How to Teach Writing Dialogue

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today we're going to talk about how to teach writing dialogue to students. Dialogue is very important to writing plays and screenplays. It is the most important skill they are going to learn whenever they start to write their plays. So you want to give them as many examples as possible of different ways to write dialogue. Give them a set of plays to read, of course, throughout the course of the semester in which they will lean different kinds of, different ways to write dialogue. Because, you can have a realistic style in which people will speak to each other in just sort of a conversational way. You can also have an naturalistic style which is a more, a very natural sort of straight from life kind of dialogue. Or, you can have the absurd dialogue which sort of lives in a world that's not our own. So, let your students know that they can write in any way that they see fit and they can even meld these genres together if that's what works for them. Just make sure they read as much as possible. Second, have the students, of course, write their own dialogue and then have them read it aloud with other students in the class playing the characters. This way, your going to be able to show them which lines feel stuffy. Which lines feel like they've been written and which lines feel realistic if they want to write in that mode. Also, teach them to create dialogue to feed off of itself. You want characters to respond to each other in a logical way. For example, if I say, "How are you doing today?" And you say, "The sky is blue", you're not responding directly to me. But, if that has relevance to your script, I would love to know what that relevance is. But otherwise, use a sort of trigger heap method. A character says one thing, which is the trigger for the next line which is the heap. Avoid stodgy exposition. As in, "As you know, John, you are my stepbrother and we have a son together." Right. This is bad exposition. Instead, sort of weave through the details of the story through the dialogue so that you don't try to just get everything out in sort of one stream because that's not realistic at all. And finally, always remember that dialogue has to be active. That means that we only speak to each other because we want something from each other. I'm speaking to you now because I want you to learn something about dialogue. Otherwise I wouldn't be talking to myself. A character talks to another character because they want or need something from them. And so, apply these methods to your teaching and I think you'll get some good results."