Russell T. Davies on Dialogue–Part 3

This is the last I’m going to post from the absolutely fabulous book DOCTOR WHO: THE WRITER’S TALE: THE FINAL CHAPTER by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook. Like I said before, this book is a compilation of the emails exchanged by Davies, former show-runner of the rebooted Doctor Who, and journalist Benjamin Cook, during RTD’s last year or so as the series show-runner and principle writer. In the course of talking about the show and how it’s all put together from a production viewpoint, Davies also discusses the writing process, where his ideas come from, and how he turns those ideas into scripts. These excerpts are from a discussion he’s having with Cook on writing dialogue–a subject that’s as dear to the novelist as it is to the script writer. Enjoy!

BEN COOK:

Dialogue should be character-driven, but how naturalistic should it be, do you think? It depends on the show, I suppose, and Doctor Who‘s dialogue is often heightened, but completely naturalistic dialogue would be so clotted with ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ and clichés and ‘at the end of the days’ and ‘oh my Gods’ that it’d be unbearable to read or listen to. Should dialogue in TV drama reflect day-to-day speech?

RUSSELL T. DAVIES:

How you want your dialogue to sound is entirely personal. That’s one of the things that defines you as a writer. I think the strongest writers in the land write dialogue that sounds like themselves. Paul Abbott’s characters sound like Paul. Kay Mellor’s sound like Kay. Alan Bennett’s sound like him. Within that, they might be writing posh lords or checkout girls or mystic swamis or cruel murderers, and each of those characters would be distinct, with their own speech patterns, rhythms, habits… and yet there’s a fundamental Abbott/Mellor/Bennett that creeps through.

I’d always aim for naturalism, within reason. I mean, let’s not pretend, all the speeches in a script are chosen, honed, shaped, edited, so it’s always going to be a faux-realism. (If only your real-life blather could go through that process. We’d sound wonderful!) It just depends which faux you fancy and how you use it. It depends on drama. The dialogue in The Second Coming was unusually stripped down for me–sparse, blunt, few jokes–because it was a cold world. Queer as Folk was foul, savage, funny–very gay! Doctor Who has much more bantering, a witty tone, because that fits the Doctor. That’s how he survives. And so on. But–

I’m not answering this too well, because I don’t think about it much. And yet I sit here all day trying to choose the right words, so I think about it all the time, I suppose. Hmm. I just think that dialogue has to be sayable. It has to sound real, while being highly artificial. Blimey! No one said it was easy.

On a practical level… avoid repeating words. That’s the simplest advice, and yet it’s what I must spend 50 per cent of my time doing. Like the word ‘just.’ I can use that word night and day. I just fall into it. ‘I just thought I’d pop in and say hello, cos I was just thinking about you, just the other day.’ Cut the ‘justs’! How many months of my life have I spent cutting ‘justs’?! But word repetition–and those clichés that you mentioned–can be dangerous. Make sure every speech doesn’t start with ‘Well’ or ‘So’ or ‘Right.’  ‘Well, I think we should go to town.’ ‘Well, I don’t.’ ‘Well, you would.’ Easy trap to fall into. And watch out for the repetition of words across scene divides. It’s really easy to end a scene with ‘I hope you find him,’ and then you go and make a cuppa, come back and start the next scene with ‘I hope you find the room comfortable.’ When that runs as one, you go ouch!

The second thing I do is trim dialogue down into blocks. Discrete sentences. What I mean is, when I started writing–and was a lot more florid–I would have had the Doctor saying, ‘I’m gonna go back to the TARDIS, and find the Daleks, and then I’ll stop them, and then have a cup of tea.’ Nowadays, I’m more likely to write, ‘I’m gonna go back to the TARDIS. Find the Daleks. Stop them. And then, tea.’ I spend a lot of time trimming down like that. Although, evidently not as much as I’d like to think. I remember Peter Kay phoning me from the set of Love & Monsters and saying, ‘Did you buy a job lot of commas somewhere? It’s all bloody commas! How am I supposed to learn this? Never seen so many bloody commas in my life!’ (Mind you, then I read his autobiography and realised that I could have sold him some. Ha ha.) But even the commas are a way of breaking down dialogue into blocks. I wouldn’t have a character say, ‘I’m going to Deck 31 to find whoever’s behind all this.’ I’d have them say, ‘I’m going to Deck 31, to find whoever’s behind all this.’ Better or worse? I don’t know, but I can’t stop myself doing it. Comma mad. But what the commas and full stops are doing is imposing a rhythm, my rhythm, on the words, deciding when they’re fast, when they’re slow, when they stop. That’s not the quest for naturalism; that’s the quest for the drama, to decide when it’s hard, when it’s witty, when it’s throwaway, when it’s stark, how a scene rises and falls and builds and declines. That’s rhythm.

The book’s about 700 pages long, so I don’t think I’ve violated copyright by posting these three sections (as I recall, “fair use” allows you to post a certain percentage of the text for review or educational purposes). If I have–apologies to the copyright holder. My intention is purely to educate, and to encourage you to consider buying this book. You can purchase it in the US from Amazon, via a third party seller, for about $20.