#SONTHAM MOVIE DIALOGUE WRITER HOW TO#

Listen for which speaker is dominating the conversation, and how often the other party chimes in to acknowledge heвЂ™s still paying attention. ItвЂ™s the auditory equivalent of un-focusing your eyes. To get a sense of this flow, you need to stop paying attention to the actual words being spoken. But when you really listen, you realize that people talk over each other constantly, and rarely finish a complete thought. We tend to think of dialogue as a tennis volley, with the subject being hit back and forth between speakers. Far more important than the content of the conversations was the flow, the back-and-forth. Sitting at Fatburger for lunch, I eavesdropped on two engineers discussing fire door trim allowances, and two women in their 60вЂ™s clucking about how small the hamburgers were. ThereвЂ™s really no alternative.ДЇortunately, the world is full of dialogue cornfields. In order to paint a great landscape, you need to get your butt out in the cornfield and paint what you see. The best you can do is a crude approximation. ItвЂ™s like trying to paint landscapes based on how other artists paint landscapes. One might think it helpful to listen to great actors speaking great words. We all watch movies and television, which is chock full of dialogue: good, bad and inane.

But itвЂ™s at least a guide for how I do it.

#SONTHAM MOVIE DIALOGUE WRITER HOW TO#

As with my earlier post on How to Write a Scene, this isnвЂ™t an exhaustive tutorial by any means. Continuing my efforts to blog less about the profession of screenwriting and more about the craft, I thought IвЂ™d offer up some thoughts on dialogue.

Sontham movie dialogue writer