You need to really learn how your characters speak, because there’s nothing worse than reading a script where everyone speaks the same, where every line could be exchanged between all the characters. Find different rhythms in your head for the way they talk, if you can do that it will translate onto the page. Work out if your character takes a beat before he speaks, making his speech much more measured, or if he simply blurts things out without thinking about them.
Again, dialogue is as much about what you omit as what you put in. It’s important to remember that in real life, very, very few people vocalise their thoughts word-for-word. Speech is a contraction of a thought process, often designed to evoke a response as much as it is to impart information; often speech is about disguising a thought process, diverting people away from what we think we may have given away with our eyes.
Which leads me to another point about being economical with dialogue: you need to LEAVE SPACE FOR THE ACTORS. Most writers are compelled to put every bit of information into the dialogue because they think in terms of the action having to be complete on paper, but this is simply not true. Think about the following:
Say two characters – who know each other well – are waiting for an important piece of plot to telephone them (another script-writing mistake, but we’ll come to that). When the phone finally rings, there’ll usually be a bit of dialogue along the lines of. “That’s our boy”, or something as one of them approaches the phone. It’s simply redundant (and stupid). All you need to indicate is that the characters exchange a look. If the actors are any good, the audience will know exactly what that look is communicating.
It maybe an old cliché, an actor saying he wants to cut a chunk of dialogue because he can say the same thing simply with his face, but like most clichés it’s actually true, a good actor really can impart a line or two’s worth of information with just a look – and doing it visually is always the better way; it is, after all, a visual medium. Now that may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many scripts don’t appear to reflect this.
And another cliché about dialogue is you should speak it out loud. This cannot be emphasised enough, because it’s the only way to work out if it has the correct rhythm to it. After all, if the writer can’t speak his own words comfortably, how the hell can he expect the actors to?
‘Mike Johnson’ is scriptwriter…yeah, he is.