Although I didn’t know it at the time, I’d been channelling the voice of the American poet, Ezra Pound; and though I couldn’t have told you why, or even what it all meant, I later discovered in what I’d scrawled over both sides of the Ozone Hotel stationary what was to become the opening monologue of Act II of my play, Sixteen Words for Water, which would take me three years to complete and would open simultaneously to rave reviews and full houses in both Sydney and London. Characters work in mysterious ways.
Fortunately I’m not alone in this experience, otherwise I could’ve easily ended up in the nuthouse, which is where my partner feared they’d put me if I kept telling journalists my writing was coming from disembodied voices.
But as I said, I’m not alone. Lots of writers hear voices — indeed, it’s one of the major ways in which enduring characters enter the world.
So let me say it once and for all — the channelling of voice is key to the realisation of successful, dramatic, character-based screenwriting.
Warning: this is only for the obsessed!
If you happen to be one of them — the obsessed, that is — a screen storyteller with a passion for vivid characters and a desire to make them fully present to your audience, then your chief task is simply to LISTEN. Which reminds me of something Charles Simic, employing a baseball metaphor, once said: “Poets are catchers, not pitchers.”
In my experience, when a screenwriter is working best s/he is working very much like a poet, and a poet understands that you cannot hope to make anything present to an audience unless you first of all make it present to yourself.
Unfortunately, you can’t really MAKE characters do anything, though there are plenty of chauvinistic screenwriting control freaks out there who I am sure would disagree with me. All you can really do is work on developing your listening skills. Pay attention, goddammit, pay attention!
The art of developing character starts with oneself, and the experience of PRESENCE — of making your characters, including yourself, present to one another. It is primarily an aural experience. Entering the Drama and freeing your characters so that they can do the work they were meant to do is less about “I see” and more about “I hear”.
Certainly the most powerful and transformative stories are nearly always possessed of voices. This is particularly the case in what is arguably America’s greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From the start, its author, Mark Twain, employs the voice of the novelist, challenging and warning his audience:
“NOTICE
“PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
“BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.”
He then goes on to explain that the novel employs “a number of dialects... to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.”
Personal familiarity? Sounds like a tribal connection... the exactness of intimacy, of shared sources and origins. The fact that Twain was able to channel all these voices in his novel, with all their particularity, requires both an openness and an intimacy grown from first-hand, living relationships, and being with those whose voices inhabit the pages of his novel. You could say that Huck Finn was an aspect of Twain, but it would be just as accurate to say that Twain was an aspect of Huck.
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary...”
The tribal connection to character is confirmed and validated by the hearing of voices. One realises one is finding the story when one stops looking for it, and begins listening to what the characters are telling you about what they want and why they want it, in their own inimical way that flows from a source that is common to both them and the writer. This is the manner in which all great works come to fruition. And there are endless examples of it.
In Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, we have an example of the symphonic energy of characters realised in a mediumistic way — the rhythms and word choices, the counter-dialogue and sub-textual sadness provoke our interest and evoke emotions by virtue of the smallest and most intimate details — details with which Miller shared a mighty empathy by virtue of his tribal connections to the characters.
The voice of Willy Loman remains, nearly 60 years after its finding, a dramatic tour de force:
WILLY: [With wonder.] I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m going’ off the road! I’m tellin’ ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. So I went on again—and five minutes later I’m dreamin’ again, and I nearly—[He presses two fingers against his eyes.] I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.
LINDA: Willy, dear. Talk to them again. There’s no reason why you can’t work in New York.
WILLY: They don’t need me in New York. I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England.
LINDA: But you’re sixty years old. They can’t expect you to keep travelling every week.
WILLY: I’ll have to send a wire to Portland. I’m supposed to see Brown and Morrison tomorrow morning at ten o’clock to show the line. Goddammit, I could sell them! [He starts putting on his jacket.]
LINDA: [Taking the jacket from him.] Why don’t you go down to the place tomorrow and tell Howard you’ve simply got to work in New York? You’re too accommodating, dear.
WILLY: If old man Wagner was alive I’d a been in charge of New York now! That man was a prince, he was a masterful man. But that boy of his, that Howard, he does’t appreciate. When I went north the first time, the Wagner Company didn’t know where New England was!
LINDA: Why don’t you tell those things to Howard, dear?
WILLY: [Encouraged.] I will, I definitely will. Is there any cheese?
LINDA: I’ll make you a sandwich.
WILLY: No, go to sleep. I’ll take some milk. I’ll be up right away. The boys in?
LINDA: They’re sleeping. Happy took Biff on a date tonight.
WILLY: [Interested.]That so?
LINDA: It was so nice to see them shaving together, one behind the other, in the bathroom. And going out together. You notice? The whole house smells of shaving lotion.
WILLY: Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.
LINDA: Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.
WILLY: No, no, some people—some people accomplish something. Did Biff say anything after I went this morning?
LINDA: You shouldn’t have criticized him, Willy, especially after he just got off the train. You mustn’t lose your temper with him.
WILLY: When the hell did I lose my temper? I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?
LINDA: But, dear, how could he make any money?
WILLY: [Worried and angered.] There’s such an undercurrent in him. He became a moody man. Did he apologize when I left this morning?
LINDA: He was crestfallen, Willy. You know how he admires you. I think if he finds himself, then you’ll both be happier and not fight any more.
WILLY: How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week
LINDA: He’s finding himself, Willy.
WILLY: Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!
LINDA: Shh!
WILLY: The trouble is he’s lazy, goddammit!
LINDA: Willy, please!
WILLY: Biff is a lazy bum!
LINDA: They’re sleeping. Get something to eat. Go on down.
WILLY: Why did he come home? I would like to know what brought him home.
LINDA: I don’t know. I think he’s still lost, Willy. I think he’s very lost.
WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.
LINDA: Never.
WILLY: [With pity and resolve.] I’ll see him in the morning; I’ll have a nice talk with him. I’ll get him a job selling. He could be big in no time. My God! Remember how they used to follow him around in high school? When he smiled at one of them their faces lit up. When he walked down the street ...[He loses himself in reminiscences.]
LINDA: [Trying to bring him out of it.] Willy, dear, I got a new kind of American type cheese today. It’s whipped.
WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?
LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change—
WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?
LINDA: [With a covering laugh] I thought it would be a surprise.
WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?
LINDA: [With infinite patience.]They’re all open, dear.
WILLY: The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.
LINDA: We should’ve bought the land next door.
WILLY: The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow any more, you can’t raise a carrot in the back yard. They should’ve had law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swing between them?
LINDA: Yeah, like being a million miles from the city.
WILLY: They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down. They massacred the neighbourhood. [Lost.] More and more I think of those days, Linda. This time of year it was lilac and wisteria. And then the peonies would come out, and the daffodils. What fragrance in this room!
LINDA: Well, after all, people had to move somewhere.
WILLY: No, there’s more people now.
LINDA: I don’t think there’s more people. I think—
WILLY: There’s more people! That’s what ruining this country! Population is getting out of control. The competition is maddening! Smell the stink from that apartment house! And another one on the other side ...How can they whip cheese?
Likewise, in J.D. Salinger’s legendary novel, Catcher in the Rye, it is the voice of Holden Caulfield that immediately conducts us into the emotional core of the central character.
But make no mistake. This is not an argument for writing more dialogue. All I am saying is that the hearing of a character’s voice is an essential key to the finding of that character. One must be able to HEAR one’s characters before one can know them, and when one knows them one is under no obligation to have them say anything at all... unless they want to, that is.
The protagonist of Salinger’s book, a high-school student at a loose end, is startlingly present to us from the first sentence he utters:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two haemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all — I'm not saying that — but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy...