3 Ways to Improve Dialogue In Your Script

Dialogue can deepen an understanding of characters and amp up a every aspect of a story. Paula Landry gives three clear way to improve dialogue in your script.

Dialogue can deepen an understanding of characters and amp up a every aspect of a story. Paula Landry gives three clear way to improve dialogue in your script.

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If a picture paints a thousand words… close your eyes and imagine really expressive dialogue, instead.Summertime is a great time to drill down on a few specific skills to master them. Just like going away to band camp – where you can allot time for special projects, practicing a lot of scales or etudes, or learning new songs, Summer can be time an opportunity to FOCUS.

Screenwriters TIP – if you’re going to chose something to focus on, pick something that needs improvement. Working with students over the years in many different mediums, people gravitate toward working on what they do well. Resist that temptation, pick where you’re flailing, and do the hard work that’s uncomfortable and often embarrassing.

Dialogue is one of those things, that after plot, can really deepen an understanding of characters and amp up a every aspect of a story.

What is dialogue?

Dialogue can be a powerful tool to further our story, entertain and inform. An evocative way of speaking can vivid characters, which ultimately deepens our appreciation of a story. Dialogue reveals who these people are, in a visceral way.

What is effective dialogue?

Dialogue is an aural representation of a person. So when you read good screenplays, examine the dialogue and ask yourself, does it show who a person it at their essence, and how? Speech patterns convey, the words they chose, and the rhythm of their patter. By focusing and working on these three elements, manner of speaking, words selection, and their rhythm of talking, you can refine what your character says and how they say it.

As an exercise you can select one of your main characters and tweak dialogue, therefore, use the following 3 ways to improve your dialogue.

3 Ways to Improve Dialogue In Your Script

Examining each in detail of your favorite script:
1. Manner of Speech
2. Words and vocabulary
3. Rhythm of talking

What the sum total of these elements convey, which is showing, not telling – which is the key to effective script writing.

More Tips on How to Write Great Dialogue

Dialogue shows (not tells)

Among the many things that dialogue offers us are the various keys to the person on their surface, as well as underneath that facade, family, past, job, education and so on. Often when you design your characters initially, you detail the following items in much detail. If you haven’t, you may find that your dialogue is bland with a flavor of same, same, same. You should be able to open up any page of your script, not read WHO is talking, but by what they say, know exactly who they are.

Ideally dialogue shows us the following:

• Personality Traits and Disposition (confident, sunny, open, shy, untrusting, thoughtful, bookish)
• Education
• Socioeconomic sensibility (White collar, blue collar, poor, middle class, upper class)
• Where you live or come from, accents, slang (region, geography, North/South)
• How you feel about yourself (deprecating, jokester, braggart)
• How you want others to feel about you – your job, social strata, your crowd – what’s commonly done, as well as your need to fit in.

Beyond Dialogue: Subtext Through Action, Description, and Silence

Creating Examples

For fun, we could create a dialogue profile for a college English professor who studies folk history. Let’s call him Clayton Dustworthy. How might he talk?

1. Manner of Speech – dry, technical, long-winded
2. Words and vocabulary – long words, almost old fashioned
3. Rhythm of talking – drone-like, ask few questions and those only rhetorical

What does this dialogue show us? It informs us that he’s overly educated, among other things and probably as dull as a bag of moist hair!

So, on to Clayton, here’s what his dialogue will reveal:
• Personality Traits and Disposition (confident, sunny, open, shy, untrusting, thoughtful, bookish)
• Education - his mind is in books, not necessarily in the present, he’s probably somewhat retiring, fanciful, and bookish
• Socioeconomic sensibility (White collar, blue collar, poor, middle class, upper class) – upper class
• Where you live or come from, accents, slang (region, geography, North/South) - North East, retains a nasal manner of speaking from being born in Maine
• How you feel about yourself (deprecating, jokester, braggart) - he feels he’s fascinating and misses that he’s boring other people. He lives for anything J.R.R. Tolkien, has an obscure book collection and gets really excited when he can add new gnomes from historical book to his figurine collection, which he’s entitled ‘gnomes from tomes’
• How you want others to feel about you – your job, social strata, your crowd – what’s commonly done – he wants people to know he knows a lot, even if they couldn’t care less. In the academic hierarchy, he’s pretty low on the pecking order. He’s a rock star at places like the Renaissance Fair where he can show off his knowledge

In addition to a character’s actions and appearance, ask yourself what you can indicate about your character through dialogue more effectively than any other way. What do we need to know about this character as it relates to the plot?

Find Examples In Your Favorite Scripts

To better understand dialogue, I like to look at extreme examples, like Rain Man or Rocky,

Opening the door Rocky is taken aback when he sees a set of very flashy clothes. ROCKY (mumbling) ... These ain't my clothes.

ROCKY
Hey, how come I been put outta my locker?

If you look at select lines of Rocky’s throughout the script you get immediately who this guy is by his grammar, straightforward, no frills way of stating his mind. He doesn’t speak beautifully, but gets straight to the point – and he’s guileless, always speaking from the heart. Here are a few of his lines:

ROCKY
I said, how ya feelin'?

...Don't you never say that.

...You guys talk like that in front of a little girl -- You guys are scum.

...That doesn't matter -- You don't really have to be a whore, just act like one an' that's it.

ROCKY
Ya gotta be a little soft to wanna be a pug... It's a racket where ya' almost guaranteed to end up a bum.

ADRIAN
I don't think you're a bum.

ROCKY
... I'm at least half a bum.

Rocky’s verbal tics in his manner or speech– like uh, ya’, and often stating what he sees as facts about morality, reveal his blue collar status and street-wise upbringing, as well as minimal school education – but a thinking and thoughtful man.

Also, ethnicity can play an important role in speech. If they speak English as a second language, they may not have an accent, but instead flip nouns and adjectives sometimes, or use unusual words, due to their ongoing translating in their head.

Image credit: Ryan McGuire

Of course you will vary a character’s speaking within a script, however it’s a good bet that if you can tell, just by the dialogue, who is speaking, it will give you a sense that is distinct and varied between characters. Then have fun and use these 3 ways to strengthen your character’s dialogue and note how it deepens and enriches your story and the characters themselves.

Rock your writing!

3 Simple Steps to Master the Rule of Show, Don't Tell

Show, don’t tell is one of the classic adages about writing. But what does it really mean? Ross Brown explains how what the character does defines them more powerfully than what they say.

ROSS BROWN

JAN 30, 2018

Show, don’t tell is one of the classic adages about writing. But what does it really mean? Ross Brown explains how what the character does defines them more powerfully than what they say.

Ross Brown is the Program Director for the MFA in Writing & Contemporary Media at Antioch University, Santa Barbara. He began his writing career on NBC’s award-winning comedy The Cosby Show and went on to write, produce and create comedies for ABC, CBS and The WB. He is the author of the book Create Your Own TV Series for the Internet.

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Show, don’t tell. It’s one of the classic adages about writing. And yet I find many of my students aren’t clear what it means or how to achieve it in their work. Does it mean writing more description? Am I supposed to throw in gratuitous action scenes?

No. “Showing” means several things. It means actively dramatizing character traits rather than merely writing them in the description of the character or flatly stating the character trait in dialogue. It means using strong, active verbs in your descriptions. It means externalizing the internal, finding a way to give the audience a window into what your characters are thinking and feeling through their actions and the decisions they make, rather than having the character just come out and say what they are thinking – which is boring and anti-dramatic. Let’s take each of these one at a time and look at them in more detail.

Script EXTRA: How to Write Effective Dialogue

Dramatizing character traits.

You can craft artfully worded character descriptions filled with sly humor and provocative language all you want, but you can never escape this fundamental truth: the audience will never get a copy of your script to read. The only way a film can communicate character is through what the characters say, what they do, and what others say about them or do in response to them. And in most cases, what the character does defines them more powerfully than what they say.

Let’s start with an example of action revealing character. In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes (Francis Mc Dormand) is furious that the local police have shown little interest in finding the man who raped and killed her daughter. So she purchases space on three gigantic billboards calling out the local police for their indifference. That is action that reveals character. It says Mildred will not back down; that she will not be silenced. She speaks truth to power, and damn the consequences.

Writer/director Martin McDonagh knows this action vividly reveals the heart of his character and his drama, so he puts it front and center. Mildred could have done other things – taken out ads in the newspaper, marched up and down Main Street with a placard, or gone into the police department to deliver a big speech about how they haven’t heard the last of her. But none of those actions would be as dynamic and memorable (and visual) as the billboards.

Another example: If I mentioned the movie When Harry Met Sally, ninety percent of you would immediately think of the same scene from the movie – the one where Sally fakes an orgasm in the deli. Nora Ephron, the film’s screenwriter, is rightfully considered a master of dialogue. And this scene, like much of the movie, is filled with razor-sharp lines. But none of them is as memorable as Meg Ryan performing that over-the-top, male fantasy of a female orgasm. Action speaks louder than words – that’s a big part of what show don’t tell means.

Strong, active verbs in your scene descriptions.

Verbs are the screenwriter’s best friend. Why? Because they are the action words. They’re the ones that help the reader of a script translate words to visuals and SEE an imaginary movie on the invisible silver screen in their head.

Here’s an example of a perfectly functional – but bland – stage direction:

INT. JOE’S APARTMENT – NIGHT

Joe enters, crosses to the couch and takes a seat. He is exhausted after a long shift at work.

Now let’s replace the weak verbs with strong, active ones:

INT. JOE’S APARTMENT – NIGHT

Joe trudges in, drops his keys on the floor, collapses on the couch.

Better, right? Trudges paints a more vivid picture than enters and crosses. Same for collapses rather than takes a seat. And drops his keys on the floor says he’s too tired to care or make an effort. All of which make He is exhausted after a long shift at work unnecessary as we already get that from the stronger verbs.

Script EXTRA: Voiceover and Subtext in 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Externalizing the internal.

This is the heart of show, don’t tell – finding ways to reveal the internal thoughts and feelings of your characters via action. Let’s examine the final scene of The Big Sick (written by Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani) as an excellent example of show, don’t tell. SPOILER ALERT: I’m about to reveal the ending of the film. But hey, it’s a rom-com, so you already know the ending – they get past the big roadblock in their relationship and end up together. The fun (and the writing challenge) is in how they come together.

In The Big Sick the big roadblock to the relationship is cultural – Kumail is Pakastani, his family expects him to submit to an arranged marriage to a Pakastani girl. He has hidden this from Emily and hidden his love for her from his family. When Emily discovers the truth, she feels betrayed and the relationship teeters on the brink. Kumail apologizes but to no avail. It looks like the relationship is toast, and Kumail moves from Chicago to New York to pursue his stand-up career.

At a purely functional level, what needs to happen next in the story is for Emily to realize that even though she feels betrayed, she and Kumail are in love and truly meant for each other. She must go to New York and tell him this so they can live happily ever after. The writing problem is that a big wordy speech where Emily says all these thoughts is clumsy and boring – and bad writing. So how can you possibly say all these things through action and subtext rather than on the nose dialogue?

Gordon and Nanjiani deliver an ingenuous solution to the problem. Emily shows up in NYC and interrupts Kumail’s stand-up act with an enthusiastic “Woo-hoo!” – just as she did when they first met in a Chicago comedy club. She insists she isn’t heckling, just complimenting him. Here’s the rest of the scene:

KUMAIL

Well see that's a common misconception.

Heckling doesn't have to be negative.

EMILY

So if I was like, oh my god, you're

amazing in bed! That would be a heckle?

KUMAIL

Yeah, and now you're getting more laughs

than me, and I don't like that. Do you

want to come up, do my job? Are you from

out of town, m'am?

EMILY

Chicago.

KUMAIL

Ooh, Windy City. And what brings you to

New York?

EMILY

I’m here to see someone.

KUMAIL

And have you seen him? Or her, I mean

I don’t know what your deal is.

EMILY

Yeah, I've seen him.

They smile at each other.

THE END

That, my friends, is show, don’t tell.

We know she forgives him. She came to New York and found him.

We know she loves him. She remembers the moment they met as fondly as he does.

We know they will live happily ever after. Yeah, I’ve seen him and all it implies says that.

Emily doesn’t tell him she loves him. She shows him that. The scene dramatizes that, and does so elegantly. No, it’s not an “action” scene in the shoot-em-up sense. But the action Emily takes – going to New York and seeking out Kumail – speaks louder than any big speech could.

Show, don’t tell. Or to put it another way (in well-deserved caps):

DRAMATIZE, DON’T EXPLAIN