Heads up! Going to share some good news tomorrow about Jason Gruich, who wrote “Cop Cam.” Let’s keep the good vibes going. Submit your script for this weekend’s Amateur Showdown Contest! You can find the submission rules here. See you soon!
One of the best ways to learn dialogue is through comparison shopping. You compare similar scenes between bad dialogue and good dialogue. Or you take a great scene of dialogue you remember from a movie and, without rewatching it, write your version of the scene, then go back and compare the two. Trust me, you’ll learn a thing or two about how to write good dialogue.
The show with the best dialogue going right now is, without question, Succession. Succession follows a Rupert-Murdoch-Slash-Robert-Iger type, named Logan Roy, who has a stroke, forcing his incompetent family to take the reins of the business. The show manages to perfectly balance a serious tone with offbeat humor. And that’s your first dialogue lesson for the day. Most of what we think of as “good dialogue” has a humorous component to it.
So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to write your own version of today’s featured scene before you read it. You’re then going to compare it to the real scene. It doesn’t matter that you haven’t seen the show. I’m going to give you some background on the scene in a second. For those of you brave enough, post your scene in the comments. Let’s see if anyone can top the dialogue from the show. I doubt it will happen. The dialogue here is really good. But if you get a ton of upvotes, I’ll concede.
The scene in question occurs after Shiv (Logan’s daughter) and Roman (Logan’s youngest son) are flying with their dad in a helicopter. During their conversation, the dad has some kind of head rush and passes out. They rush him to the hospital and have a quick talk with an Indian doctor before they’re reassigned to a new room with the rest of the family. They don’t have an official diagnosis yet but they think it may be a brain hemorrhage. The point of the scene is for the family to find out what just happened and then decide what to do next.
The five characters in the scene:
Kendall Roy – 30s, a Donald Trump Jr. type. Talks a big game but is insecure. He’s the leading contender to take over the company but the rest of the family has zero confidence in him.
Roman Roy – late 20s, Kendall’s eccentric younger brother who hates work and just wants to screw around and have fun. Very much a “dialogue-friendly” character.
Shiv Roy – 30s, the sister. The most level-headed of everyone. The only one here who’s more concerned about dad’s health than the company.
Connor Roy – Oldest son from a previous marriage of Logan’s. A bit of a weirdo who goes off on tangents.
Tom – Shiv’s fiance. We’re not sure if this guy loves Shiv or loves that he’s found a way into the Roy family. The family is a little hesitant about him.
I couldn’t find the script for this show, so I’m transcribing the dialogue myself. I’ll only refer to action when it’s necessary. But the description here is not the writer’s. It’s mine. Okay, let’s get to it!
Now if you have an acute dialogue eye, you’ll notice something off about this dialogue. IT SUCKS. That’s right. It sucks. I call this “Basic B@%$# Dialogue.” It’s dialogue anybody could write. You could literally pluck a tourist off the streets of LA and teach him to write this dialogue in ten minutes. I wrote this dialogue. To teach you a lesson. That dialogue can be so much more than you make it. Wanna see the actual dialogue? Okay, here it is.
Same situation. Same things are accomplished. Why is the dialogue in the second version so much better? For starters, note that we’re playing against the obvious emotion here. This is a sad scary situation, yet we’re still injecting humor into it. There’s something else going on here that you see throughout the show and I brought it up during the last dialogue article. There’s a sense of playfulness in the writing, a desire to take chances and go outside the strict confines of a nuts and bolts conversation. If you want to write better dialogue, be more playful. Have more fun.
Now let’s look at some specific moments. Notice Roman’s response to Kendall’s initial question. “Uh, I don’t know, ‘exactly.’ It was weird. Um, it happened fast, we were just sitting there—“ “We were talking—“ “We were talking. Shiv kind of started hard-balling Dad a little bit—“ To be honest, I don’t know if the “ums” and “uhs” were written or if they were an acting choice. But I’m going to assume they were written. Normally, writers would be afraid to write a response like this. There’s something “unclean” about it. One “um,” maybe. But two? In one response. They would be scared of that. And yet it’s what helps the dialogue feel so natural.
In addition to that, notice how the character isn’t allowed to finish before another character butts in. Interruption is ANOTHER thing that helps make dialogue feel natural. So doubling up on these “naturalistic” flourishes is already selling the dialogue way better than the Basic B@%$# version.
Notice also that when someone asks a question, the answer is not a robotic 1 or 0. It isn’t “This” or “That” happened. Roman takes the answer off on an aside. “Shiv kind of started hard-balling Dad a little—“ Already, we’re drifting away from the straight-forward on-the-nose dialogue in Basic B@%$#. Not only that, it gets Shiv to defend herself, which further derails us from getting the answers. This is the trick to dialogue. You don’t want it to be a straight-forward exchange of information. You want it to be messy, like real life! And that’s what the writer was doing here.
What really brings the scene up a notch, though, is Connor randomly bringing up cryogenics. First off, this dialogue is born out of character. It’s not just a writer trying to be funny. This is who Connor is. He’s a weirdo who’s an outcast of the family. He always says stupid stuff like this. This keeps his tangent grounded. If Shiv had said this, it wouldn’t have worked. It works because it’s born out of character. And now we’ve gone even further away from getting the answers we need. Which is what you want to do with dialogue. You don’t want it to be easy. You don’t want everybody to agree and read each other’s minds with perfect responses. You want it to be difficult. Because that’s how conflict is created and what keeps the dialogue fresh and fun.
So what about you? What differences did you notice between the Basic B@%$# version and the real version? What differences did you notice between the real version and your own version? Compare compare compare. The more you compare your dialogue to the best dialogue in the industry, the better you’re going to get at it. Now let’s see how your own scenes turned out.
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