever talks to anyone, even to himself, for no reason.
There shouldn’t be any throwaway lines like, “Hey, how are you?”
Beneath every line of dialogue said by a character, the writer must create a desire, intent, and action.
Before writing a line, ask yourself these questions:
What does my character want out of this situation?
At this precise moment, what action would he take in an effor to reach that desire?
What exact words would he use to carry out that action?
Robert McKee argues that “dialogue problems are story problems.”
If you are struggling to give a character words in a scene, you probably don’t have a firm grasp on their underlying motivations.
Continue reading my Dialogue summary:
Part 1: Dialogue is action
Part 2: Understanding the silent language
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