👋 I've gotten a lot of requests for a dialogue class, so for the past couple of months I've been behind the scenes creating one. It’s a 4-week class starting on September 29th. (Save the date!)

And, as always, I want to make sure this class provides as much useful information as it possibly can. So... What questions do you have? Is there something about writing dialogue that you haven’t quite been able to figure out? Reply and let me know.

And now, onto our regularly scheduled Friday screenwriting memo...

3 targets your dialogue should aim for

Getting feedback that your screenplay’s dialogue “needs work” can be disheartening, of course. No writer enjoys hearing something they’ve written needs more blood, sweat, and tears.

But even for those writers who are up to the challenge and ready to do the work, “fixing” a dialogue problem can feel like a big, daunting task without a clear entry point.

So today I want to offer a three-layer framework for thinking about dialogue – how it works and how to approach it in your screenplay. My hope is this quick overview will give you a way to break down that larger goal – “write great dialogue” – into more specific and manageable targets to aim for.

When the targets are clear, then we have a chance of figuring out how best to hit them.

Your screenplay’s dialogue is like a duck on a pond

Imagine a handsome Mallard gliding along, seemingly not a care in the world. All you see on the surface is calm. He makes it look effortless. What you don’t see is all the work being done under the surface. Those little duck legs are paddling like crazy to get him where he wants to go.

And so it is with the dialogue in your screenplay. There’s the snappy, powerful, polished language that the actors get to say. But that’s only the above-the-surface stuff. Underneath there are unseen (but no less important) aspects that are doing a lot of work necessary to the effectiveness of the script.

As effortless as it might look, there’s a lot that dialogue needs to accomplish. To get a handle on it we can start by looking at its three basic functions:

1. Dialogue serves the plot.
2. Dialogue serves the characters.
3. Dialogue serves the movie. (Meaning it's also a source of entertainment.)

When you’re taking a hard look at your own screenplay dialogue (or evaluating others’), you might also approach these targets by turning them into questions:

• Target 1: Is the dialogue helping the scene?
• Target 2: Is the dialogue helping the characters and relationships?
• Target 3: Is the dialogue entertaining?

Keep in mind these targets aren't completely siloed from one another. You'll definitely find overlap between them. Let’s look at each one to see what we're aiming for.

Target 1: Dialogue serves the plot by helping the scene

Each scene in a movie has a purpose. What happens in the scene must change something otherwise it has no purpose in the story. It needs to move the plot, alter relationships, contribute to the character arc, or all of the above. And the dialogue in the scene helps it accomplish that purpose.

So, to write truly great dialogue, we have to be able to construct purposeful scenes that the dialogue can be a part of.

I’ve written before about treating dialogue as action, which is a trick a lot of writers overlook. Instead they use dialogue only to convey information they think the audience needs to know. That often results in scenes without real, meaningful conflict, or scenes that are too on-the-nose (or both).

A more effective approach is to use dialogue as a weapon or a tool that your character wields in an effort to achieve their goals (both scene-specific goals and in the overall story).

That kind of dialogue is much more likely to engage your audience. 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 and goals is more compelling and engaging to us too.

What is the character trying to accomplish? If you can’t answer that, then the scene, the character, and/or their dialogue need work.

Target 2: Dialogue develops characters and relationships

When feedback on dialogue comes back with “needs work,” two of the most common notes are:

• Characters all sound the same.
• Dialogue is on-the-nose / lacking subtext.

The first is easy to grasp. But if it comes as a surprise that on-the-nose dialogue and/or subtext would fall under the character category, think of it this way:

Subtext emerges from a character's wants, needs, fears, desires – and often, their secrets in these areas. So in order to have rich subtext in their dialogue, the characters themselves must have something going on beneath the surface too.

Every line of dialogue is an expression of character. What characters say and how they say it reveals what kind of people they are, how they think and feel, their internal worlds.

And when you get the note that all of your characters sound the same, it’s not actually about dialogue. I mean it is, but it’s not.

It’s a character’s personality and point of view coming through dialogue that will make them read differently from each other. So the “fix” is understanding who the character is so those distinct qualities can manifest in dialogue.

Here are a few prompts to get you thinking about how to address these areas:

• Do the characters have interpersonal conflicts and tension that can play out alongside the plot-business of the scene?
• Can you create circumstances in the scene so that characters have a reason not to speak in an on-the-nose way? (Secrets, power dynamics, romantic desires, etc. can influence how readily a character speaks his mind.)
• Think about your characters and make sure you’ve identified some defining characteristics and know them well enough to know how they’ll show up in a scene, what they want, what’s at stake, etc.

And, if you’d like to see some of these ideas in action, the scene examples in this article offer some thoughts around these first two targets.

Target 3: Dialogue adds entertainment

This target is the one most writers start with when they’re looking to improve their dialogue, but I'm going to suggest it's the one you should set aside for last. It's not that it's less important, it's just that we need to hit the other (often overlooked) targets first. (Get your duck to swim, and then practice looking effortless.)

The temptation to improve dialogue by focusing on making it funnier or sharper is understandable. That's probably one of the things you love most about TV and movies, and you want to elevate your own writing to that level.

But you're unlikely to get away with a ton of dialogue that’s purely for entertainment and doesn’t also serve the story and/or characters. You might have a line here or there that's just entertaining, but "just entertaining" dialogue actually gets boring pretty quickly.

So I’d encourage you to put this target aside while you aim at the first two.

Your first draft scenes might feel boring, or clunky, and that's okay! You're working out the necessary, under-the-surface stuff. That's essential.

But it's true that great dialogue also holds our interest because it’s lively, varied, and emotionally resonant. So when the first draft is done, you'll edit and polish and make it better. Add some zing, some fun.

There are a whole plethora of conversational bells and whistles you can add to a scene to make it just a little more entertaining. (I like to think of these as the jazz hands of your scene.)

Things like echoing, full circles, and radical honesty are just a few of the tricks that you've seen on screen but probably didn't consciously notice. You just knew you enjoyed the dialogue – and that's the point.

But start to notice them, and you can use these bells and whistles to spice up your own screenplay's dialogue. (We’re going to cover about 25 of them in the dialogue class, btw.)

Practice gets results

I mentioned earlier that dialogue is a tool your characters use to get what they want. But think of it as a tool you can learn to use, too. And as with any other tool, you can learn to handle it more comfortably and with better results.

The path to “great dialogue” may seem murky or overwhelming, but I hope that breaking the bigger topic down into separate targets makes it all a little more manageable. Both as a way to think about and analyze the dialogue you love, and as a way to approach your own writing.

And while great dialogue manages to hit all three targets simultaneously, that doesn't mean you need to hit them all in one draft.

I truly believe great writing of any kind happens in layers. Even something that starts out pretty good can be honed and tightened and polished to become really powerful (and appear effortlessly so).

Until next time,

Naomi

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