Contents
Screenwriting Basics
How to Come Up with an Idea for Your Screenplay
How to Determine Your Audience
How to Create Characters
How to Write Dialogue
How to Create a Plot
Act I: The Setup
Act II: The Confrontation
Act III: The Resolution
How to Structure Your Story
How to Format Your Screenplay
The Screenwriting Process
After the Screenplay
Is Written
Learn more with these titles from Barnes & Noble
|
 |
 |
 |
|
How to Write Dialogue
Dialogue is the exchange of words in a scene—what the characters say to one another. The purpose of dialogue is to illuminate character and conflict.
Illuminate Character
What characters say and how they say it reveals who they are, internally and externally. Dialogue should tell the reader/viewer something about the character’s:
- Worldview
- Personal history
- Relationships with others
- Emotional state
Illuminate Conflict
There are an infinite number of ways one character might respond to another in a conversation. The response that you choose should always reveal and intensify the larger issues in the story. Dialogue should also propel the story forward. If your characters are talking just for the sake of talking, the scene will be boring. Your lines should be
infused with purpose, and that purpose is to push the scene forward—and, in turn, push the entire story forward.
Dialogue Tips
Below are some tips for writing dialogue that illuminates characters, drives conflict, propels the story forward, and jumps off the page:
- Make it realistic: Your dialogue should imitate real-life speech patterns, so listen to other people’s conversations. Notice that people don’t usually speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences. They drop pronouns and use contractions (“it’s” instead of “it is”). Your dialogue should flow and sound natural.
- Make it interesting: Dialogue should imitate regular speech patterns, but what your characters say—the content of the lines—needs to be far more interesting than normal conversation. In real life, we often falter and speak without making a point. But in a screenplay, characters express their thoughts in wittier, wiser, funnier, or more concise ways than real people do.
- Differentiate characters: All of your characters are individuals. Make sure they don’t blend into one another and adopt the same voice. Establish each character’s particular diction. Diction is your character’s speaking style—the way he constructs his sentences, and the words he chooses to express his thoughts. Establishing diction may be hard at first, but once you know each character fully, it will flow more naturally.
- Use subtext: Text is what’s being said, whereas subtext is what’s not being said. Picking up on subtext is like reading between the lines. Incorporate subtext into your dialogue to make it more interesting and realistic. If your characters always say exactly what they mean, the dialogue can be described as too “on the nose,” which means it’s unrealistic.
-
Less is more: If a line of dialogue can be revealed visually, is too long, or sounds unnatural, cut it. A common misconception is that screenplays are all dialogue, or that dialogue is the most important part of your screenplay. Dialogue is often what separates the good from the great, and it’s an important component—but the more white space in a scene, the better. This means:
- Keep dialogue short: As a general rule, characters shouldn’t speak for more than three or four lines. Within those lines, try to trim away any unnecessary words.
- Save dialogue for last: Think of dialogue as the icing on the cake. Writing dialogue is usually the last step in the screenwriting process.
| Acknowledgments & Disclaimer |
