I’ve been working on a sitcom script for the last little bit and that’s meant wrestling a lot with dialog. I know good dialog starts with being a good listener, and I’ve been trying to get out a little more to coffee shops, dude ranches, laser tag emporiums, and other places where “real people” hang out, to hear how they speak and to pick up language I might not have used myself.
\nI’m also trying to come up with a handful of basic working techniques that’ll help me get more consistent and credible results. I thought some of the folks who drop by this site might be interested in sharing techniques we’ve been taught or figured out. If you’re feeling generous, add a comment to this post — no technique too small, too cheesy, or too obvious.
\nHere are a few of the things I’ve been messing around with:
\nbackstory-a-licious<\/b>: The clearer the character’s backstory and driving motives, the more personal their reactions to any situation. This week I finally figgered out the backstory for one key character in the sitcom. It was a pretty simple sketch of a backstory, but even that really helped turn his words from “generic Cecil banter” to something more specific.
\nmessing up the tennis match<\/b>: I find I too easily get into dialog volleys of “Ingmar, what’d you have for dinner?” “Well Dave, I had tacos for dinner. How about you?” Dialog can start to get into this predictable back and forth as I race toward a particular plot objective (for example: “feed Ingmar and Dave!”). The aforementioned backstories help remind me to stay focused on what drives the characters, not just the plot point that’s driven me to write this particular scene. I’ve also been encouraging characters to interject more tangents, and I’ve been occasionally allowing them a genuine word fumble — something that’ll surprise the other characters and hopefully the audience.
\nkeying in on key phrases<\/b>: for some characters I focus in a phrase or two that they use. They don’t even have to actually use it in the piece, it’s just something I keep in the back o’ my mind as I write their lines. For example, in this micro-musical I was messing around with, there’s a character whose voice keys off the phrase “How ’bout that?” (stolen from a kid who played Tom Sawyer at Disneyland — as he walked away he called out to my kids with a light twang: “I’ll come back later and we’ll go look for treasure — how ’bout that?”) Whenever I thought I was getting off track on that character’s voice, I’d ask myself “is this the sorta thing my ‘how ’bout that’ guy would say?”
\nSo that’s a few from me. How ’bout that? And how ’bout you? — any dialog tips\/techniques\/tricks you’d be up for sharing?
\n-Cecil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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