Last week, I covered some of the most important advice I’d ever gotten about screenwriting, that the actors were the audience of a script, which I had never really considered to that point, but once I heard it, I realized how much sense it made. But that statement only laid the groundwork for the most important advice I was given about screenwriting.
The most important advice I was given about writing a script was to tell the story through the dialogue.
When the judge of the screenplay competition that I was having the Zoom call with said this, I felt it was counterintuitive. Movies are, after all, a visual medium. Why would you tell the story through dialogue?
But I quickly realized how sound this advice was.
The reason is that while a movie is a visual medium, a script is not.
This also built off the advice I covered in the previous post, that the actors were the audience for a script. Since they’re the end user, it only makes sense that they’re the ones who are facilitating the advancement of the story.
This was an adjustment for me, as my method of storytelling actually had an origin all the way back to grade school. I still remember when I was in fifth grade, whenever we had writing assignments, usually to tell a story in one to two pages (and we mostly stuck to one page, occasionally bleeding over into the start of a second) our teachers (our classroom had a divider, so I only had one teacher, but the divider was often opened so that both teachers could give joint presentations to both classes once) gave the “guideline” to not just make the story all dialogue.
This guideline made sense for the class. They were trying to develop our ability to write, even if we weren’t going to be writers when we grew up. But the reason they gave for not writing a dialogue heavy story was to “not make it like a TV show or movie.” That was fair advice, because we weren’t writing either of those. They were also trying to get us to write incorporating other writing devices, maybe incorporating other senses beyond just what we would hear, maybe what characters would feel or sense. Without using the crutch of just relying on dialogue, we might even develop atmosphere…or themes.
It’s funny to think that this note from my teachers actually stuck with me all these years, that I still don’t place an overreliance on dialogue in my stories, and that when my characters say something, its because they have something to say. But it created this conflict for me when I got this counter advice during the Zoom call. I’d been writing for so long without the story being mostly dialogue, that this felt foreign to me.
It wasn’t until I re-examined the advice from both my fifth grade teachers and the contest judge that I realized I was not getting conflicting advice. The fifth grade teachers had insisted on not making the stories we were assigned to write mostly dialogue because “they were not a TV show or movie.” But now, I was writing a movie, and so my approach to storytelling had to change.
Just like the advice I covered last week, this might have seemed obvious, but I had brought with me a certain way of telling stories without fully assessing whether this was appropriate for the medium I was writing in. Once I’d gotten this advice, I could actually see how I was capping the potential of the screenplays I’d written for both Dig Down and Lock the Doors, because although I’d adapted them to the format of screenplays, I hadn’t fully adapted them to how stories are told in screenplays.