Dispatch from The Quest: Jordan Earls
Last week as we did here on GITS, the Quest writers focused on the subject of Scene. Today’s dispatch: Jordan Earls reflects on not using dialogue in scenes:
Last weekend I was at a restaurant eating dinner with a friend. I noticed this guy sitting across from us waiting for someone. Then, his girlfriend showed up. He stood to hug her and, instead of hugging him back, she had her arms pressed against him, sort of pushing him away.
This intrigued me so I kept checking back throughout the meal, watching their body language and the way they communicated with each other. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but their dinner ended with the woman leaving early and the man staring at his plate of food for a solid five minutes. I gathered they broke up.
That moment made me realize two things:
1. I learned a lot about their relationship and what was going on just from watching, not hearing.
2. I’m a creeper.
I’m going to go ahead and blame my being totally intrusive on also being a writer. I observe people when they arouse my curiosity and I like to think this gives me insight into the ways of humans that non-observers don’t get. The point, though, is that there’s a certain power in showing and not telling. This observation made me think of another one of my favorite movies, Up.
First, if you haven’t seen Up, I’d like to welcome you back from that vacation under a rock and now you should go see it.
From a story telling point, Up is flawless. In the first ten minutes, there’s minimal dialogue. The life of Carl and Ellie’s relationship is told through images: the wedding, moving into the house, the mailbox, even something as emotionally charged as a miscarriage is understood by the audience and it’s shown with images, no dialogue.
That sequence had everything: a beginning, middle and end, a structural goal (showing Carl’s relationship) and an emotional goal (illustrating why Carl is bitter at the beginning).
I don’t think I’ve met anyone who wasn’t in tears by the end of the first ten minutes of that movie. It’s beautiful story telling and it’s all done through images.
“Show-don’t-tell” is something writers hear all the time. Reading through my past screenplays, it’s something I didn’t focus on enough in my scenes. In my first screenplay, I wrote a two-page scene filled with horrible on-the-nose dialogue about the death of a family member. I should have written it so the characters didn’t have any dialogue at all. They could’ve looked at a photo of the deceased or stood in front of the grave or anything other than horrible on-the-nose dialogue.
Last week, as we focused on scenes in TQ, being an observant creep benefited me in that I went through some of my scenes and thought to myself, “Can I get this across without dialogue?” I was shocked by how many times the answer was yes.
Movies are primarily a visual medium. We do well to remember that with every scene we write. How can we make this as visual as possible? One way to spur that thinking is by cutting dialogue from a scene or cutting it altogether.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch from The Quest.
About Jordan: Portland based writer. Connoisseur of film with an affinity for Nolan, Boyle and Jackson. Twitter: @jordanpaige00.