Last month, we had Sci-Fi Showdown. The voting was too close to call so last week I reviewed one of the top vote getters. That script didn’t quite hit the mark for me and, as it happens, I’d read Nowhere Girl a long time ago and liked it. Since I wanted a script that celebrated all the hard work people put into submitting to Sci-Fi Showdown, I decided to review Nowhere Girl this week.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A remorseless killer is given the death penalty, only to wake up 1,000 years later in a spacecraft built for one, with an artificial conscience implanted into her nervous system and a life sentence to serve out.
Why You Should Read: I wanted to write a character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the most horrible monster I could imagine, and still somehow make her worth rooting for. Since my wife is a schoolteacher, and I have received that dreaded text that her school is on active shooter lockdown a couple of times, I knew who that character would be. So now I’d love to know if my fellow writers think I pulled it off.
Writer: Chris Cobb
Details: 113 pages

Cailee Spaeny, whose acting skills are so strong that she convincingly plays a boy in Alex Garland’s Devs, would be great as Sara

When it comes to script-reading, the only thing that truly matters is, does the script stay with you?

I’ve read plenty of what I’d call “good” screenplays that people have later reminded me about and I had no idea what they’re talking about. On the flip side, I’ve read some scripts that I didn’t like at all but they’ve remained seared into my brain years later (Christy Hall’s, “Get Home Safe” for example).

I’ve come to the conclusion that if a script stays with you, good or bad, it has something going for it.

I read Nowhere Girl over a year ago as a consultation script and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s such a weird premise. It’s something that shouldn’t work at all. And yet it digs into you in a way other scripts don’t.

There were some issues with it but I don’t remember what those issues were so I’m excited to read this new draft and, hopefully, whatever problems I had with the script will have been solved. Let’s take a look!

We don’t meet 19 year old Sara under the best circumstances seeing as she’s mowing down anyone she sees at her university with a sub-automatic machine gun. After Sara kills a good chunk of people, a classmate of hers, Amber, pleads for her to stop the killing. She even offers to be Sara’s friend. But Sara wants none of it, gunning down Amber as well.

When a SWAT team rushes in, Sara tosses a bomb at them but it blows up too quickly, the blast hitting her. Cut to months later as a disfigured Sara informs a courtroom that she wants the death sentence. A year later, she gets her wish to die.

Only to wake up in a strange room. Sara learns that she’s on a spaceship far far away from earth. Andrew, an A.I. chip inside of Sara, explains what’s going on. It’s been one thousand years since that fateful day and her job is now to help facilitate an intricate bot delivery system (they drop off bots to bigger bots which then deliver those bots to planets or outposts) in the middle of nowhere.

As time goes on, Sara learns how the system works. She must routinely report to her local outpost (to a man named “The Warden”) and assure him that all systems are running smoothly, while managing the biggest threat to the ship, ion storms, each of which have the capacity to destroy her.

Just as Sara is starting to get the hang of things, Andrew takes on the identity of a familiar voice. It’s Amber, the girl who tried to stop her that fateful day. Sara finds herself drawn to Amber, ultimately befriending her. But when the Warden threatens to shut Amber off forever, Sara will do anything to save the girl whose life she took.

Let me start off by saying I’m a big fan of this script (in case I didn’t already make that clear).

It’s so bold. It’s so unexpected. It’s so different.

You’re not going to have a script experience like Nowhere Girl anytime soon.

I also put a premium on scripts that don’t go where I think they’re going to go. I love turning the page and having no idea what comes next. That’s Nowhere Girl in a nutshell. I mean how do you predict a story that starts off with a teenage female school shooter who then ends up on a ship a thousand years in the future? It’s just such an odd cool setup.

Ironically, Nowhere Girl’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. The reason you don’t know where it’s going is because there’s not a lot of structure. Neither Sara nor Andrew have a clear goal. That allows Chris to take the story in a lot of different directions. But it also risks those directions feeling pointless and unfocused.

A loose plot is fine if the character development is stellar but when it comes to Nowhere Girl, it felt like we were always flirting with good character development but never quite getting there. That’s because I don’t know what flaw Sara is trying to overcome and I’m not sure how Amber solves that flaw.

We know Sara doesn’t feel anything. She’s been diagnosed a psychopath. Andrew later shows Sara a replay of the shooting but forces her to feel what Amber felt during the exchange. This allows Sara to feel for the first time but the second the experience is over, Andrew erases the feeling so Sara is back to normal.

In other words, Sara learns how to feel in the first third of the movie. So doesn’t that mean she’s overcome her flaw? She’s learned what feeling is? Or was that meant to warn her up to the sensation of feeling? The real lessons are ahead of her. I’m not entirely sure.

Then when Amber replaces Andrew, she literally becomes Sara’s conscience. Amber actually says that (“I’m your conscience.”). That means that she’s not Amber. She’s Sara’s conscience. So as Sara and Amber build their friendship over the course of the second act, it would seem we’re further exploring the character arc of Sara being able to “feel.” Except we’re not. Because the person she’s befriending isn’t Amber. It’s her own conscience.

I don’t know. It was confusing. No matter how many times I tried to make sense of it in my head, it didn’t work. It seems like Chris is overcomplicating this. Maybe he can shed some light on what he was attempting to do so we can help him.

If you ask me, a better plot would be a good starting point. Plot equals structure and structure helps dictate where your characters need to go, both internally and externally.

You have these remote delivery vessels scattered throughout the sector to play with. And we know about these outposts where there are physical human beings. If Sara and Amber could get to a delivery vessel which, in turn, could get them to an outpost, with the ultimate plan being to escape or convince the bureaucrats to let them go, that could give you the strong goal this story needs.

I could imagine an ending where Sara gets to the outpost, is escaping in the halls, guns at her side, being pursued by others. And she essentially has the same choice she had at the beginning of the story. She can kill or she can stand down. And this time she chooses to stand down.

Another option is that maybe the goal is rehabilitation, plain and simple. Sara has two jobs. Job 1 is to perform the deliveries. Job 2 is she has to do her rehabilitation exercises for hours every day, which amount to Andrew helping her learn how to feel. That will be done through reliving certain life experiences. And it will also be providing lessons that challenge one to to feel emotion. At the end of a certain time period, she will get an audience with the Warden to prove she’s changed. If she has, she wins back her freedom. If she hasn’t, she’s got to wait another (5? 10? 30? years?) for her next chance.

Neither of these suggestions are perfect but the point is they provide structure. So if not them, find something else that can give this script a plot. Because it can’t be a character floating in space talking to herself the whole time. There has to be more to it.

With that said, Nowhere Girl was unlike anything I’ve ever read. There’s a movie in here somewhere and I think if we all gave Chris our suggestions, it would help him find that movie. Intrigued to hear what all of you thought cause I enjoyed this!

Script link: Nowhere Girl

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

What I learned: Whenever I encounter a script issue, the best solution is usually the simplest one. So when I look at Nowhere Girl’s issue of Sara’s conscience being an AI chip inside her body who later takes on the form of Amber and it being confusing what Sara is really bonding with in her pursuit to change (befriending Amber or befriending her conscience) my solution is to massively simplify it. Why can’t Andrew be the ship’s AI? Not a chip inside Sara. He creates a digital replica of Amber and Sara must learn how to feel through the friendship she builds with this entity? That’s a lot simpler, isn’t it?

If you asked 100 of Hollywood’s top producers, directors, actors, and writers, who the hottest screenwriter in the world was at the moment, the majority of them would say Phoebe Waller Bridge.

Bridge is killing it all areas of screenwriting but the thing she’s best known for is her dialogue. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a screenwriter whose dialogue was this celebrated, so I thought, why don’t we break some of her dialogue down?

And what better scene to dissect than the opening scene of the Fleabag pilot. Do not worry if you’ve never seen the show. I’m going to include the pages here for you to read.

The first lesson for why this dialogue is so great is our most important one. Fleabag is a talker. She’s the definition of a dialogue-friendly character. One of the biggest mistakes writers make is they try and inject punchy dialogue onto characters who wouldn’t say those things. Imagine putting John Wick in this scene. He’s not going to give you anything close to what Fleabag is saying because John Wick operates with his gun, not his tongue.

So if you’re ever anxious about writing good dialogue in your script, the job starts long before you’ve written a word. You want to conceive of a primary character – it doesn’t have to be your hero but it does have to be a key charcter – who likes to talk or who says interesting things or who says controversial things or who’s clever or who’s funny or who’s weird or who talks first and thinks later. This decision will dictate 90% of the quality of your dialogue.

The next thing we’ve got going here is that Fleabag talks directly to the viewer. Now some people hate characters who do this. I get it. My feeling has always been, if you’re going to do something that ballsy, you better have the skills to back it up. There’s nothing worse than a “clever” character talking to the camera who’s a big fat ball of lame.

But assuming you’re good at breaking the 4th wall, doing so achieves a unique effect. It both breaks the monotony and it breaks up the predictability of the conversational flow. You’re no longer dependent on His Turn to Talk, Her Turn to Talk, His Turn to Talk, Her Turn to Talk.

This is why I’ll tell writers that just because Character A asks a question, that doesn’t mean Character B has to answer. They can say nothing and Character A can move on to the next line. At least that way, you’re breaking up SOME of the monotony of the conversation. But outside of a few other tricks, you’re relegated to His Turn, Her Turn, His Turn, Her Turn.

Once you throw this new option into the mix of your protagonist talking to a third person that the second character can’t see, that gives you a rare opportunity to do all sorts of creative things with the dialogue, which is exactly what Bridge does here. I mean you have two characters exchanging dialogue who aren’t even talking to each other. He’s talking to her. She’s talking to us. It’s creativity like this that opens the door for a slew of new options.

The next thing Fleabag does is she talks about things you’re not supposed talk about. Again, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s baked into the character so you have to make that choice early on. But once it’s there, it’s powerful because there are very few things left that are taboo. And the fact that Fleabag consistently finds the taboo subject and talks about it so openly provides something very rare in movie and TV dialogue, which is that you don’t know what the character is going to say next.

You know how in 90% of movie conversations, you can approximately predict what the next line is going to be? Those moments never happen on Fleabag. You’re always unsure of what she’s going to say next and that’s a major key to keeping people watching. As soon as audiences figure out what’s coming next, what’s their incentive to continue?

I don’t want to overlook the technical side of dialogue here so I want you to go back to the first page and reread Fleabag’s opening monologue. Notice that IT’S ONLY ONE SENTENCE. It’s not grammatically correct. It’s not aesthetically perfect. It’s a big messy run-on sentence. However, it fits the character and it fits the situation. She’s someone who rambles on, especially when she’s drunk and horny. If this monologue had been broken into four proper sentences, it wouldn’t have felt right.

Finally, the dialogue is honest and authentic to the character who’s speaking. It isn’t movie-logic dialogue where the writer is attempting to imprint their cool lines or relevant thoughts onto the character. “But you’re drunk, and he made the effort to come all the way here so, you let him.” I don’t know a lot of writers who would be willing to go to this place. It’s borderline uncomfortable to hear. But that rawness, that realness, is what makes it authentic.

One of the best ways to study dialogue is to find a scene that has good dialogue then imagine what the scene would’ve been if written by an average writer. Because those are the scenes I read thousands of times over and have become bored by.

I mean think about how many scenes have been written where a guy or girl comes over for a booty call. Now try and think of any that are as good as this scene. Go ahead. I’ll wait. It doesn’t matter. You won’t find one.

I bet you the scenes you tried to find have the obvious funny initial text exchange. Maybe some clever quip about boning. Cut to the guy showing up. There’s some drunk dialogue. Then they smash. It’s just so… predictable.

When you can take that common of a scenario and twist it into something we’ve never seen before, that’s what’s going to set the stage for a good dialogue exchange. Because you can only do so much with the standard setup.

To summarize everything: First we have a dialogue-friendly character. Fleabag says whatever she’s thinking. She has zero tact. Next, the fourth wall option provides an opportunity for dialogue creativity. This makes the scene read different from what we’re used to. The dialogue is risky in places. It’s authentic to the main character. And, overall, there’s a desire to explore and be playful. You’re not going to find good dialogue the way you find a good plot. You have to be more open and relaxed and allow the words to flow through you. If you try to control them or you try and logically build a great dialogue exchange, it’s not going to work. Conversation is often illogical.

It’s funny. Despite Hollywood universally agreeing that Bridge is an amazing dialogue writer, whenever I post one of these breakdowns, there are always commenters who scream out, ‘THIS IS THE WORST DIALOGUE EVER, CARSON! YOU’RE WRONG.’ I welcome these comments. I only ask that you back up your claim. Give us some analysis on why the dialogue is bad. Dialogue is always one of the more polarizing screenwriting topics so I expect some fiery debates.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a young man can’t come up with enough money for his wedding, he’s forced to enlist the help of his estranged crazy grandmother, who will only provide the dough if he helps her kill herself.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 12 votes. This is writer Patrick Cadigan’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Patrick Cadigan
Details: 111 pages

Everybody in town thinks that when the pandemic is over, Hollywood’s going to want to buy a bunch of dramatic pandemic material.

I’m sure a couple of those projects will sell.

But if you’re looking for to play the smart money, it’s going to be in comedy. In times of stress, people want to laugh. So expect every studio to stock up on comedy projects. Netflix especially. They have the fastest concept-to-distribution model by far. So they can get a lot of these comedies in front of our eyes quickly.

Speaking of comedies, I’m happy that today’s script doesn’t involve a group of female characters going on a raunchy trip together, since that’s all Hollywood was buying for a good five years there. We might actually get back to seeing a variety of comedy projects. Let’s see if “Grandma” starts us off on the right foot.

30-something Ben works the phones at a dying insurance company. So while his career isn’t exactly on the upswing, he does have Mary, his partner-in-crime fiance who he’ll be marrying in a few months.

Mary is perfect in every way except for one. HER FAMILY. They suck. In fact, her father, George, corners Ben at a family gathering and informs him he can’t pay for their wedding. Which means Ben is going to have to come up with 30 grand.

This forces Ben to call his grandmother, Minnie. Minnie is one feisty old broad who tells it how it is. When Ben’s parents died unexpectedly when he was a child, Minnie raised him. The two never got along and Ben escaped the second he was of age to do so. He hasn’t talked to Minnie since.

Ben explains his predicament to Minnie and she comes up with an idea. She’s been planning to euthanize herself for years but she’s needed a family member to sign off on it. If Ben signs the suicide papers, she’ll give him the money.

Ben is thrilled with the arrangement… until he learns that they have to wait 30 days for the suicide. Which means Minnie will be helping Ben and Mary plan the wedding. When she suspects that Mary’s family is a bunch of cheating lying sleazeballs, there’s a good chance that she’s going to blow this wedding up before Ben and Mary can walk down the aisle.

Let’s start off with the good.

A comedy about a wedding where the love story isn’t about the bride and the groom, but rather the groom and his grandmother, was clever. I loved how, at the end, when the priest is reading the vows, Ben stops because he wants to go get his grandmother. It’s the the exact opposite of these “last minute sprint to the wedding” climaxes.

Also, this movie will get made.

It’s basically Bad Grandma and just like Bad Grandpa was able to get Robert DeNiro so it could make its movie, this will get an older famous female actress that ensures this moves into production as well.

But I don’t have any praise beyond that.

One of the hardest things about comedies is getting the balance between plot and comedy right. I’ve read hundreds of failed comedy scripts where my critique was, “You focused so much on the humor that the plot fell apart.” I’ve read almost as many failed comedies where my critique was, “You were so obsessed with structuring this thing that you squeezed out all the comedy.”

The best comedy scripts balance these two things.

Unfortunately, “Grandma” falls into the latter category. It’s so plot-centric that there aren’t any stand-out scenes. In fact, the only stand-out lol scene in the script is the opening flashback funeral (for Ben’s parents).

It shouldn’t be surprising that that’s the only scene that isn’t structurally attached to the story. It’s a flashback separate from everything. Without the constraints of plot, Cadigan only had to worry about being funny. Which is probably why it was the only scene that made us laugh.

Another problem is that Cadigan can’t decide whether Grandma is a comedic character or a straight up caricature. A caricature is a one-dimensional cartoonish character built solely for laughs. Mr. Chow in The Hangover is a caricature.

A comedic character is someone who’s funny, even goofy, but who we actually care about. Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents is a comedic character.

Cadigan seems to shift Grandma between these two classifications when it’s convenient. She’s a loud-talking swear-a-minute pistol through many of the early scenes. But in the second half, we’re asked to see her as this fully fleshed-out human being with flaws. In the wise words of LaVar Ball – “Pick a lane.”

Finally, I never cared enough about the wedding.

Those are the stakes, right? If Grandma doesn’t help Ben, they can’t have the wedding. But does that mean he’ll lose Mary? Can’t they just get married in Vegas or at the courthouse instead? I never felt like the wedding falling through was the end of the relationship. So the stakes were never high enough.

Contrast this with Meet the Parents where you felt that if Greg didn’t win Jack over, he was going to lose his fiance. They did a great job establishing how much stock she put into her father’s approval.

But let’s be real. LOLs trump all. If you make this funny, we’ll overlook any issues. I’ve consulted on scripts like this before and what I tell the writer is to go through every single big scene and make it as funny as you can without worrying about the plot. Just come up with the funniest possible scenario you can think of.

Then, after you’ve done that, go back and gently edit those scenes so that they retain their new hilariousness but also fit back into the plot, even if that fit isn’t as perfect as before. Again, if we’re laughing, we’re not thinking about whether the script performed a proper “break into Act 2.”

Not a bad script but it’s going to need a few rewrites to get where it wants to be.

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

What I learned: The stakes have to be present in the logline. If the stakes feel weak in the logline, you need to rethink your concept. Guys needing to find their kidnapped friend and get him back to his wedding within 24 hours (The Hangover) – high stakes. Guys trying to tag the one friend in their group who’s never been tagged yet before his wedding (Tag) – low stakes. The stakes for this wedding never felt that high to me.

Congratulations!

You’ve finished your script. Now what???

Before I answer that question, let’s talk about productivity, since that was a common theme that came up throughout this challenge.

At one point or another, everyone battled with putting words on the page.

From what I could tell, these issues fell into two categories.

Category one was writer’s block. You could open the script but you didn’t have any ideas for what to write.

Category two was resistance. You couldn’t muster the motivation to even open the document up and write.

Of the two, writer’s block is more manageable because it’s a temporary bump in the road. You’ve reached a point in the screenplay you don’t have ideas for and because it’s harder to come up with a solution than it is to give up for the day, you often chose to give up.

This is why it’s helpful to have a page count per day. It’s a psychological hack. If you know that you have to hit a certain page count, you won’t care that you don’t have the solution. You’ll push through. But if your only criteria for writing is that you have the perfect answers, chances are you won’t write anything.

I get that some people don’t like to write this way. They’d rather write nothing than write something bad. But in the grand scope of screenwriting, it’s a lot easier to work with something than it is with nothing. So write in that imperfect scene or sequence knowing that, with some distance, you’ll be able to come back later and make it better.

The second issue – resistance – is a much bigger problem that can be broken down into its own two categories.

The first is you’re not connecting with this particular script idea on an emotional level. There’s nothing you feel passionate about in the story, whether it be thematic or the characters themselves. One of the reasons Jordan Peele was able to keep working on Get Out for nearly a decade was because he had something to say about race. If his story was just about bringing home a boyfriend to some weird parents, he never finishes that script.

Or the recent spec sale, “Shut In,” about a recovering meth addict trying to save her children from an abusive husband. I’m guessing the writer, Melanie Toast, had an intense emotional connection with that main character. She may not have been a drug addict herself but maybe she’d been in an abusive relationship before and having her heroine overcome that issue helped her find closure with that abuse from her own past.

You’re more likely to get up and write every morning when you’re connected that deeply with your material. So get in there and create some characters that you have an emotional connection to!

The second is that you have some deep blockage when it comes to writing. Maybe it’s a pursuit of perfectionism. Maybe you don’t believe that you’re good enough. Maybe you experienced some screenwriting trauma whereby you wrote something you were proud of and everyone who read it didn’t like it. Maybe you’ve beat your head on the door so many times without getting in that you think, “What’s the point anymore?”

It’s hard to sit down and write anything when you’ve got that going on in your head.

But it should comfort you to know that every artist goes through this on some level. You’re not alone. In fact, I was just watching a video the other day from a successful guy in a separate craft who I considered one of the most confident people I’d come across. And, out of nowhere, he conceded that he still struggles with a basic belief in himself. That was shocking to hear because I never would’ve guessed that with him.

The difference is he didn’t allow it to cripple him. He felt it but he didn’t let it win. Which leads me to a couple of solutions for you.

One, look into the self-critic. Writers are particularly susceptible to the self-critic because they’re in their minds all the time. This breeds a nice warm nest for the self-critic to operate in.

Eckhart Tolle is the most respected voice in silencing our inner critic but there are newer books out there which offer new tools to take the self-critic on. I can tell you from my own experience that learning how the self-critic operates has helped me become a mentally stronger individual. You’d be amazed at how much more productive you can be when you’re not spending 75% of your mental energy each day beating away the guy in your head who tells you you suck.

Finally, you may need to reevaluate how you approach writing. If you’re approaching writing in a manner by which you’ll only be happy once you become rich and successful, you are not going to become rich and successful. In addition to handicapping you mentally, artists don’t create their best stuff when their only motivation is success. They achieve their best stuff when they have something to say.

So instead of trying to write something amazing that brings you tons of money and success, write to have fun. Write for yourself. That’s the whole reason you started writing to begin with, right? Well let’s get back to that. Once that becomes your definition of happiness, everything else is gravy.

Okay, getting back on track here.

You’ve just finished your script. Now what?

Some people will tell you to leave it alone for two weeks. Let it sit there. Get some distance from it. That way you can read it objectively and see what you’ve got. I’m not sure that applies here. We’ve written this so fast that I’m not sure we know what we wrote. So if you’re not burned out, read the thing right now! See what you’ve got!

If you see potential in the story, start a new document and write down ideas for the second draft. Usually, in first drafts, we’re coming up with all these new ideas in the second half of the screenplay. A second draft is about moving some of these ideas up into the first half. For example, if you unexpectedly realized that a secondary character is a lot more interesting than you thought they were, give them a bigger storyline in the first half of the screenplay.

One of the less heralded screenplay lessons I’ve learned is the importance of identifying which characters are working and which aren’t. Don’t get locked in to who gets the most screen time just because that’s how you originally conceived them. If one of your characters is killing it, give us more of them! Likewise, if someone isn’t working, throw them out.

From there, you’re just trying to identify the 2-3 biggest issues in the script and come up with solutions for those. For example, if your main character is boring, ask yourself, “How can I make her less boring?” It might be adding a sense of humor. It might be giving her a more controversial backstory. It might be making her more active.

You’re not trying to build Rome in the second draft. You’re just trying to build upon the potential of your first draft.

I’m really happy for everyone who participated in this and wrote an entire screenplay through this exercise! You now have a great base for a screenplay that, with some intense rewriting, you’ll have ready to go by the time the Last Great Screenwriting Contest deadline rolls around.

I’ll be taking tomorrow off but I will see everyone on Tuesday with a script review. :)

Want to turbo-boost your dialogue? Add a dialogue-friendly character.

Okay, it’s time for me to be… how to I put this nicely?

Parental.

I still love you but I have to teach you a couple of lessons.

I’ve noticed a good chunk of excuse-making in the comments section about why writers aren’t keeping up.

One of the biggest reasons is: Not enough time.

My response to that?

B.S.

And I can hear your resistance already. The anger is bubbling. You can’t wait to get down in that comments section and explain to me why YOUR situation is DIFFERENT from everyone else’s and how you actually truly seriously don’t have enough time to get your pages written.

B.S.

B.S. with a capital B and a capital S.

The only way you don’t have enough time to finish your pages is if there is an anti-screenwriting terrorist in your home pointing a gun at your head all 24 hours of the day and telling you that if you write anything, he’ll shoot you.

Unless that is going on, you have time.

If you are operating by the 2-Week screenwriting principle of not judging your writing, you can write 8 pages in 2 to 3 hours.

If you’re still convinced that you don’t have enough time, post every hour of your day and what you were doing during that hour in the comments section. I’m certain that the intelligent Scriptshadow community can help you rearrange some things to find two hours to write.

And if your excuse is that, sure, you do have the time, but you’re stuck and you don’t know what to write next – KEEP WRITING ANYWAY. I don’t care if you write a redundant scene or a scene that feels pointless. As long as you keep writing! Because when you write, you’re more likely to come up with ideas, and when you come up with ideas, you’ll have reason to keep writing.

“But… but… but… but…”

No buts. You know it’s true. You have time to write. Now stop making excuses and just do it.

On to something I’ve noticed a few of you having trouble with – dialogue.

Here’s the dirty little secret about dialogue.

Are you ready?

DON’T WORRY ABOUT DIALOGUE.

That’s it.

That’s the only thing you have to know about dialogue at this moment.

Why? Because there’s never been a script where more than 10% of the dialogue from the first draft made it into the final movie.

Dialogue is the most re-shaped component of a script and that’s because a) it’s easy to rewrite, and b) the more you learn about your characters over the course of a project, the better you understand what they’d say and how they’d say it. Not to mention plots are constantly evolving in rewrites, which means a lot of scenes are getting chopped, which means all those hours you spent obsessively slaving over that dialogue turned out to be for nothing cause the scenes no longer exist.

How insignificant is dialogue in the grand scheme of things? Remember how we talked about the Safdie Brothers writing 160 drafts of Uncut Gems?

Even WITH THOSE 160 drafts, they still did scripted takes AND “say whatever you want” takes with their actors. In other words, they knew that dialogue, while important, isn’t as important as your actors believing in and emotionally connecting with what they say. So after ten years of rewriting a script to death, the finished product still consisted of a ton of dialogue literally made up on the spot.

Yes, everyone, I understand that the Safdie Brothers are writer-directors and don’t need their dialogue to shine on the page. But still: dialogue should be one of the last things in the script you perfect. Once you’ve got your structure down (which usually takes about 6-7 drafts) and you therefore know you won’t be cutting many more scenes, that’s when your focus is going to shift to dialogue.

In the meantime, there’s two types of dialogue you should be writing in your first draft. Functional or fun. Functional dialogue when you’ve got exposition to convey to the writer. And fun for everything else.

So if you have a scene like in Jurassic Park where the characters are explaining the rules of the dinosaurs or how the theme park works, just get that dialogue down. It doesn’t have to be entertaining. You’ll make it entertaining in future drafts. Right now, it doesn’t matter if it’s dryer than sand. You just need to get it down.

And if you have a scene where two characters with some sexual chemistry are on their way to the next big set piece, have fun with their dialogue. Be outrageous, witty, silly, clumsy. You’re not trying to hit a home run your first at-bat. You’re trying to get a general feel for who these people are and the things they might say. These scenes can be twice as long as they’ll end up being in the final draft because you’re in exploratory mode.

With that said, I know that writing a good dialogue scene makes you feel good. And when you feel good, you want to write more.

So here are a couple of tips. One, try to have at least one dialogue-friendly character in your script, someone who likes to talk, has a lot of opinions, is clever, is funny, or all of the above (think Tony Stark, Harley Quinn, Oscar Isaac’s character in Ex Machina). Just having that character around will up the quality of your dialogue 30% without you having to do anything.

From there, look to dramatize scenes. Create some element of conflict within the scene. That conflict will force your characters to interact with dialogue that’s more fun to listen to.

For example, here are two scenes. You tell me which one is more likely to result in good dialogue.

The objective of the scene is to set up a pandemic virus that’s emerging so that the audience understands it for plot reasons we’ll explore as the movie goes on.

In our first version of the scene, Joe tells Sara why the virus is so dangerous. Sara, eager to learn, asks a lot of questions. “Where did the virus start?” “How many people have died so far?” Joe answers all the questions and when he’s finished explaining everything, Sara thanks him.

We’ve achieved what we’ve set out to do. The audience now understands the virus at the center of the movie.

Now here’s a second version of the scene. In this version, Joe and Sara have two different mindsets about the virus. Joe gets a lot of his news from conspiracy websites. He’s up to date on the latest unfounded theories. Sara, meanwhile, only trusts official fact-based data that’s been reported through official channels. The two debate each other on what’s real and what isn’t.

Note how, dramatically, this is a much more interesting way to talk about the pandemic than a simple Q & A session. The main difference is that there’s conflict between the characters and whenever you have conflict, the scene is more charged, and when a scene is more charged, it’s generally better.

This isn’t the only way to write good dialogue, of course. But it’s an example of where your mindset should be to set a stage for the most interesting conversations. You want to create a situation that has some dramatic value and isn’t just characters saying what you need them to say to set up the plot.

But don’t get too wrapped up in that. You don’t need to focus on dialogue in the first draft. You need to write the darn script. So whatever you do, keep writing. And stop sabotaging yourself. You have the time. And as long as you don’t judge your writing, you will get your 8 pages. Trust me. You just have to sit down and do it.