Guideline to create memorable conversations

You already have your project’s logline, the character bible is defined, the structure with its turning points is really marked and you even have the treatment of your script. Your face lights up, the hardest thing is done, right? You can’t wait to see your characters talking and relating between them. You start writing: INT. CLARA’S PLACE — DAY. Everything is going fine and the moment you’ve been waiting for it’s here, your main character is about to talk. You write, delete, you write again. When it seems like you have your first dialogue, satisfied, you re-read it and… you realise it’s rubbish. Suddenly, writing is not that fun. Dialogues, the love-hate story ever told.

When you write a dialogue some patterns are repeated. If you manage to control those patterns, you’ll enrich your script and characters.

When we talk about dialogues two obvious names come to our mind, Aaron Sorkin and Quentin Tarantino. In a previous post, we already talked about some lessons that we could learn from Aaron Sorkin so we won’t talk too much about it. But let’s not fool ourselves, to write dialogues, as well as these two great masters, take a lot of shooting. Like Tarantino once said, “I steal from every single movie ever made”. That’s exactly what we’re going to do here.