10 Tips On Writing Better Dialogue

Daniel Calvisi, history analyst, screenwriter, author: In PULP FICTION There is a moment where Bruce Willis' character goes to buy some cigarettes and he says to the bartender, it says 1 package of red apples and the bartender says filters and he says none. And that's just There's a really cool, quick, interesting exchange instead of 5 lines to explain what brand of cigarettes he wants and Oh, you know what? What if there are no filters on those cigarettes? You know, because it's a very Noirish feel, it's very, you know, cropped and dark and tight, and it just has no filters and that just gets the idea across.

Jeffrey Davis, screenwriter/author: That's what Claude Rains in Casablanca says to Bogart. He says what brought you to Casablanca and Bogart says the waters and And it's a desert And Booker says something like I was wrong I was misinformed I was missing Which is a great

dialogue

, just a great

dialogue

Music, it's music. You know, what's the difference between Speak like we're doing here. Author/screenwriter, Peter Desberg: Except interesting dialogue. good

writing

a good script attention-grabbing scripts have an extraordinary ability to engage the reader, and that's usually through really clever dialogue. The biggest problem with dialogue is that writers often make it carry the burden of the story when what you want to do is you.

If you want to tell the story visually, we are screenwriters, not speakers. There's a reason for that, so you want to tell the story visually and use the dialogue as icing on the cake once the dialogue doesn't have that it doesn't have. the burden of telling the whole story. Dialogue can be fun. I mean, it still gives us parts of the story, but not the whole story. So, you know, if you watch a movie and you watch a great movie, often the great movies have so many things that don't have dialogue, they're the ones that I think it was Billy Wilder who did this and the story is Billy Wilder, who was.

A great German screenwriter came to America when the Nazis took over Germany and slept with Peter. Laurie's Couch, like a lot of screenwriters, Quentin Tarantino was sleeping on Scotty Spiegel's couch and Scotty Spiegel got him a

writing

job so he could get him off the couch, so Peter Lorre wanted to get Billy off his couch and got him hooked. , but he went to Paramount Pictures and they pitched him as the best visual storytelling writer. So they had a scene and I want to say it's in Dodsworth, but I could be wrong when it was a 10 page scene where a husband and wife have an argument. and through the plot we discover that their relationship is no longer romantic or emotional in any way, they are just two people living in the same house.

So there's 10 pages of dialogue and they had to cut it and Billy Wilder turned around. that in a half-page scene And the half-page scene was husband and wife in the elevator of their building The husbands were wearing their hats The wife had a purse pressed to her chest The doors open A pretty woman gets into the elevator The husband gets he takes off his hat and smiles at her, you know, and the wife basically takes a step away from the husband, that scene pretty much gives us all the information that the emotion has disappeared from this relationship without all that dialogue, so we always have to look for the scene that can demonstrate what is happening. the story instead of telling us through the dial.

That doesn't mean you have to get rid of the dialogue, but it does mean that the dialogue can now be something more, now you can have fun. The first thing you need to understand about dialogue is that it has to be connected to the character's line of desire in the scene. In other words, if the character has a goal, her intention in the scene, the dialogue has to match that intention and what I see a lot of times, especially with exposition and information, is that a character is saying Everything. that information and you can say that is really the writer's goal, in other words the writer once wants the audience to know this information because he thinks okay the audience needs to know this and this and this and this for the characters to say this in this. on this list and that doesn't work because scenes and dialogue are about a character's intention in the scene, everything a character says matches what that desire line is.

So anything that doesn't belong to that doesn't fit and can be said. If it is the writer who wants that information, if it is part of the character, if it is part of the character. A good trick is to try to keep sentences as short as possible. Which forces you to write hard, eh? Fashion, that's something I guess I learned from my journalist father. Although, honestly, I tend to break that rule a lot. So I'm probably a bit of a hypocrite because writers constantly have one great line at the end of a scene, but then they add a couple more lines in there, in safety lines, they call them.

So we instantly crossed them out because they already had a great line. That's the end of the scene. And yes, not everything has been completely resolved, but that's what adds energy when you cut, that you're pouring energy into the story, when you leave it there, you're sucking energy out of the story because the audience is bored with it. The last two lines and Going or do we need that? I was, I'm out of this, you know, you had me at a low point, you know, you don't need that opening sentence, you know, you're saying the same thing on repeat within two lines, you know. , being really concise to the point of having or overriding where the characters say something and you could say it would be

better

if they just had a reaction, you know.

He always tries to err on the side of letting the actors act and emote instead. to say something, you know, if you see someone's eyes 60 feet away on the screen, that will say a lot more than a line of dialogue. You know, so you cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, they say you cut the dialogue and then you cut it 20% more than that. You say, oh, lean, and no one wants to do it, but I've read scripts that read like a play and you say, That's not it, that's not what it is or each director's scenes. I've worked with saying, give me something to film where the scene is just flat and two people sitting.

Quentin Tarantino can do it with interesting dialogue with ten pages of dialogue. But two characters sitting in the dinner scene. You know the directors I worked with. with that they hate him. They are lazy. What are we doing? It's just that this, this, this, you know, and also the food would spoil. You know, it takes a long time to film it. You know there's an old rule that says you enter a scene as late as possible and exit it as early. as much as possible and make sure you get to the main point of that scene and if you keep that in mind, that will also tend to focus your Dialogue to the point on what is happening, you know that less is always more.

You know what I mean? ? And I've always found that and you find that the producer I worked with caught the repetition and the dialogue and I didn't even see it and said, you're saying the same thing here again. We do not need it. I'm like, oh my God, you're right, and he's a big anti-repeat, you know. Producer and he'd never had that before. A producer like that would point out those details like, oh you. You're right, now I have a bad habit of not even seeing it. And now I'm very conscious of that when I work with him and in general, you know, we only have so much screen time and so many pages and if you don't like limitations, then write a novel.

You can do whatever you want, but if you like the script format, you know you have to have these dense scenes with subtext, but not go on for six and eight pages, you know, there's a rhythm to it. You have a feeling like when you start reading, that the scripts are overwritten and you know that everything is described in the writers. You're so afraid of letting go that your vision or his ideas won't be reflected on the page. Well, once they take that. script and do it. Yes, but you want to. You know that your imprint is the script.

So you know that all these other little details won't help when it's overwritten. By listening to how real people talk. It doesn't mean you're transcribing it exactly. You know, people don't talk like they're in a movie. But there's a certain amount of dramatic license that you have to use but you can write cinematically, you know, you can write theatrically. your characters are on stage and that can reflect on the page and that can really hurt your script. I mean, what I do is I tend to be the hero that you meet in the first Sharknado. I didn't know Ziering was going to play Fin.

So that character was just me. What would I do if I was thrown into this crazy situation? And then I write as my ideal self. What would I like to say? In that situation, what would I like to do? You know, because in everyday life we ​​all have those moments when someone says something to us, and we just walk away and don't know what to say and then ten minutes later you come up with what you should have said to that person and the good thing. of writing a script is that you can wait ten minutes until you figure it out and then write it down to write a good line of dialogue.

Sometimes it takes me three weeks and then ten drafts later, I'm still tweaking that. Think about it while you're having a fight with your friend and then you sit there in the shower, repeating that and you keep showing up. . I should have said that's what movies are like and the writer got the perfect answer. So you have this perfect back and forth exchange that real life never has, if ever, if people in real life talk like they do in movies. These will be crazy people. You know, but in the movies, it's okay. It is what is expected.

What we know in the narrative is that the idea of ​​everything being perfected to be entertaining, is compelling, and is a feast. It's a story, it's a feast instead of just running through the refrigerator, opening the door and grabbing some things. That's real life. Some of the keys to good dialogue people now want to have dialogue that sounds natural. The problem with natural sounding dialogue is if you were I once took a class where they told me to record people in nature. So I went to a mall and recorded people and the most interesting thing I got was a guy who was talking completely between burps.

And you can understand it, but what? it happens in war in nature humans in nature when we talk we talk and we talk And we talk and we never get to the point and that's a problem in real life real dialogue never seems to get anywhere So what we don't want is real dialogue We want something that looks like real dialogue and that means we're going to create something to make it sound real. One of the ways to do this is to have the characters misunderstand each other because bad dialogue in movies is when each character knows exactly what.

The other character is thinking when he says that in real life we ​​don't know what the other character is saying. So if you say I'm fed up with your job. I'm sick of you working at your job. We may hear I'm sick of you and respond that sometimes we have our answer before the end of the sentence, so misunderstandings happen in real dialogue and we create it. I have a USA Network movie called Hard Evidence that is only memorable because it was released on video after being shown on USA Network a million times on the same day as a Julia Roberts movie called Something to Talk About, both came out of Warner Brothers and my movie.

I rented it domestically and I have no idea why, except that I also saw the Julie Roberts movie. It wasn't that good, but one of the things that happens in that script is about a guy who's cheating on his wife, and while he's cheating on his wife, his lover says she sells medical supplies, but what she really is is a courier. drugs and in the course of the story He asked her to bring the gun to meet him because she usually goes to her boss and doesn't Don't worry. My boss has been there a million times.

Although he stays in the pocket he never comes out. They go to meet to make the exchange and the guy they know pulls out a badge and says I'm with the DEA. You're arrested and she says she shoots him and he's going to shoot her. I can't shoot him and her. And basically she says he's just complaining to the district attorney. It's not a real shooting and eventually she helps the husband shoot the man and then the husband has to go home to his wife and pretend that nothing happened and that he's not just covering for the mistress.

Now the mistress and the murder are coming, well the wife thinks the husband is acting strange and decides to follow him and follows him while he goes to meet his mistress because he is scared by this whole thing. He goes to talk to the mistress about this because she is only when he can talk to him he can't talk to his wife so the wife sees the mistress puts two and two together and confronts the husband and says, you know, I know you're asleep in She confronts her husband and says I know what you did. He says: So she is that you are sleeping with this woman.

He says, oh you know, she's just the lover and she basically says, you know, you're going to sleep on the couch from now on or you know we're going to break up. Then he falls and they fight. He falls asleep during the argument, he was the one who cheated, so he is sleeping on the couch and the wife comes in one morning while he is in the kitchen and says this is after a period of time has passed and saysthat the sofa cannot be too much. comfortable What does he think he means? He thinks she means.

You can go back up to the bedroom. Then he says: Are you saying I can go back up to the bedroom? That's the misunderstanding of him. She says no, I will call my lawyer. We're getting divorced. You had to get out of here at sunset, so by creating that misunderstanding it seems real, so think about how to create misunderstandings where a character hears different things or hears what they want to hear and then responds to what they want to hear and then gets the twist there is reality, so now you can play the dialogue, you know.

When you, when you're not carrying the burden of the story, the dialogue can play, the dialogue can go off in tangent places. Characters can say funnier things. A lot of that is said in everything. There's always what you know, and subtext is very important in your writing, so you're not just what you know, it's not just what you know, it's not just The dialogue has some depth to it and what exactly they What they They say it's not necessarily what they mean, you know. They're saying that A really means B because they're there, their intention is to see, you know.

There's that, so there are different layers to the dialogue and sometimes, honestly, you don't. I don't know any of that until you write it down and until you look back and say wow. That was kind of interesting or that speech didn't really go in the direction I thought and yet it's an interesting twist. You know, but you try to make it real, you try to make it the way real people interact in real situations. If so, it's certainly that kind of movie. You can learn a lot about how people talk just by listening, like listening in coffee shops, how people talk and stuff like that.

People are rarely very self-reflective. People rarely say exactly what they mean. People rarely speak in complete sentences, so knowing the words we choose when you think about when you're going to say something, there are probably hundreds of different ways. It might occur to you to say why do you choose the particular way you do and when did you start thinking like that? And why is he your character? Choosing to say something that way and what they really don't want to reveal, like why they will go that far. But they won't become a little more vulnerable. When you understand that about your character, then I think writing dialogue becomes easier.

But first you have to put that thought process into it to know what they want to hide and what. they want to give I think and then you can start working with the subtext and all that kind of stuff that makes all that flavor come out as generated subtext probably in two ways, one is if this theme of your scene is Why? Are you cheating on me as they sometimes say with Hard and Carol? You make them talk about anything but that in such a harsh way and in such a harsh context and Carol talks about her marriage while she is in the other room and hears things that you do it that way.

You get off the point of a conversation. You have a conversation about how hard it is to fix the damn pipes or whatever. But you do it to make your point very clear, which is, damn it. This is this is wrong This is all wrong and backwards Which is actually one of my favorite ways is to simply describe behavior in a certain context So Carolyn Torres riding in a car What are you looking at? What are you doing? What is this? What is really happening? And none of this has anything to do with Why don't I know the camera angles or anything like that?

It is simply about what is happening, which is the basis of all drama, whether a script or a play. How people inhabit a space at a given time. That's all. . It seems almost ridiculously simple or easy, but it rarely makes it to a screen intact in the way that this is greatly enhanced by I's own sin and the performances and everyone in every department simply working to preserve a fundamental truth about a part. of material Ultimately, this is about a character who wants something, right? Each story is about a character who wants something and then faces a conflict to get it, whether they get it or not.

So when they want something, they have a desire. That desire is expressed through the subtext if I want this glass of water. I'm going to take action, right? So the subtext is that you can infer that I'm thirsty or that I'm looking for some kind of physical distraction to keep my hands busy or something. And swallowing is part of it, I'm also sure that maybe I'm about to face it. You're onto something. Yeah, you know, either I'm your boss, or you know, whatever. I'm an ex-girlfriend. There are so many things and whatever you like, you know, yeah exactly.

She will tell me: A lot of that has to do with interpretation. We are guessing what a character wants from the behaviors. They are exhibiting that right now the context is simply the correct worldview of the situation they are dealing with. So we're sitting in a room right now. We all have different goals and so when the character and the context are literally like the plate you're serving everything on, I compare it visually, he came up with the Creme brulee metaphor, just use an image. metaphor where you have the plate as the context and then you have the brulee or the cream, the cream as the subtext and then the top layer that is burnt and charred is the text.

Oh, that's great. So the idea is basically that what we're seeing are words. Right, and those words are often in complete contradiction to the actual intention, but somehow we interpret them as a type of behavior. So most of the time, like for example, it's part of the reason why when I write. The last thing I do is write dialogues. That was another thing I learned from the wrong media. Do you want to be able to do it? Well, do what you want, but I like to have the characters' intentions very clear and the conflict they will face very clear.

What we're constantly trying to do is there's a book called character and point of view where it talks about how essentially you know, we're all like chimpanzees in the wild and when they're in the jungle, and they feel like there's a threat, they run away and the first thing they do is They do as soon as they feel safe. The first thing they do is stop, turn around, see where the source of the danger is, that's when they are fully engaged. The whole chimpanzee metaphor is basically that we are trying to interpret the intent of the things around us.

So we're, we're projecting what we think that person wants, by the way, is behaving. So, we're trying to determine if he's a threat or if he's safe, if he's one for us or against us, that kind of thing. So ultimately what we're going for with dialogue is that we're trying to see if we can believe them and the most interesting characters are completely unaware of what's really driving them. You know, like the whole time they're like Indiana Jones is going through all these ridiculous obstacles. Actually, it's not like that all the time. We wonder why he faces these Nazis?

Why is he dragged by a chair? Just to like something and turn it into a museum. Ultimately, he really has this, you know, stuff that depends on how deep you want to go with Indiana Jones, but he has this kind of drive. It's really emotionally disturbing for him that there's some betrayal, some twisting of the truth and that's what's interesting, is the whole time he makes all these really bold decisions. You think he's some kind of sarcastic, glib professor, but what he's really doing is trying to unearth the truth and he's trying like he's literally putting his body under all his brutality because he wants the truth to be revealed and you already know that and all. choice, you know this because every choice, whether he admits it or not, has led him to expose the truth for what it is.

The other thing about good dialogue is that it beats around the bush, no one comes out and says something instead what they do is imply things and that ends up being subtext and the subtext is Dialogue plus action. It's never just dialogue, usually dialogue plus action, so if I'm sitting in a movie theater seat and it's ice, then my line of dialogue is: Can I sit here? Alright? If I sit here, that line of dialogue changes meaning if it's a gigantic, you know, ex-con with tattoos all over it or if it's an attractive member of the opposite sex, but the same line of dialogue has two different meanings because of the situation and one of the things you want to do is Again, that's the dialogue, it doesn't take the story there.

It's part of the visual and part of the verbal part of a movie, but the characters often hint at two things. I never come out and say them directly and That's a good dialogue too because if you think about the characters the way I like to think about it, it's a first date, you're on a first date. You're not going to ask right away. So you were once married, instead you got divorced. What are you doing? I mean well, you know, how do you feel? You know something that seems neutral and is the neutral way to get the information.

You ask questions like you've never asked before. So what do you think about equal rights and responsibilities? When really what you want to ask is that you just ordered this lobster dish. My credit card is going to ring if you could be Dutch, you know, you kind of imply things and that's how people really talk or at least that's what seems real in the movie, like the characters don't come out and say things if they give clues and that again comes once they go around, the audience knows or doesn't know what the Reality is and then we have either of the diseases.

We are learning information about how they respond to cues or we already know information that we are going to try to hide this information. We all have our hidden agendas. No matter what it is, whether we're on a first date or a hidden agenda, we're learning everything we can about that other person to find out if there will be a second date, so we're always trying to feel out the situation. It's kind of an attempt to find the neutral question that gives us the information, if possible. Therefore, a direct question may not occur to us. We will find the indirect way to find that information.

That's like an element of subtext. Take a simple line. Forward. Drink it, right? So go ahead and drink it, it's the text. Well, we can add a different subtext to it. So if I say Drink it, there's a different subtext, I'm sure it might threaten you, right? I say, go ahead and drink it well. I'm saying I don't really care what you do if I say, go ahead, fuck it, drink it well. I change the text a little, but the subtext is totally different. Now, that's text and not subtext context. We're sitting on a bus, I'm holding a gun.

This is a clumsy way. I'm holding a gun and you're holding poison, and I'm holding your son. So now the context is extremely loaded and the choice you're about to make is implicit and what I'm saying is if you don't drink that, I'm going to shoot your baby. So I say, go ahead and drink it. Do you see the context in which this story is located? The context is a situation you are dealing with. We can find a much

better

one. That's just what comes to mind, but the idea is that basically the text is the Ironically, because writers tend to overemphasize the dialogue, the text tends to take on too much importance.

The most important thing is the context and the subtext because the subtext is the intention, the context is the conflict that you are dealing with, the situation that you are trying to address, so if we are in space and we fly to the Moon and we know that I don't know the gravity. come on if we fly to the moon and we know this is the only thing that's going to save us is this little serum and it could boil our blood or it could save our lives and we've just given up and we've been through this whole journey and we were about to open the hatch and said: go ahead, take it then.

We open the hatch Completely change the entire context So that the context is about the situation you are dealing with the subtext is the intention the texts are just the artifacts It is an expression of that desire Find the voice of the character, you know One of the mistakes most common What screenwriters do is make all the characters sound exactly the same. Well, you want each character to sound unique, ideally if you covered the character's name and read the line, you could tell it was that one. Specific character because they must have a specific voice. Another thing about dialogue is thinking about how dialogue is character-based, everything comes from the characters and if you take a different group of people and ask them to say things, they will say them in different ways and one of the things I always use As an example, I write a lot in Starbucks coffee shops, where all the baristas are dressed the same?

They all have the same basic dialogue. What will be room for cream, etc? But everyone is an individual and the spin they put on it, their attitude is reflected in the way they say things, so there is a barista at one of my Starbucks who puts a positive spin on everything. So if you come and say I lost my job today, she'll tell you great, you can spend more time with your family, no matter how bad your life is. She puts a positive spin on everything and she is so optimistic andI'm glad I just want to kill her, but that's her spin.

There is a barista who is all about himself, so if you come and say "I want you to know", the tea with two shots of melon, he says that the melons are not very good. I like berry syrup more, berry syrups with this drink and it's like how Howard has this become about you? No matter what you say, he makes it his story. And then there they are carry These are these Opie all these people have the same dialogue the same basic dialogue, but how do they say it Well, they are twists that they put on it Shows their character through you know The same basic dialogue but the twist on it and so on who thinks about the character, thinks about the dialogue as an extension of the character and how we are going to learn about that character through him.

However, they say they are, you know, the generic line is this, now our job as writers is to take the generic line. and do the specifics of the character's line. You know, this character thinks this, this character thinks everything is sexual, if you know what I mean, you know, and there's that barista that does that, there's the barista that you know. It doesn't matter what you are, the opposite of pepper, you know, whatever, it doesn't matter what you do. It's always a terrible day for them. There's the barista who thinks everyone's out to get them. He is the paranoid barista.

He's like, you know, you know, why are you asking if we have you know? And it's like these are all different characters and they basically come about through the same dialogues set up in different ways. So think about how the character emerges through dialogue and that makes him individual and interesting. You know, instead of saying the normal line. , now we have a little twist in the line. What makes it a better line of dialogue? Hopefully you've created a character that's unique enough or a character with a strong enough sense of who they are or what they are.

You know how you would describe that character and what his journey will be. The emotional journey will be that of words. in a way, they don't necessarily write themselves, but it's like the track that the train runs on, so, you know, you know, the characters above you know where they're going to go, you know. what they're doing, right? You know what they're doing wrong and what you want them to be and how they talk should match the core of who they are, if you catch the note that all your characters sound the same, first of all, take a look. the attitude, the other things you should look at are things like the characters' vocabulary because you don't want all your characters to have the same vocabulary as you.

Each character has different words for things. Common words are the main thing you should look at. the character says yes, no I get all the words that appear over and over again wrong and you need to find the individual way for each character to say things. So one character might say no, another character might say no. No, sir, and these things are relating to the character. You look at the character and how would this character say? No, and what I usually do is generate a list of yes, you know Truffaut, any word will come back and then I find the one that is that character and that's it.

He says it this way. This also produces bad words. Can I curse in this? Oh, you might be awesome, so swear words are one of those things I discovered that my favorite bad word is shit. Because I wrote a script and then when I was reading it, I discovered that when something goes wrong with one of my characters. They open their mouths and shit comes out. And then I thought that's not possible. Not everyone can beat me. So what I wanted to do is individualize his bad words. So I went through the script and found different ways to curse and each character had their own distinctive curse and when I came up with the name of one of the characters.

It was Carter. I came up with "Kitty Crap." That's just kiddie nonsense. And when I used Kitty Crap, I was, this now changes that character into something even better than what she was. So I went back and turned him into a surfer. Dude, and now I turned him into a southern surfer, dude, something I don't think I've ever seen on screen. And now he has weird lines that are like, you know, homely lines and surfer language at the same time, so I thought that makes us a totally individual character. But word choice is one of those things where everyone has their own different vocabulary.

And that's going to come out, another thing about the Dialogue is that we all speak differently, there are characters that you know that put in a word like, you know every few words, you know, and Like I don't know, and those things that use it with moderation, but still creates a different rhythm for that character. If you look at Yoda, Yoda has the most messed up sentence structure of all time because he talks backwards, but he talks backwards and you know there are memes that are like Yoda memes that have like Yoda's talk backwards and that's a So distinctive kind of dialogue if you can create a dialogue like that.

There will be people who will write those things and you will know right away that it's Yoda and that's what you want to do is basically come. Create a dialogue that has some sort of sentence structure. Using favorite words like "like" or "you know" or whatever, different vocabulary for common words and also different vocabulary, maybe education has differences. One of the things I love about Elmore Leonard's novels is he takes guys who have spent a lot of time in prison and read in prison. So they have vocabularies that are much better than any police officer's because they've had a lot of time to do some reading.

So you have these characters that have incredible vocabularies that are criminals, which makes them interesting characters. But it makes sense because you know a lot of prison time to read, so again. Their vocabularies are better than cops', which I love when you read in Elmore Leonard. In the novel, when addressing a character, the description part is written in that character's voice. So you just jump to that character and you're already seeing the world through that character's eyes before we get to them talking and it's already in his voice. I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's cool.

If you watched Justified, there's a great example of an educated criminal because that guy you know is the smartest, the smartest, the smartest, a criminal, you know, but he's. He's smart. He's smart. He can talk to people with his amazing vocabulary, which is better than mine, which is something else when you're the writer. You don't have to know, all these words. You just have to know how to look for them. I like to talk a lot about contrast. So we have two characters in the scene. It's always more interesting if the characters are contrasted. So if a character speaks in a formal way, for example, someone was an academic, a professor or a doctor, a good piece in a formal way, make sure the person you are interacting with speaks in a more slangy way or in a more contracted way because that's what you're going to do, you're going to create that contrast.

You know, like in painting, if you want to highlight the color blue, you surround it with yellow, right? It `s the opposite. So it's the same with the characters. Many of the techniques in the dialogue chapter of the book deal with individuality. How are individual voices created? Because making all the characters sound the same is a very common problem with dialogue, it's usually the writers. voice and you know, and you know Sorkin has actually been criticized for that thing about all of these characters sounding the same. But you know, when I talk about his dialogue and show actual clips and scripts, you can show that you know he really individualizes. and the characters sound different, so it's an unfair criticism, but you have to do that, you know it helps if there is any, you know the difference in the characters' speech or the cadence or the contractions versus You know, stilted writing, grammatically training Right, I think what you always want to look for as a writer is whether you have two or more characters in the scene.

Do you want to create a situation where they want opposite things either or? Because otherwise, there's no conflict or one way to look at it is that every scene is a power grab. Everyone wants to take control of the situation in what that means for them. And then how are they? Sort of secretly jockeying for position, you know, like he and I like which one of us. We are all worried. We worry about which of us seems smarter. See that's what this whole interview has been about and the other thing you said about the character's desires?

I was thinking I know you said there's a lot more than two. But as a writer I would think of two more. Also, what were the two you said? What the character knows well is that the two objectives are different. Yes. Basically, what I told Michael is what I call the public objective. In other words, if I were to ask someone in this room right now, what are you doing here? What do you want? What is your goal right now? We could talk about what we are doing this interview. That is our public objective. Then underneath is a private target that may not even be recognized.

Well, yes, that's what I was, it may be in the unconscious. What does it drive? That character should try to do well and, in a way, I would see it. It is not the same as a desire to ask: What is the character hiding from the other person? Consciously. What is she hiding from him? And what is she hiding from herself? What is it that she is not yet aware of that is really driving her? You know deep down, especially in the first half or 3/4 of the movie, towards the end, you were hoping that all of that would come to the surface, but the deception and the secrecy are very, very powerful in telling a story.

Because they add a whole new layer of conflict, they go into this internal journey. And the more conflict there is in more layers, the more you will attract your audience. That's good, I like hiding it. I see why I liked that. Yes, there is the subconscious or the unconscious or, you know, the unknowing, but concealment and deception are secrets. Brilliant. I'm going to steal that. Can I steal the? Oh sure. I'll get yours. Thanks No, you can still use it. I mean I have to take it forever. Okay, do you want to share it? You don't want to steal it.

No, I'm not staying. Yeah, I'm not going to make it clear that my job is to look better. I'll give you credit for it. Well ok. Well, because we know that my stated goal is to appear smarter, I think so and I'm not trying, but I'm trying to help you. Thank you. I'll help you think you're winning. Thank you. Let's go. That was great. Let's move on. A lot of writers don't realize that you know, they're so interested in the story. And you know, how can I do that? You know you shouldn't finish it. Instead of thinking about how this person would express themselves in this situation to make me feel like I'm a part of this scene.

To be able to put myself in his shoes and feel what he's doing through the In words, I would just add that that's what writing is for because if in a draft you're going to focus on the story and then maybe when you have the story you're going to look at the choice of words and another draft and then You're going to look at the dialogue and you know how to really polish the dialogue in general, you write a script, you hand it in, you get notes and then the notes come with dialogue problems. I don't understand this line.

This isn't any more fun. I love that line. This works. You do not know? Could you add a little to it and give it a little twist? That's duplicate. You know, that kind of thing, but it's very useful and it's like looking at the scripts. It's just a big lump of clay that you know, you're constantly molding and shaping and you know it's like moving around and trying to find the shape. And until you have your you know, the piece of pottery that you're trying to make. You know, there's a lot of them, a lot of changes, you know, they always say that the writing is being rewritten, you And that's what you really know, and that's very important.

You know, I'm a big believer in rewriting. I'm fine with rewriting as long as it makes sense and it's not just to do it because you make things better. You can't get it all at once. At least I can know that you have to write and rewrite and really work on it and let yourself think about it and take some distance from the Material, you know, so that you can look at it with your own new eyes and you'll have a much better idea of ​​what works and what not. One of the best questions you can ask yourself for every line of dialogue in your scene.

So write the first draft of the dialogue. just do what you want to do. Don't worry about it, but when you reread the dialogue, ask yourself about each line. Why does that character say this? Why does the character say that specific line? Most of the time it will be because they are responding to something, so they are reacting to something. That's fine, but a lot of times you'll find that a character says something because you want the character to say it, not because the character. Something in let's see at another specific time. So you have to know what the character wants and then each line of dialogue is a strategy for that character to get what she wants and if that dialogue is not that, then you rewrite the line until it fits.

In the '70s and '80s you talk differently in the '90s and in the lows, you know, I'm serious, it's over. The four days of the 50. It's all very different, but the basic community of communication, you know how to have clear and interesting wordsthat get you to a particular point, that's always what you know, that's the way to get there. It's been a little different writing anything. I have written. That interested me. I wrote a Christmas movie for Hallmark a few years ago and there were flashbacks to the 1920s and I had dialogue written that seemed more like for the 1920s and it was just cadence, you know, it was just being a little more formal.

You know, a little more on the nose, maybe with some of the things that were said and it was okay. You know, and it's just I think it worked You know, I mean, it wasn't about using, it's using, going back and saying now what word did they use in the 1920s for, you know, automobile, you know, it was something , I mean, it wasn't that it was just a feeling, it was a texture in the words, so it can be a lot of fun. You know, because we don't know exactly how people talked. I mean, yeah, we have movies from that era and we can watch, but we're.

Still filtering those things through a contemporary lens, so it won't be like it was back then. Do you want people to be able to relate to it and understand it as a guy with gray hair? You know, one of the common problems is that my vocabulary is different from today, you know vocabulary from 15 to 25 years ago and part of that is that you have to stay a little bit updated on what's happening in the world and you know. listen to the slang, there are two theories about slang and one is basically keeping up with how people talk, whether it's going to the mall with your two people going to a mall.

That's probably already dated there So, but anyway go wherever the young people go to your skate park. You know, record people and find out what the slang is or the other way to do it is the clueless version where you create your own slang because that way you do create slang. for today for the youth of today So that movie slang doesn't work for the youth of tomorrow they are jeepers, you know It's like, you know, it doesn't work but without a clue they decided what they were going to take, they were going to create their own slang so that it would be Although it doesn't really work because it's totally Baldwin, it has no meaning now.

But they basically created their own lingo for that movie and created their own slang. They came up with something we hadn't heard before, which also made the dialogue more interesting, but really, if you're a writer and you're writing for today's audience. You have to still know what today's audience sounds like and that takes care of the stories too. Just the story concepts because you know, it's like I know a writer my age who still writes movies for Julie Andrews and that's never going to happen. You know, it's like you can write, you can write for the past in the past unless you have a time machine.

You can't sell that script for me. I grew up watching '70s movies and gritty '70s movies are great, but I don't have a time machine. I can't go if I wrote one. I can't really go back and sell it. So although I could still write one of those just for my personal use. You know, those are tough sales. They are for everyone. So it shows up and I think part of it ends up there based on a novel, so you lose it, you kill me softly, what the hell is it called? Do you know there is a Brad Pitt movie?

All my memories are gone, but there's like a seventh, there was a recent movie from the '70s. Somehow it was made today and it was a crime movie. It was totally a gritty feel to it, you know. Same kind of '70s feel, but they're so few and far between. Writing in the wrong time period is a mistake. Good dialogue writers also have very good ears and are listening. The way people talk and remember those kinds of things, hear things, write things, write expressions. Like my God. What a great expression. What does that mean? I'm going to take that, you know, or is it just the dynamic between people, you know, types of relationships Who's talking to who in the supermarket listening to a couple arguing or?

Or being too nice to each other or whatever. You know, it's fascinating. I'm always writing things listening to how people talk. Listening to interesting people about how they talk and then once you write your dialogue, read it out loud, you know, read a table with friends or with your writing group, or even if you read. do it yourself out loud Listening to readings I think readings are incredibly valuable workshops And movies and TV should be made the same way Actors aren't shy about telling you what doesn't work for them. Just like singers have no qualms about telling a composer, Hey, you know, when it comes down to it, the words don't go, they don't go with the notes.

Kind of a simple answer to your question is to read your dialogue out loud. Yes, very good point. And I don't know, you can start using a world that doesn't roll off my tongue very easily. I don't think I want to ask someone to say that you know when composers compose and you write for an orchestra. and you don't know how to play the horn and you can't play the oboe and quite often after you've finished it. You have people who play the parts and they say it can't be played. You can't play it that way and they have to go back and change their parts.

Because they are not writing for that instrument at this moment where we are reading. the work We could be directors dividing the work into accounts and sections and we are really focusing on ourselves after we have read it all together. Now we are focusing on the individual words and to see exactly what is working. And you know, what words really don't make sense. So what did you have in mind that actresses don't necessarily feel or understand or don't know how to say it or the director doesn't? Sure and that's an amazing process. You know, it's like a fantastic process.

So being able to perfect the words is a little weird, you know, man, it's just a table read of your script before something happens, which doesn't always happen, it's actually very useful. You have to listen to other voices than those in your head. You know, you have to hear them say the words. Let the actors read them aloud. I mean, they don't have to be professional actors, just you and a friend read them. aloud. Listen to how it flows. I think it can be really useful. People think, for example, that objectivity exists in the world, but that is not the case.

If three people walked into this room, would they all see the same thing? They are the chairs, the carpet, the desk. If an interior designer walked into this room, he would feel nauseous. If a carpenter came in, he would look at the plumb shelves. If a psychologist came in, he would look at the titles of the articles. books and if a chiropractor came in, they would be looking at our posture and saying I see money coming towards me hunched over but the eye doesn't tell the brain what it sees, the brain tells the eyes what to look for and then they didn't know and that's why they Actors constantly watch when they see some extreme behavior.

They are paying attention to the smallest things. You know, it's not just that he raises his voice, but what does he do with his hands while he does it? How do you change this posture? I'll use that and So, same thing again, good writers when they hear people talk they say, did that person become speechless when she got really angry or did this whole series of things? She just rolls off the tongue and does it sound like something she's said many times or is it something that you already know, is she saying it legato or staccato?

You know, it's like she's so mad at you that she might just burst or I'm just that mad at you. Okay, cook, just resale and you all this stuff. They're hearing these things saying wow. Listen to how emotions arise in every person who does things. That's the way I want to write the dialogue. So, you look at what interests you. And if you're a good dialogue writer, you don't just think about the words they're going to say. That's what I've seen in people. do when they are trying to show them when they are showing that emotion How do the words come out pay attention to the world around you? and you know, I see something I see, I see the movie or something on television or whatever and I see the dialogue that Manama speaks, a phenomenal speech, you know, and it's phenomenal. piece of dial, you know, I loved the newsroom there, so I can show the HBO show and, you know, I would literally like to just watch it, play it over and over again through certain sections of that show and the way that The dialogue was built and you know that He is a genius in terms of building dialogues and the word that he has is the one that people use, but you can learn a lot from that, you can be inspired and then put your own voice in that type of things and Again, a lot of writing dialogue is cadence and personality and stuff like that and trying to make the characters sound different, you know, so that not all the characters sound exactly the same, you know.

You give each character their own voice. Which is complicated, it's hard to do, but that's also very important and you have to create a little bit, you have to create the character. You know it below, you know the character who is the one driving the dialogue for that. Even if it's just what you know about a supporting character, someone we don't see much of. But yes, you have to pay attention to what's around you, you know, the best things are outside of reality when you're making very content like a low budget that has a lot to do with it too because a lot of times people are sitting and talking, right? ?

You are in a room. You're in a house or whatever. So they're sitting and talking, but I think making sure the rhythm is good. When people explain too much and don't know how to weave that exposition in a nice way, then it really just sits there. That's not good writing. I think the biggest mistake is explaining too much and not knowing how to channel the background of the story within the story instead of exposing it. Like we've just developed a brilliant script over the last few years where the initial conversation just isn't convincing because there's no other explanation for the words in the conversation other than explaining to the audience what's going on?

And that's a hard mistake to avoid because you know, you have to explain what's going on. But if you do it openly, the audience won't believe the dialogue. They're not going to believe, you know, you can't suspend their disbelief, so you have to introduce these things into the story at the moments when they're necessary and not too much, too soon. One of the common mistakes, the root of the mistake behind that mistake is thinking that the audience is not as smart as them. It's that you belittle your audience. There are ways to make sure exposition and dialogue match the goal, for example, if you know, I'm a murder suspect and you're the detective who asks me the right questions and tells me where you were and I didn't do the murder right. , whatever I'm going to say is My desire to make you think that I didn't commit the murder.

So there's a reason I say that line: I didn't do it. I was in the cinema saying in the cinema position But it is connected with my desire to convince you that I was not the murderer. You see, exposition matches the goal of the character you know, so there are ways to do it by showing it, you know. There are techniques to make sure the exposition is resolved, you know part of a part of the conflict, part of your desire line, etc. There are a lot of things you could do, but that's the lesson you really need to know.

That's the most important thing. Make sure you know what each character is once in the scene. Make sure what they say matches that goal, so I always mention David Mamet, you know, a genius at dialogue and he once said. Nobody says anything unless they want something. So unless you want something, no one says anything because no one is going to say, you know, hey. I am a trustworthy character. Right, I mean, if someone told you that, you're not going to think, wow, why is he telling me this, right? There's always a reason why there's always a reason and if we know what the reason is in the movie, if you know what the character wants or you're trying to figure out what the character wants.

That's more interesting than Someone Leaves the Exposition, you know, the characters would just leave the exposition. It's just boring because it's not connected to a desire line, even characters who don't agree with each other. Although that could be kind of interesting because there's some tension there. If we don't know what they want, it's going to be boring. You see, you see this a lot with amateur scenes of people like oh, I need a conflict. So my characters are just going to argue and then you have people arguing back and forth. But that means nothing. It's okay because we don't know what they want.

That's really what makes something interesting, the intention and the obstacle to direct dialogue can be one of the worst. I like to say sometimes that the dialogue in Talking Heads, where there are just two characters talking to each other, adds to each other and then questions and answers. Sessions are the worst and that's where one character keeps asking another character questions and then they keep answering. So it's almost like an interview and if that goes on too long, it really tires the reader out and they just get what we're looking for. Crips horrible is when the characters tell you everything, for example, if a husband and a wife, let's say a wife She saw her husband having lunch with another woman she didn't know and he comes home from work.

He sayshello darling. How's your day? And if she said what she'd probably say in real life, that's nothing? By that kind of you know, I mean Matthew Waters, a master of subtext. I recommend watching almost any episode of Mad Men, but much less interesting or I could say the husband comes in and says What did you do today? and I was once in a similar situation and didn't say: I saw you with another woman having lunch today. She wanted him to like her, maybe she wanted to catch him in a lie. I said or actually, well, you know, what did she do today?

And she didn't really say anything special? Did you have lunch somewhere interesting? What are you talking about? Maybe one of the things I loved about it is that if you really play along. You can also play with the audience in terms of making them think, Oh yeah, he was having an affair and then we found out he was an interior decorator and he was surprising his wife because he had just bought a little vacation home and he was insured. that or just rent a place in Malibu and he wanted to make sure all these things were special for their anniversary and then what can happen is if she keeps trying him and trying him and she starts bringing up old stuff about how he pisses her off, that scene could end with Him not telling him what the surprise was and the couple deciding that you never trust me You know what?

I was going to do something nice for you and screw you. I want the divorce. I'm just rambling here, and I'm not saying that's it. You know, they are the best scene. But that's an example of when you play with subtext versus characters. They say everything they are thinking. Another example if you take A Streetcar Named Desire with Blanche, Stanley and Stella, and if Blanche said well, I've actually been working as a prostitute and I'm depressed and I don't have anywhere else to live. The game ended as if it wasn't very interesting. So if you think about it in those terms Yes, it really reflects how people are in real life.

People don't always say exactly what they think and feel, you find that when you start writing dialogue, sometimes characters speak differently. So you would expect it to Evolve, you know, and that can be very interesting and sometimes your character changes as a result of your dialogue. But in general, you know you know, it's that we're using our voices. We're using people's voices We know we're using Cadence, we're using regional words, you know, you know, it's a combination of a lot of things, but it does it in a way that it writes itself. You know, you. You're the driver, but you know, it develops.

But again, a dialogue, you know, it's about how you write a natural dialogue. How do you write the way people actually speak and their cadence and their is the simplicity of the words. It's, you know, expressing saying the most, imagining the most ideas and the fewest letters, basically, the fewest words, and to keep everything moving forward. There is something like a bumper sticker. I don't actually call her Pat Patrick Shane Duncan, who wrote Courage Under Fire and Mr. Holland's work he calls it bumper sticker dialogue and what it is is that he wrote it. He did a rewrite job on a Chuck Norris movie and he didn't get a screen credit, but everyone has the bumper sticker that says, if I want your opinion, I beat it out of you and he wrote that line.

So if you come up with those lines, go ahead and make my day, you know, and all those things that will end up on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. Know. That's the gold we're looking for and in the film noir class. What I did from the past just has line after line after line, you could engrave that on a gold bar and it would increase the value and you know, if we can create those lines that are clever and that people remember.