The Key to Writing Freakishly Good Dialogue | Video Essay

I don't write books sorry sorry I've never written a story that was not a screenplay so when I say dialogue I'm exclusively referring to the words that come out of character's mouths I'm not going into said versus exclaimed or paragraph breaks because none of that stuff exists in my trade but for the pros folk there's still huge overlap so I'd encourage you to stick around dialogue is dead last in the order of operations after your central idea after your characters after your conflict after your scenes weight scenes let's talk about those for a second before

you can attempt a first draft as per the local script method you're gonna have to take your big character flowchart and divide it into scenes not key moments connected by Vibes actual scenes contain blocks of time set at specific locations remember we're talking screenplays here if information is not communicated within the confines of a scene it is not communicated at all and this is something I didn't fully realize until I tried to adapt a novel into a screenplay the manuscript I was adapting written by a friend of mine had pages and pages of thoughts feelings

and information all of it communicated with an exceptional degree of Elegance but only one paragraph and 20 would communicate something that was actually happening on the timeline and so to communicate the information in those other 19 paragraphs I would need to invent new scenes which became irritating for my adapt which is why the product never got past a half-baked pilot draft which is all to say that dialogue is one of the writer's tools for communicating information in Universe factual information emotional information cultural information Etc and that sounds like a no-brainer but it is it is

a brainer because if you're anything like me you know a lot of stuff about your characters in your world that needs to be communicated to the audience but that information might not be tied down to any particular scene I want to clarify my stance on Exposition because many consider it to be inherently cringe but I do not if the character device disclosing that Exposition would do it then it's not a problem this is another one of those dumb rules writing gurus preach and I just wanted to make a point of ignoring it that said you're

probably not going to find yourself in a perfect situation to disclose everything your audience needs to know more than likely you'll be forced to do it within the confines of a dialogue scene and by confines I mean the nature of your characters you have this giant pile of information but your character X is a filter so the information is Bob feels extremely sad but the filter is Bob is really committed to being an optimist so Bob can't just come out there and openly be sad to communicate to the audience that he's sad we have to

sneak through the filter Bob would only say optimistic things because he's Bob but we can have Bob phrase them in a vaguely cynical way we can have him do subconscious things that give away his true emotions that's basically the mental model I use to approach dialogue information through a human filter the filter is in a sentence how would this character in this situation communicate this information so before you tackle a big dialogue scene there are a couple things you'll need to do firstly you'll need to list off all of the information the scene needs to

communicate to demonstrate this I'm going to create a hypothetical sci-fi drama scene featuring the characters Philip and keema whom we're meeting for the first time here's how the scene is described on the sticky note it's the year 2097 Philip comes to kima's Flat to pick up his stuff their six month relationship is ending because Philip a Space Academy student has just been selected for a one-way trip to the planet Icarus Philip is enthusiastic about the mission and doesn't care about their relationship keema is heartbroken that's the information and for the sake of this exercise I'm

going to force myself to squeeze all of that information into the dialogue including specific names and dates okay okay okay and done hello keema I am here to pick up my belongings from your flat also it is the year of Our Lord 2097. Philip we have been together for six months I love you so want you to go to space I don't love you I love my career I am very excited about my career at the Space Academy where I will travel to the planet Icarus I am so sad about this information I am never

coming back to Earth goodbye I did communicate all the information I wanted to but that scene felt robotic because I forgot my filters who are these characters you need to definitively list off your character's priorities at this point in the story that is your filter what your filter isn't is a description of the character's personality avoid one word descriptors like arrogant or funny if you have to get some information across and your solution is I'll have the funny characters say it in a funny way you're not grounding the line in anything meaningful instead ask what

does this character want in this scene and how would their wording reflect that let's just say Philip is the kind of person who doesn't confront negative emotions he just wants to ride the High and if you get all dramatic he's gonna snap at you basically an avoidant and deeply unhealthy Enneagram seven and keema knows all this throughout their relationship she's been putting her negative emotions aside because she knows that expressing how she really feels would scare him off but now it's their last time seeing each other and she's been keeping so much in for so

long and she's confused because now he's leaving anyway and by the end of the scene she's going to explode on him in addition to all of this Philip and Kima are both sane human beings who wouldn't just you know State what the current year is but for the sake of the exercise we're going to find a way to sneak that through the filter along with everything else I highlighted this will be no easy task there is of course an artistic musical component to dialogue and I'll talk about that later but right now I'm thinking tactically

I need to get my information through the filter starting with he walks in so what's their first interaction how can I set the tone for this whole scene hey hey that's it that's basically a perfect introduction to their Dynamic now why is Philip here I'm here to pick up my stuff no no she knows that he wouldn't just say it like that what if we use this opportunity to learn more about keema got all together in the living room boom multitasking with this line we give a justification for why Philip is here and we show

what sort of person keema is she's making kind gestures towards him even now she's making his life easier because that's how she expresses love and how does Philip respond to that well I'm not going to have him brush it off entirely like he's still appreciative but he's not appreciative the way she wants him to be no eye contact walks past her damn thanks Kim yeah you know what's crazy the first Icarus Mission left in 2084 right and when they arrive in two years it'll have been like a 14-year thing but we're doing the whole trip

in eight years that's how fast the technology is moving and the third mission could even beat us there is he just rattling off Exposition yes but this is purposeful he's talking about this because it's what's on his mind right now what's on her mind closure but she won't demand it outright the filter is still there how does she guide the conversation in that direction how's your mom I think this is good because it establishes that keema knows Philip's family and deepens their history and it's also a subtle way for her to inject sentimentality into the

conversation she's supportive very blunt he can see what she's trying to do this is also him putting up a boundary subtextually he's saying the correct way for you to respond to this is to support me I remember when we went with dinner the day you got into the academy she was so basically there's the first quarantine he's really not trying to have a serious conversation we can use him packing up his stuff as a device to keep him in the room but we have him loading into his vehicle so we use the bags like a

timer and we keep cutting back to the bags like four left three left two left oh boy she better get this off her chest and he's just rambling all excited and we're on her face the whole time I'm proud of you Phillip thanks he grabs the last bag I I want I wanted how are you feeling again she can't just initiate the conversation she wants to have so she's giving him an opening and hoping he takes it she almost wants him to not be okay but he is I'm great how are you I'm good all

right well goodbye wait I I I'm I'm sorry could we please just talk about you and me I don't really know what there is to talk about you know we we had our fun we'll always consider you a friend but I'm never coming back I don't want you to mope about this nope yeah mope that's what you're doing chemo you're making this about you I'm I'm sorry I know I just wish we continuous was the end game like six months ago we moved in together you knew I was going to end up on that ship

I'm not trying to stop you yes you are you're gonna cry and you're gonna beg me to stay here with you I'm not you are I just wanted you to say goodbye I did no not like you want me to hug you and kiss you and mope with you how is that gonna make this easy I don't want it to be easy I just want it to be real please tell me if it was real this video is about skillshare what you there I see you peeking your head into the creative world you thinking about

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for free also your breath stank this is a smooth transition into the next part of the video fitting information naturally in your scene was the first thing I talked about and I do think my model works for that but it's not terribly specific so I want to focus on some do's and don'ts there is a phenomenon I like to call the alley-oop line you know when you see it it's a line that exists only only to facilitate the next line usually what this looks like is a random question at an unnatural time back at the

tank why'd you stick your neck out for me oh and foolish naive hope nothing takes me out of a dialogue scene like this and I've done it myself more times than I can count I have the meaningful line and I need to get my conversation there so I have another character set it up the cloud operations the temporal pencil oh yours there's just something off about that setup line oh it's impure why does the protagonist pick this moment to ask who the commanding officer of the mission is and regardless that's such a weird way to

ask it oh do these missions belong to people has that ever been the language used to describe them look these lines never derail a scene even at their worst they're usually forgotten right after the cool line happens but I bring them up because I believe them to be symptoms of a larger problem I know I talked structure on this channel but a part of that structure is the illusion of a natural progression and that applies to dialogue just as much as it applies to the cause and effect progression of the plot alley-oop lines are the

writer fudging cause and effect to meet a desired end not to an egregiously high degree but just enough to turn a character into a device for a split second so what are some solutions to this I think the first question to ask yourself is whether or not you even need a setup line The Tweak I would make to the tenant scene would go like this the crowd operations the temporal pencil yours because Neil was already in a bean spilling mood but let's say that's not an option let's say I need a character to disclose their

opinion on the nature of power in a scene that's a tall order somehow silco this guy needs to verbally State his ideology if I were a lesser writer I might have savika walk in and ask hey boss what do you think about power but I'm an Arcane writer so I'm gonna reach into the plot and create a situation where it would make sense for silco to disclose his ideology one where doing so would benefit him an underling is communicating a boundary and silco needs to get past that boundary so silco attributes his own power to

his lack of boundaries it comes to those who will do anything AKA his ideology this Thug kid didn't have to be apprehensive about taking that scissor he could have just been like hell yeah but by making one little change to one little side character we open the door to conflict and conflict is the state in which characters reveal things about themselves I like to think of all dialogue as conflict especially dialogue between thematic characters it should go without saying that if you can't think of anything meaningful for your characters to disagree on you might have

to return to your outline and perspective map but turning a disagreement into a conflict requires plot character a hates Hawaiian pizza and character B loves it they disagree but it's not a conflict until the time comes to order pizza which is all to say that if you have a bunch of characters who are ripe with disagreements but still not butting heads it's probably because you haven't used the plot to trigger conflict you haven't put those characters in a situation where the claws are going to come out they're just standing around but I think I have

a halfway decent fix for this or at least a mental process you can maybe use to remedy it if you're struggling with a dialogue scene ask what else is happening in the scene besides dialogue and if the answer is nothing make something happen hell make more than one thing happen an unprompted Pulp Fiction style banter about Hawaiian pizza is level one an argument about what to order is level two an argument about what to order while on the phone with the pizza guy is level three an argument about what to order while on the phone

with the pizza guy while simultaneously trying to fix a busted water pipe okay you get the idea if a dialogue scene feels like it's happening in a void and you don't want that to be the case make it collide with the plot a little bit make it a situation specific dialogue scene the dialogue can interact with the location and the props after all it's just one tool the writer has break out the whole tool belt use subtext to your advantage maybe that Hawaiian pizza argument is code for something else a real emotional dispute between these

two characters lurking just under the surface so they're getting extremely emotional about this pizza but it's not actually the pizza they're talking about you know what I mean you can see this in practice with the wire it's local when D'Angelo Bodie and Mike Uncle Michael Jordan talk about Chess they use the game of chess as an allegory for the drug operation and everyone's like oh the subtext but that's not the subtext that's just an allegory the characters are making in Universe the real subjects of the scene is how the characters respond to the allegory pawns

man in the game they get capped quick they'd be out the game early unless they some smart ass pawns you can boil ideas down to physical representations you know props and when the characters Express attitudes towards those props they're actually expressing attitudes towards the ideas imbued in those props the most common example this is when a character will have a deceased loved one whom they Remember by carrying around an object it's an incredible human way to process feelings and it's also a tactic that can be used to give dialogue more layers the cool thing about

subtext is that it forces the audience to actively decode the text which keeps them engaged you know if you care about that sort of thing and when you find Crafty colorful ways to communicate your information in every scene it's going to hit so different when you finally do serve up a two characters alone in the void scene because the absence of other variables will itself become a variable that tells the audience hey you can't look away this time this moment is big and absolute ever done improv yes and I enjoyed it so yes and is

one of the core tenets of improv basically it means you should never just respond you should respond and then give your scene partner a little extra that way the conversation can mutate new information keeps getting added by Design the scene stays alive and never gets stale does that mean you should drop a huge game-changing Revelation at the end of every line absolutely not all I'm saying is that maybe the answer to your writer's block is letting a bit of additional information slip out here's one more visualizer this is what we'll call a type a conversation

every line is a line every color is an idea but this is a type B conversation the colors are offset here's the S here's the and and the and sets the stage for the next line making the conversation harder to disengage from first model books second model duplicates then elaborates I mean basically yeah I'm not trying to stop you yes you are you're gonna cry and you're gonna beg me to stay here with you this specific rhythm of dial log is by no means something I'm prescribing for your specific situation but it's just one more

thing that could help you and if you maintain this Rhythm for a scene and then abruptly change it that could be really cool too I don't know I'm spitballing I plan for this to be a longer video but I couldn't think of anything to do besides analytically Ogle at my favorite dialogue scenes which wasn't really my intent going in I get a lot of positive feedback on my writing strategies and I'm very happy to have helped people Along on their Journeys but for every 99 of those comments I get one that goes hey could you

stop trying to be a writing coach and just go back to having takes please sometimes these comments are very polite and other times I'm accused of thinking professional writer virus but for new viewers here's a synopsis of my whole thing I'm not just here to argue about whether piece of media is good or bad I want to rise above that discourse and harness analysis to create new writing Frameworks that help me get better at my craft or as I've called it in the past critique as a means to an end even um the Q a

ended up being over three hours if you sent in the question thank you if your name is skillshare thank you for sponsoring this video and as always thank you to my patrons Aaron rockenstock Alex Moore Alexandria Chloe Elise at Main Arcane wit everybody go check out his meme page it's really good Bradley Chrome Casey Brown Daniel Langley Deborah dewald Oliver Elijah K Ashburn Eric J Moffett Evan Wiles govins hamoon Bertram Jake eckenroe Janelle Jones Jarrett Tyree Joanna Van Brunt Joseph Daniel Rodriguez Juda buhanda karasu King Tut lion Lucas Matthew Torres Micah zagrebelny McKeel and nachos

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