Dialogue

My posts are long. And far between. So here's a quick thought on dialogue, the 2x4 of the screenwriter's trade.

I wrote a play once. Back in junior college when I wanted to be Eugene O'Neill. I sent it off to Jeffrey and received back one of the only pieces of literary advice for which I have ever had much use. This was a two-man, one-act ditty about a hit man, his mark, and the inevitable change of heart, all set in the junior college romance of a Vegas all-night buffet. Jeffrey said, "Both these guys sound like you." It was true. And that fact has become one of the guiding principles of my screenwriting.

Now this is not to say that you can't have a successful work wherein the characters all sound the same, far from it. But a 60 year old retiree and the 30 something punk who has been sent to off him should not sound like a middle class 19 year-old chick from California.

How, then, do you make ten characters have their own voice, and not sound like you? Personally, I cheat. Syd Field says, "Dialogue is a function of character. If you know your character, your dialogue should flow easily in line with the unfolding of your story." Now that would be wonderful. But knowing the ins and outs of a character and knowing how those ins and outs influence the way they construct sentences is a whole new world of "Knowing".

I say, why go to all that trouble when the world around you is already filled with people who talk in a way that is wholly unique, wholly their own?

So, the main character in Fine Arts? A guy I had a crush on in high school. His coworker in that script? A current coworker of mine.

And in the new script I'm writing, the love interest talks like my ex-boyfriend. The protagonist takes word right out of the mouth of one of my best high school girlfriends. Fun fact: I sometimes futz with the names of the characters to give a little homage to the source material.

Now this is not to say that the characters ARE the people I'm referencing. They most certainly are not. I'm just borrowing the way people I have known talk, as a tool to get out of my own head, out of my own way of saying things and constructing thoughts.

Damn. That wasn't a very short post, was it? I blame god.

The ghost of Christmas of fifteen years ago

This is the boring part of the process. But this is a record of "the movie" and the script is part of the movie. So here's what I've been up to:

I've been using note cards to map out the story. Syd Field says note cards are the way to go. I like the idea of following a how-to book's instructions--something I've never done. I've had this particular how-to since I was fourteen. My grandma gave it to me after I said I wanted to write movies when I grew up. It's finally fulfilling its intended purpose. Fifteen years later.

Writing the script has produced something useful. I've cracked the enigma of formatting. You can buy software for 15o dollars and it will format your script for you. But 150 dollars on this project is ten boxes of cupcake bribes. And actors won't work for nothing. So with trusty/infuriating Word, lots of searching and searching for decent formatting information online, and an hour of futzing with Word's Styles function, I made my own damn template. I think it works real good. And since no one should go through that process alone, here's step by step what I did.

As far as the screenplay itself, I'm on page three. At one point I was on page eleven. But I had to scrap that entire idea and start over. So technically I'm fourteen pages behind. But it wasn't working. There comes a point when you have to cut your losses and move on.

Of course doing this too many times is a sign of procrastination. Syd calls it "resistance," something he says comes in many forms--from sitting down to write then realizing you should clean out the fridge or scrub the toilet or, my favorite, eat. It also comes in the form of abandoning one story for another. He says when you encounter resistance, it's okay. Understand that's what it is, understand what you're doing. Don't get mad. Don't get down on yourself. Just let it go. Let go of the resistance and get to work. Very Zen.

Despite the bouts of resistance, the script soldiers on. My eyes are getting sandpapery and raw from looking at a computer screen to write scripts at work (the kind that I'm paid to write) then coming home and looking at a computer screen to write another script. And I'm sure staring at the computer to write this mishmash is not helping my eyesight any. But what can I say, I can't resist.