The memoir-writing class I teach has a syllabus that’s changed remarkably little over the years. It’s evolved, certainly, as I’ve honed the exercises and assignments to be both fun and provide an obvious path to skill mastery. Overall, though, the grand design of the class has remained the same: as I urge students to start writing about their experiences, I have them start making timelines of their life, then identifying the areas of most interest for a potential book-length memoir, and finally thinking of the stories of their lives as a focused literary form—all while trying to provide them the basics of good storytelling.
On the other hand, I originally designed my Creative Writing Calisthenics class to be totally modular. I planned a handful of in-class exercises to have ready, at a moment’s notice. My thought, though, was that from week to week I’d assess the types of projects the students were bringing for critique, and from there I’d decide what they needed to explore. My students, this semester, have really been on point; I was so blown away by their short stories last week that the seminar ran nearly an hour late because everyone was so excited to be there. (How often does that happen?)
During the critique session last week, though, I noticed that a couple of the students were avoiding the use of dialogue in their stories. They’d write paragraph after paragraph of luscious description that dripped with sensory detail, but have their characters interact only in non-spoken ways. They’d tell us the characters chatted; they didn’t show us about what. You’ve got opportunities here, here, and here for dialogue, I’d tell them. Don’t let them go to waste!
For this week’s class, I thought I’d make up an opening calisthenic that would stretch their dialogue muscles. Not only dialogue, but subtext. Every good actor knows about subtext. Subtext is the motivation underlying each line an individual character utters in a script—the unspoken emotions, the murky meanings that the person talking may feel quite deeply, but doesn’t, can’t, or won’t put into speech.
A good writer keeps track of his characters’ subtexts. In a stage play, a sycophant might harbor deep feelings of hostility toward his supervisor, but he’ll say the sweetest yeses and verbally brown his nose. However, his physical reactions, stance, eye contact, expression, might possibly betray many of the true emotions roiling underneath. Written stories handle subtext slightly differently; the nonverbal communications of body language must be described, the state of mind hinted at, though perhaps not explicitly detailed.
It’s important for all writers to remember that every character, no matter how minor, speaks with his or her own subtexts. Knowing why a character says something is as important as—and quite often is the determination of—the actual words that come out of her mouth.
One of the most helpful classes I enjoyed in college happened in my Beginning Acting course, my freshman year at William & Mary. Professor Richard Palmer handed those of us in the seminar a list of lines to learn on the spot for a two-person skit. We all memorized the same ten or so lines. They were so mundane in nature that the very blandness of them made them easy to regurgitate. If I recall correctly, they started something like this:
PERSON 1: Hello
PERSON 2: Hi.
PERSON 1: How are you?
PERSON 2: Pretty well, I guess.
I mean, I think I’ve conveyed the white-hot excitement of the written words, there. What mattered wasn’t the exchange of niceties, however. Mr. Palmer would take each pair of actors aside, immediately before they got up in front of the class, and whisper to us our secret motivations. “You,” he’d say to my partner, “are a prison warden delivering a prisoner his last meal. And you,” he’d tell me, “are a death row prisoner scheduled to go to the electric chair before noon.” Our job as actors, then, was to use our delivery, our tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and a heavy amount of miming to imply what exactly was going on.
I remember being surprised how often the other students in the class figured out the various scenarios. I acted in one comic variation in which I was a guy on an elevator trying to pick up a pretty girl, while my partner’s recoiling reaction made it obvious to the seminar that she wasn’t biting. I remember another pair used the lines to convey pretty vividly that they were just about to walk down the aisle and get married. No one was on the nose about the death row situation, but they did manage to glean that there were life-or-death stakes involved. (I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve mimed the electric chair at the end.)
The point, of course, was to make us understand that the words themselves weren’t the only thing that mattered. The words weren’t doing all the work. We were all using the same sparse script. It managed to lend itself to any number of situations. What got the subtext across were all the other skills we as actors brought to the table.
Now, in a fiction writing class, it’s the words that matter. The words are doing all the work. I wanted to create a dialogue exercise—straight dialogue, no description, no internal monologue, no indication for them to use anything other than the spoken word to imply deep and seething currents of subtext.
First, I discussed the notion of subtext with my brilliant students this week. “If you were a pregnant character in one of your stories,” I suggested, “and you standing with a co-worker at a water cooler, and you wanted to convey to your coworker through dialogue that you were pregnant—without actually saying the words, and without being able to do something physical and non-verbal like this—” and here I rested my cupped hands on an imaginary baby bump, “what kind of thing would you say?”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I feel so nauseous this morning!” immediately replied one student.
“I’ve been thinking it’s time to freshen up that spare room of mine,” blurted another.
Either of those examples were a thousand times better than anything I’d dreamed up in my class notes. They totally had the general concept under control.
I then led them on to the callisthenic itself. I had the students pair up and share a single sheet of paper. I’d prepared colored notecards ahead of time. Each pair was going to write out a conversation made of nothing but speeches, I informed them. On pink notecards, I’d printed who their characters were, where their characters were located at the moment, and what was the situation prompting the conversation. In order to avoid false starts and get right to the point, I also provided the first line of each pair’s dialogue. So, for one of the groups, it looked like this:
The Characters
• The Single Older Sister
• The Single Younger Sister
The Setting
• The wedding reception of a childhood friend
The Situation
• Have a conversation about the unsuitability of the marriage you’ve just attended.
The First Line
• "He's just so wrong for her, don't you think?"
I gave the students a moment to read their pink notecard. Then I let them randomly pick one of two blue notecards made especially for their team—a secret subtext card that only their character would know, though they were forbidden to say it aloud. They were not to show these secret subtexts to their partners at any point during the exercise; they could only reveal them when I said.
So, for the sisters at the wedding, the random subtexts were:
Random Subtext 1
• You think your sister is eternally single because she's too picky about guys.
Random Subtext 2
• You have always found your sister infuriatingly controlling. That's probably the number one reason why she's still single.
Here’s an example from another group:
The Characters
• The Husband
• The Wife
The Setting
• Your breakfast table at home
The Situation
• Have a conversation with each other about the girl your son is dating.
The First Line
• "Jeremy was on the front porch kissing that girl of his well past midnight, you know."
Random Subtext 1
• You think your spouse has been paying too much attention to matters outside your marriage.
Random Subtext 2
• You find it ironic that your spouse shows such interest in your son's love life, when he/she hasn't been paying a bit of attention to your own.
I told the students to take ten seconds to choose who would take which character, and to decide who would be writing the first line I’d kindly provided. It didn’t matter which person spoke the first line; it didn’t matter which subtext either character got. (I loved the potential randomness of it. If I were to do it again, I might come up with even more subtexts for each pair, so I’d never know what I was going to get.)
They’d have eight minutes to take turns writing their lines of dialogue down on the sheets of paper they were sharing.
Go.
I sat in place, listening discreetly to the giggles as they played in their little sandboxes. I didn’t really know how successful the exercise might be, as I’d only conjured it up the day before. I deliberately attempted to create scenarios that might lead to squabbling, or polite hostility. There’s rich subtext to be found in situation in which two characters know each other well enough to have accumulated a heavy catalog of the other’s faults, but are compelled by circumstances not to speak of them directly.
But honestly, I had no idea whether these short dialogues would sink or swim. The only thing in which I could take heart was how quickly their pens flew across and covered the sheets of notebook paper.
Eight minutes later, I had them break off their dialogue where it was. I asked each pair to read their conversation aloud to the class. The sisters at the wedding went first. I know for a fact that the Younger Sister who was supposed to be perceived as the choosy one hadn’t read Older Sister’s blue subtext card (“You think your sister is eternally single because she's too picky about guys”), but by some stroke of good fortune the Younger Sister very quickly launched into a launched into a diatribe about the imaginary groom’s faults (“He’s too short, he has no chin, and those freckles!”) that fed right into Older Sister’s unspoken agenda, prompting some tart family bickering that was so naturally written that it sounded as if it had been transcribed from an actual wedding reception.
When they were finished, I waited for the laughter to clear before asking, “What does Older Sister here think about Younger Sister?”
Immediately someone said, “She’s distressed about her lifestyle choices,” and someone else zeroed in a little further: “She obviously thinks her younger sister is too picky about men.”
I told Older Sister to reveal her blue card. It read almost word for word what the last student had suggested. “How about Younger Sister?” I asked the class. “What are her feelings about Older Sister?”
“That she’s too intrusive,” said someone. Another student said, “I think she feels she’s being controlled and bossed around?” I had Younger Sister reveal her blue card.
The woman who had written the Younger Sister lines spoke up. “But wait,” she said, thinking aloud. “I had absolutely no idea what my partner thought about me, but somehow she got me to act as if I was picky and to say exactly what she wanted to hear, when I gave her the list of the groom’s shortcomings. . . .” She thought some more. “I mean, I fed right into her.”
“That’s subtext at work,” I pointed out, nodding vigorously. “Older Sister gave you a prompt that very clearly indicated she expected you to find things wrong with the poor groom, and you obliged her by giving that list. Her character never outright said, ‘Oh lord, I think you’re a persnickety bitch and I’m sure you’ve already got a laundry list of minor things that you’ve decided are this man’s major faults,’ but she clearly expected that from your character—and you obliged by giving it to her. You confirmed her prejudices.”
“And I didn’t know I was supposed to be controlling!” said the woman who had played Older Sister. “She turned me into it! She controlled me and made me controlling!”
I didn’t expect this reaction, but I found it to be a universal theme with the exercise. The students were so busy concentrating on conveying their hidden subtexts that they weren’t really engaging in any detective work about what their partners’ characters secretly thought about them. Yet somehow, in the sisters’ wedding squabbling, or the husband and wife icily and tacitly discussing their marriage through the vehicle of their son’s porch light make-out session, or whatever situation they encountered, everyone seemed to understand that when one character really brings their subtext to an encounter—even subtly—other characters will respond at an instinctive level.
The exercise made clear that everything was as it should be—their readers/listeners were able to discern exactly what information they needed to know about the two characters they created on the spot, while the characters each remained blissfully unaware of what the other really thought of them. They were even somewhat ignorant of how they themselves were behaving in ways that justified the other.
Every character a writer creates, at any given moment, has his or her own hopes and dreams and motivations. To each line of dialogue, they’re bringing entire worlds of experience and emotion. The mildest of declarations, deep inside, can be the throwing down of a gauntlet; a seemingly milquetoast question can be a covert declaration of war.
It’s the writer’s job to know what every character wants and feels, and what wild unknowns they wish to convey—particularly when the characters don’t know for themselves. Without subtext, dialogue is bland. Interchangeable. With it, it’s a writer’s best tool to conveying the individual rich worlds that each character occupies.
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