Actions Speak Louder Than Words

I love complicated, flawed, devious, tempted characters. They’re fun to write and they’re a blast to read. It’s even better when these are main characters in a novel – the heroes of the tale, and not just the villains.

One of the ways you can show a character’s struggle against their inner bad boy/girl, is to have them say one thing and do another. Dialogue is powerful and can jack-knife a story in all sorts of directions – but you can create whopper moments by letting your characters be real. Real people renege on promises, they say they’re going to workout all morning and end up crashing on the couch watching The Quest for the Holy Grail (for the millionth time), they lie, they omit – often times increasing the drama in their lives.

Let’s give you a quick visual reference. Quentin Tarantino is the master of this kind of dialogue/action juxtaposition. Here’s my favourite bit from Pulp Fiction (lines courtesy of www.imdb.com):

Honey Bunny: [about to rob a diner] I love you, Pumpkin.
Pumpkin: I love you, Honey Bunny.
Pumpkin: [Standing up with a gun] All right, everybody be cool, this is a robbery!

The benign exchange of “I love yous” right before this young couple goes postal is insane, shocking, and good for a dark laugh. So why not employ a bit of deception, harmless, or otherwise? I wonder how your character’s contradictory actions will crank up the tension and reveal hidden depths...

Script Reading: Pregnant with Learning Opportunities

It started with a chair - a butt-worn, chocolate stained chair – so old it didn’t have a cup holder. I sat in it while watching the movie, Juno, at our small town movie theatre on a cheap Tuesday night - and I was blown away.

I was in awe of Diablo Cody’s slap-happy dialogue, and the actors who so casually delivered line after snarky line. This, I thought, was going to change the way I write. And it did – once I bought the script.

I’d never read a script before. I didn’t even know you could buy them until I searched Amazon.com one day, looking for the Juno DVD, and found the script. I ordered it from my local bookstore and a few weeks later it was mine.

Scripts are a bare bones kind of thing. Stark. Filled with strange formatting. Still, they have much to teach - especially if you need to beef up your dialogue. There’s nothing like reading the back and forth between characters – stripped of all narrative and dialogue tags - to show you, that with good dialogue, you can eliminate pages of needless exposition from your WIP.

It ended with a chair - my “office” chair, with my butt in it, and me – writing noticeably improved dialogue.

Want to read a script from your favourite TV show or film? Can’t find it to purchase? Try this fabu website: http://www.simplyscripts.com/