For those not up to date, I’ve moved The Last Great Screenplay Contest deadline to July 4th. That gives us FOUR Thursday articles to get your script into shape so you can win the contest and we can get your movie made and take over Hollywood. Each of these four articles will deal with a major screenwriting component and why not start with everybody’s favorite screenwriting topic: DIALOGUE.
Now we’ve gone over dialogue every which way on this site. I’m not sure I can add anything new. But what I *can* do is talk about some of these things in a more abstract sense. Because let’s be honest. The pursuit of great dialogue has an undefinable abstract quality to it. Nobody’s able to nail down definitive rules that lead to great dialogue. I’m hoping that by exploring some of the topics that influence dialogue, we can get a stronger sense of how to master this elusive part of screenwriting. Let’s get to it.
1) Keep it clean – Yesterday’s script, The Swells, didn’t have the greatest dialogue. But the dialogue was very easy to read. And the thing I noticed was that the writer put as little description between dialogue lines as possible. This ensured that the dialogue flowed effortlessly. When a writer starts interjecting what the characters are doing or how they’re reacting inside a dialogue scene, it slows things down A LOT. This is one of the easiest ways to make your dialogue stronger. Keep your excessive description to yourself.
2) Excavation of Exposition – Exposition is a dialogue killer. And, depending on how excessive your plot is, you could get stuck writing tons of it. So how do you make the dialogue fun to read when you have all this technical plot stuff you have to convey? The answer to this could be its own article. But here’s what I endorse. Do a first draft of the scene with all your exposition in there. Then, every time you rewrite the scene, take away AS MUCH EXPOSITION AS YOU CAN and replace it with natural conversation. Make it sound more and more like people talking to each other as opposed to characters giving readers information. You’d be surprised at how far you can take it. A page-long monologue about what it’s going to take to steal the money might end up being as simple is, “We get in there by sunset, we’ve got eight minutes, then we’re out.” If it feels like there’s even a little bit of talky exposition in a scene, do everything in your power to squash it.
3) Turn off your inner grammar Nazi – A telltale sign of weak dialogue is grammatically correct dialogue. Dialogue that doesn’t have any of the messy linguistic flow of a real-life conversation. The most basic example of this is if a character says, “What is up?” Instead of “What’s up?” This mistake permeates logic-based writers who don’t have an appreciation for how loose and fun language can be. Instead of saying, “Did you and Mary finally make it to your date night reservation on time?” you might want to go with something like, “Lemme guess. Another Taco Tuesday disaster?” Yes, there will be robotic characters who speak in grammatically correct sentences. But if you don’t have one of those, loosen up, dude.
4) Don’t overwrite dialogue – Dialogue is the opposite of description. Description is something you can keep perfecting with each draft and it’ll continue to get better. But when you do this with dialogue, it reaches a point where it starts to feel too perfect. The answers are too clever. The responses are more intelligent than the character who’s saying them. It’s this “crossing the rubicon” moment where the dialogue is so honed that it no longer sounds like the messy splattered world of real-life conversation. You can approach this problem in two ways. The first is to be aware of when you’re doing it. It usually picks up around the 5th or 6th draft. Check yourself. Ask, “Does this sound too perfect?” A second more radical approach is, once you’ve perfected the dialogue of a scene over 5 to 6 drafts, erase the scene altogether and write the dialogue from scratch. The reason this works is because you know the scene so well that you’re much better able to navigate the conversation. And yet, the dialogue still has that messy real-life feel to it since you’ve rewritten it from scratch.
5) Boring dialogue comes from boring characters – Think about it. When has a really interesting character ever spouted out a bunch of boring dialogue? It doesn’t happen. So if you’re struggling with bad dialogue in your script, look at your characters and ask if they’re interesting – if they’re unique and have strong personalities. One of the hardest things to do is to make a bland character an interesting conversationalist. Do a character check. Add personality to the ones who aren’t interesting and you’re going to find that your dialogue becomes a lot better.
6) Pump up the pressure – The things we say usually become more interesting when more pressure is added to the situation. So if you put two characters in a room who have nothing to do but talk, you have zero pressure in the scene. Which is a recipe for bland dialogue. Find a pressure point, push, and your dialogue is going to come alive. Pressure can come from anywhere. It could be the pressure of the walls closing in in the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. It could come from characters being chained to the wall like in the original Saw. It could come from one character needing something important from the other character, which is why interrogation scenes work so well. It could come from the deadly sun constantly being on their tail in Into The Night. Find a pressure point, or two, or three, press in on the scene, and your dialogue is going to start popping.
7) Embrace indirectness – Dialogue is worst when what the characters are saying is exactly what they’re thinking. The trick with dialogue is to look for ways AROUND saying the thing they’re saying. For example, if a wife wants to know where her husband was last night, she could say, “Where were you last night?” Or she could say, “You came home late.” The second one is going to lead to a much more interesting conversation because it’s indirect. Likewise, the husband could respond, “I know I stayed out too late. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” Or he could respond, “So this is how you want to start the day?” While there are scenes in movies where characters will have straight-forward conversations, most conversations contain an element of shifting around the information that’s being exchanged. This is what makes conversation interesting, is the human element. It’s the dance. It’s the playful way in which we slither around the topic.
8) Have fun when it’s appropriate – You hear it over and over again. Erase all dialogue that doesn’t move the scene forward. I don’t believe in that. As long as your characters are moving towards something (as opposed to sitting around doing nothing) you can create little pockets of “pointless” dialogue because they’re not pointless if they’re informing us about the characters. I’m reminded of the famous Jules and Vincent scene from Pulp Fiction where they go up to kill a guy. Tarantino could’ve cut to them walking into the room. Instead, he showed us these two shooting the shit before they get to the room. And the reason it worked was because there was no plot to expose. It was just a funny scene of two dudes talking. And we didn’t mind because the characters were MOVING TOWARDS SOMETHING. The mistake all these Tarantino wannabe writers made after Pulp Fiction was they would write scenes like this with characters sitting around doing nothing. The audience is more likely to accept these “pointless” dialogue exchanges when the characters are moving towards some goal.
9) The people in your script are real – This is more of a mindset shift than anything. But if you think of your characters as characters in a story, they will speak like characters in a story. If you think of them as real people, they’re more likely to speak like real people. Let’s say your hero, Nathan, needs to ask his friend, Hank, for money. If you’re thinking of this as a story, you’re going to overthink how Nathan would say the correct lines that both inform the reader what’s going on while keeping the dialogue short and to the point in order to move the scene along as quickly as possible. But if you’re thinking of this as two real life friends, everything that they’d say changes. Hank might sit down and start babbling about the guy at his office who lost his entire paycheck on a pyramid scheme. Their conversation is going to be more free-flowing and realistic, and therefore more reflective of real life. Eventually, you’ll have to cut some of the extraneous “real-life” stuff out to keep the scene focused. But, chances are, you’ll retain enough of these real-life thoughts that the conversation is going to feel more realistic.
10) The way you say it is rarely the most interesting way to say it – That big splashy “we need to hire this writer for a dialogue polish” type of dialogue breaks down to finding creative ways to say common things. Normal is boring. Different is refreshing. In the Black List script, “Get Home Safe,” writer Christy Hall has a Skype scene between her main character, Skylar, and Skylar’s mom. In the scene, the mom asks Skylar if it’s okay to post a link to her band. Skylar says of course, you should’ve done that already. Her mom replies, “But you get mad at me when I post stuff without telling you.” Skylar then clarifies what things her mom posts that make her mad. For this, I want all of you to go in the comments section and write out Skylar’s frustrated dialogue response to her mom that explains the things she gets upset about that her mom posts to social media. Then, I want you to come back here and read what Christy Hall wrote. Because it’s going to show you the difference between weak and strong dialogue. Here’s Skylar’s reply in the script: “I only get mad when you post a photo of me deep-throating a burger on the Fourth of July, when I’m on my period, in a bikini, and looking like a friggin’ house, Mom, there’s a huuuuuuge difference.” There’s a ton to get into as to why this is such a strong line of dialogue. First, “deep-throating” is a way more interesting way to say “eating.” So already, she’s separated herself from the screenwriter pack. Next, we get the very specific DETAILED response of Skylar not liking period bikini pictures. That’s a place a lot of writers would be scared to go or not even think of. It feels specific. It feels unique. Skylar does not say “fucking.” She says “friggin.” It’s a small difference, but it’s one more slightly unique element that helps the line stand out. Finally, she doesn’t use proper sentence structure at the end. “There’s a huge difference” should be its own sentence. But by using a comma instead of period, it conveys the “all said in one breath” nature of the response, which mimics how it would sound in real life. Even the detail of using “huuuuuuuge” as opposed to “huge,” adds flavor to the line that further differentiates it from your average line of dialogue. This is an A+ level dialogue line. You achieve this by looking for different ways to say common things. You’ve got to tap into that creative spot of your brain to find this stuff and level up your dialogue.
