The Best Dialogue Lesson I Ever Learned From Aaron Sorkin

It involves less words than you think.

Have you ever had one of those moments while writing that's not exactly an epiphany but a moment where you realized you might not be terrible at this and you stopped yourself from being worse? 

I had one of those great moments while writing some fanfiction garbage, specifically the West Wing/Sam Seaborn/hostage thing I've talked about. It was about dialogue, and what I wanted the character to say. That sounds like a dumb sentence, but hear me out for a second. It was a gut-wrenching conversation about a deeply, deeply sensitive subject. One of the characters was in a very vulnerable position, the other was there to give him upsetting information. It was a Moment. A big one. If it was the kind of scene that was on TV, it would be one of those Emmy-grab character arcs. Super dramatic, super emotional, and as I said, super vulnerable. 

I wrote some dialogue for it, and it was pretty fun to get into a flow between these two characters. But when I got to that one moment, I really felt the need to pause and think about what these characters wanted to say and whether or not they'd actually say it out loud or express something nonverbally. Or they'd say something different than what they meant to say because it's too upsetting to say. 

As people, we don't always say what we mean. This is when writing can go well or go badly, and bad writing happens when you write conversations that are just too expository or "explainy." Verbal human beings do vent on occasion, and sometimes we do have it out in an argument or with a therapist. But more often than not, we lie. We cover. We say different words than what we're actually trying to say, or what we're trying to avoid saying. 

This could have been an exercise in two people having a very deep, intimate conversation about a very private, awful experience. Or it could have been more realistic, with both of them doing everything they could to address it without actually talking about it. 

When I write scenes like this, I think of the same scene from The West Wing every single time. It's from the Season 2 premiere, the two-parter when we find out who was shot at the end of the first season. In the second part, one of the shooters is taken into custody and reveals that the gunmen were from a White supremacist group. The President -- who was shot and recovering -- and the First Lady are in the room with their daughter Zoey and the head of the Secret Service Ron Butterfield, who was also shot. Charlie, the President's body man, enters the room, as he is wont to do when he is beckoned by his boss. That's what he thinks is happening. 

He's about to find out something so much worse. This is how the conversation appears in the script (which, of course, I own): 

Bartlet: Charlie, the guy the Secret Service have in custody is Carl LeRoy. He gives a statement in which he says that he and the two shooters were members of an organization called West Virginia White Pride. 

BARTLET and everyone else in the room is gonna let CHARLIE take a moment to absorb this. After a moment…

Charlie: They tried to kill the President because Zoey and I are together? 

Abbey: No. 

Charlie (pause): Why did--

Butterfield: Charlie, the President wasn't the target. (beat) According to the statement, the President wasn't the target. 

Charlie (pause): Oh. (pause) Okay. (pause) Okay, well… (pause) Okay. (pause) Thank you, Mr. President. 

CHARLIE exits. 

Charlie is not known for his speechifying. As a character, he's one of the smartest people in the room, as well as one of the most thoughtful, protective, and empathetic. He's also quietly, wickedly clever and funny when he wants to be. And like most Sorkin characters, he's teeming with guilt. But he's a Sorkin character who is not a talker. So he wasn't going to be diving into a monologue about this whole ordeal. 

I love Charlie -- and Dulé Hill -- and this scene was one of the reasons why. There are a million things going through his head here. Upon learning this information, Charlie now feels responsible for even more people being shot than he did before. In the next episode, Charlie reveals that his mother, who was a police officer, was shot and killed in the line of duty on a night that she wouldn't have normally been working. He had asked her to switch shifts. And now, the President was shot, the head of the Secret Service was shot, Josh Lyman was shot and holding on by a thread, and another young woman was shot. But they were aiming at Charlie, because Charlie was there. Because Charlie was dating Zoey. Because Charlie was Black and Zoey was White. 

Let's be clear, we all wish we could tell Charlie that the racists with the guns were the problem here. Them choosing to be racist and plan this shooting was the problem. But Charlie, as the intended target who did not get shot while others around him did… that's a real mindfuck. 

In the hands of a less skilled writer, Charlie might have broken down, screamed, slammed a door, demanded more answers, decried the injustice of it all. But Aaron Sorkin, for all his flaws in occasionally overwriting and laying it on too thick, knew exactly when to keep his mouth shut. It was too much of a moment for someone like Charlie -- or probably a lot of characters -- to say what they were really thinking. We don't need them to say what they're really thinking, we can simply watch them act. Plus letting them reveal it little by little really works to stretch out a storyline over the course of an episode or two. 

But I think about this scene all the time. There are plenty of West Wing scenes that I think about at different times, but this is the one I think about when I'm writing. Every time, and more and more. It always serves as such a great reminder: What are they trying not to say, and what do they say instead? What do they say, but what do they mean?

This isn't the scene I was talking about, but this is a scene from the same hostage fanfic. For context, since this is clearly not from an episode, Ainsley has been staying with Sam while he recovers from the experience. (Because I want to see Sam and Ainsley kiss.) When she leaves for a while, Sam calls Josh who asks: 

"Where’s Ainsley now?” 

“She went grocery shopping.”

“You’re alone?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that why you called me?”

Sam, in his apartment, stood by the window, watching for Ainsley. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No, not at all.” Josh shifted in his chair and sat up. “Do you need me to stay on the phone with you?”

“If you’re planning on throwing a party at my place then we should discuss it.”

“Uh-huh.” 

I didn't think Sam would ever admit to Josh that he was afraid of being alone. It's not a Big Moment, but it was one of those moments when I thought about that Charlie scene. Except in this case, Sam -- a former corporate lawyer and current politician -- was talking. What's also so intriguing about Sam as a character is that he's a speechwriter. He's into Gilbert & Sullivan and Charles Dickens. He's all about the art of words. So while I force him to live through the aftermath of a trauma, I feel like he would always be finding different words than the ones he's thinking of, because he's already been so vulnerable and he will do anything not to expose himself. Or he’d completely clam up.

This is another reason I like writing ready-made characters. I've been given a lot of information to play with while futzing through new situations. 

Sometimes the best way for your characters to say something is to have them say as little as possible. A surprising lesson to learn from Aaron Sorkin of all people, but the most important one I've ever learned.