Get the Writing Right, First

Know what your character will say, how they’ll say it, what they’re holding back. And know what what your characters hope to get out of speaking.

If you love creating characters, right up to the moment where they have to open their mouths to speak, you might have internalized the phrase, “I’m really bad at dialog.” How many projects have been put on hold because when the time comes to write actual scenes, you don’t know how to make the characters faithfully interact with one another, so the whole process feels like it’s more trouble than it’s worth?

Our stories can be better. Our stories can be easier to write. Every season we watch new shows and films, hopeful that they’ll stir us, fill us with that sense of wonder that great stories can provide. Every season, we are disappointed by at least some of the stories. Many of these stories have astronomical budgets, and still fall flat, and we are left to wonder: When this was just a script, did it seem like a quality story? Or did they not think they needed to fix the problems with the story before spending all that money on costumes, sets, and special effects?

This exact mistake is what started my career in story and dialog.

My Big Looming Failure

I was so scared– we’d just spent a month of our lives creating our longest cartoon ever, and it was finally time to record our voices and make the characters speak. We knew that we’d done the process in reverse, that professional animation studios record their voice actors first, and then match the animated characters to the voice, but we weren’t professionals, we were high school students, “so what,” if we were doing things backwards! But the worrying thing wasn’t that we’d have to re-animate once we recorded the voice over. The thing scaring me was… we hadn’t written the dialog yet.

Pacing back and forth, while my partner worked on the many backgrounds and props for our cartoon, I was trying to figure out the story. “Man vs Nature, Man vs Society, Man vs Man, right??” Basic high school English courses had not prepared me to write my own stories, and that lack of preparation was about to show… in front of the whole class… if we didn’t get a story soon for our 100+ hour final project. We had a scenario… just not a story. Two characters, an orange one and a green one, leave their hometown on a simple errand, but are waylaid getting back. We had all sorts of imaginative places for them to end up along the way, but beyond simple gags, we didn’t know what needed to happen in each scene.

How to Fix It

After years of study, it’s so obvious what to do, that I could tell you, even if you woke me up from the dead of sleep and asked me to diagnose what that project needed: The orange character was a Narcissist archetype, whose unrestrained flood of “great ideas” got the duo into trouble, and the comedy of the green character was that of the Anchor archetype, who’s go-to move was to silently solve the problem, exacting a look of hatred at the orange character every time he had to clean up the mess. The two characters didn’t agree on how to navigate the world, and they were stuck with each other. The story was all there in what we drew and dreamed up, but no one told us where to find the conflict between our two lead characters, so when it was time to make them speak, we didn’t know:

You make them disagree.

Scene by scene, we’d already written the pressures that would affect the characters. The problem? We didn’t understand how each person is asymmetrically affected by every experience. The orange character would have been manically bothered by a scene where they were stuck somewhere, and the green character would have thought the orange character needed to calm down. In another scene, there was a monster to run from; that’s when the green character would have had a terrible time, and the orange character would be scared but also excited.

Potential, Unlocked

If we’d known to make them each react differently to the inciting events of each scene, the story would had the potential to be a hit. It was colorful, it was creative, and it was the year 2005 so it was an impressive feat for high schoolers to create a short trailer for an animated film. It could have gone viral. Instead: no one laughed, because we released the short without dialog. We never figured out how to write any.

We would have had very different lives, if someone could have given us the key to dialog.