The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/dialogue-and-character-voice).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 609 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today’s episode is a clip show, but I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how we got to this clip show. So often, these clip shows come out of work we’re doing in the office on other things. This stemmed from a conversation we were having yesterday.
Chris Csont, who does our newsletter, is working on an issue about dialogue and character voice. It started a whole conversation about the difference between a writer’s character voice and what the actor brings to that voice. Drew, you had actually had some research before this, because you guys were working on chapters about this for the book.
**Drew Marquardt:** Yeah, our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, was putting together a chapter on writing dialogue, and this conversation started ringing some bells, so went back and looked through it and found some really wonderful gems to talk about character voice and writing for actors.
**John:** In any of these clip shows, we’re traveling through time. We have 10 years of Scriptnotes. Which episodes are you plucking from here?
**Drew:** We’re starting with Episode 37, which was ages ago. It’s very fun to hear you guys and how you’ve changed. We’re talking there about the four general rules of character voice. Then we’re going to go up to Episode 286, where we’re going to talk about the history of dialogue and expand on the idea of character voice. Then Episode 371, where Craig, who had started acting at that point, was talking about what makes dialogue easy to memorize. Then we move to how to make sure you’re doing right by all the characters in a scene and keeping everyone engaged.
**John:** Fantastic. For our Premium members, what kind of Bonus Segment will they get at the end?
**Drew:** We’re going to look at Episode 470 on dual dialogue, which is really fun.
**John:** That’s great. Drew, thank you so much for putting this clip show together. We look forward to coming back with hopefully a normal episode next week.
**Drew:** Definitely.
**John:** Thanks. Enjoy.
Episode 37 clip:
**John:** And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.
**Craig:** Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.
**John:** Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are some times where… There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again, I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that, you don’t really care about him.
And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.
**Craig:** Okay.
**John:** First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?
**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error. I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. They write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.
**John:** Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem. You already hit on my next thing, which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.
**Craig:** Aha, I read your mind.
**John:** You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny, and so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome. It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.
**Craig:** Some people will say that there are highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies, you realize that he actually is crafting… Yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.
Sorkin is another one who… It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.
**John:** Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.
**Craig:** I agree.
**John:** Those characters are very specific and very unique.
**Craig:** That’s a good example.
**John:** Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point, is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is, is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing?
And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.
At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.
**Craig:** No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”
Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.
I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?
**John:** No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.
**Craig:** No radio plays.
**John:** In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together, and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know, so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.
**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” I know. You don’t have to tell me. The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.
**John:** Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** This is one I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.
**Craig:** And a lovely woman.
**John:** And a lovely woman. During the strike, our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”
And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny, because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way. What is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations, how they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.
**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”
And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. Use that. Scenes are all, to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. Allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.
**John:** Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this, can you picture a given actor in the role, or at least preclude certain actors from the role, because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things? And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.
**Craig:** Yeah, probably not.
**John:** Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.
**Craig:** Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was appropriately-
**John:** But it’s not telling a joke funny.
**Craig:** No, it was sort of clipped and wry, which is…
**John:** Perfect.
**Craig:** She has a great arched brow. It’s funny, when you think about doing impressions. I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. She can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.
I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble, and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing, because it goes counter to the normal thing, which is the rambler is the weak one, and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.
But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with, because it just made those scenes more interesting to me.
And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed… I mean, language is music, and you should be musical about it, I think.
**John:** The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past like, it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors, like, oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.
Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice, because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.
It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who could ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.
**Craig:** Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.
Episode 286 clip:
**John:** I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously, human beings have been speaking for our entire existence. That’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case.
And so I was thinking back to what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story, and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.
But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.
And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton, where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.
**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays, so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand-year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.
**John:** Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** There’s less of that sort of back and forth.
**Craig:** I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.
**John:** Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is, as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way, because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.
Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue, is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot, and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form.
**Craig:** It’s very strange, because the cards, they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.
**John:** Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air.
And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.
**Craig:** It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.
And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to, famously, some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.
**John:** Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.
Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well, because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue.
There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial, because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process.
Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre, where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information, so you can get it out to the audience.
**Craig:** And prior to a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free, for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television, which dominated all television, was highly bifurcated, trifurcated, quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, they had missed it, or they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. People were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.
**John:** Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.
When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.
**Craig:** That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. They always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship.
I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us, but they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.
**John:** It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next.
I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it.” I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, okay, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you. There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words, it’s For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out.
And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers, and as a screenwriter, how to be aware of those things. I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.
So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that and sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”
**Craig:** Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation.
So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.
**John:** Yep.
**Craig:** Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about… Everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear. It is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.
So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically, I use that in the wrong sense, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.
**John:** Yep. We talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. An example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” That “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it, it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.
**Craig:** Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.
**John:** Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.
**Craig:** We’ll call it the affirmative no. Sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something. I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.
**John:** A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “Okay, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.” Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”
**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a–
**John:** But that “and” is really helpful, because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful, and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.
**Craig:** I think sometimes when educational therapists… There’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous.
But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.” And some people need to be taught these things.
**John:** Talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.
**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we, meaning humans or characters, speak, and if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.
The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I’ll just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive or informative or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies, sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.
**John:** Mm-hmm.
**Craig:** Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated.
This we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way, when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode, which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.
**John:** There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment, and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. The moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.
**Craig:** Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap, where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation.
Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in, what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful… There’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments, because they are so remarkable. You know, Yoda is always declarative. But when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake, and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.
**John:** Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.
**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave… Oh and interesting, I just used “by the way,” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and then it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment, with how they feel. Without putting their finger on it, what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.
Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person.
And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.
**John:** Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.
That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now, not like how it functioned historically. But what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character, but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.
It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting, because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.
**Craig:** Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be… We’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.
Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment, reacting to the world around them, reacting to the feelings inside of them, and most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once, and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene.
And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.
You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional, and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible, you do want that mismatch, because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights. Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.
**John:** Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.
Episode 371 clip:
**John:** Craig, start us off.
**Craig:** Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.
But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day, new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on, and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.
And I had an opportunity to do that. And so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.
And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered, that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end, someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate, which is when do you say it.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends, because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part, you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things: the relationships between different words and what I call, what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?
**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially, we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages, and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.
**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they can reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you, and single digits, and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now. You didn’t write it down. You can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.
**John:** Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning, that would be very simple.
**Craig:** Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands.
So for instance, chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small, whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them, because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces in relationship, it’s sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.
**John:** It’s a pattern.
**Craig:** It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored, essentially.
So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal, or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word. So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?
**John:** Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything, it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.
**Craig:** Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line, but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it.
So, for instance, here’s something that, the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the … “ Every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in. You’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff, and there’s nothing anchoring it together.
The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing, so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.
**John:** Yeah. So classically, dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you to pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.
**Craig:** Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” okay, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says, “Take a look at this,” and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember, because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.
And similarly, as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue, there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built-in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words, but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.
**John:** Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases, but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.
**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign, because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign, and you chunk a larger bit together.
And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting. Odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just… This is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”
Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word “just” to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point, because just is kind of the anchoring word, because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. “But if it hurts it’s odd in,” all single-syllable words.
It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things, and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance, “This is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this.” Okay, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except “this is the third time” is kind of… Your brain starts to–
**John:** It’s annoying. It’s not that hard. It’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the “this” and “third” are not the same TH.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** And that also messes you up. I want to get back to your moving the “just.” I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way, without the “just” there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place. And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.
**Craig:** Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong, or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.
They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform, and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier, I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word “just” should be placed in that sentence, it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.
So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization, and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.
**John:** So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. That running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies, weirdly, it just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.
When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.
Make sure the words mean something to you, that you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare. She had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And you can just spout the words out, but if you don’t actually understand what they mean, the scene is not going to really work, and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words, because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.
And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking. It’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously, you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line, because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.
So it’s not just a ping-pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.
**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in the end, when you learn your part of a conversation, you have to learn their part too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least. Part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.
**John:** Yeah. Being surprised by what you said, that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So would your characters in the scene, and so will you as an actor. So, it’s okay to let the mental wheels spin a little bit, to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.
**Craig:** Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them, these things are always… I think they’re very helpful to consider.
And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl, he’s wordy. He’s a scientist, and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going, it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.
**John:** My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar, that are in different parts of the scene, that messes them up. If they were completely different lines, it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves, but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing, or at least in the execution, because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.
**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, okay, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.
**John:** Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.
Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service in it. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene, when they don’t have a lot to actually do.
And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because, Craig, I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.
**Craig:** It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there, because they have to listen to something happen. And they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen. And yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.
**John:** And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot.
So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this, that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene, because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.
So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene, even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.
**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors, because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be, because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.
So, that’s kind of the thing. When you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.
**John:** I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men, because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this, where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.
**Craig:** I can’t get over sporting championships.
**John:** Sporting championships. Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.
**Craig:** I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questron.
**John:** I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games and sporting matches.
**Craig:** You’re like, “When writing sporting championships.” Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.
**John:** But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence, and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough.
Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character. This is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now. You have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking. So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.
So, for me, what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. That’s making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene, rather than having them do individual things.
I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be, so that in cutting to them around the space, we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?
Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it, I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.
**Craig:** Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl, and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials, it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.
But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, okay, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s “I’m watching,” then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be “I’m watching,” because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching, actively listening.
**John:** Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there, who had to watch or witness part of it, still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.
**Craig:** Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over, and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer.
So when I write those scenes, I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go, “I have to stop this,” or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.
This is frankly, no offense to our director brothers and sisters, but this is so important for us to do as writers, because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, okay, let’s just grab reaction shots now. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene, understanding that they are not covering one narrative here, but multiple narratives.
It’s really important that we do this on the page, because if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.
**John:** Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script, if I am worried that people are going to miss it, because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy, and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.
And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore it and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting, where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep, they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial, that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.
**Craig:** Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like, given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have, that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.
**John:** Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.
**Craig:** There you go.
**John:** That concludes our clip show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and featured segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonald, and Megana Rao, the whole murderers row of former Scriptnotes producers.
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[Bonus Segment]
Episode 470 clip:
**John:** All right, let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue, because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it, which is not something I often do. We’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.
**Craig:** It is a little bit of a trap, because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue, it will make things look realer.
The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going, “Oh my god, I have to actually, we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically.” This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.
**John:** Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love, we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue, and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page, often that’s not how you do it.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.
**Craig:** Yeah.
**John:** For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table, and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there, listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.
Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are, and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.
**Craig:** Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping, for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody.
But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other, with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other, and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.
**John:** Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.
**Craig:** Right.
**John:** So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way, I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs. If you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.
**Craig:** Huh.
**John:** So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.
**Craig:** And when you are there, you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text from a playwright and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible, whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer, as opposed to a play.
So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized, whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read …
**John:** It’s brutal to read.
**Craig:** … I’ll say, on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue, your eyelids will get heavy.
**John:** Yeah, because you have to make the choice of, okay, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.
**Craig:** It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** So, you know, you’re asking something there. When you use it, know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.
Links:
* [Scriptnotes Episode 37 – Let’s talk about dialogue](https://johnaugust.com/2012/dialogue)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 286 – Script Doctors, Dialogue and Hacks](https://johnaugust.com/2017/script-doctors-dialogue-and-hacks)
* [Scriptnotes Episode 371 – Writing Memorable Dialogue](https://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-memorable-dialogue)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, featuring segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
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