Catch up continues. The theme of Week 6 is ‘the scene’ and dialogue.

Cherry Potter’s chapter on ‘Characterisation and Dialogue’ was a pretty enjoyable read and a good overview of screen dialogue’s function, how it works best and some starter-for-ten suggestions on how to best write it. My issue with dialogue is that I enjoy writing it but have perhaps always over relied on it, especially in my attempts at comedy, to convey wants, meaning and information. So one thing I’m very conscious of now is asking questions like how could this scene be told with less or no dialogue? I know from my day job as a commercials director, working in a medium where the skill is to communicate entire stories including characters, ideas and desires in as little as 30″, that viewers will remember most of what they see, but can often miss information if its spoken. For example, you can have woman sat on her sofa saying she’s a stressed out mum. Or you can have a woman on the phone, a child demanding her attention, someone at the door and dinner burning on the stove, all at the same time. Story telling on screen at its best is primarily visual, then backed up with strong and efficient dialogue. 

One of the areas that interests me is how dialogue is used in different genres and how the skill of a writer is being able work within a specific world and set of audience expectations. Aaron Sorkin is famously verbose and high speed, writing a form of dialogue that isn’t necessarily 100% realistic but is often very dramatic and entertaining. Tarantino is famous for the heightened tone and referential nature of dialogue. The Coen Brothers are famous for the depth, wit and idiosyncrasy of theirs. Judd Apatow is famous for the comedically truthful and painfully honest style of his dialogue. Or Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the self-deprecating, unflinchingly honest and insightful style of hers.

What all of these writers have in common is they write very specifically within a genre, with a huge amount of the tone and mood of the work coming from the specificity of the way their characters speak. Equally, all of their characters are incredibly definable with strong identities and points of view. The hard work has been done creating intriguing characters, putting them in entertaining situations, giving them difficult obstacles to overcome, and then giving them voices that not only perform the task of communicating feelings, wants, needs, personality and information, but also delivering a specific tone, world view and staking it’s place in the storytelling multiverse.