Screenwriting Tips, You Hack

Chapter | nine

Dialog: We Need to Talk

Really, we need to talk, and by “we” I mean “human beings.” We're one of the noisiest species on the planet, endlessly chattering away to each other, to our phones, or just to ourselves. The whole world runs on speech and human interaction. And so does your screenplay.

Screenplay dialog is a strange and special beast. It's just a little sharper, a little edgier, a little more to the point than the way people actually talk. Good dialog walks the razor's edge between cheesy and sincere, simple and clever, too little and too much. But when it works, you might end up creating iconic movie lines that live on in the memory of the audience. “Hasta la vista, baby.” “I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this ...