Make a Monologue

Monologues are the meat of theatre. In a killer monologue, a single character takes control of the stage or the screen to open their heart and spill out their inner turmoil. Or make us laugh. Good monologues tend to be the most memorable scenes from our favorite movies and plays, moments that allow actors to shine and display their craft. If you want to write a monologue for your play or script, learn how to place them properly and how to find the right tone. See Step 1 for more information.

Steps

Monologue Usage

  1. Study famous monologues. From Hamlet's famous inner turmoils to Quint's harrowing WWII story in Jaws, monologues can be used in drama to add depth to a character. Monologues give us an arrow into characters' insights and their motivations. It's less a plot device (though it should always serve to move the plot forward) than a character study that happens out loud. Get familiar with some of the classic monologues of theatre and film to study the form. Check out:
    • The sales speech that opens David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross"
    • Hamlet's monologues
    • The "I could have been a contender" speech in "On the Waterfront"
    • The "I ate the divorce papers" speech from "Goodbye Charles," by Gabriel Davis
    • Masha's "I'm telling you this because you're a writer" speech in Chekhov's "The Seagull"
    • Draped-in-a-flag Bill the Butcher giving the "Honorable man" speech in "Gangs of New York"
  2. Use monologues at the appropriate time. A play written for the stage or the screen will be a complicated series of dialogs, actions, and silences. Knowing when to allow a monologue to surface in the plot will take some practice. You'll want to have most of the plot essentials and the characters figured out before worrying about monologues. They should emerge organically as the script dictates.
    • Some monologues are used to introduce characters, while some scripts will use monologues to allow a taciturn character to suddenly speak up and change the way the audience feels about them.
    • In general, a good time in the script to use a monologue would be at moments of change, when one character needs to reveal something to another character.
  3. Learn the difference between a monologue and a soliloquy. For a true monologue, another character must be present to hear the speech. If not, it's a soliloquy. The soliloquy is a classical technique not commonly used in contemporary drama, but is still sometimes used in one-person plays and experimental theatre.
    • Inner monologues or voice over narration are a different category of exposition, more like a dramatic aside to the audience than a monologue. Monologues need to assume the presence of other characters who hear the action, providing an important interaction that can be the fuel for or the purpose of the monologue.
  4. Always use monologues to show change in a character. A good opportunity for a monologue is anytime a character is undergoing a significant change of heart or attitude. Allowing them to open up and reveal their inner tension is a benefit to the reader and plot.
    • Even if the character is not changed significantly, perhaps their decision to speak up is a change in and of itself. A taciturn character driven to a long monologue is revealing, when deployed properly. Why have they spoken up now? How does this change the way we feel about them?
    • Consider allowing the character to change as they speak over the course of their monologue. If a character starts in a rage, it might be more interesting for their to end in hysterics, or laughter. If they start out laughing, maybe they end up contemplative. Use the monologue as a vessel for change.
  5. Give your monologue a beginning, middle, and end. If you're going to take the time to put the rest of the story on pause to let one character speak at length, it's safe to say that the writing needs to be structured just like any other piece of writing. If it's a story, it needs to have an arc. If it's a rant, it needs to change into something else. If it's a plea, it needs to up the ante over the course of its pleading.
    • The beginning of a good monologue will hook the audience and the other characters. The beginning should signal that something important is happening. Like any good dialogue, it shouldn't sputter or waste space with "Hellos" and "How are yous." Cut to the chase.
    • In the middle, the monologue should climax. Build it to its maximum height and then bring it back down to lower the tension and allow the conversation between the characters to continue or end entirely. This is where the specific details, the drama, and the tangents in the monologue will occur.
    • The ending should bring the speech or the story back around to the play at hand. After dwelling on his failures and fatigue, Randy the Ram's heartbreaking speech to his daughter in "The Wrestler" ends, "I just don't want you to hate me, ok?" The tension of the monologue is relieved and the scene ends on that note of finality.

Dramatic

  1. Find the character's voice. When we finally get to hear the character speak at length, it should come as no surprise to hear the voice the character uses and the way that they speak. If you're exploring their voice as you write, don't explore it in a long and important monologue, explore it elsewhere in the script.[1]
    • Alternatively, as a freewrite, consider allowing your character to spout off about any number of subjects to develop their voice. Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho features many short exposition chapters in which the main character, Patrick, monologues about various aspects of consumer culture: stereo equipment, pop music, and clothes. Supposedly, Ellis wrote these as character sketches and ended up using them in the novel proper.
    • Consider filling out a questionnaire for your character, or a character profile. Giving thought to the character in terms of things that won't necessarily be in the script (like your character's room decorating choices, their music playlists, their morning routines, etc.).
  2. Use a variety of tones. A monologue that starts in one place and ends up somewhere entirely different will make the tension more dramatic, the characters more compelling, and your script much better. A good monologue should be alternatively funny, harrowing, and touching, pointing on no one emotion or no one state by itself.
    • In the film Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon's character has a great monologue in which he takes a snarky Harvard student down a notch in a bar. While there's humor and triumph in the monologue, there's also a deep sadness and anger that's palpable in his words.
  3. Use stories to build character. Monologues can be a great opportunity to pause the main plot of the story and allow a main character to reveal something in their past, to tell an anecdote or a bit of "background" about themselves. When done well and at the appropriate moment, an illuminating or surprising story provides color and texture to the main story, giving us another way of seeing the plot at hand.
    • Quint's story about surviving the USS Indianapolis disaster provides us deep layers into his character. He doesn't wear a life vest because it reminds him of the trauma. The story doesn't necessarily move the plot forward, but it adds tremendous depth and pathos to Quint, who was basically a macho archetype up until that point in the story.[2]
  4. Use exclamation points sparingly. Don't mistake drama and tension for "screaming." No one wants to see a play or a film in which everyone screams at each other all the time, so learning to work up to the emotional pitch of dramatic moments is the real trick to creating tension and avoiding the shrillness of inexperienced writers writing fights.
    • Real fights are a roller coaster. People get tired and can't yell their innermost turmoil for much more than a sentence. Use restraint and the tension will be even more palpable if we suspect someone might boil over, but they don't.
  5. Let silence speak also. It can be tempting for writers who're just starting out to over-write. To create drama, it's often tempting to add too many characters, too many scenes, and too many words. Practice stepping back and allowing only the most essential components of speech to come into play, especially in a monologue. What's going unsaid?
    • Look at some of the monologue sermons from the play/film Doubt. When the priest sermonizes about "gossip," there's a lot of particular details that are left out because he's in front of a whole congregation of people. The message delivered to the nun he's in conflict with, however, is pointed and palpable.

Comedic

  1. Try revising a dramatic monologue to make it comedic. How might you rewrite one of Pacino's monologues from Scent of a Woman to make it comedic? What if you had to rewrite Quint's story in such a way as to suggest that he might be a liar? Comic writing is difficult because it has much less to do with the content of the writing and much more to do with the presentation of them.
    • As an exercise, try rewriting "angry" monologues to play them up for humor. Comedy and drama share borderlines, making this more do-able than it may seem.
    • Gabriel Davis is a modern playwright with a great talent for humor and witty scenarios with humor built into them. A woman who eats her divorce papers? A man who decides to have a bar mitzvah at the age of 26? Check. Check out his frequent use of monologues for comedic effect.
  2. Aim for complexity. A good monologue won't necessarily be all funny or all serious. Like you want to vary the anger-level of a fight scene, putting funny content into an otherwise tragic situation will leaven the drama with a laugh and help to make the audience feel something complicated. That's what good comedy does.
    • The films of Martin Scorsese are often notable for combining extremely funny moments with moments of high tension. Jake LaMotta's monologues while preparing to go on stage in Raging Bull are simultaneously humorous and heartbreaking.
  3. Make it funny, not goofy. Successful comic monologues generally won't involve toilet humor or bodily functions, unless the other aspects of the drama somehow dictate it. Building in a sense of irony, sarcasm, and some sort of complexity into the humor will make it much more successful and interesting to the general audience.
  4. Write from one pole to another. Before you write a monologue, decide where it will start and where it will end, even going as far as to write the first and the last sentence; have some idea of how long you'd like the monologue to be, and then filling in the middle space.[3] How would you finish the following first and last lines of a potential monologue?
    • Your dog is dead. / Wipe that stupid grin off your face!
    • What is your mother's problem? / I'm not going to Skype with a cat in the room.
    • Where's the godforsaken half-and-half? / Forget it, forget it, forget it, I'm taking the horse.
    • Come on, just this once. / I'm never going back to church.

Sample Monologues

Doc:Comedic Monologue,Dramatic Monologue

Tips

  • Always revise your drama. Practice reading it out loud to get a sense of the speech of the characters. Make sure it sounds natural.

Warnings

  • Timing is everything. Deploy your monologues judiciously, or you risk boring the audience.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

  1. ↑ http://www.monologuegenie.com/monologue-writing-101.html
  2. ↑ http://www.ace-your-audition.com/comedic-monologues.html
  3. ↑ https://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlights/writing-the-monologue

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