WRITING FOR TV
Lesson 3
Before we start the lesson, let’s get one obvious but still great truth out of the way: William Shakespeare and his ilk didn’t write real dialogue, they wrote prose and even poems to be spoken as dialogue. Unless you’re writing satire, don’t go anywhere near it, please.
And If you have the kind of money Sylvester Stallone or Tom Cruise can get as budget for an action-packed movie, don’t worry about dialogue too much, just let it move the story along. You know many of those stars grunt their way through the scenes not involving major action.
In the world of television, where budgets are often tight, dialogue steps into the spotlight and it has to shine like a jewel or you could see your behind as a scriptwriter. It is now your job to entertain with words rather than action. I’m not saying don’t write any action at all, but keep it down, okay? Action often involves stunts and explosions, and that costs money.
The power of dialogue
Okay, fine, we all know what dialogue is. Talk. The stuff the old silent movies didn’t have. And because they didn’t have it, when sound came many successful players of the old Hollywood game fell by the way because they thought what the hell, this is easy, just let the actors talk. And audiences laughed at them, and not in the right places. Talk is not easy.
Because talk has to be real.
When sound came, Hollywood thought it had the answer: Get stage writers, radio writers, they work with words, right? It was a total disaster. Please read the following scene I sneaked from a very old script, written for film in 1930:
INTERIOR SUSPECT’S APARTMENT NIGHT
Show us the apartment with an old pirate’s treasure chest used as coffee table. There’s no-one around. Private eye SAM MALONE and sidekick JERRY, looking for clues, sneak into the apartment through an open window.
SAM
Look, there’s an old treasure chest.
JERRY
Good place to start looking.
Let’s stop reading right there. What’s wrong with that dialogue? Say it out loud – always a good thing to do when you’re writing dialogue, it’s supposed to be heard – and remember what you’re actually seeing while this is being said.
You’ve got it: the pirate’s treasure chest being used as a coffee table. SAM is telling the audience what they’re already seeing. This is radio dialogue, often stage dialogue as well; radio listeners can’t see the scene, and theater watchers sitting far back can’t always see what’s on the stage.
I’m sure the audience – the viewers – burst out laughing when Sam said that in the film, because it made him look like an idiot. Personally this is why I prefer to think VIEWERS when I’m writing instead of AUDIENCE, because VIEW already reminds me people will be VIEWING what I’m writing. It stops me from making the radio or stage writing mistake.
There are other pitfalls in writing dialogue. The next one I call Viewer Explaining. Let’s continue the old film scene with private eye Sam Malone and his sidekick Jerry:
SAM and JERRY go through the contents of the pirate’s treasure chest, taking out
old papers and drawings.
JERRY
Old papers describing ship battles in the Carribean, maps of
lost treasure…this could be what we’re looking for, Sam.
SAM
We’ll have to double check with the cops, but I’m guessing this
belongs to the great grandson of Blackbeard, the most dangerous
pirate who ever sailed the seven seas.
Okay, fine, that’s more than enough of that. What’s wrong with it? Everything. They have just opened the treasure chest and Jerry is already explaining the papers and drawings before properly studying it. Sam is already identifying the owner of the chest as the great grandson of the pirate Blackbeard – good grief, it’s hard to believe this is from an actual script and it was actually filmed. And yet, I watched an episode of a new TV series last week, let’s not name and shame it, and in one scene the characters were pretty much jumping to the same kind of conclusions.
Don’t be that kind of writer, please. Your career will not last, trust me.
Let’s talk about good dialogue. Actors say they know it when they hear it, and that’s very true. It can often look weird written down, you usually have to say it out loud to really get it – because it’s not actually meant to be read, it’s meant to be spoken, the way people really talk, and that means its grammer and sentence construction aren’t always the best. Do you and your best friend use perfect grammer when you’re chatting? I don’t think so.
Best exercise for good dialogue writing: Listen to real people talk, really listen. They often repeat themselves, don’t finish sentences, interrupt themselves. The true genius of good dialogue lies in the way you can marry real talk to the story information your viewers need. It’s not easy, you’re going to have to do a lot of exercises. Remember: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
Character ID dialogue can be useful, but it’s not always necessary. This is when a certain character has a certain saying he or she tends to repeat. Can be very effective, it can become a famous line fans of the show repeat and put on shirts, but don’t overdo it.
Caution: Real dialogue can be overdone, become meaningless jabbering, and when that happens you will lose your viewers, they won’t understand what’s going on. Always find the middle way where the dialogue passes on the information you need passed on, but it still sounds like real talk.
Here comes the really difficult part: Keep it short. Viewers get bored if dialogue goes on too long. Unless that’s the actual point of the dialogue. A comedy character with verbal diarrhoea can, for instance, be extremely funny. But be careful, it’s difficult to know when to stop.
And I don’t care how many pages of dialogue you wrote today, do yourself and the work a favour: Say it out loud. Try to play it. Get someone to play the other character. I promise you the mistakes will reveal themselves. I knew a successful scriptwriter who actually taped all his dialogue and later played it back, just to catch the mistakes.
Always remember: Real dialogue is the jewel at the heart of a good script, and it’s meant to be spoken.