Advanced Playwriting: Clean Up Dialogue

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to cover how to clean up your dialogue. Now you're familiar with movies that started off in the silent era which was very visual, and then in the late twenties, it went into the talkies and it was all about the dialogue, and if you know some of those thirties gangsters movies, it's like talk talk talk talk talk, back and forth, it's constant a barrage of dialogue. And then over the decades it became more of a blend again where a movie was very visual and also the dialogue was much more concise, it worked, those things worked together. And I think that's the way plays are at this time too. And it's best if you can be as concise as you can be, with the dialogue. Now this isn't when you're doing the writing. This is more in the editing phase. So when you write, put all of your ideas down on paper. Put way more than you even want. Just write and let that flow. But during the editing process is when you can go back and really take a close look at that dialogue and hone it down. Now there are certain areas you can be really aware of, and some is just plain unnecessary dialogues like greetings. Like let's say we have a couple guys who are poker players, they haven't seen each other for a while. They're going to greet each other and they're going to get into talking more about this bank heist or something. The first guy says 'Hey Sam, how's is going?' Second guy goes 'Yeah, not bad,' 'Good, good. What's going on? I haven't seen you for a while.' 'Yeah, yeah, I've been around.' And then they go into the heist thing. But what if we cut out all that unnecessary dialogue in the beginning, and just when they meet, have the first guy go say 'Hey, missed taking away all your money at last week's poker game.' And the other one says "That's not how I remember it. I miss hearing you say. I fold, I fold I fold." Something where you see right away that they're really competitive and it brings us in. You know exactly where their relationship is and then they start in about their bank heist or whatever the story is. Now another thing you can do is to eliminate dialogue completely and show something silently to get more impact. So let's say we have a manager who's just been fired from a job after many years and the scene is about him coming home and he and his wife are going to talk about their financial situation now that he's been laid off. So here's his wife there, making dinner, and he walks in the door and looks at her and says, "Honey I've been laid off. This is the most devastating thing that could have happened to me. They walked me out of the building. They literally walked me out. These people love me. I had no idea this was coming. I worked so hard for them." I mean, he might do that, instead of all that dialogue, instead you might have, let's put the wife, she's in the kitchen bringing out, making the dinner. And let's have him enter and instead of just talking away, he's got his arms full of cardboard boxes with all his stuff he's gathered from over the years. And he sets it down and maybe he slowly brings out some of the old photographs that show him in there. And he has a big banner that says "Happy birthday Stan, we love you. World's best manager." And he sets that down. And so we see visually what's going on. Then his wife walks in, looks, there's a moment where they're both frozen, she comes together they embrace, and then the scene begins. So that's a wonderful way to get us in the mood so with the very first word of dialogue, we already know what's happening. Now another area of clean up is in the exposition. Exposition is the back story, so it's usually not the most dynamic part of the play, but let's say we have a couple of prisoners waking up and we need to know that they've been in prison for five years together so instead of one of the prisoners waking up and saying, "Man I hate this place, five long years. I am going out of my mind." Instead of all that stuff, what if we have him wake up, walk over to the wall with a marker pen and the wall is full of tic marks to show that they've been there many many months and he's running out of room on that part of the wall because there's so many marks. He has to go to a brand new part, make the mark, go sit down, and then they begin the scene. And it starts off. So that brings us in, we know that information without having heard it, so the very first word of dialogue we hear, we're already into the scene. Now an audience is not going to sit out there and look at your play that hasn't been cut down as much as it maybe could have and go "Wow this dialogue is not concise, I really don't like this." An audience is really not going to know what it is, but they're just going to know that the play is a little slow or they kind of, they didn't know what they didn't like about it, but there was something. You'd be surprised if the dialogue is really cleaned up how an audience appreciates that."