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Welcome to part two of our look at how to improve your screenplay’s dialogue in a few easy steps. In part one, we showed you three great ways to improve your script’s dialogue.

Here’s another three.

Improve the scene

As we stated in our previous post, dialogue should come last when writing a scene. Dialogue doesn’t carry the action, but supports it.

The main point of a scene is what’s happens visually and how the story moves from one beat to another.

Therefore, the primary cause of bad dialogue isn’t really bad dialogue. It’s a bad scene. Good dialogue depends on your characters being in an already good scene.

Take a look at your scenes and ramp up the stakes / conflict until there’s something interesting happening in them regardless of the dialogue.

A scene charged with conflict in which something significantly moves the plot forward naturally lends itself to better dialogue.

Hide exposition

When your characters have to reveal dry information necessary to move the plot forward, one way to keep the scene from being boring is to make sure they’re busy doing something else.

Something you don’t do every day, but your character might.

In Lethal Weapon, exposition is hidden by Riggs and Murtaugh having a conversation while emptying clips at a firing range.

Another technique is to make one of the characters as confused as the audience about what’s going on. That way one character can explain what’s happening to them, rather than to us.

This is achieved near the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the scene in which the two guys from the military visit Indy at his college. All of the exposition about the Ark, the Nazis, Indy’s former professor etc, is hidden by Indy explaining everything to the other guys.

Delete telegraphing

Don’t telegraph action. i.e. have a character say they’re going to do something and then go ahead and do it.

Avoid having a character say, “I’m going to make a chicken sandwich,” before showing them going to make a chicken sandwich.

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Be sure to check out our script coverage services for a complete assessment of your screenplay’s dialogue.