Y’all I read a lot of scripts. And the one note I give over and over and over and over to the point that I can pretty much copy and paste it from one review to another…. let your characters lie. Let them omit, stumble, and circumvent. Allow them to be completely unable to express what they’re feeling. Make them unable to admit a truth. Let them sit in silence because they can’t think of anything clever to say! Let them say the exact wrong thing!
Dee Rees talks about it in her BAFTA lecture (which you should ABSOLUTELY WATCH): that what your character actually says should be three degrees of separation away from what they mean to say.
I read script after script after script where characters articulate their needs, desires, and objectives with perfect accuracy off the cuff 24/7 and there is not one single human person on this planet who is actually able to do that. This is the #1 thing that’s going to make your script sound stilted and the #1 thing that’s going to make shit difficult on your actors. Let them shut up, and let them lie.
This!! In real life no one says what they mean. We say we’re fine when we’re not. We keep secrets because the truth is painful or embarrassing. We fight over stupid shit that’s a stand-in for what we’re really upset about. We don’t say what we want or need because recognizing, let alone vocalizing, our wants and needs is hard.
If your characters say what they mean all the time, you, as a writer, are robbing yourself of so much power to affect the audience. This is true in all writing but especially in dramatic writing, where everything in the character’s interior life has to be externalized in some way to be known. You can create intimacy by allowing the audience to see something your character hides from other characters. You can create tension by letting the audience know the character has a secret or has told a lie they don’t want revealed. You can create catharsis by allowing the character to finally say what they’re really thinking at a key moment.
You’re also creating a much more interesting text for your actors because you allow for the presence of subtext. If you’re someone who directs your own material you’ll start to realize how little you actually need your characters to say to make it clear exactly what’s going on with them. What starts as a monologue in the first draft may, in rehearsal, become a single line, which in the final cut becomes a shared glance, and the audience will still know exactly what you mean.
I love this. thank u so much for pointing this out so concisely, it explains so well why some lines have an insane impact, while others feel just meh