I’ve been reading a lot of new and emerging writers lately, and I find myself giving some of the same notes again and again. Look, writing is difficult. There’s so much to think about when you’re writing a scene, from the macro (“Does this scene move my story forward?”) to the micro (“Would this character say this line of dialogue?”). It’s why we do draft after draft after draft of a script. By the time we finish, we’ve worked each of these questions to the bone and polished that bone into a gratifying treasure. I mean, if you’re the type of person who treasures bones.
I guess this is as good a time as any to say: if any serial killers follow me, please turn yourselves in.
Just doing my part.
People Are Funny
So, we’re going to focus on one tiny aspect of scene-work that I think can help your scripts immensely. I remember when The Walking Dead first began, one of the few complaints about the show was that it was just so unrelentingly bleak. Nobody in this zombie post-apocalypse had a sense of humor, and that just didn’t ring true for most of us.
“People are often funniest when they’re in the darkest place,” recent Q&A guest Jane Espenson told me in 2012. A sense of humor can give “a spark of realism” to a dark drama.
“Or you can do the reverse, which is to take a show like Rosanne which had a character who was at her funniest the more stressed she was. Or Chandler on Friends, where you end up with this character who, when they’re at their funniest, you know that’s a sign that they’re under stress. So it’s a way to bring darkness into the comedy or bring comedy into the darkness. Those are both important.”
In that same conversation, Jane and Doug Petrie, who wrote on Buffy with her, talked about the humor of even the darkest psychopaths. “He’s got a great sense of humor,” Doug said about Hannibal Lecter.
On Buffy, “writing Angelus was a lot more fun that writing Angel for the same reason,” Jane added. “When Angel was in villain mode he was having fun.”
Reality TV
The “note behind the note” of the above is to give us something unexpected. Adding humor to your script doesn’t mean that characters are constantly quipping. That can be as tedious as unyielding doom and gloom. When a potential agent or a showrunner is reading to staff, the last thing they want is something they’ve seen before.
As Jane said in our “6 Questions” newsletter from a few weeks ago:
If you’ve heard the joke you’re writing, or seen the scene you’re writing, it can feel “right’— after all, another professional did it this way. But it’s not going to work — it’ll be stale… Stop and think about a fresh way to approach the moment. Usually this will involve thinking about would really happen, what someone would really say.
Oftentimes, we find ourselves writing dialogue that we think works just because it feels like something that a character on TV would say. But I think the thing we forget is that we aren’t writing characters on TV; we’re writing real people.
So what kind of person are you writing?
Real people are messy with their emotions. Sometimes we laugh when we mean to cry. Sometimes we cry when we mean to fight. Sometimes we just cry because of the unrelenting weight of the world. But sometimes we laugh at that.
We don’t always say what we mean. In fact, we rarely do! We regard others as humans with emotions equivalent to ours. Sometimes that’s a false assumption. Sometimes we are psychopaths who don’t see others as human. Any of these dynamics make for interesting scenes.
Some people only talk about themselves. Some people don’t like to talk about themselves at all. Most people interrupt. Generally, people don’t ask questions to which they already know the answer. Nor do they ask questions when they don’t want to hear the answer.
The thing is, we as real people aren’t driving a plot forward. So, your dialogue needs to serve multiple purposes.
Quantumania
This graphic about quantum physics perfectly illustrates our job when writing a scene. We want to capture an emotional honesty while still recognizing, as we write, that we are not presenting accurate real life.
If a movie were to completely accurately represent real life, scenes would be meandering and unconnected, dialogue would come in fits and starts, and most of the jokes wouldn’t land.
So, while we want to reflect real life, we don’t want to be beholden to it. We want the rhythms of real life without the incoherence.
“Having the the dialogue be clever and bantery, but still feel naturalistic, is what we hope for,” says Gloria Calderon Kellett, creator of With Love and the One Day at a Time reboot. “I prefer naturalistic comedy. Sometimes things feel ‘written’ to me… it happens in every show you ever watch because it is written. But as much as possible, I like to feel like it's not written.” You want to have a cleverness, she says, without it “feeling too sweated over.”
I know! It’s a lot to cram into our brains and then make come out of our fingers!
The Idiosyncrasy Test
There’s no trick to this. There’s no shortcut. And the process isn’t as easy as “what’s the best/cleverest/funniest/most dramatic version of this next line of dialogue?”
But there are best practices. As Jane says above, the answer is often to think about the reality of the situation. And reality has specifics that make our scenes and characters, and therefore our dialogue, unique.
Celeste Ballard, co-writer of Do Revenge, suggests making sure “every line does sound specific, both to the character, but also just in terms of like the texture and details of what they're saying. You don't want them speaking in generalisms and vagaries. You want it to be layered and rich and referenced.”
Consider the specifics of your character. I remember chatting with Kristin Newman who, at the time, was running the underrated The Muppets. Because the Muppets are outsized characters, specificity was easy and funny. “You get to come at it from: what’s the real human emotional thing? Is this a friendship story? Is this a romance story? Is someone feeling rejected? Is someone feeling insecure? Does someone have a dream they are pursuing? All of the basic human stories to tell.”
Once you know that emotional story or moment, you layer the specificity on top. She talks about a scene from The Muppets:
It was Kermit going to Rowlf for advice. And it was a sort of dry emotional scene of Kermit going to his old friend and asking about Miss Piggy, and what he should do. And then we remembered that Rowlf is a dog, and so we had him notice that Kermit is anxious, and say “Do you want to pet me? You know, I’m a licensed therapy animal now, I think it will really help.” So we had Kermit scratching Rowlf’s head through the whole scene where they’re talking back and forth, and Kermit would, you know, give a huge “Here’s the pros and cons of this thing I’m thinking about” and Rowlf’s just like, “that’s very interesting. Maybe you should just get a little closer behind the ear.” And it added this whole element of laughter and adorableness to this straight scene.
WWTCBD?
Here’s another approach to writing scenes that are fun to read. My partner and I often ask ourselves, “What is the unexpected reaction here?” Or, “What would the Coen Brothers do?”
Truly, few are better at presenting scenes in an unexpected way than the Coens. We learned a lot from watching their movies (and the Fargo TV show, which is like a perfectly distilled Coens experience!).
There’s a terrific scene in True Grit which Rooster Cogburn tries to get information from two outlaws. It could play as a straightforward interrogation scene. But one of the outlaws is nervous and the other is threatening. Cogburn is patient and steely. And the scene is funny too. When violence erupts, it’s almost a relief.
Fargo is the Coens’ masterpiece for a good reason. Marge Gunderson’s matter-of-fact delivery is completely unexpected for a police procedural. The Coens manage to keep the stakes of the investigation, and the danger to which it leads, all very real while still being funny and human.
One of the best villains to come along in many years is Harry Potter’s Dolores Umbridge, of whom Stephen King wrote, “the gently smiling Dolores Umbridge, with her girlish voice, toad-like face, and clutching, stubby fingers, is the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter.”
What makes Umbridge so ghastly is that she doesn’t, at first, seem to be ghastly. She’s sweet and kind and even warm. And even when she unleashes her evil side, she’s still the same person. She doesn’t mustache-twirl or rant and rave. She’s nice! Terrifyingly nice!
Voices in Your Head
This kind of scene-work really is my favorite part of writing. As much as I enjoy breaking story or that heady “what is this thing?” phase, this is the part where you get to really show who you are as a writer. What emotional relationships between characters are interesting to you? What makes you laugh or cry? How do the characters hurt each other without meaning to? Or help each other without knowing it? What are their frames of reference and perspectives on the world?
We watch TV because we love characters, and it’s these interactions and idiosyncrasies that keep us coming back. So think of the people you know, people who are like your characters, or who aren’t. What do they sound like? How do they interact with each other and the world that makes them specific?
Listen to those voices in your head and write down what they’re saying.
Are there scenes from movies or TV that you keep coming back to? What makes them work?
Reminder that I’m teaching a couple of classes at Script Anatomy early next year, and I hope you’ll consider taking one or both of them. Both are good for drama or comedy scripts (and I’ve worked in both).
Televisionary is a good class that covers the basics of TV script writing. I’d love to have some smart, interesting people in that class, because, frankly, it’s very tool-based and can get boring for me.
The Draft Intensive is where I’ll help you take your outline (done in Televisionary or on your own) to first draft. This one has a fun writers’ room vibe to it and is much more collaborative.