You’ve just finished the first draft of your screenplay. The plot is solid. The characters are compelling. But your dialogue? Frankly, it stinks.
If dialogue is your personal Achilles heel, take heart: Rib Davis’ Writing Dialogue for Scripts may be able to help.
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“Generally it is the dialogue that cements a script, that holds it together,” writes Davis, an award-winning playwright and former script reader for the BBC, in the preface. “This book takes a microscope to that cement, and then uses the findings to provide not only some insights into how dialogue works, but also a better understanding of how to go about writing it.”
The book uses real-life movie, TV, and playwriting examples, such as American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, Mad Men, and the play Ruined.
It has a companion handbook called Creating Compelling Characters for Film, TV, Theatre, and Radio, also written by Davis, who has 60+ scripts under his belt in addition to these two theater handbooks.
David Lane, a lecturer in creative writing at City University, calls Writing Dialogue for Scripts “an undisputed must-have for any student of writing.”
