Talk the Talk. Penny Penniston
Forces at Work
Lesson 19: Rewrite Exercise: Turning Points
Lesson 19: Rewrite Exercise: The Ending
Lesson Twenty: Scene to Script
Lesson 20: Script Analysis Exercise
Lesson 20: Beginner Exercise
Lesson 20: Intermediate and Advanced Exercise
Lesson 20: Solo Exercise
Put This Book Down
Conclusion
Appendix
Script Analysis Suggestions
Course and Workshop Syllabus Suggestions
For Further Reading
About the Author
GEORGE: My mother thanks you. My father thanks you. My sister thanks you. And I thank you.
—Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Dave Bell, Jessica Ross, and Kathy Stieber for allowing me to raid their DVD collections. Thanks to Kathleen Lange for her assistance in compiling the dialogue quotes that begin each chapter. Finally, I am grateful to Michael Wiese, Ken Lee, and Gary Sunshine for their guidance in putting this book together.
This book was born out of my experience teaching Dramatic Writing at Northwestern University. With warm wishes, I dedicate it to all of my former students. Keep writing.
HENRY: Words if you look after them… they can build bridges.
—Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing)
Introduction
WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK
Dialogue puts conversation in motion. Great dialogue moves like a great athlete; it is nimble, precise, and powerful. It commands the attention, yet feels effortless in its execution. However, if we want our dialogue to move like an athlete, then we must train like an athlete.
This is a book of exercises to tone the scriptwriter's dialogue skills. It is written for university-level playwriting and screenwriting students or preprofessional writing groups and workshops. It is also appropriate for professional playwrights and screenwriters who wish to keep their dialogue skills sharp.
Most playwriting and screenwriting books take a sweeping scope. They tend to include a brief discussion of dialogue, but then abandon the topic in favor of other issues. Talk the Talk is exclusively a focused examination of and an exercise regimen for dialogue writing. By mastering this fundamental building block of dramatic writing, authors breathe life into characters and create scripts that jump off the page. Great moments of dialogue are the great moments of film and theater.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book is based on a few core beliefs about the teaching of writing:
Writers Learn by Writing
The frustrating thing about dialogue writing is that it seems like it ought to be easy. We all engage in dialogue every day. We've all been in situations that are funny or ironic or tragic. And, being human and living in a world of humans, we are all experts on human behavior. So why is it so hard?
The truth is that all those things are just the notes of drama. They are the keys on the piano. Anyone can come along and make noise on a piano — all you have to do is bang on the keys. But to make music on a piano — that is harder. It requires striking a particular set of notes in a particular sequence in order to generate a particular set of sounds. Trained pianists do this gracefully and beautifully. Their fingers glide across the keys. They make it look effortless. The truth is that it only got to be effortless after lots and lots of practice.
So if you want to be a writer, practice writing. Practice it the way a musician practices her instrument. Great piano players did not become great by attending lectures and reading books on music theory. Those things certainly helped, but, at the end of the day, it is years and years of fingers on the keyboard that make a piano player. Scales and drills and études get played over and over again until they become instinctive. Technique that once required careful concentration becomes effortless and subliminal. It is the same with writing. Think of this book as a book of scales and études. Use this book to drill technique into your muscle memory so that when you sit down at your keyboard in the future, the dialogue will flow effortlessly.
A few tips on doing the exercises in this book:
There are twenty lessons in this book. Most lessons contains four dialogue-writing exercises. These exercises are marked in the margins so that you can find them easily:
• Script Analysis Exercises are marked with a
• Beginner Exercises are marked with a
• Intermediate/Advanced Exercises are marked with a
• Solo Exercises are marked with a
All exercises are appropriate for both screenwriters and playwrights. However, if you are focusing exclusively on screenwriting or exclusively on playwriting, then I recommend the following tweaks to the exercises:
• When doing the script analysis exercises, screenwriters should exclusively analyze films. Playwrights should exclusively analyze stage plays. (The Appendix includes script suggestions for both film and theater.)
• Screenwriters should write all dialogue in standard screenplay format. Playwrights should write all dialogue in standard playscript format.
• In general, screenplays have shorter dialogue scenes than stage plays. Therefore, when doing a dialogue-writing exercise, screenwriters should lean toward the lower end of the recommended page count. Playwrights should lean toward the higher end of the recommended page count.
The Best Feedback Is from an Audience
As playwrights and screenwriters, we aren't just writing, we are writing for an audience. Writing without an audience is simply a form of self-expression. We write down all sorts of things for our own reference: lists, notes for class, journal entries, etc. This writing exists only for ourselves. We don't expect or require other people to take meaning from it.
Writing for an audience is different. We write something and an audience interprets it. It is an act of communication. If we do our job well, the meaning that we put into our words will interact constructively with the meaning that the audience takes from our words. Or, to put it simply: Our audience will understand what the hell we are talking about.
As writers, it's easy to lose sight of the audience. We assume that, if we understand what is happening in the story and what we are trying to communicate with the story, then surely an audience will understand it as well. We know our story and our intent so well that we lose the perspective of someone who is experiencing our script for the first time.
Therefore, one of the most useful ways to hone your craft is to get feedback from others. You need people to act as your audience — people who can give you objective feedback about the effect your writing is having upon them. Is it clear? Is it coherent? Does it move them? Does it engage them? These are hard questions to answer on your own. You need