All language subtitles for Masterclass Joyce Carol Oates Teaches the Art of the Short Story - 08.Form Study Short Monologue

Well, monologue is a literary forum that

is very short. Some monologues are only

a paragraph long and very few monologues

are more than a couple pages long. If

you have dialogue, it's usually longer.

So, the monologue is just somebody

speaking, but usually it moves from

emotion A, emotion B to emotion C.

Usually there's a trajectory or an arc

of emotion. So it starts off with

something just a statement and it takes

you through some emotion and some

acceleration and intensification and

then there's an ending that may be a

little startling if it's dramatic. So

the person is revealing something about

himself or herself

that wasn't known in the beginning. The

monologue I've I've often assigned it

takes takes you from one emotional level

to another. Like it may start off very

somber. It may be funny. It may start

off um quiet and then get angry and then

reside again. And so that you have an

arc of emotion. So however it starts

out, it doesn't end that way. It ends in

a slightly different way. And when you

see really good acting in movies or on

stage, you see an actor going through

some arc of emotion. They're not flat

and they're not always the same. And

when the actor is not doing that, it's

sort of like carbonated beverage that's

lost, you know, it's lost the fizz. It's

just sort of flat. And great monologues

exist all through theater because uh

Hamlet's saliloquis are basically

monologues you know and some people

think that Hamlet was constructed as a

sequence of of sonnetss of saliloquis

and then the play was kind of

constructed around these these great

saliloquis. So it's very exciting for a

writer to just write a monologue without

anything around it. One of these little

monologues could be like the stepping

stone to a novel.

If the character comes alive, the person

could be very much a character that you

would want to write about.

In 1990, I was invited as a as a

novelist to write for the theater. And I

wrote one act plays and longer plays and

monologues. And I wrote a play that was

about eight monologues called I Stand

Before You Naked and some other little

dramas. And this is one of them. This is

called Lethal.

It has one long

paragraph and then one sentence. So the

structure is very important. It

basically is one long paragraph and then

this structure. So this is a man

speaking. It's not a woman speaking, but

he's speaking to a woman. Lethal.

I just want to touch you a little.

That delicate blue vein at your temple,

the soft down of your neck.

I just want to caress you a little. I

just want to kiss you a little. your

lips, your throat, your breasts.

I just want to embrace you a little. I

just want to comfort you a little. I

just want to hold you tight like this. I

just want to measure your skeleton with

my arms. These are strong, healthy arms,

aren't they? I just want to poke my

tongue in your ear. Don't giggle. Don't

squirm. This is serious. This is a real

thing. I just want to suck a little. I

just want to press into you a little. I

just want to penetrate you a little. I

just want to ejaculate into you a

little. It won't hurt if you don't

scream, but you'll be hurt if you keep

straining away like that. Thank you. I

just want to squeeze you a little. I

just want to feel my weight against your

bones a little.

I just want to bite a little. I just

want a taste of it. Your saliva, your

blood, just a taste. A little. You've

got plenty to spare. You're being

selfish. You're being ridiculous. You're

being cruel. You're being unfair. You're

hysterical. You're hyperventilating.

You're provoking me. You're laughing at

me. You want to humiliate me. You want

to make a fool of me. You want to gut me

like a chicken. You want to castrate me.

You want to make me fight for my life.

Is that it? You want to make me fight

for my life? Is that it?

So that's a man speaking.

The structure is one long paragraph

growing in intensity as the person

reveals more of himself and then the

final line is like the summation. You

want me to fight for my life? Whereas he

really she's fighting for her life at

this point and he is so projecting his

masculinity into her that even though

she's the victim, he perceives himself

as the victim. And many rapists and ch

child molesters and abusers, they

actually think of themselves as victims.

They don't they don't feel necessarily

guilty. They feel that the the victim

made them do it. She provoked him by

wearing a red dress or the child looked

at him in a certain way and it's all her

fault

and so that final line is meant to be

ironic. In a dramatic monologue, you do

want to have an escalation of of

tension. So having an incantatory lines

like I just this a little a little a

little I just want to do this and then

several sentences that have exclamation

points you know one after another sort

of like machine gun then fire on stage

that would be effective and then you

might want to have a longer sentence and

something a little longer and then the

whole thing is over with

so it doesn't last very long. You

couldn't do this for very long. Like you

couldn't do it for you couldn't do it

for 15 minutes. You could only do it

like for 2 minutes, 3 minutes.

It's very important to look forward to

your work and the playfulness is

something that comes with letting your

imagination go. So not not writing

something that's for your professor. You

want to get an A+ by being very

diligent, having a lot of footnotes. The

the creative writing is something that's

much more fluent. If you read short

stories by JD Salinger, for instance,

you see how funny he is. He's very

sarcastic and ironic, and a lot of it's

sort of juvenile humor, but it's funny.

You know, the idea that we're all

teenagers and we always remember what it

was like to have these adults around us

who are so pompous and hypocritical.

And that um that release is why

many firsterson novels have adolescent

speakers and young adult fiction is a

very fertile field where people are

writing from the point of view of of

teenagers even though they're much

older. It's very important to to project

your own imagination into someone else.

For instance, if you're a fairly young

person to write from the point of view

of an older person. It gives you an

immense um objectivity and and the

perspective is just so much it's so much

more interesting. Like a young man who's

a college student, if he writes from the

point of view of a girl,

that's something that's new to him and

it's it's very liberating. So he can

write about something he wouldn't have

dreamt about writing