The Dialogue Workshop: Writing Characters Who Sound Like Themselves

Craft notes on the specific techniques for differentiating character voice through dialogue -- the most visible and often most underdeveloped dimension of screenplay craft

Screenplay.biz. Journalism about the craft and business of screenwriting.

The dialogue problem that characterises most developmental screenplays -- the problem that readers identify most quickly and that rewriting most reliably improves -- is the problem of characters who sound like each other rather than like themselves. When you can remove a character's name from a piece of dialogue and be uncertain which character said it, the dialogue is not doing the characterisation work that the format requires. Every character in a screenplay should have a voice so distinct that their dialogue identifies them without attribution.

The specific techniques for differentiating character voice: vocabulary and register (the specific words characters use -- their education level, their region, their class background, their professional context -- should be consistent and distinctive); speech patterns (some characters speak in complete sentences, others in fragments; some characters ask questions rhetorically, others literally; some characters correct themselves mid-sentence, others never do); and what characters don't say (the things a character avoids discussing, the words they won't use, the subjects they change -- the negative space of character voice is as distinctive as what they do say).

The Revision Approach

The revision approach that reliably improves dialogue differentiation: read each character's dialogue in isolation across the full script, removing all stage directions and other characters' lines. The character should emerge as a consistent, distinct voice across the isolated reading. If the voice is inconsistent, the differentiation work has not been completed. If the voice sounds like another character's voice when read in isolation, the two characters' voices have not been sufficiently differentiated. Screenplay.biz covers dialogue craft because it is the dimension of screenplay writing that is most visible on the page and most discussed in script notes.

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