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Dialogue will compel the
turning of pages if it is a
compression and extension
of action.
Bloated, clunky, dull dialogue is a fi ve-alarm warning to
the reviewer that you can’t write salable fi ction.
Crisp, crackling dialogue, differentiated among the
characters (so they don’t all sound the same) instills a
feeling of confi dence in the reviewer.
Everyone loves great dialogue.
So, how do you crank yours up?
By remembering the most important rule of all, a def-
inition that comes from the noted playwright and screen-
writer John Howard Lawson (also one of the blacklisted
Hollywood Ten in the 1950s). Dialogue, he said, must be
viewed as “a compression and extension of action.”
1
That means you never have a character say anything
that is unconnected to that character’s objective in a scene.
And every character in every scene must have an ob-
jective, otherwise he shouldn’t be there. Replace him with
a chair.
1 Lawson, John Howard, Theory and Technique of Playwriting, (NY, Putnam, 1936,
P. 288.)
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