Stilted Dialogue

[vizcarra]

How do you balance the storytelling within the dialogue without it coming out forced or stilted? I just recieved coverage from Columbia Tristar with comments saying my dialogue is stilted. I thought I'd ask the question to the professionals before I start the rewrite.---Thanks

[Deus Ex Machine]

Stilted dialogue is usually the result of not knowing your characters well enough to make their words sound natural.

Dig deep into your characters to figure out how and what they would say.

[Webs]

Read your script out loud, and act out your characters as you do so.

If it sounds stilted or it's unnatural to say, it needs work.

[whistlelock]

don't forget the use of ineundo, and, as the call it in the art world, negative space. Sometimes not saying anything is a more powerful way to say something. And body language, don't forget to use body language to communicate with the audience.

[wcmartell]

Another reason for stilted dialogue is that the dialogue is telling the story instead of using the actions of your charcaters to tell the story.

Also - OTN dialogue (things said in the most obvious way). In real life people never say what they mean, they hint at it.

- Bill

[dean461]

When Robert Rodriguez asked Quentin Tarantino how he gets his dialogue so good he replied: "I just sit two characters down and get them talking, and even I'm surprised by what they say"

I think this just means to get them talking and the dialogue should come naturally from within the characters and the topic of conversation.

Anyways good luck.

[Carlton Redford]

As a screenwriter you absolutely have to develop a second nature habit of listening to how people actually talk to each other everywhere you go. It doesn't sound like the wooden, formal, say-everything-you're-thinking version that sinks most "early" scripts.

Then use what you've learned when you're doing dialogue, making sure to compress it further than real-life, leaving out ererything extraneous. Movies are *visual,* so dialogue has to sound like natural speech while actually being much more abbreviated.

If you're hearing "stilted," "stiff," or "wooden," one very quick improvement that can double the professional quality of your dialogue, is to be certain you also use contractions at every opportunity while you're compressing what you've written. Think about the reasons that contractions exist in normal speech.

-- Carlton

[OkeyDokey]

Less is usually more.

[roscoegino]

Watch The Breakfast Club.

Not a classic but the big dialogue sequence is effective. It either reveals information we didn't already know or it adds dimension to what was previously hinted at. It opens the curtains or opens the curtains wider. Nothing flat about any of it.