Home
News
Services
Resume
Quotations
Views

Good Dialog Is
   Not as Real as It Sounds       Return to Views Directory Page
Many of the scripts I write for business clients are teleplays--reenactments, dramas, sitcoms, spoofs, whodunits and soap operas designed to teach and to motivate.  They are great fun to write.   And they are great fun to watch, which means that audience's remember them.

The key to success in these programs is believable dialogue.  Many people are surprised at how artificial good dialog is.  The anecdotal accounts of the Great Writers sitting in Parisian bistros and backwoods bars and recording the conversations they heard are probably true.  But when they sat down to write, they wrote.  They did not transcribe.

Good dramatic dialog is as artificial as film, videotape and the stage.  If it's not, it bores us all silly.  We don't want fifteen minutes of the prattling of an old aunt.  We want one minute of dialog that creates in our minds an image of fifteen.  We don't want to hear every "well," "um," "yes," "no," and "gee gosh" that real people say.  We want to hear the effect of all that verbal stumbling.

Here's an example.

Real Life:
"Don, I asked you twice already to do your chores.  I'm not going to ask again.   Are you going to do them, or are you just going to sit there on your lazy ass?"

"Me?  Jeez, can't Tommy help?  I mean, like, he's out playing with his friends all day and doesn't do shit.  I don't know why I have to do everything around here all the time.  It's, like, not fair, you know?"

Dialog:
"Don, get up off your lazy ass and do your chores, like I asked you to."

"Why can't Tommy help?  I have to do all the chores.  It's not fair."

Dialog is one area where less is truly more, and where what seems not enough is often plenty.  The writing of effective dialog--dialog that entertains, doesn't drag, and yet still says what it has to say--takes a good while to learn.  For guidelines, I recommend the "Dialog" chapter of Oakley Hall's The Art & Craft of Novel Writing (Story Press, Cincinati, Ohio; 1989).  Then read some Hemingway, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, and Elmore Leonard.

Back to top of page          Return to Views Directory Page