to spite our face
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"Wait, wait whoa!– Your goldfish EATS human noses?"
I haven't written too much about dialogue and now that I think about it, I can't think of many times I've seen others do it either. Professors, gurus, and bloggers can go on and on about structure and protagonists (and, good God, they do), but writing what characters say is rarely addressed. Which is funny, because dialogue is pretty much 50-70% of what is physically on a screenplay page.
A lot of times you hear the complaint that dialogue sounds flat, wooden, or "unnatural," so there's a big focus on making dialogue simple and realistic. What I wish someone would have told me early on is that good, meaningful dialogue in movies is actually artful and crafted… just disguised as something someone would actually say. One common way to achieve this is taking dialogue "off the nose." For clarity's sake, here's the same simple demo that was given to me:
la la love you
Hey, remember that time I had a blog and stuff? Me too. But just barely.
Truth is I've had to limit my time on HAB for other pursuits. Chiefly, rewrites for the 2012 contest season I'm woefully behind on, AND because I went on vacation (hypothesis: these are somehow related?). Usually, I wouldn't think to bore anyone to tears by recounting a trip, but I visited LA for the first time… and that was something.
Los Angeles has a fickle relationship with aspiring screenwriters. Is it the place to be? A place to visit? A place to avoid? For a vocation filled with admitted caveats, everyone in the screenwriting community seems ready to throw down over this. I'm not about to write about it because how the hell would I know? But I do like John August's point-counterpoint from a year or so back.
stations of the draft
Pictured: rewriting.
It's officially Spring and you know that that means: for us lowly, miserable, un-repped, un-managed, unproduced screenwriters, it's crunch time for contests.
I've already spoken a bit about how participating in a few contests can really fast track a rewriting schedule, but this year, as I rifled through notes upon notes, tore through old pages, and bathed in the crimson ink ye mighty ball-pointed sword, I noticed something new about rewriting: all my specs have a certain "type" dictated by a cause-and-effect pattern. Is this happening to anyone else? …Do I need to see a doctor?
