One Great Technique for Writing Subtext: The Third Thing

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 27, subtext can be the difference between polished prose and an amateur sounding story. Today, we look at one surefire way to add subtext to your dialogue. We're talking about the third thing. And welcome back to the Inside Creative Writing podcast.

My name is Brad Reed, and I've got some great news for you before we jump into today's topic. As you know, if you've been listening to the show for a while, I've been working on building up a Patreon team to support the show and allow us to offer the kinds of resources that we've got in mind for the show and the website. Now, we've been putting a lot of time and effort into things like our weekly real-time revision videos and other exclusive resources. And we've had a lot of fun creating those for you.

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But that means that only a very few people get the benefit of those resources that you're creating as an artist and that people have to basically buy in, even if it's just a few bucks a month, before they ever really see what they're going to be getting. So we are changing up how our Patreon team works. And I think this is something that you're really going to like.

So starting today, absolutely everyone has access to all of the rewards we're creating for our Patreon team for free all the time. Then if you find the rewards valuable, if they help you with your goals as a writer, then we simply ask that you consider supporting the show with a few bucks a month. So there's no strings. There's no guilt. Just, hey, if you're using the resources and you like them, think about helping us keep them coming by helping us meet some of our expenses here at the show.

So as little as a dollar a month helps and you can cancel that at any time. So I want to invite you all to check out the now free to absolutely everyone Patreon rewards by going to patreon. com slash Brad read writes or by clicking the Patreon link at bradreedwrites. com. My favorite thing over there is the real time revision videos where you get to watch as I put the techniques that we use on the show, that we talk about on the show into action on my own work in progress, on my own manuscript. It's a great companion piece to the podcast and now all of those are free for you to check out.

We've got a bunch of those up there. So if you like the podcast and are interesting to see how, or interested to see how I use those in my actual writing, free to everybody now are those Patreon resources. So I hope you'll check those out. And one thing I haven't really done a great job of with this podcast so far is kind of dropping the curtain a little bit and letting you see behind the scenes of my own writing life.

Now, this is something I actually do quite a bit of in those real time revision Patreon rewards I was talking about, but I don't do it so much on the podcast. After hearing back from some of you in response to our recent listener questionnaire, I realized that this is something that a bunch of you would actually appreciate. And I get that, you know, if you're going to take some of my advice on writing, you kind of want to know me not just as an educator or a teacher of writing, but you also want to know me as a writer myself.

So every once in a while, I plan to just give you a little update on my current work in progress and my own kind of successes and struggles as I'm writing and revising that. So a bunch of you told me you'd find that valuable. So we're going to add that little piece in. We'll go ahead and start today. I'm kind of in a weird place with my book right now. I finished the rough draft not quite a year ago and have been plodding along with a pretty extensive revision since then.

It's been slow going with my teaching schedule and other commitments that I have, but I've been generally happy with that progress. I was making good forward progress until about a month ago. As writers, we're always thinking in analogies and metaphors for our writing.

So I often actually think of my own writing life as a kind of metaphor or as a kind of analogy. And I think sports, using sports, often provides an insightful metaphor for our writing lives. And what I realized is that I'd become kind of like that football team that gets so caught up in designing complex plays or tricky offensive schemes that I forgot to keep up on those fundamentals. I forgot to keep running those tackling drills and I let some of those fundamentals slide.

Now, here's what I mean by that. If you follow sports at all, you've seen that team, right? And this is applicable in almost every sport that I've ever seen. You've seen that team that gets so caught up in finding the ingenious or clever ways to approach the game that they stop running basic drills. Before long, they're losing games and they're just scratching their heads to figure out what happened. And it always comes back to the basics, the fundamentals.

If you can't make a tackle in football, all the trick plays and fancy offensive schemes are not going to help you win games, right? You're going to be losing those games. And this is where I realized I was in my own writing. I was having a blast and I think I was doing good work on sentence level revision of my rough draft, but something was gnawing at my gut. Something that said the story still wasn't working on some fundamental level.

Now, I had planned so completely and outlined so completely that I think I was convincing myself that all the basics were there, right? But I had forgotten about them as I began this rough draft process. So finally, I paid attention to that nagging little feeling and decided to take a step back from that kind of sentence and word level revision and look at my basic skills, my fundamentals, right? If I was a football team, I'd be running tackling drills, but I was looking at my fundamentals to make sure that they hadn't slid backwards. And often when I do this, I do it by rereading either a favorite book about writing or I pick up a new one.

Now I've been studying writing for so long that there's almost never anything new in the books that I read. I mean, there are different angles and, you know, different approaches, but there's rarely a new revolutionary idea or a new concept. And that's true with the book that I read most recently. I just finished reading the story grid by Sean Coyne.

Now, some of you who may have read this book, um, might be recoiling a little bit right now because it sometimes comes off as very rigid, very formulaic, um, a very formulaic way of writing a story. But I'm not sure anybody can make the argument that that book isn't grounded in fundamental principles of solid storytelling technique. So through reading this book and beginning to play with some of the techniques that, uh, that he puts forward in it, I discovered that I'd gone away from a vital fundamental, one of the basics that I thought I had nailed down. And that basic is that every scene must move the story forward.

Now through applying some of Sean's techniques, I was able to see that many of the scenes I was plowing through and revising on that sentence level really needed to be completely reworked and a lot of them actually just deleted that I was wasting my time trying to revise them in that way because they weren't, um, serving a story function. So it's one of those discoveries as a writer, that's both thrilling because I can see how much better my story can become through those, uh, through those, that level of revision, but it's also daunting because of how much work I still have ahead of me. In other words, I'm not as close as I thought I was, um, to getting this book, uh, kind of, uh, crafted into its final form.

Understanding Subtext in Writing

So I want to thank you, Sean Coyne, for a great book and for reminding me that all the ingenious and creative prose skills in the world won't cover up the fact that a book is missing some of its fundamentals. So we're going to be exploring a technique today that we're calling the third thing. It's a way to imbue your writing with that all important and often very mysterious quality subtext.

Now, rather than give you a textbook definition of what subtext is, I want to share with you how I actually learned about what it is and, and how it works. So, I mean, after all, we're storytellers, so it's always better to try to teach a concept through story, I think. So I want to tell you a little bit of a story about the moment that I really got what subtext was and how important it is.

So I don't know about you, but I can't sleep if it's too quiet. Um, I need some kind of noise in the room and I used to listen to music, but as a musician, my mind would get all caught up in the lyrics and the chord progressions. And I'd think about how the musicians crafted the arrangement and I couldn't get my mind quiet enough to sleep.

So what we did is we tried uh switching on the television, which would, um, you know, most shows alternate between being really loud and then really quiet or they have too many flashing lights or every time it would change to a new scene, the lighting would be different. So it was distracting. So what we did, we, we finally stumbled across the perfect solution for my wife and I.

So when we're ready to go to Our home does. The TV at some point in this hotel switches over somehow, I don't know, to the Disney Channel in the middle of the night. So I wake up to the Disney Channel playing on a Saturday morning.

Now, if you've ever watched the Disney Channel, maybe accidentally or on purpose on a Saturday morning, you know that it's not, I'm going to offend some people, you know it's not necessarily quality written television, right? This is television that often gets cranked out very fast. And anyway, enough said about that. If you've seen it, you know what I mean.

So here I am exhausted from a late night. It's the morning. I can't find the remote because I'm literally just kind of reaching around the bed. And if it's not there, I'm too tired to get up and get it.

So I just lay there and listen to this Disney Channel television show for a while. Now I have no idea what show I'm actually listening to. I wish that I knew so I could go back and kind of study it a little more in depth.

But I find myself getting really annoyed by the show. Now, of course, I am not the target market for a Disney Channel show. I get that.

But this was beyond just missing the target market. There was something about the way the characters were speaking to each other that started driving me absolutely crazy. And I realized what I was hearing was actually a very important writing lesson in what not to do. And what I realized before long was that the reason it was making me so nuts and was so absolutely miserable to listen to was that all the characters were simply saying exactly what was on their mind.

So if one character, you know, was in love with another, they'd just say, I love you. If that character wasn't in love back, they'd say, well, I don't love you. Then one could say something like, I'm hungry and a friend would respond with, let's go eat, right?

Now, those weren't the words exactly, but that was essentially the level of the dialogue. If a character was thinking it, the character just came right out and said it, plain as day, word for word. And it was the worst piece of dialogue that I've ever tried to listen to.

Now, I'm sure Disney has some good shows, actually, I'm not so sure, but again, I'm not the target market. But that morning proved to be a huge writing lesson for me. On some level, we hate to hear people say exactly what they're thinking.

Now, we think that that's what we want in life and in our entertainment, right? We want things to be clear, concise, and direct, but we don't actually want that. And we're going to explore why that is in just a little bit. It goes beyond just that it's not natural, that that's not the way people actually talk. What I realized is that it's incredibly insulting to the audience to have dialogue like that.

Now, we've grown up to become absolute experts in reading between the lines of what people say. I'm absolutely convinced that we communicate more through what we imply but don't actually say than what we actually say. Now, that is subtext, right? What are we implying? It's beating around the bush or it's hinting about something but never quite coming out and saying it directly. It's revealing just enough to sneak a message through to someone who is in tune to receive it, somebody who's really listening.

Now, it's one of the hardest things to do in our writing, this subtext, whether prose or screenplay, but it's absolutely vital that we figure out how to do it. Otherwise, our readers are, at least metaphorically, desperately searching for the remote to change the channel before you drive them crazy with your inane on-the-nose dialogue. So subtext is a huge subject and one we could devote episode after episode to.

The 'Third Thing' Technique

So rather than do that today, rather than try to bite off that much material, we're going to look at one simple technique, one of a bunch of techniques, that can be used to help imbue your writing with subtext. It's actually my favorite technique, partially because it's so effective, but also because it's one of the easier ones to teach and then immediately be able to use in your own writing. Now, a lot of the credit for the technique in today's show goes to Robert McKee, a legend of storytelling. He's the author of the book Dialogue that you really should own and devour, read it over and over again. If you want to be an expert on writing dialogue for prose or especially for screenplay. I'm hoping, though, that we can expand on what he talks about in that book and give it a little more real-world application because I've found this technique so helpful in my own writing.

So basically the idea of the third thing is this. Have your characters talk about something other than what they are really wanting to talk about and use that thing as a kind of metaphor for what they wish they could just come right out and say. So in other words, have them talk about a third thing that is somehow safer to talk about.

So what I want to do is play for you a couple of clips. One of them is from a TV show. It's actually from Frasier. And one of them is from a film. And both of these things do a good job of illustrating how this concept of the third thing works.

So, as I mentioned, the first one is from Frasier. I didn't actually plan that. It just occurred to me that I talk so much about that at the beginning and now I have a clip from it.

But I guess that stands to reason for how much I end up watching the show. But this clip comes in an episode where Daphne, if you haven't watched the show, Daphne is the longtime live-in physical therapist. So she becomes kind of a member of the family.

But she's getting ready to move out of the house. And she's leaving behind Frasier and his father. And they are worried about how much they're going to miss her, right? She's become like a member of the family.

So in this clip that you're going to hear, they're sitting around a bar. And rather than have them all say kind of dumb things like, Gee, Daphne, I'm really going to miss you. Listen to how the writers use a third thing to get the point across.

Now, this first example is a little heavy-handed, which means it's a little almost too obvious what they're trying to do here. But it makes it a particularly good example of the technique because it's so obvious. So what you're about to hear is Marty. He's Frasier's dad, the older man that Daphne has been taking care of. And he's talking about how much he's going to miss his favorite beer, right? That's the third thing is that this beer is no longer available.

So he's going to be talking about how much he's going to miss this famous beer or this famous, his favorite beer. But I want you to listen how he uses the beer as a stand-in for what he really wishes he could say to Daphne, who's sitting right there at the bar with them. Here we go.

Anyway, I should be toasting you. I'm going to miss you, you rotten old sod. Valentine, okay? Oh, yeah, that's my beer. Yes. You know, I just found out they're going to quit making this stuff.

Really? Yeah. Well, there's an end of an era. That's right. It's going to be one sad day when I get down to my last one. You know, it's funny.

You get used to having something in your life. It's part of your day. Just take it for granted. Then suddenly it's gone and you realize how much it meant to you.

Now, what you just heard is a perfect example of what we're calling the third thing. What Marty really wants to do is tell Daphne how much he's going to miss her. But what he does is use the beer as a stand-in. And because everybody's invested in kind of this emotion and this feeling, they all get it, right? Including the audience.

Now, that's subtext. And it's much more powerful than obvious on-the-nose language because it gives your audience the opportunity to figure it out. Now, the audience is more engaged in the story because they played a part in creating meaning.

Now, when you don't use subtext, when you just use on-the-nose language, your audience is passive. They just sit there and take in your story. There's no role for them to play.

In other words, they're bored. They're outside of your story. But subtext, because it works almost like a little puzzle, invites them in and engages them.

Examples of Effective Subtext

So let's look next at the example that Robert McKee uses in his book because it's an absolutely beautiful piece of subtext in dialogue. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen a better scene using subtext and this concept of the third thing. So it comes from this film, Sideways, and it features Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen as the actors. In this scene, you're basically hearing what is the tail end of a first date. The two are obviously very interested in each other, but neither is ready to come right out and say that, right? They're just kind of trying to feel each other out and beat around the bush to see if they're a good fit.

And they're both scared because they've both been burned by previous relationships. Now that's way too much to talk about on a first date, right? Can you imagine sitting down on a first date and suddenly you're talking about how scared you are of new relationships and all of this other baggage?

So instead of that, they begin to talk about a third thing. And that third thing is wine. Now wine is a passion that they both share. And I want you to listen to how they use wine as that third thing, as a stand-in to talk about themselves and what their fears are and what their hopes are in a relationship.

So first up, you're going to All right. Did you hear that? He's using wine to tell her that he's basically fragile, right? That he needs someone who is willing to invest some real time into him before he's able to reveal who he truly is, right? Or the potential that he actually has.

Now, that's not something you could come right out and tell someone on a first date without kind of sounding insane, right, and needy. But through subtext, she hears that message loud and clear, and so does the audience, right? The audience has had a chance to create meaning and to solve that little puzzle, which engages them.

So now we're going to listen to Virginia Madsen's, her character's response. Listen for how she feels about the subtext that she's just heard and what she wants him to know about her. Again, it's all cleverly disguised as a discussion simply about wine. One word of warning here. She does use the F word at the end of this passage, and I'm actually going to repeat that word a few times as we kind of unpack this moment of subtext.

So if that bothers you, just be forewarned that that's coming up in this clip. I don't know. Why are you into wine? Oh, I think I originally got into wine through my ex-husband. You know, he had this big sort of show-off cellar, you know?

But then I discovered that I had a really sharp palate. And the more I drank, the more I liked what it made me think about. Like what? Like what a fraud he was. No, I like to think about the life of wine, how it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing, how the sun was shining, if it rained.

I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. Like if I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day. Because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is until it peaks, like your 61.

And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline. And it tastes so fucking good. All right, now even though that's subtext, it's loud and clear, isn't it? It's clear that she's afraid, right? She's been burned before and she's afraid of that happening again.

But it's also clear that she's willing to take the risk of falling in love again, of having another relationship. So she's been burned by her last marriage, but she's fascinated by and really deeply interested in the idea of being in love. She wants a relationship that's deep and alive and evolving, a profound kind of lifelong love. And listen to the power of that last line where she says, and it tastes so fucking good. Think about the tension of the situation.

So love is in the air, right? There's romantic music in the background. You couldn't see it in the clip, obviously, but they're alone together kind of on this porch, lots of privacy. And it's the end of the date, right?

So it's on their minds, right? Are we going to make love? And she can't just come out and say, I want to have sex with you, right? That would be too on the nose, too abrupt.

So she continues the third thing idea, places her hand on his, looks into his eyes and says, and it tastes so fucking good, right? She's saying in subtext, and now we should have sex, right? You can't miss it. And it's clear that the guy gets it, right? The Paul Giamatti character gets it because he hears that subtext loud and clear, but it scares him to death, right? He is not ready to take a risk of that kind of deep evolving love.

And we know he's scared because we can see his reaction immediately after that line. In fact, he changes the subject and then he asks where the bathroom is, right? The moment is gone and the entire scene plays out as a discussion just about wine. In fact, I'm going to play that little, it's just a short little bit. I want you to hear his reaction after she delivers that line. You know, I like other wines besides Pinot too.

I don't know, I mean, lately I've been really into Rieslings. You like Rieslings, Rieslings? There's a bathroom in the back. Yes, through the kitchen. I'll be right back.

All right, so what you've just heard is a beautiful example of subtext, right? The audience member feels like a genius now because they understood the code that was being used and the scene is compelling and insightful and beautiful because everybody involved gets it, right? We hear that subtext.

Applying Subtext in Your Work

So here's the best way to approach using this kind of third thing subtext, at least an approach to get started. All you need to do really is look for a moment of conflict in your story, especially where two characters need to work something out that's hard to talk about, right? So maybe they're arguing about something that's a very emotional or that has a lot of fear around it.

So then instead of just having them fight directly about what's going on, find a third thing for them to argue about. Now, as you're writing this, you're going to worry that your audience doesn't get it or won't get it, but you really shouldn't worry about it because this is the way we actually talk all the time in subtext. We're incredibly nuanced about it and we're experts at decoding it.

So have some faith and trust in the intelligence and the ability of your audience to understand and unpack subtext because they'll be able to do it. So I want to leave you with one last example of how this can work. This actually comes from one of my high school creative writing students. This is something I do with them pretty much every year. I have them work on this technique of the third thing.

But I'm not going to read the exact piece of writing, but I do want to share with you the concept that one of my students came up with. So she was writing a fantasy story, and there was a scene where a king and a queen are fighting about their marriage, right? And so she wrote this very on-the-nose, right? You don't love me anymore. Yes, I do. No, you don't.

Blah, blah, blah. Got really boring and on-the-nose. So essentially, once we talked through it, the king thinks the marriage is perfectly fine, and he's kind of in denial that there's anything wrong with the marriage at all.

But the queen, on the other hand, thinks that the marriage is failing, and she hates that she cannot get him to see that there are problems. So once we kind of talked through what was actually going on in the scene, I had her rewrite it. And instead of an on-the-nose fight about their marriage, what she decided to do was have them fight about their castle instead.

So she started the fight by having the queen complain about how drafty and cold it was in the castle because it was in such disrepair. And then the king countered by talking about how, oh, but it's majestic and historic, and it's the chinks and the blemishes that show the evidence of its ability to stand the test of time, to survive, right? And this argument went on and on this way about the castle.

Now, that's a beautiful use of the third thing because it's going to be clear to any reader that has been following these characters and can see what's really going on, that they're actually arguing about their marriage, even though they're using the third thing of their castle, right? She's pointing out that, boy, you don't even see how in disrepair this castle is, of course, meaning their marriage. And he says, no, no, no, it's evidence of how strong it is and how it can stand the test of time.

So he's in denial and we get all that as the audience. Another example, very quick, that I loved, is of a wife who thinks her husband is cheating on her. Now, you could write that as kind of a cliche argument, you know, put them in the bedroom and they're throwing accusations at each other.

But this writer put them in a car and had them try to decide where to have dinner, right? Now, for anybody who's married, this is a very common, right? We get this situation. We know that this can sometimes be packed with other things, with subtext.

So what she does instead of having them just argue about, hey, I think you're cheating on me. No, no, I'm not cheating on you. What she does is she has him suggest, hey, you know, we should go get some Thai food.

Now, this is very out of character for this guy who consistently eats the same boring thing every day. So she confronts him. You know, why would you suddenly want something so exotic and so different after all these years of eating at our same old favorite restaurants?

So, and of course, what she's really trying to get at is whether or not he's bored with her, right? Not with their meals, but with her. And whether or not he's been seeing other women, or in this case, right, why do you suddenly want Thai food?

So she's not trying to find out, not really trying to find out whether he's actually bored with their restaurant choices, has been, quote, seeing other foods, I guess is a way to say that. But the whole thing works on subtext, right? So our writing should be riddled with subtext. And like I said at the start of the show, this is just one of the techniques that can be used to help get that subtext in there.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Now, it's not going to work in every instance, for sure, but especially watch for places elusive, almost magical elements of writing that can lead you to pull your hair out, but it also can get you to that place where you sit in awe of what you've just created when you get it right. So today's show hasn't been about the only way to imbue your story with subtext. It's been one of a thousand techniques. And if nothing else, hopefully it serves to bring the concept more to the front of your minds and help you look for those opportunities to give your dialogue, your characters, your settings that much needed subtext to bring it to life in your readers' minds. And our weekly challenge this week is, you guessed it, to bring a third thing piece of subtext into your current work in progress.

So what I want you to do is find a place in your story where you've got two characters that are disagreeing about something, whether that's an all out fight or just a small disagreement, and look over how you've written that. Ask yourself, are they arguing on the nose? Or in other words, saying exactly what they think and feel. And then spend a little time brainstorming a third thing that they could actually argue about instead. And don't jump at the first thing that comes to your mind. You really want to dig in until you find that thing that resonates with their real disagreement and serves as a good stand in, almost like a metaphor for it.

Then rewrite your scene with its newfound subtext. Sometimes it'll be exactly the right move for your scene and bring it to life, and other times it won't work, right? And you'll have to rewrite it a number of times with different third things until you find the right one.

Now this can be a really fun process, and it'll be the thing that brings those fights, those moments of conflict to life. The things that make it feel real. And the thing that invites your audience in to help create its meaning. And that's one of the most powerful things we can accomplish as writers.

So that's going to wrap it up for this week. Watch for our next Real Time revision. We're now going to be releasing those on Thursdays instead of Mondays, and I'll almost certainly be doing this week's weekly challenge in my Real Time revision, so you'll get to watch as I take one of my scenes and find that third thing for it.

So remember, these Patreon resources are now all free for everyone, regardless of if you're a member of the Patreon team or not, so I hope you'll check those out. Until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do, and I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.