Talk the Talk. Penny Penniston
group.
Most of the exercises in this book are designed for this kind of environment. I encourage you to find trusted peers to help evaluate your work. This might be easier in a large city, but, thanks to the Internet, no one has to be excluded from forming his or her own support group of fellow writers. Once you have completed the group exercises in each chapter, you can do the solo exercises on your own as a regular writer's workout.
If you are truly on your own, then you must develop the ability to be your own audience. This means putting your completed work away for a few weeks and then reviewing it as if you were a virgin to the material. You can still go through the discussion questions, but you must split your perspective in half. Debate the discussion questions between two sides of yourself: the writer and the objective audience-member.
There Are Only Two Kinds of Writing Advice
From your point of view, there is not good advice or bad advice. There is not right advice and wrong advice. There is only:
• Helpful Advice
• Not Helpful Advice
Making this distinction forces you to take responsibility for figuring out what you need, right now, to make your work better and to help you along in this moment. It also keeps your work and your artistic ego from getting torn apart in the endless crosscurrents of opinions from teachers, professionals, and peers.
So… read books on writing. Attend lectures on writing. Take writing classes and workshops. Try out everything that anyone suggests. If you find a suggestion helpful, use it. If it's not helpful, ignore it for the moment — just keep working with the helpful stuff; keep writing. In six months, revisit the unhelpful advice. Reevaluate it. Maybe it's helpful now. Maybe you're at a different place in your writing. Maybe the advice that was completely useless and 100% not helpful six months ago is now suddenly, miraculously… brilliant. If that's the case, use it. If that's not the case, ignore it for six more months, then evaluate it again. Is it helpful yet? If so, use it; if not, put it aside for six more months. Repeat this process over and over again until you die. By the sheer force of evolution, the useful advice will end up in your work and the useless advice will stay out of your way.
Per my own instructions, try out everything in this book. But if any section is, in your opinion, not the thing you need to help you along in this particular moment, then ignore it. Go find the helpful stuff. Go find the useful stuff. Focus on that.
THE VOICE:HOW PEOPLE TALK
HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.
—William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
LESSON ONE:
Capturing the Voice
As a scriptwriter, one of the first things you need to master is the ability to capture dialogue on the page. This is trickier than it sounds. Schools spend years drilling us in prose writing — writing that is meant to be read. Dialogue isn't meant to be read; it is meant to be heard. The scriptwriter has the difficult task of taking something that is meant to be heard, putting it on the page in such a way that it can be read, but ultimately making sure that once it comes off the page and into an actor's mouth, it will still sound like speech.
Scriptwriters do this by abandoning almost everything we ever learned about composition, grammar, and punctuation. In dialogue, people rarely pre-organize their thoughts. They don't necessarily use complete sentences or speak with proper grammar. People do not talk in prose. And because people do not talk in prose, scriptwriters do not write dialogue in prose. We do not stay bound to the traditional rules of composition. We reappropriate grammar. We create vocabulary. We employ rogue punctuation marks such as the ellipsis and the em dash. Your fourth grade teacher would be horrified, but your actors and your audience will thank you for it.
A few tips on dialogue punctuation:
• An ellipsis (…) suggests that a character's thought trails off.
• An em dash ( — ) suggests that a character stops a thought short, interrupts himself, or is interrupted by someone else.
• Periods create a pause or complete a thought. They work sort of like the word “stop” in a telegram. Forget what you learned in school. In dialogue, you don't need a complete sentence in order to use the period.
Here's an example:
MARK
So. Right. There's this girl — she's not the type I usually go out with. I usually go out with someone… skinnier. More fit, you know? But this girl — she's fat. I mean FAT. And the thing is, I think it's hot. Yeah. Smokin’.
LESSON 1: SCRIPT ANALYSIS EXERCISE
NOTE: In this exercise, beginning and intermediate writers should analyze published work by established writers. See the Appendix for a list of suggestions. Advanced writers have the option of bringing in their own work for analysis.
Have each member of the group bring in one page of dialogue from a play or screenplay. It's helpful to include a broad range of authors, genres, and writing styles.
For Discussion:
Review each page of dialogue with the group.
1. Describe the speaking style of each character.
2. How did the phrasing and punctuation of the dialogue contribute to your sense of each character's voice?
3. How does the style and rhythm of the dialogue contribute to the overall tone of the scene? Is this a comic scene? A romantic scene? A melodramatic scene? What in the rhythm of the dialogue contributes to this impression?
4. Do you notice a difference in the style of dialogue from author to author? Compare and contrast your impressions.
LESSON 1: BEGINNER EXERCISE
For this exercise, you will need a portable audio recorder. Interview two to three different people and ask them the same question. The question should be open-ended: one that can't be answered with a simple yes or no. (See below for a list of examples.) When selecting your interview subjects, try to find people as different from each other as possible: different ages, genders, socioeconomic backgrounds, nationalities, etc. It doesn't matter if your subjects know or remember all the details that the question asks — the point is to get them talking and to get them to answer the question as fully as possible in their own voice. Try to speak as little as possible while they answer.
Record each interview with an audio recorder. Then type up the interview word for word. As you type, try to capture the rhythm of the subject's speech in your punctuation.
Some suggestions for interview questions:
• What is your earliest memory?
• Describe the job of president of the United States.
• Tell me what happened in the most recent episode of your favorite television show.
• How did God create the world?
• Describe a dream that you had recently.
For Discussion:
1. Look over your transcriptions. Does anything surprise you? How does the transcription of the dialogue differ from traditional prose?
2. Have someone in the group (preferably someone with an acting background) read your transcription out loud. After the group member has read the transcription, play the original audio recording. In what ways did the reader sound different than the original speaker? Were there differences in the rhythm of the speech? Were there differences in emphasis or tone? If so, was there something in the way that the speech was transcribed onto the