Riot Tales

Tales of action-adventure, fantasy and horror

Writer Advice

Read your dialogue out loud!

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(Part 1: “You see, it seems that”)

(2019 update: this is another re-post from an older blog that was originally written for screenwriters but that I think works perfectly for all kinds of authors. Authenticity is important no matter the format. Note that I’ve made some edits to reflect that.)

I had a conversation with a couple of prospective writers recently that bears repeating in a larger context.

What the point boils down to is “READ YOUR DIALOGUE OUT LOUD.”

Until you’ve done that, your screenplay (or book or play or whatever) is not “done.”

I read a LOT of screenplays, many of them bad… a few of them very bad. And one of the problems I see most often is that the dialogue just does NOT sound like words ever spoken by an actual human being.

I’ll call the two recurring attrocities that annoy me the most, “You see… it seems that.” As in…

“You see…. what no one realizes is…”

Or…

“It seems that… someone in this room is…

“Real humans just don’t talk this way, and yet I see those phrases repeated in script after script and movie after movie and book after book. It’s like the half-word “um”… would you ever actually type “um” into your dialogue? Of course not. It’s a hiccup… a pause your brain takes before it decides what it wants to say next.

And that’s what “You see, It seems that” is.

Worse, it’s often the hallmark of that most objectionable refuge of the lazy writer… the talking villain. You know the scene, A vaguely European bad guy has his gun at the hero’s head and says something like “Before I kill you in an unnecessarily complicated way, I’ll do you the favor of putting all the puzzle pieces together and tell you both how and why I did it so that after you escape you can ruin my plans and put me in jail or the grave… you see, it seems that…”

GAH!!!

No movie character should ever say “You see… it seems that” unless they’re wearing a long black duster, a black top hat, a handlebar mustache that they can’t stop twirling, and the movie is set in 1890.

Don’t believe me? Say the lines out loud with and without those phrases. Isn’t it obvious? That, my friends, is the value of reading one’s dialogue out loud. If it doesn’t sound natural, like an actual human being speaking conversational English (or conversational Medieval French if that’s where your characters happened to be), reading it out loud will save you from that mistake, and your screenplays and novels will be better for it.

Seriously, If I can stop even one writer from forcing their characters to start sentences with “you see… it seems that”, my efforts will have been worthwhile, and I will die a happy man.

Structure is King

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(This is a re-post of a piece of advice I published on an old screenwriting blog. I’ll be periodically re-posting some of those pieces because the advice applies just as well to book writing as screenwriting)

M*A*S*H was on the Fox Movie Channel this past weekend and was introduced by Tom Rothman who runs the studio. As he told the story of the movie’s journey from book to screenplay to film, he pointed out that simply having great source material is not enough… that great material has to be put into the three-act screenplay structure by a talented writer (in the case of M*A*S*H it was Ring Lardner Jr., who won an Oscar for his efforts)… failing that, even the best book ever written will result in a crappy film every single time.

I’ve said this before on this site, but don’t take it from me, Tom Rothman has been running a studio very successfully for a decade. If “structure first” is the message he’s sending downstream to his executives, then you’d better be sure you’re getting it right in your screenplay before you send it out to be read. Structure is what they’ll critique first. If the movie doesn’t work from a structural point of view, all the great dialogue and action in the world won’t save it from getting a “pass.”

2019 UPDATE: This applies to all kinds of writing… not just to screenwriting but to novel writing, thank you letter writing, resume writing, even query letter writing. Take the time to find out what kind of structure your reader is expecting to see and nail it.

The Question Most Asked

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I’ve heard Stephen King say that the question he’s asked most often is “where do you get your ideas?”. That makes perfect sense… the guy seems to produce another novel every time he goes to the loo.

Now, I’m not one of the two or three best-selling authors of all time (yet) so I don’t get that question. But I do have a twenty-five year history of working with professional writers, and so I get a slightly different question.

“What should I write?”

The answer is easy, if not exactly simple. Write what you’re passionate about. The mindset of most of the writers I meet is “I need to write something commercial” or “I need to write something that will sell” or “I need to write what the market is looking for.” I call this “writing to the market” and it’s exactly the wrong way to think about that question.

If you consider yourself a writer, then I hope that you have at least ONE story that is figuratively clawing its way out of your head each and every day. It’s that story you just can’t stop thinking about. The one the universe is DEMANDING that you tell.

Write that.

I don’t care if it’s the story of two blind penguins trapped in a shoe box on Easter Island… your Harry Potter knock-off won’t be as commercial as that blind Penguin story because it’s not the story that’s DEMANDING TO BE TOLD. Writing the story that’s DEMANDING TO BE TOLD will be the book that shows the world your true voice, and it’s your voice that is going to sell your work. Yes, the story is important too, but it’s your voice that matters most.

And as far as writing something that will sell… something that the market wants? Well that’s a fool’s errand. What the market wants will change next week, and then it will change again the week after that, and again the week after that.

Write your passion… the rest will take care of itself.