The writers room weeks 6-7-8: "Writing better dialogue"

It's late Friday afternoon, end of week eight working on the screenplay my co-writer and I are planning to enter into the 2013 Nicholl Fellowship competition, I believe.

Clicking on a link to an Onion article, "Find the one thing you're most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life," has made me feel much better about not updating the blog sooner. Here's the link: onion.com/11YVZeN

In spite of the painful truth highlighted in the Onion feature, my friend and I are making progress on our screenplay. We're working on every day at lunch and some Friday afternoons. with four-and-a-half weeks left we're determined to finish before the May 1 Nicholl deadline.

Here's this week's writing lesson (Writing better dialogue):

When I first began studying screenwriting, I remember struggling to write dialogue. Everything I wrote seemed fake and unnatural. Even worse every character's voice sounded the same. 

During my first screenwriting course, Sandi Berg's favorite saying was, "better line!" She said these words often, to each student in the summer production workshop she taught. What her words really meant was: "that dialogue is weak, pitiful, and I know you can create better dialogue; you owe it to your characters."

As we've been working in the writers room there have been incredibly powerful lines, perfection. But as we try to write other scenes the dialogue is lame and I hear Sandi's directive, "Better line!"

As we worked on one of these scenes nothing was helping. The scene was dead. The audience would squirm uncomfortably. We threw out more ideas but each was as lame as the last. The energy in our writers room lagged.

Then I began talking about our character—She's a kick-ass girl. We talked about the other person in the scene (a doctor). We talked about their relationship to each other (to succeed she may just outwit the brilliant doctor; she is street-wise). My co-writer and I talked about what each person in the scene wanted and what they really needed. Then, magically, lines of dialogue came alive and the energy in the writers room returned.

And even better, the momentum from scene to scene and page to page remains unpredictable and yet right on; the story is becoming powerful and intriguing. 

During a break we spoke about how certain we were about what we were going to include in the story. However, because we had patiently tried to understand each character and honored who they were before beginning to write the direction we thought the screenplay would take faded. While following a solid outline the characters have awakened and are now commanding the creative space. They are alive and are driving the story.

There's no way that their voices are boring and they don't sound identical. In fact they are completely different from anyone who has lived, or who will ever live. I wish I could share this with Kersh; I know he would smile.

Today at 3:40 as we were leaving the office my co-writer mentioned something that meant quite a bit to me after I finished my first screenplay. In less than two months he said, we will do something that most people will not accomplish their entire lives—completing an entire screenplay. 

That's a great feeling and we won't have given up one precious evening to do it. Take that, Onion!