I’ve been working on a sitcom script for the last little bit and that’s meant wrestling a lot with dialog. I know good dialog starts with being a good listener, and I’ve been trying to get out a little more to coffee shops, dude ranches, laser tag emporiums, and other places where “real people” hang out, to hear how they speak and to pick up language I might not have used myself.
I’m also trying to come up with a handful of basic working techniques that’ll help me get more consistent and credible results. I thought some of the folks who drop by this site might be interested in sharing techniques we’ve been taught or figured out. If you’re feeling generous, add a comment to this post — no technique too small, too cheesy, or too obvious.
Here are a few of the things I’ve been messing around with:
backstory-a-licious: The clearer the character’s backstory and driving motives, the more personal their reactions to any situation. This week I finally figgered out the backstory for one key character in the sitcom. It was a pretty simple sketch of a backstory, but even that really helped turn his words from “generic Cecil banter” to something more specific.
messing up the tennis match: I find I too easily get into dialog volleys of “Ingmar, what’d you have for dinner?” “Well Dave, I had tacos for dinner. How about you?” Dialog can start to get into this predictable back and forth as I race toward a particular plot objective (for example: “feed Ingmar and Dave!”). The aforementioned backstories help remind me to stay focused on what drives the characters, not just the plot point that’s driven me to write this particular scene. I’ve also been encouraging characters to interject more tangents, and I’ve been occasionally allowing them a genuine word fumble — something that’ll surprise the other characters and hopefully the audience.
keying in on key phrases: for some characters I focus in a phrase or two that they use. They don’t even have to actually use it in the piece, it’s just something I keep in the back o’ my mind as I write their lines. For example, in this micro-musical I was messing around with, there’s a character whose voice keys off the phrase “How ’bout that?” (stolen from a kid who played Tom Sawyer at Disneyland — as he walked away he called out to my kids with a light twang: “I’ll come back later and we’ll go look for treasure — how ’bout that?”) Whenever I thought I was getting off track on that character’s voice, I’d ask myself “is this the sorta thing my ‘how ’bout that’ guy would say?”
So that’s a few from me. How ’bout that? And how ’bout you? — any dialog tips/techniques/tricks you’d be up for sharing?
-Cecil
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
CV,
Great project! Couldn’t help think of our other current project, the Lighthouse one, and how brilliant Woolf is at suggesting backstories–or really more the workings of consciousness itself as it manifests in her different characters and their “stories”–through the sparest means.
Like, for instance, we don’t know how the Ramsays met or fell in love, but Woolf give us that instant, through Mr. Bankes’s eyes no less, where young Mr. Ramsay saw a duck protecting her chicks with its wings, and he, in meditation on something high and important, broke off to say “Pretty — pretty” and you have the man right there, just from that.
There’s something too Lily ponders–how you’d know Mrs. Ramsay just from her discarded glove. What is it that makes that empty glove communicate Mrs. Ramsay?
Maybe no help in writing dialogue, but I like her knack for turning incidental things–a covey of ducks, an empty glove–into expressions of a whole person’s character. Any thing to strip for use from that?
Don’t know if it helps in writing a sitcom — but dialogue is hecka important in fiction. I try to avoid anything other than “said,” and lots of times don’t use any attribution that might read as stage direction (he said angrily). No adverbs! I guess in a script that’s not an issue. Verbal tics, yes, but always always (try to) avoid that horrible cancer, the clunky exposition in dialogue — “Honey, we’ve been married 12 years.” “Yes, I know.”
It’s weird — people don’t talk in complete sentences but you can’t just write the dialogue like that because people seem to really speak in grunts and clicks. So how to make a false-construction situation like a dialogue feel real when by its very nature it can’t be real because it would read too awkwardly or poorly? Um, practice. And more practice.
Lemonblossom’s comment reminded me of a related thing I learned once from an actor friend. Actors who seem most “natural” on stage often over-enunciate, or enunciate much more forcefully than they would in street life. They do disturbing stretching exercises with their mouths before performing to accomplish this; they speak more loudly and with larger gestures than you ever would in real conversation. I guess what I’m saying is that “natural” when it comes to stage or film dialog is a kind of accepted convention, not nec. a matter of on-the-street mimicry, like the way you forget how incredibly strained & artificial that newscaster voice is, because that’s the convention for signalling authority when you’re doing the news.
Dialog on “Seinfeld” seems like a good example of this to me–it sounds like nothing so much as vaudeville when you step back from it, but while they’re doing it, I often forget to notice how put-on it is. Maybe on the other end of the same spectrum, Mamet: totally mannered, yet sounding so vernacular and “street”.
Dunno: is this any help? Like, totally signing off.
I agree completely with RK’s comment: sitcom dialogue is entirely unreal. Listening to real people can give you clues as to the core of what they communicate, but the *form* of a sitcom character’s speech can’t be as error-filled and telegraphic as ordinary conversation. You have to work both form and meaning at the same time, but I’ve always tried to finalize meaning first (in any medium) and then massage the form later. Find the plot and characters, then what they do and say, then how they do or say it.
I have to be really “method” to write passable dialogue (and it’s still the weakest part of my writing), mentally getting into the character to see what locutions sound natural. So I’m probably a poor coach on the subject.