This Will Change How You Write Dialogue Forever
Lesson 1 of “How REAL Humans Talk!” dialogue writing essentials with Lauren Veloski
This is Part 1 of Lauren Veloski’s Dialogue Masterclass
Hello, Human Talkers Who Also Write! Yes, you! Welcome to Lesson #1 of How REAL Humans Talk! I’m thrilled to get you rolling around in the mud with the beautiful MESS that is two or more humans … attempting conversation (what madness!). Across the next four lessons, you’re going to learn how to write flawlessly fucked-up, halting, gorgeously messy, and staggeringly REAL dialogue!
Why does dialogue matter to your writing? Glad you asked. Dialogue that HASN’T been trained on real human conversation is maybe your biggest liability. It’s often the weakest link in an otherwise beautiful work—flowing prose interrupted by robot stiff diction, or a cloyingly poetic turn of phrase.
But when we nail authentic “voice,” we DEEPEN investment in our fictional world, reflect our readers back to themselves, pop champagne, and celebrate the gnarly mess that is humanity! To get to that authenticity, you and I will: 1). Investigate how we can use our LIVED EXPERIENCES as actual humans who talk all the time in real life—and are thus natural experts!—to shape how our fictional humans talk in fictional stories. 2). We’ll read and watch loads of vivid examples from pop culture, to bring the lessons home with heart and oomph. My big goal: I want you to sashay out of the month of January feeling like a conversational GOD on the page. WAY more confident and exploratory in your dialogue writing than ever before. A Chatty Cathy badass, practically burping speech bubbles.
I’m Lauren Veloski and I’m a screenwriter, comedy writer, and the founder of THAT’S BANANAS. I teach screenwriting courses year-round (including many at Write or Die) and work as a coach with writers of ALL modes: short story writers, novelists, screenwriters, comedy writers, memoirists, playwrights, you name it. Before I started teaching and coaching, I spent 15+ years as the “story doctor” in the room on loads of film & TV projects. I was brought in to fix narrative problems, to find the funny, to make it weird, to make scenes go ka-boom, and most importantly: to shape the dialogue into something chiseled and powerful, but flawlessly authentic.
Whatever you love to write—fiction, plays, creative nonfiction, sketch comedy, recipes!—I believe that a screenwriting lens is a the perfect “in” for radical dialogue work, because dialogue is THE dominant tool of the screenwriter.
Over the next four lessons, we’ll be looking at fab/fun examples from some of your favorite films & TV shows, including:
Snaggle-toothed bitch slap arguments in “THE BEAR”
Mom-daughter toxicity in “LADY BIRD”
Symphonic crosstalk in Greta Gerwig’s “LITTLE WOMEN”
Rich boy retributive justice in “THE SOCIAL NETWORK”
Use these lessons to muscle-up the dialogue component of whatever it is you want to create. If you walk away from this Forever Workshop with a new electricity in your dialogue writing, EXCITED AS HELL to explore the wacky entirely of the human predicament and its blabbering-blathering: I’ve done my job! And you can always ask questions or bounce ideas off me in the Comments—I’m here to support you!
Our plan of attack:
First, I want to acknowledge that the subject of dialogue in creative writing is VAST. In screenwriting alone, it could constitute an entire year of a dramatic writing MFA. There are countless angles and nooks and crannies. We could spend a month just looking at dialect and slang, or the curve of more mannered speech through history and genre—Jane Austen witticisms, or the thudding brute speech in action films. We could focus JUST on comedy or JUST on drama, because they do each utilize unique hat tricks.
But this is a 4-part workshop, so my inclination is to bring it all back to YOU. I want you writing in ways that are first and foremost obliterating sameness—because ONLY YOU could have written these things!
Naturally, your singular, super-duper specific P.O.V becomes extra crystalline in dialogue writing, where so many of your personal “hot takes” on humanity inevitably seep through the conversations you write. You have exponentially more power as a writer of fiction when you’ve mastered the dialogue game AND know your unique take on humans.
Let’s dive in!
Lesson #1: GREAT Dialogue VS Garbage Dialogue
