When vandals come and strip the road to hell of all its good intentions and sell them at the Long Beach swap meet, what will be left behind is the dusty trail of writers who "love to write dialog" (meaning: love to toss same-same quips together in a sly string of characterless one-liners) but can't structure a story to save their souls.

Still, there's no doubting that writing snappy dialog is a lot of fun. Amidst this fun there exist two major challenges: consistency and differentiation.

Consistency means that a character should sound the same from one scene to the next. Differentiation means that every character should sound different from each other.

A have a lot of tricks that I use to achieve both consistency and differentiation. I happen to have a ton of experience working with licensed characters -- from Buffy to Kim Possible to Hellboy. I discovered something early on that has changed the way I think about, study, and write dialog.

Before jumping on a project with someone else's characters, I build a dialog study.

I take some of the source material (usually a bunch of scripts), pick a main character, and retype all of this character's dialog. No description, no context.

Most of the people I know -- and this includes most fictional characters -- have very limited vocabularies. Even skilled rhetoricians often use the same words and phrases over and over, sometimes for effect, sometimes unconsciously. Looking at a person/character's isolated dialog should bring to the surface all kinds of revealing ticks.

In addition to repeated key words (words like indeed, actually, I think, yeah, dude, etc.), you can find other things that might not be immediately apparent: Maybe one character doesn't speak in contractions. Maybe another starts speaking with contractions or other bridge words (and, but, so, well), while another never does this.

When I started working on the Hellboy Animated comics, one of the first things I did was take the two screenplays for the animated films and retype all the dialog. I was having a bit of a problem finding the character distinction between Kate and Liz. I understood (or thought I understood) the kind of women they were, but was having a hard time putting that into distinct words to come out of their mouths.

What I found was immediate obvious, though I hadn't seen in when reading the scripts: Liz almost never said more than two sentences at a time. Her dialog was largely very short reaction lines. While each time Kate spoke it was almost three lines of exposition. If all of the line I wrote for Kate were too brief, it simply wouldn't sound like her.

Let's say you are not working on a licensed project. It's a great idea to do this "study" on your own characters. Inconsistencies are much easier to find this way. You may even discover some of your hidden subconscious secrets.

Labels: Hellboy Animated, writers' tips