More Tips for Dialogue in Screenplays

I met up with Neill D. Hicks, author of Screenwriting 101, again last night, as we are developing a seminar for him to teach through my workshops program at Your Plot Thickens. He gave me some excellent tips about how to write better dialogue for screenplays.

1) Attempt to write a scene (or scenes) without any the use of any questions. When you eliminate questions, and characters instead make statements, it drives them more quickly to conflict. And what is more conflict, after all, but more drama!

2) While you're at it, now write a scene without the use of any dialogue whatsoever. How do your characters interact with one another -- get across what they want to say -- without the use of words? My two cents worth is, to enhance this process, you might want to give your character a problem, or create a turning point in their relationship for them to deal with. How does each character thus get across their viewpoints and emotions through ACTION?

3) Dialogue isn't just about what is being said, it's about how you say it -- and good dialogue has rhythm. Another tip is to write a scene for which you select just a few words -- and then create "dialogue" with the use of just those words. Again, in this exercise, it's not about WHAT is being said, but about the cadence of the words. Do your characters speak in a clipped manner, or are they loquacious? This will definitely help the audience understand what kind of characters they are.

4) Lastly, write a scene in which characters are not allowed to use any conjunctions, the most popular of which are: and - but - or - yet. What I think Hicks means by this is that words such as "but" and "yet" especially work to temper statements by contradicting them, lessening their effect. A good example of this is: "I like you but..." Sure, such a statement voiced in a rom-com would definitely cause drama. But I think the idea is to have your characters making concise and direct statements without adding on too much information or qualifying their sentiments with contradictory information.

Tips for Creating Great Dialogue

Want to learn to create awesome dialogue that will pull readers in and differentiate you from the pack of writers whose characters all sound the same? Here are some tips!

Think about what each of your character's attitudes are: Are they happy? Are they sad? What I mean is are they are a happy or sad person overall? Do they take a gloomy perspective to life or an optimistic one? Do they find barbs in every compliment? Or are they the sort of person who pulls others up out of bad moods?

Think of who your character is and how they approach life. Then fool around with writing some dialogue by creating a situation that this kind of character would be faced with.

For example: a character who thinks the whole world is against him has to ask for help when his car breaks down.

A character who is perenially happy is going to approach this situation differently, as is a person who finds sexual innuendo in everything -- or a person who very much has a victim mentality. What about the person who gets off on gossip. Or that person who always must one-up everyone on everything. You get where I'm going. Think about the attitude with which your character approaches life because this is going to inform the kind of dialogue he or she uses.

Related to this is what your character's background is. Obviously if you are a professor of English you are going to have a different way of speaking than a guy who fixes cars for a living. (Although a great way of creating a deep characters is making your mechanic speak as if he were a college professor.)

Sure, we don't want to stereotype too much. Still, how much education we've had, our social class, etc., does often have an impact on how we speak. And these differences can be subtle. A professor of English at the local community college might speak differently then one from Harvard. The same professor who comes from the South may speak differently than someone from the North.
Again you can brainstorm the different ways that different characters might ask for the same thing. Say, your characters all want a cup of coffee.

The elitist wants a cup of French-pressed Ethiopian roast with no cream.
The coach dad wants a cup of joe.
The New York taxi-cab driver wants a cup of caw-fee.
The Brit wants a cuppa.

You get it. And then does your character say thank you when they get their coffee? Or do they just take it and drink it without saying anything? Or do they even just send it back because they don't like it? All this is what your character can be saying that lets the reader (or audience if this is a screenplay) learn about who your character is without having to use a lot of expository sentences to get across the same idea.

Another great way to distinguish characters is by creating a catch phrase that you character always uses. I learned this in a character improv class, but you can also apply this to your writing. Is there that one thing that the character always (or often says) that can distinguish him from everyone else. This is especially true when writing screenplays. You want a reader to be able to cover up the character names and STILL be able to get an idea of who's talking.

When in Doubt, Ditch the First 100 Pages of Your Novel

I have gotten a lot of advice about the importance of condensing your first act. Why? Because, as writers, we tend to write voluminous first acts, thinking that we need to explain everything, provide so much backstory. But you know what that does? It makes your screenplay really boring. Why? Because while you're doing all that explaining, your characters aren't living. What I mean by that is that they aren't acting. They aren't making the important choices necessary for them to change. And you probably aren't paying off the premise of the script either, which promises what we are going to see once your main character is changing -- those funny or dramatic setpieces -- and instead we remain too long in what Christopher Vogler calls "the ordinary world." So the advice I've heard is to make your first act short. If you can tell all you need to tell in 5-10 pages, wonderful! Scripts these days tend to be no longer than 110 pages, and that means you need to leave a lot of other pages open to the development of story -- not backstory.

I have come into this problem recently with the novel I am writing. I have so much set-up. And trust me, I love the set-up I've written, all 100 pages of it. Yeah, 100 pages of set-up for act one! But unless I'm planning on writing a novel that is 500 pages (which I'm not), then I need to cut a lot of that. I don't want to, of course, because I love what I've written. But something tells me that I am going to have to "kill my darlings" one of these days, whether I like it or not.

As I've explained in a past blog entry, I highly recommend working on your ending first, before you plod through so many pages of your second act. This will help you know exactly what you need to have in that first act -- all the essentials. It has also, for me at least, shed light on ways that I can cut those glorious first 100 pages I've spent so much time on polishing and thus jump into the action of act two even more quickly.

That said, I do also realize how important it is for writers to spend the time writing those first pages of their screenplay or novel during the early days of your work's conception. A lot of times, it can work as an exercise in helping you to determine the tone of the work, as well as figure out your character's voices and their dynamics. If you do have to cut a lot of those pages, though (and you probably will), you might consider seeing how you can retool some of those scenes to make them work as part of new scenes in the second act, or as flash-back throughout the second act. (Although if this is a screenplay, not too much flashback, please.)

Finding Your Hook

I spent a lot of years as a magazine writer. In the same way that your article for a magazine needs a hook, so does your story. What is that interesting thing that makes your story different and therefore why should people read it? Are you looking at a subject in a new and different way? One example of this is the plethora of vampire stories out there. But as long as you are coming at the subject of vampires in a new way, you can still make a new and interesting story out of it. (Although if you want to write a screenplay or a TV series, I would advise you at this point not to write about vampires… Sure, the genre is popular, but even if you come up with a new take on it at this point, it’s kind of been done to death. Uh, no pun intended.)

Anyhow, back to you hook... Once you know what your hook is, I advise you to brainstorm scenes (even if this is a novel) that pay off the premise of your hook. For example, if your story is about a countrygirl who moves to the city for the first time (yes, this is an old, rote story, but bear with me), you would want to show scenes in which the ramifications of her moving would be shown and also how her country-ness is juxtaposed against the backdrop of the city and vice-versa. You get the picture. Just brainstorm as many combinations as you can think of that you can make into scenes and incorporate into your plot.

One of the ways that scenes for your screenplay or novel can be created is through your main character's fatal flaw. Once you decide what your character’s fatal flaw is, you can brainstorm a bunch of scenes in which we see her committing this “mistake”. Of course, if you abide by the tenets of story structure, we should be seeing some kind of a progression, meaning that, throughout the course of the story, your main character should be getting over her flaw, at least to some extent. Even if in the end you decide that she doesn’t finally conquer her “misbehavior,”  then we need to have seen her grow and change throughout the course of the story.