Chapter | nine

Dialog: We Need to Talk

Really, we need to talk, and by “we” I mean “human beings.” We're one of the noisiest species on the planet, endlessly chattering away to each other, to our phones, or just to ourselves. The whole world runs on speech and human interaction. And so does your screenplay.

Screenplay dialog is a strange and special beast. It's just a little sharper, a little edgier, a little more to the point than the way people actually talk. Good dialog walks the razor's edge between cheesy and sincere, simple and clever, too little and too much. But when it works, you might end up creating iconic movie lines that live on in the memory of the audience. “Hasta la vista, baby.” “I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!” “Here's looking at you, kid.”

That's worth a little struggle, don't you think?

Actions speak louder than words. It's a cliché, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Remember Tip #Zero? The aim of the game is to not be boring, and that means being interesting. Action is just inherently more interesting than dialog.

Arguments are interesting, but fights are better. Sexy talk is interesting, but sex is better. Hearing about a fifty-foot-tall, man-eating dinosaur is interesting, but … well, you get the idea. Cinema is an active medium. When people say something was “cinematic,” they mean things were moving, happening, possibly exploding. As much as dialog is integral to film and television, it's not the essence of cinema. Nobody ever called a televised debate “cinematic.”

What this means for you: whenever you have a choice between making your characters act or talk, you should probably choose the action. Ever seen a “soft” act out on a TV show? I can almost guarantee that you have, and I can almost guarantee that it sucked. A soft act out is when the act break (which leads into the commercial break) ends on a line of dialog rather than a piece of action. It's called “soft” because it's weaker than a typical action-based act out.

What the hell am I talking about, you ask? Okay, try this: the act out in question is the revelation that the lead detective's partner has been killed. The strong version of this act out is that the detective finds her partner's body herself – we cut to black on her shock at seeing the body, no dialog necessary. The crappy, soft version is that the chief calls her into his office and says, “I'm sorry, but we found your partner's body” – then cut to black on a relatively weak line of dialog instead of a strong action. The really crappy version is when she gets the news via phone call.

This is why, if you can manage it, all the turning points in the structure of your narrative should be physical actions. What would The Wizard of Oz's Act 1 turning point have looked like if the Yellow Brick Road hadn't existed? Instead of beginning her long walk down the fabled road, Dorothy would have had to shrug and say, “Well, I guess this is the start of our adventure, guys.” If the main characters in The Kids Are Alright had stopped to chat about their blossoming lust for each other, it wouldn't have been a very good midpoint. Instead they jumped into bed together, and that hasty act flipped the entire narrative on its head. And what if ET had just told Elliot he wanted to go home instead of indicating it physically in the legendary “phone home” scene?

When it comes to major moments in your narrative, sometimes words just aren't enough. When the bad guy threatens the heroine, she spits in his face – an action that says more than any reply could. There comes a point in many screen arguments when a slap to the face speaks much louder than a verbal retort. And when the two leads finally kiss in a romantic scene, it's usually because there was nothing else left to say.

But more than just turning points can benefit from upping the action. There's a screenwriting rule, “Always have your characters doing something.” This rule applies to any scene and any character, not just the protagonist in pivotal moments. Not only is minor action more cinematically interesting than static, talking heads, but it's also a free way to indicate character without having to resort to dialog.

I'm not just talking about nodding, pointing, smiling, or other physical punctuation. (In fact, unless it's vital to the story, or necessary for clarity, you probably don't need to be writing that stuff at all. Let the actors do their jobs.) I'm talking about incidental action – something that a character does during a conversation that adds an extra layer of meaning to her words.

Imagine a scene in a diner in which two characters sit and talk in a booth. Who eats and who doesn't, and how they eat, says a whole lot about the subtext of that conversation. What if one character spends the entire conversation playing with his food – building mashed potato houses, pulling the labels off of ketchup bottles, and so on? Depending on the situation, incidental actions like this might indicate that he's bored, anxious, scared, or horny.

How about a soldier who spends every spare moment loading and unloading his weapon (or shaving his face, à la Predator)? A stealthy alcoholic who always seems to be drinking faster than everyone else, pouring herself another glass whenever people aren't looking? The schoolgirl who texts so often it's as if her phone is glued to her hand? These incidental actions either reveal character or help enhance characterization without resorting to dialog.

Even the subtlest of actions can be vital to our understanding of a scene. What does it mean when a boss calls his secretary into a meeting … but just before she arrives, he takes the photo of his wife off his desk? What's implied when a mother lets her drunk ex-husband into her apartment … but quickly moves to physically position herself between her drunk ex and their young daughter?

Actions speak louder than words. It's not just a crappy greeting card slogan; it's also a powerful bit of screenwriting advice.

The protagonist relates a tragic story from her past, the words spilling out of her. The antagonist holds forth about the childhood accident that turned her into the bitter person she is today. The romantic interest confesses that he loves the protagonist, has always loved her, will always love her until the end of time.

Unless you're writing a school play, this kind of dialog sucks. It's boring, obvious, and trite.

In the business, they call this stuff “on-the-nose” dialog. As in punched you on the nose, because that's what bad, groan-worthy dialog does – it jumps out and assaults you. It drags you out of the read and forces you to think about the writing. It kills emotional involvement in the characters. It sucks, plain and simple.

But here's the thing: your first draft is going to be absolutely littered with this crap. On virtually every page, characters will be explaining their backstory, foregrounding the plot, and loudly declaiming their every thought and feeling.

It's important to know that this is not your fault. In screenwriting, as in most things, we try the easy way first, and if that doesn't work we move on to the hard way. Everyone writes lame dialog in the first draft. That's what the first draft is for – to get the crappy version of the dialog out there in plain sight. Seeing on-the-nose dialog for what it is – recognizing that it's obvious, bland, and perfunctory – is the first step in the process of brutally cutting it out.

Yes, cutting it. There's no careful rewriting that can save a truly obvious, unnecessary line. If you can say the same thing with subtext, use subtext instead. Better yet, see if you can achieve the same effect using action instead of dialog. Screenwriter Scott Myers likes to talk about the scene in Sideways where the protagonist and the romantic lead are talking about their favorite wines … except that, no, they're not. “Requires constant care and attention,” “fragile and delicate,” “constantly evolving” – they're actually spilling their guts about how they see themselves. It's a beautiful scene. But what if they had really been talking about themselves, without the “buffer zone” of wine to create some emotional distance? It would have been awkward, simplistic, and on-the-nose.

The hardest on-the-nose lines to change are those that you feel like the character has really earned it – really gotten to that point where they should be able to declare their feelings frankly. For example, in a romance or romantic comedy, when the entire story has been leading up to some ultimate expression of love … well, then, you should probably let the characters express it. Right?

Or not. Check out the final scene of When Harry Met Sally. Harry sprints to the New Year's Eve party and gets there just in time to profess his love for Sally, but she rejects him. She doesn't believe a word he says. So Harry throws it back at her, angrily listing all the things he loves about her, as if trying to win a competition. The scene ends with Sally repeating, “I hate you, Harry; I hate you” and then they kiss. It's actually the triumphal moment of the film – the high point in their relationship!

The scene works because it's true to the nature of the characters and their relationship. To have them just blandly express their love, agree with each other, and ride off into the sunset would not only have been on-the-nose – it would have been out of character, given everything we know about these people.

Yet I can almost guarantee you that Nora Ephron's first draft of that scene was simpler, more traditional, and more on-the-nose. All screenwriters do it – we write the easy version first, then we work our asses off to find the good version. How do you know when you've found the good version? If you don't groan when you read it out loud, you're probably on the right track.

Continuing the theme of “less dialog, please,” we come now to everybody's (read: nobody's) favorite kind of scripts: blabby scripts. These are the scripts in which nobody speaks in less than three lines of dialog, everybody's quick with a joke or a weighty pronouncement, and the characters repeat lines and parrot each other over and over and over again.

Simply put, blabby scripts are hiding something:

They're hiding the fact that the characters all sound the same. The blabby scriptwriter might have designated one character as “the talkative one,” another as “the dry, sarcastic one,” and so on, but none of them actually comes across that way because everyone talks in exactly the same manner. They might all sound educated and breezy, or stilted and prosaic – it doesn't matter how they talk, but they all do it in the same voice. Often it's the screenwriter's own voice, or a self-congratulating version of the same. If you're a blogger, article writer, or journalist – basically, if you've trained yourself to write with a particular kind of authorial voice – then you may be especially prone to this problem.

They're hiding the fact that they're not funny. Blabby dialog crops up most often in comedies, which makes sense, as comedy tends to be the most “talky” of genres. Blabby comedy writers seem to think that by putting a bunch of vaguely humorous character archetypes (a sex-crazed nerd! a shy biker! a swearing grandma!) in a room together and making them talk to each other – and talk and talk and talk – comedy will ensue. Surely, the blabby writer thinks, all you have to do is get the characters talking and the jokes will write themselves! Spoiler alert: the jokes do not write themselves. You have to write the jokes.

They're hiding a lack of proper pacing and scene structure. In the best movie conversations – as in actual, real-life conversations – people don't just talk constantly. They go suddenly quiet; they pause for dramatic effect; they forget what they were saying; they interject; they alternate between short and long sentences; they stop talking and act instead. This is how you inject drama into a scene. A scene has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a turning point in the middle, remember?

At least, that's the theory. But in blabby scripts, the scenes never seem to make any sense. Because the characters speak too much, it's hard to discern the twists and turns of the scenes – the dialog doesn't resemble human conversation, making it difficult to know who wants what, or why.

Blabby characters will often repeat each other (“Hey dude, have you seen my cake?” “Your cake?” “Yeah, my cake. You know, the cake I baked.” “Why would I have seen your cake?”) or they'll sum up complex conversations in one huge dump of a line (“Look, it's obvious your cake's not here. But I don't think we're really talking about your cake. This is about you and me, isn't it? This is about how you think I stole your girlfriend. Well, you don't know what you're talking about. And even if I had seen your cake, I wouldn't tell you!”).

Oh god. That was painful to write.

So how do you avoid blabbiness? It's not difficult. Simply go through your script and meticulously hunt down those lines where characters have repeated themselves (“I love cake! Cake is the best”), then cut the repetition. If a character is described as “quiet” or “taciturn” or “shy,” make sure they're not holding forth with dialog that runs for half a page. And if you're writing a comedy, make sure that you don't just have designated “funny” characters – actually write some jokes in there as well.

But most of all, think about the value of words, especially as it pertains to dialog. This is Sparta. E.T. phone home. Good morning, Vietnam. I'll be back. You can do a lot with just three measly words. The more careful you are with your dialog – the more you treat it like a precious, valuable commodity – the more your characters will feel like the strong, smart, or witty people they're supposed to be.

God, I love white space.

If you're not familiar with the term, “white space” refers to the amount of white (i.e., everything that's not text) on the pages of a screenplay. White space is a beautiful thing, both from an aesthetic standpoint and for the power it gives us over the narrative flow of our scripts. It's one of our most powerful screenwriting tools because it naturally draws the reader down the page instead of across it; and down the page is exactly where we want them to go.

Think of how it feels when you're reading a really gripping novel. It's 3:00 a.m., you've got work in the morning, but you can't stop reading because there's only a few dozen pages left and you have to find out how it ends. How are you reading? You're reading fast – blazing through those pages to see what happens next. When readers are engaged with a story, they read quickly. And conversely, we can “trick” readers into becoming more engaged with our screenplays by subtly cuing them to read faster. That's what white space does – it “pulls” readers down the page.

Now that we've established that white space is great, let's talk about how you keep screwing it up. I'm referring to those overly long action paragraphs you keep writing; those annoying parentheticals you put after every second character name; and, most importantly, those little one-sentence bits of inane character action you keep dropping into your conversations.

You don't need to tell us that “Bob nods” or “Susie smiles.” We don't care that Aaron says something “(cheerfully)” or that Jennifer pauses for a “(beat)” before her next line. These are screenwriting tics, and they're bad for the white space. Don't believe me? Let's go line by line through the tip above:

I don't care.

The “I,” in this case, is the script reader. You remember script readers, don't you? They're the gatekeepers of Hollywood, the first (and possibly last) people who will read your script. They are the people you have to impress. Their bosses literally do not have time to read your script.

No, really. They are that busy. How many hours do you think a Hollywood development executive, producer, or manager works? Got a figure in your head? Okay – add half again on top of that, and throw in weekends, too. That's why they need script readers (or poorly paid assistants) to read the scripts they don't have time for. If a reader loves your script, she'll pass it along to her boss for consideration. That's why script readers matter – in a very real sense, we're all writing to impress the script readers.

Let me tell you something in confidence: as a script reader, there is nothing worse than the feeling of turning the page to find a mammoth wall of text staring back at you. Because we have to read all that. That's right – the story about script readers throwing screenplays in the trash after just a couple of pages is pure mythology. We have to read to the end, and worse, we have to follow and understand everything you wrote so we can write our coverage. Under these circumstances, it's no wonder that a whole page of dialog surrounded by white space starts to look like the most beautiful thing in the world.

One of the best scripts I ever read was written by a Serbian gentleman who had obviously learned English as a second language. The paragraphs were short, there were very few adverbs or adjectives, and the dialog was thinner than Courteney Cox. But with all that decoration stripped away, the story shone through. Let me tell you, I read that script fast.

Script readers – despite rumors to the contrary – are human beings, and human beings tend to like things that are fun. Scripts that read fast are fun, and fun scripts get recommended to managers and executives.

The actors don't care.

They really don't.

If you'll permit me to generalize broadly: actors are vocal, emotional, outgoing people. And yes, okay, a lot of actors are kind of vain. (This is broadly true for the same reason that a lot of screenwriters are kind of neurotic and a lot of comedians are kind of suicidally depressing. It comes with the territory of self-examination.) So it follows that when actors read a script, they tend to focus on the dialog because, hey, that's the stuff that makes them looks good. That's their meat and potatoes. The other stuff – all your carefully chosen adjectives and heady, descriptive prose passages? They don't care so much about that.

Remember also that whenever you add a parenthetical to a dialog line or a minor piece of physical action to a conversation, a good actor is going to come up with something better. They're going to put their own spin on it, and thanks for your input and all, but they probably know their own craft better than you do.

The actors don't care. So don't gum up your script with action that'll never get used.

Also note: the director doesn't care either.

It breaks the flow of dialog.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with creating a sense of geography within a scene; it's good to give the reader some idea of where characters are and how they're moving and acting in relation to each other. The trick is hiding it.

Stage direction shouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. We shouldn't be rollicking along with a page full of dialog and suddenly stop dead at “Jason giggles,” or “Molly nods in agreement,” or “Cletus picks his nose.” These lines exist only because the writer got scared. The characters were talking too much, or there was too much dialog, so they decided to throw in a totally unnecessary line of action. These lines are nervous outbursts, little twinges of fear that scream “I don't trust my own dialog to carry the scene.”

White space, on the other hand, is cool. White space is rock star calm. White space says, “My dialog is brilliant. My dialog carries weight. Borne within my dialog are whole universes of subtext and implied character action. So screw you if you don't like my white space.”

You too can exude confidence and cool. You can impress actors, charm script readers, and make your dialog the centerpiece of your script. All you need is a little white space.

Screenwriting Tip #83:

If you tell me in a character's introduction that they're “fun-loving,” “mischievous,” or “free-spirited,” then their dialog had better reflect that.

Screenwriting Tip #85:

You can't just tell us there's dialog coming from the radio, the TV, or some character in the background. You have to actually write that dialog.

Screenwriting Tip #87:

Imagine you were an actor and you had to say these lines. Which ones sound weird or ridiculous? Which ones sound like clichés when you say them out loud?

Screenwriting Tip #89:

People talk very differently around their family and friends than they do around strangers. Shorthand dialog, familiarity, and in-jokes are your ticket to quick characterization.