The flowers are blooming and the pollen is poppin’ and it’s time for another edition of I HAVE SOME NOTES! This month I got buried in a mountain’s glade worth of scripts, and had a lot of time to consider this particular topic. Dialogue is a skill that’s quite dear to me, as I find in my own work that it’s the most intuitive area for me. But as I’ve met and worked with other writers, I’ve learned there’s a whole breed of excellent writer who struggles with dialogue, leading to a few common problems. One of the bigger ones is overly expository dialogue, sometimes called the Marvin the Explainer problem. This occurs when you need to give critical plot or character information through the dialogue, but it comes out sounding like an alien is reading a shopping list of human words. But rather than tackle that one directly, I’d like to talk about more specific tools that, if used right, can solve the exposition problem for you. Grab yourself a slice of strawberry tart and a beverage of choice, we’re fixin’ words! 

Bland Moon Rising

So what exactly do we mean when we say “bland dialogue?” Sometimes, you’ll hear this note as: “Your characters all sound the same,” or “This character didn’t sound like their age.” In essence, bland dialogue is a problem that occurs when not enough thought has gone into how your characters speak, and why they speak that way.

Bland dialogue is an easy trap to fall into! Often, in your first and second draft, you’re going to be primarily concerned with making the plot and emotional beats land. This can lead to using “placeholder” dialogue. Placeholder dialogue may get across the essential information of the scene or what the characters are feeling and doing, but that’s as far as it goes. It lacks the nuance of character development or awareness of the setting and circumstances, and it probably all sounds mostly how you talk. After all, all of these characters are coming from your brain, and when your mind is on getting to the end of a draft, it’s natural to default to your own voice. This is no problem if we’re talking about an early draft that you’re still working out the kinks on. However, when it comes time to submit a draft to professionals, to get coverage, query, or enter competitions, you don’t want a word of placeholder left in your script.

So let’s say our plot and our emotional stories are in working order. How do we go about rewriting dialogue to make it individualized and useful for character development?

Enormous Red Flag Warning:

Not all scripts need individualized dialogue! If you are writing in a specific style, it may be more important to create a unified voice for the whole film, rather than focus on character-driven dialogue choices. David Mamet characters ,for example, all sound like David Mamet characters - there’s a conscious choice to create a single dialogue style for the whole piece. However, the key is typically intent - and whether that intent is readable to the audience.

You Say…I Only Write What I Want To

First of all, the key to fixing dialogue is to not be discouraged if you’re getting the bland note on an early draft. Your characters are people. They live in your head, but they’re people you’re just meeting for the first time when you invent them. And just like real people, as you spend more time with them, you’ll get to know more about them. If your outline is your first meeting, and your first draft is the first time you get coffee together, by the third or fourth round of rewrites, you’re going to know them on a much deeper level. So don’t panic if you don’t have all the information below when you’re starting. You’ll make decisions along the way of writing and rewriting that will help answer some of these questions for you.

Background:

People are a product of their environments. One of the most practical places to start for finding a character’s voice is asking where they come from. Now you don’t have to write a 15 page character biography, but making choices about a few key areas can have a vast effect on building their dialogue. Areas of their background that can be important to consider include:

• Cultural/Ethnic heritage

  Are they native speakers of the language? Are their parents immigrants? Do they have specific idioms or patterns of speech that are informed by their family’s cultural history? What part of a country are they from? Is there a regional accent? Are they from a specific economic class that would affect their speech (IE, the upper class received British dialect vs. a working class London dialect?) Do they speak multiple languages?

• Education/Profession

  Are they minimally or highly educated? Do they specialize in a particular field that would affect the type of examples or metaphors they use? Did they excel at language/literature classes, or did they struggle with them? Does their job involve being good at working with a lot of people, or do they work in solitude mostly?

• Era/Age

  Are they from a specific time period? What generation do they belong to? If the story is modern, how keyed in are they to social media and the vernacular of the Internet? How much slang do they use, and is that slang currently popular or out of date?

• Disability

  Do they have a physical, intellectual, or developmental disability that could affect speech patterns by affecting recall, memory, word choice, or speech pattern?

Background is a critical component to dialogue if you’re dealing with characters from widely different circumstances. STAR WARS feels so rich as a universe in part because there are hundreds of different planets and species, and each place tends to have its own idiom, speech patterns and dialects. If Yoda sounded just like Luke, some of the status differences between them would be affected. Part of Yoda’s training is that Luke needs to slow down and learn to listen - and his slower, more scattered speech patterns reinforce this. You can use background to spice up your dialogue while giving the audience critical - but unspoken - information about the character’s history.

Psychology:

Most of the time, background information does not give us anywhere near enough specificity to determine how a character speaks. This is because who we are as people interacts with our background to create someone unique. Look at Rob Reiner’s STAND BY ME, for instance, which features four young boys from the same town, same era, same schools, and same age.

You’d think they’d all sound alike, but the boys each have distinct psychological factors that affect how they approach the world and how they speak. The reserved, A-student Gordy speaks significantly differently from the raucous Teddy or the slightly gullible Verne. When background meets psychology, your dialogue will start to take off. Here’s some factors to think about:

• What is the character’s approach to conflict? Do they like verbal sparring? Or does it make them feel nervous and tense? Do they try to avoid fights?

• Is your character an assertive or passive person? Do they like all eyes on them, or are they a wallflower?

• How much self-esteem do they have? Do they constantly change their personality to fit the people around them? Or are they always themselves? Or are they arrogant, and often brag about themselves?

• How articulate are they? Are they someone who loves playing with words, or do they struggle with getting their feelings out? Do they have a language barrier that frustrates them, or do they like the challenge of learning new words?

• Does the character have any fears or insecurities about speaking their mind, being in crowds, talking to a large group, opening up about their feelings?

• Is the character charismatic? Are they good with words and intuitive with other people? Or do they accidentally or intentionally push others away?

• Do they have trauma in their backgrounds that they haven’t addressed? Is it hard for them to speak up because of a domineering parent? Do they have no filter? Are there topics that will shut down their ability to communicate as a defense mechanism?

Understanding the psychology of a character when building their dialogue is incredibly helpful in showing the audience their emotional arc, and in defining their relationships with other characters. If a character is learning to be less shy, for instance, one of the ways to show this is by gradually having their dialogue become more definitive and assertive. Anne Hathaway in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA does not talk about fashion the same way at the beginning and end of the movie, because both her psychology and her education level have changed. Considering psychology can be a great way to clue the audience into change in your characters, without having to have someone say aloud “MY, YOU’VE CHANGED!”

Mood:

This is one I see missed all the time with newer writers. People tend to speak differently when they are in different moods. If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone who is in a lot of physical pain, for example, you’ll notice their speech patterns can differ enormously from having a casual chat with them at their desk. The most common error I see in regards to character mood is that in highly emotional scenes, newer writers will often have their characters speaking with total emotional clarity about their feelings. But if you’ve ever actually been in a big fight or a big emotional confrontation, you’ll likely recall that most people get LESS articulate the more upset they become. Here’s a few other mood factors that can affect your characters’ speech:

• Are they drunk, high, or on medications that can affect speech patterns and cause issues like brain fog?

• How emotionally engaged are they? Are they an empathetic person who feels every feeling deeply, or do they tend to remain emotionally detached in charged situations?

• Are they experiencing a situation that is totally new to them, or are they in their routine daily life?

• When they get emotional - happy, sad, or mad - is speaking their true feelings easier or harder for them?

• Do they live with chronic physical or emotional pain that puts a constant drag on their mood?

Mood is a great way to make scene work feel dynamic and to add nuance to relationships. It can also make big emotional scenes like fights feel more organic and recognizable to the audience as real. If you’re allowing how your character feels in the moment to drive how they speak, you’re going to end up with significantly more individualized dialogue that helps dodge expository pitfalls.

What I’m Watching:

Guys, if you’re missing out on THE STUDIO it’s time to catch up. The most inside of inside jokes about Hollywood. I truly don’t understand how anyone outside the town is comprehending a word of what’s going on, but somehow it’s been renewed for a second cameo-blasting season, and I can’t believe it. This is a gem of a show!