DGWG Tip: Dialogue

Dialogue is not just "what characters say." It's subtext in motion. The words on the page are 1% of what's happening. The other 99% is what the character won't say, can't say, or doesn't even know they're not saying. 

THE SIX FUNCTIONS

A line of dialogue should do more than one thing. This is not a suggestion. One-function dialogue gets cut in the room. Two-function is competent. Three-function is what people quote thirty years later.

1. Reveal character: not who they are, but how they think. Word choice, rhythm, what they avoid. Two characters can say the same rejection in completely different ways. "I appreciate your concern" and "I don't need your pity" are the same information and completely different people.

2. Advance plot: a line that changes what's possible next. A door opens or closes. A decision gets made that can't be unmade.

3. Create conflict: two people with different objectives talking at each other instead of to each other. If everyone in the scene wants the same thing, you don't have a scene.

4. Establish relationship: power dynamics, history, love, contempt. Who interrupts whom? Who defers? Who uses the full name? Two lines of banter can tell you more about a twenty-year friendship than a page of backstory.

5. Control rhythm and pace: short lines accelerate. Long speeches slow down. Interruptions fracture. Silence redirects. Dialogue is music. You're composing, not transcribing.

6. Carry theme: your characters argue about the play. Not abstractly but through the specific drama of their scene. The philosophical conflict dressed as personal conflict.

Test every significant line against this list. One function, it's probably filler. Three functions, protect it.

THE ONE DIAGNOSTIC QUESTION

Before you write a line, ask: what is this line doing that the previous line couldn't do?

This is the most generative question in dialogue writing. It forces every line to earn its existence by moving something the prior line left stationary. If you can't answer it, the line is probably just bridging to the next moment without actually doing anything. That's also how you find scenes that are stalling out. Find the sequence of lines where nobody is doing anything new, cut it, and put the scene where it needs to go.

DIALOGUE AND YOUR HPM (History/Philosophy/Metaphor)

This is the connection most writing instruction skips. The six functions above are craft mechanics. The deeper question is: how does the dialogue serve the HPM (history/philosophy/metaphor)

The most distinctive scenes in great work are almost always a character's HPM being performed through speech. Not stated. Performed. There's a difference.

Canewell's rooster taxonomy in SEVEN GUITARS goes on for six pages classifying roosters by regional origin. What is it doing? Everything. It's a man who knows the specific name of every specific thing in a world that has refused to know his name. The dialogue is doing all six functions, but what makes it transcendent is that it's simultaneously about nothing and everything at once.

Before you write a scene: whose HPM is being dramatized here, and what does it look like when it moves through speech? If the answer is nobody's, you probably have exposition dressed up as dialogue.

RHYTHM IS MEANING

This gets treated like decoration. It isn't. The way lines move against each other tells the audience what to feel before the words even register.

Short lines mean urgency. Panic. Desire. People who've lost the distance they need to think.

Long speeches mean weight, authority, interiority...or the performance of those things. A character who takes over a scene with a long speech is either the most powerful person in the room or the most frightened. Usually both.

Interruptions (marked with a dash or a slash) say: I can't wait for you to finish because what I need is more urgent than your right to finish. They reveal dominance, panic, love. Overuse and they lose all meaning.

Beats and silences redirect. A beat before a line changes the line. A beat after throws weight onto what comes next. In THE WIRE, McNulty and Bunk solve a whole crime scene using only the word "fuck" said in different rhythms and intonations. That scene works because the writers understood that rhythm is character is scene is theme. The word means nothing. The rhythm means everything.

THE REVISION CHECKLIST

Write the way you think. Then go back and look for:

-Every place a character answers the question they were asked. Usually they shouldn't. They should answer the question underneath the one that was asked.

-Every "I feel..." followed by an emotion. Cut it. Show the feeling through what they want, what they'll do, what they won't say.

-Every line doing only one thing. Ask what it would need to do to do two.

-Every scene where no one's tactics change from beginning to end. Scenes that linger are almost always scenes where nobody is trying hard enough or changing their approach when what they're doing isn't working. The longer the scene, the more the tactics should shift.

-The best dialogue is irreplaceable. It could only exist in this play, spoken by this character, in this moment. Nothing else could take its place. That's the standard.

DIFFERENT DIALOGUE LEVELS

One-function dialogue is what gets cut in the room. Two-function dialogue is competent. Three- and four-function dialogue is what people remember. Five- or 6-function dialogues are the lines people quote years later in their dreams or when they're drunk. Dialogue that makes its way to bumper stickers. You don't want a script filled with these moments, but sprinkled throughout an entire movie or play and you're cooking.

(IMO 3-function dialogue is the happy middle most lines can achaieve: advances plot, reveals character, AND one more thing: underlines theme, creates rhythm while delivering information, etc.)

EXAMPLES

“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” 

Explosive dialogue carefully positioned at the climax of A FEW GOOD MEN that accomplishes all 6 functions with 5 words. It’s character (rude, cocky officer), plot (getting Jack Nicholson to blow up and lose), conflict, establish relationship, rhythm and pacing (look at the lines that build toward this moment. It’s designed to build up to this moment) and carries the overall theme of a military coverup. 

"Get busy living or get busy dying."

-a call to arms in SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION. It launches the story forward into the ‘living’ part after so much abuse and torture. It feels like the story turns a corner on this phrase.

"Fuck"

In “THE WIRE” there’s a famous scene where 2 detectives -Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce)- investigate a crime and only use one word: fuck. The dialogue is in the intonation, rhythm, rapport between the 2 detectives. It’s a writing challenge to the extreme degree that is all about tone, pacing, character while advancing the plot of the investigation. 

"Gurl"

SNL repeated the same challenge later on with the “GURL” scene as 2 blk women engage in a whole discourse with one describing her man and the friend responding with different intonations of ‘girl, gurl…gurrrrrrrl.’ 

"What IS a weekEND?"

-a lifestyle and worldview all in the phrasing and rhythm of 4 words. 

"To Be Or Not To Be"

-stalling. Hamlet knows what he needs to do: avenge his father’s death. But he’s stalls with the most famous interior monologue about how to we, as humans, should make decisions.  And he weighs the dilemma of human existence. It also has great rhythm flow, underlines the themes of the play, speaks to Hamlet’s character and establishes his relationship to the world.