Daily Dialogue theme for next week

An email from Greg Colburn:

How about characters talking out lout to themselves?

Could be voiceover or out loud. A few come to mind…

 — Deniro in Taxi Driver

 — Nuke & Crash in Bull Durham

 — Tom in 500 Days of Summer when Summer and him are about to have sex for the first time

This is a good theme for Daily Dialogue because sometimes circumstances require us to write such scenes. Screenplays are not like other fiction, we can’t enter ‘into’ the mind of characters, they can only communicate through action and dialogue. Talking out loud to themselves either works really well or feels clumsy, an example of writer’s convenience where we ‘force’ the character to talk out loud in order to convey what’s going on.

Let’s find some good examples of this type of dialogue and see what lessons we can learn about how to make talking out loud alone scenes work.

As usual, if you can copy/paste the dialogue from IMDB and find an accompanying YouTube link, that would be most groovy.

Comment Archive