This week I’ve had several conversations about dialogue with writers, and one point that keeps coming up is the idea of dialogue as action. Thinking about it that way can help you improve the dialogue you’re writing.
Being able to write good screenplay dialogue is a skill set that screenwriters need, but what constitutes “good” dialogue seems tough to grasp (and master).
Good dialogue isn’t on the nose, or clunky, or unnatural. It isn’t bland, or indistinguishable from one character to the next. It isn’t dense, over-written, or unnecessarily repetitive. It isn’t an obvious, graceless exposition dump. It isn’t vague to the point of obfuscation.
But it’s easy to say what good dialogue isn’t. More importantly, what is it?
Many newer writers think of dialogue only as necessary information that has to be communicated to the audience. Or they might veer the other direction and use it as filler, to pass the time in a scene. If you’re doing either, you’re weakening the script.
Your screenplay will be stronger if you think of dialogue as an action
Dialogue shouldn’t “tell” the story. Meaning, if the dialogue is doing the heavy lifting to convey what’s going on in the plot then the script will probably feel boring to the reader.
Storytelling is less about “telling” via dialogue, and more about showing via dramatization. We hide or embed the information the audience needs to understand and experience the story within the story itself.
Yes, dialogue conveys information we need to know, but the challenge is doing it in a way that “conveying information to the audience” doesn’t feel like the point of the dialogue.
And when you think of dialogue as an action with a real purpose behind it, you give it urgency and meaning – which immediately makes it more interesting.
Think about what the character’s dialogue is trying to achieve
Rather than thinking about what information needs to come through the dialogue to achieve your purpose as the writer, think about dialogue as an action that the character takes for his or her own purposes.
Like all action, dialogue has to feel motivated otherwise the audience is left wondering why it’s happening. Every word of dialogue comes from something the character wants or needs.
Does the character want to feel like the smartest guy in the room? Does he need to get permission to leave the bunker? Does she want to outshine her rival? Do they need to warn their teammate before the bomb detonates?
You can brainstorm what the character wants or needs in the plot as well as what they want or need emotionally. Coming at it from both angles will add layers to your scenes by showing what’s going on within the character, between characters (in relationships of all kinds), and in the plot.
And motivations and objectives can change from moment to moment within a scene, too. So you might think of the character’s overall objective in the scene, and then break that down into strategies that the character will employ from moment to moment as they’re trying to achieve that objective. Each of those strategies can result in differences in the dialogue and inform what the character says from one line to the next.
Purpose in a “pointless” scene
In the movie Vengeance, one of my favorite scenes is the very funny introduction of protagonist Ben and his friend John. It’s a totally dialogue-focused scene. And while on first glance you might think this scene is just about entertaining us with witty banter, if you step back a bit you’ll see that the funny dialogue is action taken by the characters, and it reveals to us what their goals and motivations are. (In the scene and in life.)
In this scene, Ben wants to validate his own thoughts and life strategy in this echo chamber, reaffirming that he doesn’t need deeper or more meaningful connections with anyone because he’s doing life the smarter, maybe even more evolved way.
Dialogue is the primary way the point of the scene is accomplished, which is really to show us who Ben is at the start of his character arc.
A character in action is easy to root for
Dialogue conveys information we need to know, but the challenge is doing it in a way that the dialogue itself isn’t directly stating it to the audience. When dialogue tells us the story directly, it sounds unearned, on-the-nose, and like we’re being buried in exposition.
Instead, we want dialogue that helps fulfill the point of the scene by dramatizing the information being offered. (The real meaning of “show, don’t tell”.)
In the same way that — at the story level — seeing a character go after something they want very badly makes us lean in to root for them, dialogue that feels motivated by clear desires is more compelling and engaging to us too.
Showing us how a character goes after what they want involves all of their action, including what they say in order to get it.