Dialogue

Dialogue is the part of a screenplay most people notice first, and the part beginners most often overwrite. Good screen dialogue sounds natural but is not natural: it is compressed, shaped and full of intention. Real speech is full of hesitation, repetition and small talk; screen dialogue keeps the flavor of real speech while cutting almost everything that does not move the scene. This lesson covers the jobs dialogue does, how to give each character a distinct voice, how to handle exposition, and practical techniques for revising dialogue until it sounds speakable.

What dialogue is for

Dialogue is action. Characters speak to get something: to persuade, threaten, seduce, deflect, apologize or hide. When dialogue is treated as action, it gains energy and conflict. When it is treated as a way to deliver information to the audience, it goes flat.

• Advance the scene: each line should push toward or away from the scene goal.
• Reveal character: word choice, rhythm and what a person avoids saying show who they are.
• Create conflict: characters with opposing goals collide through what they say.
• Convey information, sparingly: facts the audience needs, ideally slipped in while something else is happening.
• Set tone and genre: rapid banter signals comedy; clipped lines might signal a thriller.

A useful exercise is to label every line in a scene with a verb describing what the speaker is doing: pleading, accusing, testing, dodging. If you cannot find a verb, the line may be filler.

Voice

Each character should sound like themselves. A reader should be able to cover the character names and still guess who is speaking. Voice comes from background, education, age, region, profession, personality and the situation.

Be careful with accent and dialect. Spelling out an accent phonetically on the page is hard to read and can slip into caricature. A light touch, such as a few word choices, rhythm and a note in the character introduction, usually works better and leaves the performance to the actor.

Exposition

Exposition is information the audience needs to understand the story: who people are, what happened before, how the world works. Poorly handled exposition is one of the most common problems in early drafts. The classic error is "as you know" dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they both already know so the audience can hear it.

• Dramatize it: make the information emerge from conflict, such as an argument in which one character throws a past mistake at another.
• Delay it: give information only when the audience needs it, and let curiosity build until then.
• Show it: a newspaper clipping, a scar, a photograph or an empty chair can carry backstory without words.
• Use a newcomer: a character new to the world can ask natural questions, though this device is easy to overuse.
• Hide it in action: deliver information while characters are doing something interesting, so the audience absorbs it without noticing.

Economy

Screen dialogue is usually shorter than beginners expect. Long speeches can work at key moments, but most exchanges are made of short lines. A common guideline is that a line should rarely run more than three or four lines on the page without a reason. Cut words that repeat what the image shows, what another character just said, or what the audience already knows. Let actors and images do some of the work.

Speakability

Dialogue is written to be spoken, so read it aloud. Lines that look fine on the page can be tongue twisters or rhythmically awkward in the mouth. Listen for repeated words, unintended rhymes, long clauses before the main point and lines that end weakly. Put the most important word near the end of the line, where actors naturally stress it.

• Read every scene aloud, ideally with other people.
• Mark lines that make readers stumble or pause.
• Cut "well," "so," "I mean" and similar fillers unless they characterize.
• End lines on strong words.
• Hold a table read before major rewrites.

Monologues and silence

Sometimes a long speech is exactly right: a confession, a closing argument, a story told at a funeral. A great monologue has a shape of its own, with a goal, an obstacle and a turn, and it usually reveals something the character has been hiding. It also gives the listener something to react to, because the camera will cut to them.

Silence is just as important. A character who does not answer can say more than any line. Writers indicate silence through action ("She looks at the ring. Doesn't answer.") rather than by writing "(silence)" again and again. Some of the most powerful scenes in film contain almost no dialogue, relying on behavior, sound and image.

Dialogue conventions on the page

Lesson 8 covers formatting in detail, but a few conventions concern dialogue specifically.

• Parentheticals: short directions under the character's name, such as (whispering) or (to Leo), used sparingly to clarify, not to direct every reading.
• Extensions: (V.O.) for voice-over and (O.S.) for off-screen, placed next to the character's name.
• Interruptions: a double hyphen or em dash at the end of a line shows a character is cut off.
• Overlapping dialogue: some writers mark simultaneous speech with dual dialogue columns.
• Other languages: if characters speak a language other than the script's, writers note it once, such as "(in Cree, subtitled)," and then write the lines in English or in the original with translations.

In the United States, many scripts include Spanish and other languages, and writers note subtitled passages clearly so producers can plan translation and subtitling.

Exercise: rewriting for voice

Take a page of your own dialogue and try these steps.

• Cover the names and see if you can tell who is speaking. If not, adjust vocabulary and rhythm.
• Label each line with an action verb. Cut or rewrite lines with no verb.
• Find every piece of exposition and ask whether it can be shown, delayed or dramatized.
• Cut 20 percent of the words without losing meaning.
• Read it aloud and fix any line that makes you stumble.

Dialogue in comedy and genre

Different genres ask different things of dialogue. In comedy, rhythm is everything: setups and punchlines depend on timing, word choice and the order of words, and the funniest word usually comes last. Comic characters often reveal themselves through obsessions, misunderstandings and the gap between what they say and what they do. In thrillers and horror, dialogue tends to be sparse and functional, with tension carried by silence and sound. In romance, dialogue often works through banter, in which characters spar while attraction builds underneath. Period films need dialogue that feels of its time without becoming hard to follow, usually by suggesting the era through formality and a few period terms rather than reproducing archaic speech.

• Comedy: end lines on the funny word, use callbacks to earlier jokes and let characters be serious about absurd goals.
• Thriller: keep lines short, let threats stay implicit and use silence as pressure.
• Romance: build attraction through conflict and wit, not declarations.
• Period: suggest the era with formality and a few chosen words, keeping modern slang out.

Dialogue and the actor

Remember that every line you write will be spoken by an actor who brings choices of their own. Actors look for intention: what does my character want from the other person right now? Dialogue that hides intention under subtext gives actors more to play than dialogue that states everything. At the same time, actors need lines they can say truthfully. If a line exists only to deliver information or set up a plot point, an actor will feel it, and so will the audience. When actors improvise on set or suggest changes in rehearsal, listen; their instincts about speakability are often right.

Reading dialogue aloud

Read every scene aloud before you share it, or better still, ask friends to read the parts while you listen. Lines that look fine on the page often trip the tongue, run too long or sound alike. Mark every place a reader stumbles and revise it.