(upbeat music)
-: Hello, my name is Rachel Atkins.
I'm a playwright and a teaching artist,
and this is a lesson to help you write your own play.
In this lesson, we're going to be looking
at ways to make your dialogue really powerful,
the things that characters say to one another.
If you did my last lesson with me,
you wrote a scene using really limited dialogue,
so today you're gonna get to do something new
with that scene, adding onto it using these tips.
If you didn't do that lesson with me,
that's totally fine, you'll still be able
to use these tips in your writing.
So, here are my tips for using really powerful dialogue.
Number one, have characters address each other
by their names, or their titles.
So Mom, Officer, Doctor, these things help your audience
know who those characters are
and what their relationships might be.
Number two, use nouns, be specific.
Have your characters say what they're actually talking about
instead of just using pronouns,
like it, or that.
I want you to listen to the difference
between these two lines, and notice what you get
by adding more specificity to your language.
Version one, can I have that?
Version two, Mom, could you please pass the maple syrup?
Listen again.
Can I have that?
Mom, could you please pass the maple syrup?
Think about what you learn in the second version
that you didn't get in the first version.
You get a relationship, you get where they might be,
you get time of day, you get what they're doing,
you even get a little bit of politeness.
All of that can be achieved just by being more specific
with your language.
Tip number three, every line should add new information
and raise the stakes.
Raising the stakes means you create more tension,
or you make the situation more important.
So for example, if one character says,
"The volcano is erupting!"
Then the next character should add something
on to that information.
"And the lava has almost reached our house!"
Instead of just saying, "Oh no," or "Yeah, it is."
You always wanna add more information,
especially when you're writing a short play.
You want to avoid what I call throwaway lines like,
yeah, or oh no.
I call them throw away lines because they don't tell
the audience anything new.
You could literally pull those lines
out of your script and throw them away,
and nobody would know the difference.
It wouldn't matter to your script.
You might also have ideas about what your characters
are doing while they're talking.
You can add these to your script
through stage directions.
When you write stage directions in your script,
you wanna put them in parentheses,
in the same line as the character's dialogue.
You can use stage directions to say how a character
is feeling when they're talking,
you can also use stage directions
to explain what a character is doing while they're talking.
If it's how they're feeling or what they're doing
while they're speaking, you wanna put it
at the beginning of the line.
So for example it would say, the name of the character,
colon, and then in parentheses,
you'd have the stage direction,
and then you'd have their line.
So it might say, Character A:, in parentheses,
pointing, shocked, and then the dialogue,
"The volcano is erupting!"
And then you would say the next line.
Character B, colon, parentheses, terrified,
and then their dialogue.
"And the lava has almost reached our house!"
If you have ideas about what the characters
are doing after they speak, you'll put your stage directions
at the end of the line.
So all of these tips, of being more specific
in your dialogue, adding new information in your dialogue,
using your stage directions to explain
how the characters are feeling or what they should be doing,
all of these tips can help your writing stronger.
Here's a little reminder of everything
that I just said.
(upbeat music)
So, now that you know all these ways
to make your dialogue really clear,
and strong, and specific, you're going to have a chance
to revise the scene that you wrote in our last lesson
about the $100.
Again, if you didn't write that scene,
don't worry about it.
You can use these same tips for other writing.
But if you did write that scene,
I want you to use the same thing that you wrote.
So you're using the same characters,
the same objectives and conflict.
Start with the scene that you wrote
with that really limited dialogue,
but now you have no limits on how many words you can use,
and you can add as many stage directions as you want.
If you are revising the scene that you wrote last time,
you should make an adjustment to every line
that you wrote.
That could be using more words in your character's dialogue,
it could be adding stage directions,
it could be both.
But I wanna challenge you to try to change
every single line in that scene.
If you wrote that scene last time
by passing the paper back and forth with another writer,
if you were doing this lesson with somebody else,
you can do this in the same way,
where you're each still writing
from your own character's point of view,
and you're changing your own character's line.
If you wrote it by yourself, great,
you're gonna do the same thing representing both characters.
And again, if you didn't write that scene,
or you wanna use these ideas to write a new scene,
that's fine too.
You can use these tips to revise
some other kind of writing that you did,
or to write a brand new scene.
It's up to you.
But I'm gonna stop talking, I'm gonna let you go away
and write your new scene.
When you're done, you should find somebody
to read it out loud with you,
because playwriting is meant to be spoken out loud,
it's meant to be heard and not just read on a page.
So if you can find someone else to read it with you, great.
Even better if you can find two people
to read it for you so that you can hear your work,
and even, to hear the difference between the first version
and the second version of your writing, that's terrific.
Again, my name is Rachel Atkins,
thank you so much for joining me,
and I hope to see you in another playwriting lesson.
(upbeat music)