10 Tips for Writing Better Dialogue
This is one of the more practical and repeated questions I get from screenwriters and it’s a good one. After all, dialogue is what ends up on screen. While it doesn’t begin to encompass what a screenwriter actually does, dialogue is what most people think of when they think of screenwriting.
So here’s a few tips:
- Make your characters clearly defined. A lot of times when your dialogue is flat, it just means you don’t know your character well enough. Go back and watch scenes from your favorite movies featuring your favorite characters. Notice how they talk different from each other. Notice how they have clear goals and values. Write down their lines and watch for a rhythm. A lot of times our main characters are most bland because they are avatars of ourselves and the surrounding characters are interesting and memorable. Don’t go with your first idea of what a character should be — give them 10 potential variations before deciding on your character. How can you push your main character to be as clear as possible about their values and outlook on life? This should influence the way they talk.
- Give your characters more conflict. If all of your characters sound the same, don’t worry — every writer has the same problem at the beginning. A quick fix for this is to make your characters disagree with each other. Every scene should have multiple characters with multiple conflicting goals. A man really wants a drink. His sister doesn’t want him to have that drink. How does this define those characters in the moment? Do they start to take shape more? Conflict defines characters and clear characters will have clear dialogue.
- Jump into the meat of a scene. “Hey. How’s it going. Good to see you.” serves no purpose in a story and is painful dialogue to read — even though it happens in real life. Instead, get to the point of the scene faster, and get out faster. We don’t need to see hellos and goodbyes.
- Don’t ever have one character explain to another something they already know for the benefit of the audience AND don’t have a character talk to themselves. Neither of these things happen in real life, they only happening bad movies.
- Sometimes a line should be an action. Before you write a long monologue, or a cliche line, ask yourself if the same intention couldn’t be done with an action. Instead of saying “I love you” have them do something sweet. Instead of saying “burn in hell” have them do something twisty and evil.
- Make sure your dialogue matches your tone. Nothing is more painful than trying to be funny in a scene that should be touching or trying to hammer a theme home in a scene that is supposed to be funny. Make sure the dialogue serves your story — not an opportunity for you to be flashy with your witty dialogue or deep thoughts on the world.
- Think in three dimensions. Your characters shouldn’t be easily defined as “the comic relief” or “the bad guy.” Take it TWO more steps forward: “The comic relief with a short temper and.a dark secret” or “the bad guy who is a survivor and surprisingly empathetic”. The less cliche your character is, the less cliche their dialogue will be.
- Listen to people. Normally I encourage writers to get out in the world, sit in a coffee shop, and listen to what is going on around them. Learn how different people talk with different cadences. Write conversations down and see how clearly the voices stand out. Take notes. Learn how conversations don’t start and stop with clear beginnings and ends, instead they weave in and out and get distracted. Since you can’t go out into the world right now, try watching some documentaries — especially ones where it’s capturing real-life conversations with groups of people and not just one-on-one Q&A.
- Do table reads of your scripts. You can’t tell how good (or bad) your dialogue is by reading it on a page. You have to hear it out loud, interpreted by actors (or friends) to find out if there’s anything there. It will be embarrassing the first few times you do it (okay, maybe every time you do it) at how obvious and cliche so many lines come across. But you take those notes and you fix them and you adjust them and you do it all over again.
- Practice. A lot. This is so obvious with every other skill, but we often forget it with writing. The more you do it, the better you get. Come up with 10 characters and write 10 short screenplays where different groupings of those characters come together. See how they talk differently. See how they interact with each other differently. You’ll start to notice that maybe they even write themselves. Your dialogue will sound stiff and expositional and one-dimensional at first, but the more you do it, the more you challenge yourself, the more it will open up and feel more natural.
You might notice a trend in these tips: the “thing” isn’t really about the “thing.” Stilted dialogue only happens when your characters aren’t real people or you have a misunderstanding of the format. When you have a clear idea of your three-dimensional characters, when you’ve really put the time in to study the craft, and try to make your writing as succinct and visual as possible, the dialogue will come naturally.
Any other tips I missed? What do you guys do to write better dialogue?
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