How do you write dialog? - Page 2

First up I know very little

I write my own 4 panel comics and while there is dialog it's often short and brief.

Still, to try and improve here's what I do
a) Try lots of different things and see what works and what doesn't

b) Look at lots of different examples and try and deconstruct what works about them.

c) Most importantly play to your own strengths. I think it's better to define your own style that try to imitate others.

David Mamet said something about how it's not important whether or not the audience understands what the characters are talking about as long as the characters seem to understand it. Primer is a good example of this.

for screenplays, the most important thing to do (and toughest for me) is to make sure you externalize all the things going on inside of your characters. for example, you cant just say "Bernard nervously askes, 'Why?'" you have to use the dialogue to convey nervousness. Bernard: "JESUS! W-w-why?" that might not be the best example, but mainly dont let words just be what people are talking about to advance the plot, let them reveal the characters' emotions and real feelings.

We could talk about hundreds of movies as great examples of this or that, but one especially good example of dialogue that's been on my mind lately is PT Anderson's HARD EIGHT. There's that great sequence early in the film where Philip Baker Hall is showing John C. Reilly how to siphon the same $150 through the casino so it looks like you're spending ten times that. It's really pure exposition ("Here, let me show you how to do this. First you...") but Anderson makes it compelling with the precision with which he writes. And by then, through Hall's diner conversation with Reilly, he's established Hall as a gentleman guru. This is all within the first ten minutes of the movie, and all through dialogue. Reilly gets the same service for his part as the follower to Hall's leader, and I love the details, for example the way he turns into the host when he gets the comped hotel room and starts offering all the freebies to Hall. The parameters of an entire relationship are formed in the first few sequences.

We're sort of veering between movies and prose, but I think this is a great lesson for short stories as well. You have to inform the story as much as you can, but at the same time you have to be concise. Definitely not an easy task. I tend to think of dialogue as the shortest bridge between the two.

Great example. I own that film and watch it once a week. Anderson has always been great at writing compelling dialogue. But he's also good at creating rich, complex characters by contradicting them through the differences in what they say and what they do.

For instance, at the beginning in the diner, where Sydney and John first meet, John asks Sydney for $6,000 for his mother's funeral. Sydney flat out tells him no.

Later, when Jimmy threatens to tell John that *SPOILER* Sydney killed his father and wants money to keep his mouth shut, Sydney offers him $6,000, the exact amount John needed for his mother's funeral. Now it's presumed earlier that Sydney helped John with the funeral through a friend, but it's never clear whether or not he gave him any money...it doesn't matter though.

What's interesting about this is that Sydney is obviously trying to make up for what he did to John's father by taking him under his wing. But he's unwilling to give John any money. He could have taken him under his wing and given him the money, since it was for his mother's funeral, someone else in John's life that has died.

But that's not all. After Sydney tells Jimmy he'll give him $6,000 but they have to wait until the bank opens, they go to Jimmy's hotel room. After a great scene of dialogue, Sydney says he has the $6,000 with him, not in the bank as he stated previously. Why did he do that? Why did he wait? It's difficult to ascertain the reason because Anderson never spells it out clearly, which is what great writers do...but he takes it a step further by linking it with his first diner conversation with John. John also wanted $6,000 but he never gave it to him, even though he wanted to make amends for his crime. He obviously can afford it, since he's practically living in a Vegas hotel suite. In other words, Sydney's character has been revealed in something that is not obviously stated, and contradicts what he's been doing for the entire film.

PTA takes this concept and puts it to brilliant use in There Will Be Blood, an incredibly written character study.