“Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences”

“Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences without any overlapping or interruption, and avoids elliptical speech, which is truer to how people actually talk.”

This from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. While dialogue is a major point of attention in the rewrite stage — really digging into each character and their distinctive forms of expression, looking for set-up and payoff lines, cutting words, cutting lines, cutting sides, etc — we should always be mindful of it even in the first draft.

If you’ve done sufficient work in prep getting to know your characters, you should be ‘hearing’ them [more or less]. And what you’re hearing should be filtered through an understanding of how people talk. Contractions, idioms, slang, and as Anderson suggests interruptions among other dynamics.

That said, we have to balance out a desire for authenticity and naturalness with an awareness that dialogue is not just conversation, but characters speaking with a purpose. They have individual goals. They have underlying motives of which they may or may not be aware that shape dialogue as subtext. And then there is the purpose related to the overall flow of the narrative as dialogue, like action, occurs in sum to move the story forward.

This is not to get you hung up on individual sides of dialogue. Again you have a time and place for that kind of attention, during rewrites. But at the very least in the first draft, you can be trying to give your dialogue as natural a feel as possible.

So remember:

“Bad movie dialogue speaks in complete sentences.”

“The Quest” has entered Week 20! And so did Go On Your Own Quest, an opportunity for anyone to follow the structure of “The Quest” to dig into screenwriting theory [Core — 8 weeks], figure out your story [Prep — 6 weeks], and write a first draft [Pages — 10 weeks]. It’s a 24-week immersion in the screenwriting process and you can do it here — for free!

Today and every Monday through Friday for 10 weeks, I’ll use this slot to post something inspirational as GOYOQ participants pound out their first drafts.

For background on “Go Into The Story: The Quest,” go here and here.

For all the previous weeks of Go On Your Own Quest posts, go here.

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