Читать книгу Talk the Talk - Penny Penniston - Страница 7

HENRY: Words if you look after them… they can build bridges.

—Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing)

Introduction

WHY YOU NEED THIS BOOK

Dialogue puts conversation in motion. Great dialogue moves like a great athlete; it is nimble, precise, and powerful. It commands the attention, yet feels effortless in its execution. However, if we want our dialogue to move like an athlete, then we must train like an athlete.

This is a book of exercises to tone the scriptwriter's dialogue skills. It is written for university-level playwriting and screenwriting students or preprofessional writing groups and workshops. It is also appropriate for professional playwrights and screenwriters who wish to keep their dialogue skills sharp.

Most playwriting and screenwriting books take a sweeping scope. They tend to include a brief discussion of dialogue, but then abandon the topic in favor of other issues. Talk the Talk is exclusively a focused examination of and an exercise regimen for dialogue writing. By mastering this fundamental building block of dramatic writing, authors breathe life into characters and create scripts that jump off the page. Great moments of dialogue are the great moments of film and theater.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is based on a few core beliefs about the teaching of writing:

Writers Learn by Writing

The frustrating thing about dialogue writing is that it seems like it ought to be easy. We all engage in dialogue every day. We've all been in situations that are funny or ironic or tragic. And, being human and living in a world of humans, we are all experts on human behavior. So why is it so hard?

The truth is that all those things are just the notes of drama. They are the keys on the piano. Anyone can come along and make noise on a piano — all you have to do is bang on the keys. But to make music on a piano — that is harder. It requires striking a particular set of notes in a particular sequence in order to generate a particular set of sounds. Trained pianists do this gracefully and beautifully. Their fingers glide across the keys. They make it look effortless. The truth is that it only got to be effortless after lots and lots of practice.

So if you want to be a writer, practice writing. Practice it the way a musician practices her instrument. Great piano players did not become great by attending lectures and reading books on music theory. Those things certainly helped, but, at the end of the day, it is years and years of fingers on the keyboard that make a piano player. Scales and drills and études get played over and over again until they become instinctive. Technique that once required careful concentration becomes effortless and subliminal. It is the same with writing. Think of this book as a book of scales and études. Use this book to drill technique into your muscle memory so that when you sit down at your keyboard in the future, the dialogue will flow effortlessly.

A few tips on doing the exercises in this book:

There are twenty lessons in this book. Most lessons contains four dialogue-writing exercises. These exercises are marked in the margins so that you can find them easily:

• Script Analysis Exercises are marked with a .

• Beginner Exercises are marked with a .

• Intermediate/Advanced Exercises are marked with a .

• Solo Exercises are marked with a .

All exercises are appropriate for both screenwriters and playwrights. However, if you are focusing exclusively on screenwriting or exclusively on playwriting, then I recommend the following tweaks to the exercises:

• When doing the script analysis exercises, screenwriters should exclusively analyze films. Playwrights should exclusively analyze stage plays. (The Appendix includes script suggestions for both film and theater.)

• Screenwriters should write all dialogue in standard screenplay format. Playwrights should write all dialogue in standard playscript format.

• In general, screenplays have shorter dialogue scenes than stage plays. Therefore, when doing a dialogue-writing exercise, screenwriters should lean toward the lower end of the recommended page count. Playwrights should lean toward the higher end of the recommended page count.

The Best Feedback Is from an Audience

As playwrights and screenwriters, we aren't just writing, we are writing for an audience. Writing without an audience is simply a form of self-expression. We write down all sorts of things for our own reference: lists, notes for class, journal entries, etc. This writing exists only for ourselves. We don't expect or require other people to take meaning from it.

Writing for an audience is different. We write something and an audience interprets it. It is an act of communication. If we do our job well, the meaning that we put into our words will interact constructively with the meaning that the audience takes from our words. Or, to put it simply: Our audience will understand what the hell we are talking about.

As writers, it's easy to lose sight of the audience. We assume that, if we understand what is happening in the story and what we are trying to communicate with the story, then surely an audience will understand it as well. We know our story and our intent so well that we lose the perspective of someone who is experiencing our script for the first time.

Therefore, one of the most useful ways to hone your craft is to get feedback from others. You need people to act as your audience — people who can give you objective feedback about the effect your writing is having upon them. Is it clear? Is it coherent? Does it move them? Does it engage them? These are hard questions to answer on your own. You need a group setting: a classroom, a workshop, or a writers’ group.

Most of the exercises in this book are designed for this kind of environment. I encourage you to find trusted peers to help evaluate your work. This might be easier in a large city, but, thanks to the Internet, no one has to be excluded from forming his or her own support group of fellow writers. Once you have completed the group exercises in each chapter, you can do the solo exercises on your own as a regular writer's workout.

If you are truly on your own, then you must develop the ability to be your own audience. This means putting your completed work away for a few weeks and then reviewing it as if you were a virgin to the material. You can still go through the discussion questions, but you must split your perspective in half. Debate the discussion questions between two sides of yourself: the writer and the objective audience-member.

There Are Only Two Kinds of Writing Advice

From your point of view, there is not good advice or bad advice. There is not right advice and wrong advice. There is only:

• Helpful Advice

• Not Helpful Advice

Making this distinction forces you to take responsibility for figuring out what you need, right now, to make your work better and to help you along in this moment. It also keeps your work and your artistic ego from getting torn apart in the endless crosscurrents of opinions from teachers, professionals, and peers.

So… read books on writing. Attend lectures on writing. Take writing classes and workshops. Try out everything that anyone suggests. If you find a suggestion helpful, use it. If it's not helpful, ignore it for the moment — just keep working with the helpful stuff; keep writing. In six months, revisit the unhelpful advice. Reevaluate it. Maybe it's helpful now. Maybe you're at a different place in your writing. Maybe the advice that was completely useless and 100% not helpful six months ago is now suddenly, miraculously… brilliant. If that's the case, use it. If that's not the case, ignore it for six more months, then evaluate it again. Is it helpful yet? If so, use it; if not, put it aside for six more months. Repeat this process over and over again until you die. By the sheer force of evolution, the useful advice will end up in your work and the useless advice will stay out of your way.

Per my own instructions, try out everything in this book. But if any section is, in your opinion, not the thing you need to help you along in this particular moment, then ignore it. Go find the helpful stuff. Go find the useful stuff. Focus on that.