Dialogue that Sings: What Dialogue does for your Script

Dialogue is one of the elements that showcases a writer’s talent in a matter of minutes, portraying time period, plot, setting and characterisation. It also reveals the subtext and context of your film. Because it’s so difficult to do well, good dialogue demonstrates your unique voice and style in ways that bring your characters alive from the page, and shape an actor’s performance. Good dialogue is that which (perhaps ironically) doesn’t represent real-life conversation because it’s full of buts and ums and repetitiveness. Sometimes we don’t even realise just how much so. Dialogue needs to emulate the sense of what real conversations sound like, but eliminating those fillers we pepper our talk with.

This is because in a script, you’ve only got a few pages to get your character’s point across, so everything the characters say must move plot along as well as being poignant. This is probably why real-life conversation can go on for so long, because none of us have any plot to develop in a page!