Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work: Listen to a Movie
Let’s say you have a moment of clarity. You admit to yourself that your ability to write dialogue could use a boost.
I’ve run across a lot of tricks re writing dialogue, but this is one of the best. Here’s what you do:
Step 1: Select a movie that is known for its stellar dialogue
Step 2: Find that movie (streaming, pay cable, DVD)
Step 3: Turn on your TV
Step 4: Turn your chair around so it’s facing away from the screen
Step 5: Deposit your butt onto the chair
Step 6: Listen to the movie
That’s right. Do not watch the movie. Listen to it. And if you’re still confused by my advice, let me make this very clear:
I am asking you to sit in a room… with your back to the TV… looking like a complete fool… then listen to the movie.
If you can get past the whole “complete fool” thing, you can learn a lot.
In particular, you are listening to…
the length and shape of each side of dialogue…
the collection of those exact words into those sides of dialogue…
the pacing of the language in the movie…
the emotion behind each word…
phrases that grab your attention.
When I’ve done this in the past, I imagined the words being typed out in my head as they were spoken by each character. I could even see how the page of dialogue laid out in my mind’s eye.
One thing in particular to pay attention to is how does each character sound different? Not their voices, but the combination of the words they use, their word choices… slang, lingo, cadence, formality vs. informality.
The point is you’re trying to immerse yourself in the words spoken by the characters, the world of dialogue.
If you do this several times with different types of movie genres, I’ll bet you’ll have a kind of gestalt experience, where you suddenly grok dialogue in a way you’ve never gotten it before. That knowledge may be more instinctual than conscious, but I’d be hugely surprised if the next time you sat down to write, you would have a whole new level of understanding about writing the words that your characters speak.
And here is a bonus YOU get from reading all the way to the end of this post. If you go here, you can access 100s of audio version of movies. It’s called Listen To A Movie: For the Cubicle Workers of the World. Now you don’t even have to turn your chair around to listen to a movie. Just plug in your headphones using this website.
For more Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work articles, go here.
