Dialogue in Film and TV

I like well written dialogue.

I like it even more when the actors put the stress in a sentence where the writer intended them to put it. I suppose this is really the fault of the director for letting the actors get away with mistakes. I frequently find myself articulating the interruptions that I feel the director should have made.

If I can remember several lines from the film, in most cases it means the dialogue was good, though in some unfortunate cases it means it was memorably bad.

I like it more still if I don’t need subtitles to tell what the cast are saying. The ability to enunciate is gradually disappearing, sadly, as acting is replaced by verisimilitude (a fashionable word for mumbling). I am not deaf, but I’d often be happier if the film was in French or Italian because the actors would be forced to enunciate better, and I’d have a better chance of understanding them. As a writer, though not yet of film scripts, sadly, I don’t like my work being mangled in the delivery.

One thing that we lack as writers is the ability to transmit our voices as sound. This means we have to communicate expression, stress, and intonation in other ways. Interestingly, one of the things I learned in preparing my audiobook, was that occasionally things that seem to work in text don’t work when you read aloud. I have great difficulty tolerating text-to-speech software, which I suppose does not help. And I can tolerate grammar software for missed commas, but I don’t want my voice standardised, thank you very much.

So, I think it’s an important part of our job to leave as little room for misunderstanding and confusion as possible.