After my last dialogue post some of you expressed the need for even MORE dialogue advice. Cue today’s post, baby! It’s time to conjure some magic dialogue spells! Shoozazah!

Remember that at the heart of all good dialogue is conflict, but more specifically some kind of imbalance in the interaction. Something is unresolved and the characters haven’t come to an agreement yet. This necessitates conversation, which is where good dialogue is born.

For example, let’s say that my girlfriend, Jane, was driving me to the airport. If we spent the entire conversation agreeing to all the things we needed to have done by the time I got back from my trip, the dialogue would be boring.

But what if last night, at 3am, I got a text from someone named “Lisa.” My girlfriend and I argued about it and left it at, “We’ll discuss it in the morning.” Here we now are, in the car, driving to the airport, and that text is still lingering. Our dialogue is going to be way more interesting cause there’s an unresolved issue dominating the conversation.

So that’s the main thing you need to keep in mind. Conflict will be at the heart of most good dialogue. Also, feel free to combo these tips up, bitches!!!

Each character should want something in the scene – This is the basic tenet for any meaningful conversation. Each person in the conversation should want something. If they don’t, they’re just babbling. And while the babbling will feel realistic at first (since that’s what we do in real life), it will quickly grow tiring, as we’ll drift further and further into aimlessness. It is sometimes okay for only one character in the scene to want something. But I’ve found that the more people with definitive goals there are in a scene, the better the dialogue gets. In the above scene, my girlfriend wants to know who the hell Lisa is and why she’s sending me a text at 3am. I, on the other hand, want to get to the airport without having to answer that question.

Contrast (character) – One of the easiest ways to create good dialogue is to place contrasting characters together. One character is selfless, the other selfish. One character is arrogant, the other modest. One character is smooth, the other a klutz. A stud, a dork. Intelligent, an idiot. The reason this works on the same level conflict does is that there’s an imbalance. Except this time the imbalance is in the characters themselves. Also of note: the goofier the movie, the further away the polarity should be. The more serious a movie, the differences between the characters will be more subtle.

Contrast (scene specific) – This is when you create contrast via a specific scenario. It doesn’t require that your two characters be permanently on opposite sides of the spectrum. Just temporarily. This could mean that one character is calm about something while the other is freaking out. One character is furious while the other is laughing. One character thinks something is a big deal while the other doesn’t think it’s a big deal at all. The opening scene in Fargo when Jerry Lundergaard walks into the bar to hire the kidnappers highlights this well. They’re pissed that Jerry’s late. Jerry believes this is incidental. That contrast leads to a scene laced with killer conflict (as the kidnappers become agitated that Jerry isn’t even acknowledging their anger).

Dialogue-Friendly Characters – No amount of dialoguing will help if you don’t have at least one dialogue-friendly character in a scene. You gotta have a character in a scene who’s witty or thoughtful or weird or manic or an arrogant prick or overly friendly or anything that necessitates an above-average output of words. It’s not impossible to write good dialogue without dialogue-friendly characters. But it’s hard.

Dramatic Irony – One of the easiest ways to write good dialogue. Place a character in a conversation where we know more than he knows. If Joe is reuniting with his high school friends in a remote cottage for the weekend and we previously had a scene showing that the friends plan to murder Joe, the dialogue is going to be great. A scene as simple as Frank (Joe’s best friend) welcoming him and showing him around the house, can result in riveting dialogue. Also, dramatic irony allows you to play around with and have fun with the dialogue! Joe: “This is going to be a memorable weekend.” Frank: “It sure is.”

Elephant in the room conflict – Elephant in the room conflict is when there’s an issue between characters that they’re not discussing. This issue then permeates whatever conversation they’re having, adding an extra layer to it. If a married couple loses a child and keeps their pain buried, they’re going to have a lot of “elephant in the room conflict.” They may be talking about taking their car in to get fixed. But you can feel that both characters have something much bigger on the brain. Elephant in the room conflict is not reserved for tragedies, by the way. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly could’ve just had a big unresolved fight in Step Brothers and then were called in for dinner. That dinner scene will be laced with the elephant in the room, the fight they just had.

Stakes – If there are no stakes attached to the conversation, we won’t care about the conversation. I watched this awful awful movie the other day called “The Intervention.” It was about a group of friends who spend a weekend together with the plan to tell two of the friends (who are engaged) not to get married because they’re terrible for each other. So what are the stakes here? If they fail at their goal, the friends get married. SO WHAT!!! Do we care if this couple gets married or not? No. So, of course, every single conversation in the movie fell flat. Stakes are not just movie-specific, but scene-specific as well. The bigger the stakes are for a scene, the better the dialogue. Let’s take that earlier example of Jane driving me to the airport. Let’s say that now my flight is taking me to the job interview of a lifetime – my dream job. Let’s move our conversation to right outside the airport entrance. My flight is leaving in 15 minutes. But Jane wants to know who the fuck Lisa is and why she’s texting me at 3am. We argue and argue some more, and all the while that plane is getting closer to leaving. Do you see how stakes (the job interview of a lifetime) beefs up the intensity of this scene? And by association, the dialogue? This is a great segue into our next dialogue booster…

A time constraint – Just like I showed you there. A time constraint is one of the easiest ways to juice up your dialogue. Simply make it so that one of the characters has something immediate they have to get to or has to leave in a few minutes, and instantly, the dialogue takes on a whole new intensity.

Specificity Over Generalities – The dialogue should seem specific and unique to the characters saying the words. The more general the details are, the less realistic the interaction seems. There’s a moment in Annie Hall where Alvy recounts his school days. He could’ve easily said. “I hated school. Everyone was a jerk-off. Those were some of the worst days of my life.” Talk about general!!! Instead, here’s what he says: “I always felt my schoolmates were idiots. Melvyn Greenglass, you know, fat little face, and Henrietta Farrell, just Miss Perfect all the time. And-and Ivan Ackerman, always the wrong answer. Always.” Specific!

Characters should be talking to each other, not to the audience – This is one of the easiest ways to spot an amateur. Even a lot of newer professional writers do this. Don’t write scenes where characters are only saying things to convey information to the audience. My Red Widow review (in the newsletter) is the perfect example. The married couple would reminisce about when and how they first met. None of that conversation was for them. It was strictly for us so that we understood their backstory. Hence, it felt unnatural. It’s true that sometimes you will need to fit exposition or backstory into a scene. But keep massaging the scene until you can legitimately say that this is a conversation your characters would have EVEN IF there was no one watching them.

In addition to the ten tips above, there are the intangibles. Wit, jokes, bullshitting, setting up and paying off lines, the ability for a character to go off on an interesting tangent. I’ve nicknamed this skill “small talk” as it mirrors the ability to converse in real life and it’s one of the skills most responsible for your dialogue feeling natural. It is also the part of dialogue most dependent on talent. The good news is, even if you’re bad at small talk, you can still master the ten tips above and do your best to sprinkle in enough “small talk” to write solid dialogue. You may not be Tarantino, but nobody’s going to dock you points for your dialogue either.

What about you guys? Any more game-changing dialogue tips???

Hey guys. No review today but that’s okay because the Scriptshadow Newsletter should be appearing in your Inbox any second now. I review a major new spec script sale that Hollywood’s been looking for forever. I’ve also got some writing links such as the intense debate behind Donald Glover’s all-black writing room. And I address that rewrite time issue with the Scriptshadow Tournament.

If you don’t see the newsletter in your inbox, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. It should be in there. If it isn’t, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “NO NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you personally. If you want to be added to the newsletter, e-mail me at the same address with the subject line “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send. And hurry up if you want a shot at the half-off consultation trivia!

The writer of the best-written show on television comes to us with his next Boob-Tube project. Will it take over the airwaves like Fargo?

Genre: Supernatural
Premise: A schizophrenic man living in a nuthouse falls in love with a fellow patient who he must team up with when outside forces descend upon them, believing that their illnesses are actually powers.
About: Noah Hawley is best known for bringing Fargo to television and creating the best anthology series, well, I’ve ever seen. This is his new show which will appear on FX. (note: I originally wrote this review having no idea that this was a Marvel character. Now that I now that, a lot of the weaknesses in this pilot make sense. This isn’t Hawley’s baby. He’s constrained by the ubiquitous Marvel universe).
Writer: Noah Hawley
Details: 62 pages

It’s been awhile since we’ve dipped into the TV waters but that’s only because there haven’t been any highly buzzed about projects out there. If you believe all the networks, there’s a scarcity of good 1-hour dramas being pitched. And why wouldn’t there be? There are now 100 suitors for projects as opposed to the old days, when there were 5. So yeah, television, get used to competition.

I’ve been all over Noah Hawley like syrup on pancakes, looking for anything in my archives he may have written. I excitedly found a script he wrote with his brother called Dead in the Water, only to realize I’d already reviewed it (it was good! here’s the review). I was particularly excited to find Legion, since TV appears to be what Hawley does best (though I’d bet we’ll see Hawley dominate the feature world soon enough). Will Legion turn Hawley into the next Ryan Murphy?

For as long as 30-something David Haller has been alive, he’s heard the voices in his head. Sometimes these voices tell him to do good things, but usually they tell him to do bad things. He’s fought these voices tooth and nail, but at a certain point, the battle was too intense for him to fight alone.

So David now lives in a psyche ward with a bunch of other crazies, existing on a steady cocktail of anti-psychotics, which seem to keep the voices at bay.

David’s life is turned upside-down when Sydney arrives, a beautiful young woman who’s, of course, crazy in her own way, as in she refuses to touch anyone. The two begin a unique romance whereby they can never touch, which only seems to make their love stronger.

Then one day Sydney gets better and has to leave, and that’s when things get fucked up. David rushes to finally kiss Sydney and when they kiss they… switch bodies???

This takes the script in a whole different direction. All of a sudden we’re flashing forward to an interrogation session between some guy named The Interrogator and David. He’s asking David about an “event” that happened in the hospital.

Jumping back and forth in time, we eventually learn that this event consisted of all the windows and doors in the facility disappearing, people being locked in rooms, some people being seared into the wall itself. Oh, and this seems to have happened because when Sydney jumped into David’s body, she used his special powers to wreak havoc on the ward. Or something like that. Confused? I know I am.

As we gradually move away from the backstory and to the present, David uses his powers to escape the Interrogator and reunite with Sydney. But for what? What kind of plan does Sydney have in store? We’ll have to see.

Wow.

Um.

I did not like this.

I mean, there’s a lot wrong here. From big things to little things. I’m kind of shocked that this is the same person who wrote Fargo.

For starters, there is no ground floor in Legion. There is nothing to hold this story up. As a result, we feel weightless, unsure, constantly searching for something to grab onto. And there’s nothing but a boatload of confusion.

Not only are we unsure if David’s crazy or not, but we’re also jumping around in time, turning a disorienting experience into an even more disorienting experience. The tipping point for me was when David and Syd kissed and switched bodies. Did we really just pull a Parent Trap? Then Sydney’s using David’s powers to sear people into walls? Why???

When you pose a question in a story, it’s supposed to make the audience want to know the answer. I didn’t care why Sydney and David switched bodies. I didn’t care why Sydney seared people into walls.

Somehow the two go back into their own bodies but it’s never explained how. I guess their consciousness took a wormhole back to the source body after getting bored? Talk about bizarre.

And there were little issues too. Like the dialogue. The characters— would talk— like this— where they would— always— pause— every few words— to find— the next— thing to say. Imagine reading an entire script like that. Wow.

And I kept hearing about these voices David was hearing. Yet we never hear what the voices actually say. It’s written as, “David keeps hearing the voices.” It seems like that would be a really important plot and character point to know what the voices say. Yet we never get one word. If it’s going to be on the screen, it needs to be on the page.

A much better version of this show would be Stranger Things, which has its share of weirdness. But it’s grounded by a clear storyline. A kid is missing. Another kid has escaped a nearby laboratory. This allows for the other characters to make logical choices based on these problems. Either they’re off looking for one kid or helping the one who escaped.

I don’t know what the hell David and Syd are doing. I suppose The Interrogator is trying to figure out what happened that day at the ward, but there are so many unknowns involved and so many weird choices (switching bodies?? really??) that we lose track of what the point of it all is.

I don’t know. Lost got beat up for its constant mindfuckery. This is Lost x 100 at least. Nothing is clear. Nothing is normal. Nothing is explained. It’s one “what the fuck” moment after the next.

Did I like anything here? I liked the character descriptions. TV shows are more character-dependent than features. So a description like, “Syd is in her 30s and a handful” doesn’t tell me a whole lot. Hawley goes 5-6 lines deep for his character descriptions, and I liked that. Here’s his Syd description:

And here’s what you need to know about Syd, aside from the fact that she doesn’t let anybody touch her: she still believes in happily ever after. Yeah, she knows it makes her a sucker — that it Puts Her At Risk — but she just can’t help herself. Hope is like an ember she can’t stamp out, a place in her heart that knows somehow, one day, things are gonna work out.

Anything that helps me understand a character better, I like. Because most of the time writers will neither describe a character in any kind of specific way or pace them through enough relevant action to help me understand who they are. Any trick you want to use to circumvent this issue, I support.

When you wrap your mysteries in enigmas that are already wrapped in mysteries, the audience isn’t going to know which way is up. And I don’t think the average person is going to be onboard for that. I mean sure, you’ll have your iowaska demographic firmly in hand. “Yeah, make shit even more confusing!” But I don’t think a show can sustain even a few episodes of this level of mind-fuckery, much less 7 seasons. People won’t have the patience.

I was really confused by this one, guys. And sadly disappointed.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: In TV, character is king. So make sure to fully define your characters. It doesn’t have to be via 6-line paragraphs, like Hawley does here. But the more specific you can be in defining your characters, the better. Unlike features, where plot is the engine, characters are the engine in television. Make them big, bright, unique, and specific. Oh, and if you’re having trouble figuring out what’s unique about your character, so will the audience.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A federal agent is sent to a crazed woman’s remote home when it’s discovered that she’s built a nuclear reactor to make contact with aliens.
About: The master of the 2016 spec sale is back at it. After a couple of 7 figure sales, Max Landis is back with the second script in his thematic trilogy. The first one was “Deeper.” This one is “Higher.” The third one will be… I’ll let you guys take some guesses in the comments.
Writer: Max Landis
Details: 90 pages – 3/29/16

Regardless of how you feel about Max Landis scripts, as a reader, they’re freaking golden. You know you’re going to be done in an hour at most.

I don’t know if Landis does this on purpose – understanding that the average person in Hollywood values a free hour more than they do their second child – or the famously prolific scribe gets an idea for another script midway through the first and finishes the script as fast as possible so he can write it. Either way, the reader benefits.

Another thing that happens during a Landis script is that it’s impossible to separate the script from the personality. No matter what you do, you can’t NOT have an image of Max Landis with one of his crazy hairdos (the one in my brain is the rainbow one) typing away on his computer in your head. And as a person who believes that a good screenplay should make you forget that someone’s written it, this isn’t preferable.

With that said, there’s always something to talk about after a Landis script, so let’s see what the viral video maven’s latest script has in store for us.

We meet Flynn, an FBI agent, in the midst of a very difficult moment. We don’t know why it’s so difficult. We just know he has to do something that he doesn’t want to do.

Then again, he’s in the middle of America, farmland as far as the eye can see. What could possibly be so terrible out here?

The target is a seemingly mundane barn. But when Flynn walks in, we see that the barn’s been retrofitted into some low-tech lab. There are jerry-rigged planks and walkways everywhere housing ancient computers that spit and sputter as if they’re on their last calculation.

That’s when we meet Polly, a 40-something woman who is the physical embodiment of that barn. She’s a mess. But a smart mess. There’s no denying that it took brains to come up with… whatever’s going on in here.

But Polly’s also lost it. She’s kind of built… well, she’s built a nuclear reactor. And she’s babbling on about aliens. It’s around this time that we learn Flynn isn’t just an agent. He’s Polly’s ex-husband. And he’s been sent here alone to try and talk Polly down, get her out of here so they can contain the reactor.

While Polly and Flynn verbally duke it out, we learn about their complicated past, we learn about why Polly believes aliens are coming to kill us, we learn about Polly’s disease (schizophrenia), and the FBI comes in to contain the situation.

Is Polly right about the aliens? If the Feds take her away, will it open our planet up to destruction? Only myself and Max Landis currently know. Locate Higher to find out for yourself!

Like I said in my previous Landis review, the guy writes scripts for the millennial. His stories move so fast, you feel like you should be reading them in an Uber while streaming Yeezy’s latest album on Tidal.

And while that may annoy some people, I remember when all those crusty Hollywood types bemoaned the influence of MTV and its “fast-cutting” culture when it came around, proclaiming it would ruin storytelling. Where are those guys now?

Might we be today’s crusty types by proclaiming the same thing? I mean you have Hell or High Water (formally “Comancheria”), a slow-as-molasses great script and great movie… that nobody has seen. If you guys want less Max Landis-y like scripts, why aren’t you going out to support Hell or High Water?

It’s the kind of hypocrisy that’s always been there with this argument. Audiences complain about the big cliche Hollywood movies but they don’t show up for the smaller smarter ones. Every ticket is a vote, guys. You tell the studios what you want with that vote. That’s how it’s always worked. So when you’re in line for Batman vs. Robin or whatever the hell DC has in store for us next, keep that in mind.

Anyway, back to Higher. Besides moving the story along quickly, Landis made another solid choice. He focused on the emotion. Once it’s revealed that Flynn is Polly’s ex-husband, the story becomes more than a “Is this woman nuts or not” story.

It’s about a man realizing how far his ex-wife has succumbed to her disease and knowing that the woman he fell in love with will never be back. It’s about reliving the pain of her breakdown, how it broke apart their family, and how it permanently broke Flynn.

That’s exactly what I tell you guys to do. If you want to know what separates amateur from pro, it’s when you start exploring characters on a deeper level. The best way to do that is through relationships. While it’s possible to only explore a character’s inner conflict, it’s always more interesting when there’s another player across the table.

Our fears and flaws are magnified best when there’s someone else to bring them out. There’s a moment in Higher where Flynn explains that the reason they found Polly was because her meth-head boyfriend ratted her out. “He’s not my boyfriend,” Polly says. “He’s just some guy I fuck.”

The way that hits Flynn – to see that this is how far the woman he loved has fallen – that she’s now fucking random meth-heads – that creates sympathy for the character. That creates context and complexity to the relationship we’re now watching. It turns a plot-centric script into a character-centric script.

But let me remind you that character exploration is NOTHING if it’s not contained within an entertaining story. If ALL you’re doing is exploring characters, that’s just as boring as ONLY constructing a plot. Entertaining the audience should always be paramount.

So we’ve established that Higher does some good things. But is it good?

This is the question I kept asking myself. And just the fact that I was asking myself is a bad sign. When you’re reading something you love, you don’t ask anything. You’re too busy enjoying the story.

The problem is, I’ve read so many “are they crazy or not” scripts at this point that they don’t do it for me anymore. Even as far back as Shutter Island I was getting tired of this setup. I don’t know if it’s because of the binary nature of the question. There’s only two answers, which feels simplistic. Or maybe I just don’t care if they’re crazy. Once you don’t care about the question, it doesn’t matter what the answer is. And that’s where I found myself on Higher. I didn’t care if there were aliens or she was nuts.

That’s too bad. Because Higher isn’t a bad script. It just [x] wasn’t for me.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Evolving information – the process by which information evolves over the course of the story. If it’s page 80 and we still only know what we knew on page 30, you’re not doing it right. So here, we start out only knowing that this barn has been retrofitted to conduct some sort of experiment. Then we find out it has a nuclear reactor. Then we find out the nuclear reactor is for a spaceship. Same on the character side. First, Flynn’s just some agent. Then it turns out he’s her husband. Then it turns out he left her because she has schizophrenia. Try to advance information once on the plot side and once on the character side every 10-15 pages.

THE WINNER OF WEEK 1 HAS BEEN LISTED BELOW

The Scriptshadow Tournament pits 40 amateur screenplays against each other that you, the readers of the site, will vote on. Ultimately, YOU will decide the winner. These are the first five entries. Read as much as you can from each of the entries and vote for the week’s winner in the Comments Section. Although it’s not required, your vote will carry more weight if you explain why you chose the script (doesn’t have to be elaborate, just has to make sense). I say “carry more weight” because a vote for a script without any explanation from an unknown voter may be seen as fake and not count towards the tally. I will announce the winner of this week here, in this post, on Sunday, 10pm Pacific time. That script will then go into the quarterfinals. Let the tournament begin and good luck to everyone!

Title: PREHISTORIC
Writer: Nicholas Malik
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: After a viral outbreak causes animals to de-evolve into their monstrous, prehistoric forms, a troubled CDC investigator races to the Manhattan epicenter to stop the virus and save his trapped son.

Title: BURNING BRIGADE
Writer: David Kushner
Genre: DRAMA/HISTORICAL/PERIOD
Logline: Based on true events, BURNING BRIGADE tells the story of the captured Jews forced by the Nazis to burn Holocaust victims, and their daring attempt to escape their captors.

Title: Cratchit
Writer: Katerine Botts
Genre: Mystery & Suspense, Fantasy
Logline: “A Christmas Carol” reimagined, told from the point of view of Bob Cratchit as he and Ebenezer Scrooge race to track down Jacob Marley’s killer — the same killer who now targets Scrooge and Cratchit’s son, Tiny Tim.

Title: The Honorable Doctor
Writer: Ben James Johnson
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Logline: In a dystopian future ravaged by a never-ending war, an insane military surgeon pits his enslaved cyborg experiments against a general’s men in a battle to the death.

Title: The Bait
Writer: Billie Bates
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Logline: An untrusting woman attempts to seduce men prior to marriage for concerned wives-to-be, but when she falls for her latest bait while he remains rocksteady in his denial of their mutual attraction, her world is turned upside down.

WINNER OF WEEK 1: “BAIT” by Billie Bates. Congratulations, Billie. Under the Scriptshadow Tournament rules, you may start incorporating changes into your script for its Quarterfinal Showdown. Good luck!