Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen

No matter how lavish a play’s production, how vivid a novel’s descriptions, how lush a film’s photography, character talk shapes the deepest complexities, ironies, and innerness of story.

Therefore, no line of dialogue is finished until you’ve answered this question: In the subtext of my character’s verbal activity, what action is he in fact taking?

Authors give us this power through a series of steps: First, they create those metaphors for human nature we call characters. Next, they dig into the characters’ psychologies to unearth conscious wishes and subconscious desires, those longings that impel inner and outer selves. With this insight in hand, writers clash the characters’ most compellin

The said are those ideas and emotions a character chooses to express to others; the unsaid are those thoughts and feelings a character expresses in an inner voice but only to himself; the unsayable are those subconscious urges and desires a character cannot express in words, even to himself, because they are mute and beyond awareness.

Without expressive dialogue, events lack depth, characters lose dimension, and story flattens.

Dialogue, dramatized and narratized, performs three essential functions: exposition, characterization, action.

All talk responds to a need, engages a purpose, and performs an action.