Daily Dialogue theme for next week: Deathbed
As we wind up a week’s worth of Daily Dialogue posts spotlighting factoids, it’s time to dig into next week’s theme. And I want to push back a week Teddy’s suggestion [interrogation / extracting information] to have a go at Gabe’s suggestion: deathbed.
There are dying scenes where the turn of events is quite sudden. That leads to one set of circumstances in terms of how the writer approaches a character’s dialogue.
But what about scenes where the character has known for awhile they are dying? That is an entirely different set of psychological conditions. The dying character will have had time to deliberate their final words. Those words will — presumably — have considerable meaning to the character in question. Often they will be wanting to convey something of meaning to the people listening to their words.
So with our suggestions this week, let’s really try to zero in on actual deathbed scenes, not just any character’s final moments. They don’t have to be in a bed per se, rather the focus should be on the fact the character has known for sometime they are dying.
Relevant scenes that immediately spring to mind: Forrest Gump, Blade Runner, Terms of Endearment. I’m sure there are many others we can come up with.
The usual drill to elevate your Groovy Status:
* Please copy/paste the dialogue from IMDB Quotes.
* Please try to find the URL for an accompanying video scene from MovieClips.com or YouTube.com.
Deathbed scenes are challenging to write as they can so easily devolve into melodrama. Let’s see what we can learn about writing such scenes from a week’s worth of them.
And thanks to Gabe for the suggestion.