1. I used to write plays. In a play, dialogue is everything. Almost nothing else matters. This fact was proven to me when I would try to put action into a play. I found that anything I wrote in a stage direction, unless it was indicated in dialogue as well, simply did not happen. No one ever pays any attention to stage directions. Seriously. I could write in a stage direction “He points a gun at her,” and unless I included a line where she says “Don’t point that gun at me!” nobody would ever point a gun at anybody.

(This goes for scene description as well. I once wrote a play that took place in “an empty room.” I showed up on the first day of rehearsal to find a set that looked like the set for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The set designer took “an empty room” to mean a room with tables and chairs and a sofa and a nice rug on the floor and nice pictures on the wall and a cunning ceiling lamp. So in addition to writing the action of the play into the dialogue, I took to writing the set description into the dialogue as well. “I can’t believe how empty this room is! There isn’t a stick of furniture in it!” and so forth.)

In a play, you can have scenes that go on for hours, characters talking about ideas, on and on, and as long as the dialogue is interesting you can sustain an audience’s interest. Try that in a movie and the studio reader won’t get past page five.

2. Conversely to plays, I discovered, to my dismay, that dialogue is the least important aspect of a screenplay. I say “to my dismay” because, as a playwright, I found I had a felicitous talent for dialogue, a talent developed to the point where I could have plays skate by for 90 minutes or more without a decent story, and this talent would simply not sustain me in writing screenplays. No, to write screenplays I had to learn structure, and structure, I found, was a completely different animal to dialogue or scenework.

(This is, incidentally, why writers who do a dialogue polish on a screenplay often do not get credit — because the WGA knows that dialogue is the least important reason why a screenplay works or not.)

A reader yesterday brought up a scene from The Wire, where instead of having the characters blather on about a bunch of stuff the audience doesn’t care about, the writer simply had them say the word “fuck” and its variants for the entire scene. That sounds like a good idea for a scene to me, and I’m here to tell you that the scene probably would have worked just as well if the characters had been barking like dogs instead of saying the word “fuck.” You can watch foreign movies without subtitles and generally figure out what’s going on. That is one reason why Hollywood movies are so wildly successful overseas — who needs to understand what the people are saying in Star Wars?

Think about the Shakespeare productions you’ve seen. All right, now think about the good Shakespeare productions you’ve seen. If you’re like me, you spend the first ten minutes of the play thinking “Oh shit, I have no idea what they’re saying! I’m a moron! How am I going to make it through this play?” and then, after the shock wears off, you find that you can understand what they’re saying, even though the poetry is dense and the play is about things that happened a long time ago to people wearing doublets. The reason this happens is, if you are seeing a decently-directed production with relatively intelligent actors, the character’s intent will become clear even if you can’t really understand what the actors are saying. One character wants something from another character, the other character is giving in or not giving in, complications come along, the broad outlines of the story become clear, and (as Shakespeare is an excellent dramatist) we stay and watch because we want to know how it will turn out. And I promise you that the effect was very much the same in Shakespeare’s time.

In a screenplay, the thing you’re striving to do is write a silent movie, a story told only in moving pictures. Now then, we live in a very verbal time, people yakking all over the place ceaselessly, so in general, if you write a scene where a bunch of people are doing something and they don’t say anything to each other, it’s probably going to feel untrue. So you do have to put some dialogue in or else your screenplay will look pretentious and “arty” (believe me, you do not want a studio executive to say your screenplay is “arty”).

(Not to harp on it, but There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men are excellent examples of screenwriting — it’s almost a shock when a character goes ahead and speaks. And even then they don’t say much that’s important. The characters in No Country threaten and intimidate, say “yep” or “nope,” and that’s about it. Daniel Plainview in Blood speaks rarely and almost everything he does say is a lie designed to extract money from someone.)

This is one reason why the treatment is crucial. When you write your story out in prose form, revealing only the actions of the characters (“Luke lives on the desert planet of Tatooine. He hates it there. His uncle makes him work in the moisture fields,” etc) you begin to learn how unimportant dialogue is. If you get to a point in the treatment where the plot-point must and can only be made in dialogue (eg “No, I am your father,” for instance) then you know that that’s an important line that absolutely must be in the screenplay. There should be no more than five or six instances like this in your treatment — if your characters are talking so much that their speeches become the action of the narrative, your screenplay is going to be too talky.

(Incidentally, let’s take a look at that line, and the economy of that scene. VADER: Obi-wan never told you what happened to your father. LUKE: He told me enough. He told me you killed him! VADER: No, I am your father. The dialogue is plain, simple, straightforward, unadorned and even blunt. Our hero George Lucas is not always on the ball dialogue-wise, but this is very good movie dialogue.)

(Shakespeare, of course, also knew when to be flowery and when to cut to the chase. It doesn’t get any simpler than “To be or not to be.”)

If you do happen to have a gift for dialogue, it will serve you well, presuming you can use your gift to make characters say things that are brief, to the point, unadorned and revealing of character, in as few words as possible.

3. To every extent possible, characters should not tell each other how they feel. Any time a character tells another character how he or she feels, the audience is going to wonder “what the heck is he or she getting at?” Any time a character says “Here’s the truth of a matter:” what should follow the colon is anything other than the truth of the matter. Think of it: any time someone comes to you in your daily goings-about and says “Let me tell you something about myself” or “I have some feelings I want to share with you” or “The fact of the matter is…” you want to turn around and run in the opposite direction. Because the only reason someone would come up to you and offer you some kind of truth is because they want something from you.

And I’m sure I’ll think of more but this is enough for now.