Voice & Subtext: Creating Your Sound as a Playwright

by Richard Toscan

I don't write, I listen, and I just take dictation. I was trained as a musician. I'm a terrible speller, and I don't have a sense of prose as a discipline. I only hear people talking, and I put down what they say.
-- Michael Weller

Voice is what makes directors and literary managers of regional theatres read past page three of a new play. Playwrights build a physical construction on stage -- with spoken words. You can move around in it, as the performers do. But it's an invisible construction. And that makes it easy to think it's just words -- any old words that do the job. Well, it's not.

Any old words that just do the job are a crashing bore in the theatre. What playwrights do is make us hear things we've never quite heard in that way before. There's a simple rule for developing your unique voice as a playwright:

Listen More Than You Talk
What playwrights write is the language as it's spoken, not as it's written. Forget English 101. The syntax of spoken language is only vaguely related to what gets drummed into you in those dismal affairs. Spoken language is governed by the structure of thoughts, not conventional grammar and sentence structure. To be good at this playwriting business, you need to retrain your ears to hear how people really speak. Here's what to listen for:

• How people actually express thoughts in spoken language.

• The way words are used (which ones are dropped from spoken language, which are combined as contractions)

• How punctuation is thrown around in speech

• The odd rhythms of spoken language

A great way to start this listening business: Eavesdrop on your friends, your relations, and especially strangers on the streets, in restaurants, or stores. Be shameless, but don't be obvious. This sort of thing is not an endearing trait in the normal world unless you work for the FBI. William Saroyan learned to write dialogue by keeping his ear to the upstairs heating vent while his parents entertained guests below -- and wrote down what he heard.

Most playwrights don't duplicate on paper what they've heard on the street -- unless what they've heard is especially wonderful. By doing the work of listening and then writing dialogue, you'll gradually create your own special Voice. Doing this is almost pure magic. By listening and writing, your Voice will usually form on its own.

Once you get your ear trained to spoken language, your natural story-telling abilities will rise to the occasion. This skill's in your DNA -- they just haven't located the gene yet. It'll be there when you need it. And the best way to speed up this process is to keep Subtext out of the mouths of your characters. Subtext is what your characters don't tell us.
. . . there's nothing there except lines of dialogue. If they're sketched correctly and minimally, they will give the audience the illusion that these are "real people," especially if the lines are spoken by real people -- the actors are going to fill a lot in. So a large part of the technique of playwriting is to leave a lot out."
-- David Mamet

Unspoken Thoughts and Motives
And what you leave a lot out of in the dialogue is subtext. Pushing this just beneath the surface of the dialogue is what makes plays exciting and helps keep audiences in their seats. Subtext is the unspoken thoughts and motives of your characters -- what they really think and believe. In well-written dialogue, subtext seldom breaks through the surface of the dialogue except in moments of extreme conflict. At other times, it colors the dialogue. Another way of looking at this: Subtext is Content underneath the Spoken Dialogue.

And subtext gives the performers something to do. If you let your characters tell each other everything they think or feel, actors can't do what they're trained to do best: revealing through gesture, intonation, and expression, the real essence of a character.

-- RT
© 1998 Richard Toscan

Adapted from The Playwriting Seminars by Richard Toscan http://www.vcu.edu/artweb/playwriting Richard Toscan's radio dramas have been broadcast throughout Europe, North America, and Australia by the BBC, CBC, ABC, and NPR, featuring among other stars, Richard Thomas, Mark Hammil, Brock Peters, and Richard Widmark. He conceived and produced the original Star Wars Radio Series in association with Lucasfilm, NPR, and the BBC. The series has aired continuously since 1981 and is credited with increasing the audience for public radio in America by 40%. His stage plays have been in the finals and semifinals of The Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, Foundation for The Dramatists Guild/CBS-TV New Play Program, The Sergel Drama Prize, and The Market House Theatre One Act Competition. He was a founding playwright and Board member of First Stage, the Los Angeles new-play development program and is a member of the Dramatists Guild. He is currently Dean of the School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University.