Common Beginner's Mistakes:
"the 5 Too's"


I read a lot of beginning dialogue in my screenwriting classes, of course, and much of what is wrong with it falls into one of four categories:

Let's look at each of these more closely.

Too much. There is just too much dialogue, often by a significant degree, such as twice or three times more than is useful. Playwrights especially have this problem since they are trained to develop stories via dialogue, and slowly at that. For the screenwriter, dialogue is a secondary tool, not a primary one, and always holds second fiddle to visual storytelling. Always look for ways to tell your story without dialogue. Ask yourself, If this was a silent movie, how would I tell it? Keep your dialogue to what is functional and necessary. All dialogue must move the story forward and/or reveal new aspects of character.

Too formal. Write dialogue the way people actually talk, not the way your usually write when you are writing language to be read. Dialogue is language to be heard and there is a great difference. For example, we usually speak in contractions: I can't, I won't. If you write, I cannot or I will not, then you have to know what you are doing: People commonly only speak this way for emphasis, and the context of the scene must justify this. You can learn a lot about the way people actually speak by improving your eavesdropping skills: listen to them! And read your own dialogue aloud. Better yet, record it, preferably in someone else's voice, and listen to it. Formal dialogue always registers on the ear before it registers on the eye.

Too chatty. Chatty dialogue is dialogue that goes nowhere. It may be fine in terms of sounding like real folks -- but it does not move the story along. In this most efficient of all narrative forms, the screenplay, you don't have time to give us chat and all scenes suggesting chat must have a strong function in characterization or dramatic relief (such as the dialogue relief after strong violence in a Tarrantino movie). Chatty dialogue often is found at the beginning of a scene -- a lot of "hi, how are ya" stuff that is just fat.

Too repetitive. Dialogue that tells us what we already know is boring. Beginners usually do this when they have a character inform another character of something s/he needs to know but which we, the audience, already know. You make us suffer to tell us all over again. All you need to do, in the situation above, is lead into the explanation, "John, you'll never guess what happened," and then cut to a new scene after the character has been told.

Another way in which dialogue is repetitive is that all characters sound alike. I've already touched on this. The solution is to give the major characters "verbal prints," having them use phrases and syntax unique to their speech patterns. Again, listen to the conversations all around you for idioms that you can shape for your own writing uses.

Too "on the nose". Dialogue is called "on the nose" when it too directly expresses emotion. Everything is on the surface, "on the nose," and the dialogue lacks suggestion and density. This is the oppose of "subtext" (see example) when dialogue has a deeper meaning under the literal, surface meaning of what is said. Now there are times when "on the nose" dialogue is contextually appropriate -- during a heated argument, for example -- but beginners overdo this and have all characters turn into folks at confession, which turns any story into a heavy, simplistic melodrama. In real life, we talk around our problems more than we talk directly about them, and in drama characters are more interesting when they do this as well.

Too much, too formal, too chatty, too repetitive, too "on the nose" -- if you can rid your dialogue of these common faults, you are on your way to writing crisp, entertaining, character dialogue.


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