THE TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR WRITING GOOD DIALOGUE – PART 1
EPISODE DESCRIPTION:
Last week’s episode laid a foundation for how to write great dialogue, and gave us the first of the top ten principles for writing dialogue in your story. Namely:
1. It must be essential & crucial to the story in one or more of the following ways:
- a. It advances plot (gives us essential story information/ exposition)
- b. It shows us essential character relationships
- c. It helps us understand scenes
- d. It reveals character
- e. It reflects Theme
This week, we continue to unpack these top ten principles with:
2. It comes FROM one character TO another character. Don’t write for the audience’s benefit and have the characters telling each other things that they wouldn’t need to say. Good dialogue must be between the characters only. Don’t underestimate your audience. They’ll get it.
3. It is an extension of action. Your character should always be pursuing some sort of objective. Ask yourself, “What is his or her next step to get whatever he or she wants?” Also, give the characters something to do. A lot of dynamic scenes can develop if only you put the characters in situations where they’re already doing something.
4. It is not contrived. It is organic. Don’t give too much information or exposition. Just show us the relationship and let the audience interpret the dynamics of that relationship. Also, Let the scene build and unfold in a natural, organic way. Don’t rush it or force it. Things must build in an organic, believable way.
UP NEXT
Next week, we will go over three more of the top ten principles of good dialogue, and we’ll learn a few more tricks of the trade. Don’t miss out!
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TAGS: Artist, Artists, Dialogue, How to write dialogue, characters, Writing tips, Writing, Writers, Story, Storytelling, Storytellers, Zena Dell Lowe, Mission Ranch Films, The Storyteller’s Mission, The Mission with Zena Dell Lowe
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THE STORYTELLER’S MISSION WITH ZENA DELL LOWE
EP. 30: The Top Ten Principles for How to Write Great Dialogue – Part 1.
INTRO:
Hello, and welcome to The Storyteller's Mission with Zena Dell Lowe, a podcast for artist's and storyteller's about changing the world for the better through story.
Last week, we launched into a series on dialogue, in particular, how to write dialogue well. Whether or not you're writing a novel, a screenplay or a play, how well you write your dialogue can make or break your story. So, it's important that we understand how to do this well. Dialogue is an essential component of good storytelling.
PRESENTATION:
So last week, we went over the definition of dialogue, the types of dialogue that we might be writing, and the primary principle that should tell us whether or not a particular piece of dialogue ought to be included. However, in addition to that primary rule of thumb, there are nine other principles of good dialogue that we're going to discuss. So today we're going to launch into a few of those.
1. As a reminder, the number one principle of good dialogue is that it must be essential and crucial to the story.Otherwise, why do we have it? So, any particular dialogue that you write in your story must adhere to rule number one in some way. But now let's look at some of the other primary rules, shall we?
2. A primary rule of good dialogue is that it comes from one character to another character. In other words, it's not something written just for the audience's benefit. It must be between the characters only.
You see, what happens is, a lot of people have characters telling each other stuff that those characters wouldn't need to tell each other because they both share that knowledge, and the only reason that writers do that is solely for the audience's benefit. But we don't buy that. We don't believe that. There are things that people don't discuss.
What I'm talking about here is putting words into your character's mouth that are basically exposition -- information that you want your audience to know. And so, you have your characters say it overtly, out loud to each other. But the problem is, there is stuff, that when two people share information, they don't talk about; they don't need to.
Here's a really simple example. Let's say I have two characters that are siblings, and somehow, I want to make sure the audience knows that they're siblings. So, what might I mistakenly do as a writer? "Well Hello Sister, how are you today?" "Brother. It's good to see you."
Oh, please, come on. People don't say that. Okay, maybe if it's a period piece, maybe you can get away with that. But it's cheating. It's weird. It's not organic. It doesn't ring true. It feels like stuff you're putting in your character's mouth because you want the audience to know that they're siblings.
A better way to go about something like that is to show them behaving as brother and sister in a way that allows me to interpret the status of their relationship. It's a far more powerful way to do it. But it's not as easy, and so a lot of people don't do that. But there're other examples of this. This is a violation that happens all the time.
The basic rule of thumb is that you want any dialogue that comes out of your character's mouth to be from one character to another character in a way that is believable to the scene, the situation, and to what's happening in the story. And it shouldn't be stuff that they wouldn't need to say out loud or that they wouldn't need to talk about.
Now, there's something called high context versus low context dialogue. When we get into the tools section, I'm going to give you some tricks that you can use to actually get out important exposition that your audience does need to know, but in a way that doesn't feel like you're cheating. For now, just understand that you need your characters to only speak to each other. Do not write for your audience's ears. Don't underestimate your audience; they'll get it. In fact, they want to try to interpret what's going on based on your character's behavior and based on how they're treating each other and based on the relationship as it unfolds through behavior, rather than you putting words into their mouths specifically for the audience's benefit.
3. Another rule of good dialogue is that it is an extension of action.
Now, obviously this is the definition itself, but now you've got to make sure that you're putting it into that context. So, what would that look like? Well, first of all, your character should always be pursuing some kind of an objective.
I want to give you an example from a coaching session I had just this last week. My client had a character who had a conflict with his daughter, and the daughter was very angry at her father for a variety of reasons. But what happened was, my client had a scene where the father was leaving a particular room, and the daughter was walking down the hallway and sees him. And then she comes to him and confronts him. "What are you doing here? You don't need to be here. I'm taking care of Grandma, and you shouldn't be here."
And I asked my client, what was the father doing when he left that room? Where was he headed? What was he going? What came next? How was he going to pursue his goal? What goal was he in the middle of pursuing? And then I asked my client, where was the daughter coming from? Why is she in the hallway? Is this an accidental meeting or was she intentionally on her way to meet the father as he leaves the library? What's happening here? Where are the characters’ mindsets? What do they think they're doing? What are they trying to pursue?
And my client didn't have an answer to those questions; things just happened. And I get that. That's what a lot of us do. We don't think about our scenes in terms of character intentions or characters pursuing their goals. So, what I challenged her to do was to go back and rethink both perspectives, which would bring out greater dynamics for the scene. So now, instead of the daughter just happening to be in the hallway when the father leaves the room, he's leaving the room, backing up, shutting the door, and when he turns around, she's right there with her arms crossed, waiting to confront him. And he jumps sky high, which increases the stakes and the tension, and it makes that scene much more dynamic and interesting.
Now it helps her dialogue unfold because before, my client wasn't sure what the daughter really wanted except for to confront the dad. But now, we were able to say, yeah, but she's not just confronting the dad. She wants the dad to go be with the mom because she knows that the parents have a rocky relationship. And that's why she's saying, "You don't need to be here." So that added levels of dialogue to their conversation that were much more interesting.
In the meantime, we were able to figure out, well, the dad is actually trying not to get caught with something, and he's trying to figure out what this other gal is doing here, so he can't really deal with his daughter right now, which damages their relationship, but he's trying to get out of the situation because the stakes are high for him because if he gets caught, he's going to jail. So now all of a sudden that scene becomes far more interesting because each character is pursuing a goal. So, your character should always be pursuing some kind of objective.
In addition to that, your characters should always have something to do. A lot of great dialogue can come out of it when characters are engaged in other activities. Actors will thank you for it, as I discussed in another episode.
But in addition to that, it's about using the environment to convey internal emotional state. So if I have a character who's digging holes in the garden to plant seeds, and somebody else comes up and they have a conflict, I can use the prop of the shovel and the dirt and all those things -- I can use them in the scene and make my scene much more dynamic. Whereas if I have them become Talking Heads who are talking around the kitchen table while drinking tea, it wouldn't be nearly as dynamic. So, you want to give your characters something to do. Again, the rule of thumb here is that good dialogue always comes as an extension of action.
4. Good dialogue is not contrived. It's organic.
So, obviously, as we just talked about, one of the problems that a lot of writers have is that they give too much information. They don't show us the character relationship. They try to tell us what the character relationship is like through dialogue, and you don't want to do that.
But the other thing that you want to do is let the scene build and unfold. A lot of times what happens is, it becomes contrived because writers are trying to force it to go in a certain way. They're trying to get there quickly because they know, rightfully so, that dialogue exchanges should not take too long, should not go on forever. You do have to have economy of language. You do have to cut things down as much as possible. Nevertheless, writers don't take the time to just let the scene build and unfold organically in a way that feels natural and believable to the audience.
One of the ways that we can do this is by employing something called the trigger method. The trigger method is where you have characters respond as soon as they hear a particular keyword or hot phrase or hot word that would prompt a response. This is how we behave in real life. If you're arguing with your spouse, and they say something that triggers you, you immediately respond. You generally do not wait until they've said another paragraph to respond. You respond immediately when you hear the hot phrase. And how do you respond? Well, you try to modify what they've said or challenge what they've said or correct what they’ve said. In some way, you are addressing what they've said.
For example, if they say, "You never take out the trash." The other character might respond, "Oh, I never take out the trash. Really? What do you think I did last week right before the garbage came? Do you remember that? Or how about last month?" They're responding to the trigger word, "Never". How many of us have done that in a marriage relationship? We're not supposed to say "always" and "never," right? It's a trigger word. So, we respond. We modify.
Obviously, the example that I just gave is in the context of escalating conflict, and that's definitely when the trigger method is at its best because you respond as conflict escalates. However, that's not the only time that you have to be careful to not contrive the dialogue. If you have two characters who are old enemies, you can't just dive back into that. You have to allow things to unfold; you have to allow that information to come out organically, in the midst of action, which then allows things to slowly escalate to the point that the scene would reach conflict. Too many times we try to short circuit those things and it reads unbelievable. If we rush it, if we hurry it, if we force it, the audience will not believe what's coming out of the characters’ mouths.
EPISODE RECAP
Next week, we'll dive into a more primary principles of good dialogue. In the meantime, so far, we know the first four primary rules of good dialogue:
1. It must be essential and crucial to the story. Otherwise, why is it there?
2. It comes from one character to another character; it is not for the audience's benefit.
3. It is an extension of action. Every character is always pursuing some kind of objective.
4. It is not contrived. It's organic. The scene must build and unfold at a natural pace.
I hope that these principles are helpful to you today and that you'll be able to take them and apply them to your own work in progress. In the meantime, I want to thank you so much for listening to this podcast.
CALL TO ACTION
If you're finding these episodes helpful, would you consider writing a review on Apple podcasts and rating the show?
Also, we're going to stick to dialogue for a couple of weeks, but once we're done with this particular series, we'll be ready to jump into a new one. If there is something you would like me to address, would you please let me know? I would love to address that for you. The best way for you to leave me a message is to go to my website at www.missionranchfilms.com, and click on the link at the right hand side of the landing page that says, “Podcast Voicemail.” You can actually leave me a voicemail right there and let me know what it is you'd like me to talk about.
OUTRO
Thank you so much for listening to The Storyteller's Mission with Zena Dell Lowe. May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better through story.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sept. 23, 2020