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Killer Lines: How Dialogue Can Take Horror Scripts from Good to Great

October 17, 2024

Happy Halloween! 'Tis the season for falling leaves and pumpkin-flavored lattes. It's also the season for screenwriters to ponder such issues as ‘are machetes passé?’ and the relative merits of fast versus slow zombie pacing. In short, it’s horror mo...

How To Use Digressions To Create Natural Sounding Dialogue

March 22, 2024

Many aspiring screenwriters struggle to make dialogue sound naturalistic. Often, the dialogue is stilted and doesn’t sound like the way people actually speak (this can be said of a few professional screenwriters as well). Or the dialogue is just perf...

5 Reasons Writers Should Take an Acting Class

December 5, 2023

Hollywood is filled with stereotypes. Here’s one: Writers are introverts who sweat when they’re nervous and hide behind the safety of their laptops and the precious characters they create. Actors, meanwhile, are extroverts who never sweat unless it’s...

How to Make Your Characters Sound Different on the Page

September 22, 2023

If you were to take a scene for your latest screenplay, remove the names and read it out loud, would you know which characters were saying which lines? Or do they all kind of sound the same?

How To Write Naturalistic Dialogue

February 25, 2023

If it’s one thing I’ve seen aspiring screenwriters struggle with most over the years, it’s how to write naturalistic dialogue. Oftentimes their scripts might have good ideas or memorable sequences, but when the characters speak, their dialogue comes ...

How a filmmaker used her low-budget skills to create a $50k union feature

December 22, 2022

What does “low budget” mean? It’s all based on context. One person’s $50,000 film might be low budget, but so would a $10 million dollar Ridley Scott studio picture.

7 ways to enhance your dialogue and find your voice

December 12, 2022

When you think of masterful movie dialogue the names Aaron Sorkin, Quentin Tarantino and Nora Ephron come to mind. It’s a specialty in screenwriting to craft the words that characters say that are both believable and yet like how no one else talks.

Dialogue Choices and Dual Dialogue

April 18, 2022

In real life, people don’t speak in perfectly rendered and well-orchestrated dialogue. Not in most cases, anyway. The way we converse with others can vary depending on whom we’re speaking with: If we speak to an employer or authority figure, we’ll be...