Shrinking Part 2: Five Tips For Writing Better Dialogue and Exploding Cliché

Shrinking Part 2: Five Tips For Writing Better Dialogue and Exploding Cliché In Part 1 of my Shrinking podcast, we got really deep into the link between screenwriting and therapy, as well as the challenges of writing therapy scenes and scenes with therapists as characters. This episode, we’re going to get really crunchy with 5 hugely helpful craft techniques you can learn from Shrinking to write better dialogue in your screenplay. Then we’ll do a deep analysis of a pivotal scene from Episode 9 of Shrinking to show you how to deal with the biggest craft concern of most writers: cliché.   If you are writing therapy scenes, or if you are writing teaching scenes (which are related and equally challenging for the same reason: the teacher wants to teach, the student wants to learn, so where’s the drama?) there are a couple of things you can think about:  #1- Question Questions in Your Dialogue.  This is a good rule of thumb for almost any writing. That’s not to say that questions can't work in screenwriting. Questions can certainly work under certain circumstances, but questions are hard, because they can undercut drama and force all the weight of the scene onto only one character. If you've ever studied improv, you probably know that asking questions is the most challenging thing you can do to your improv partner.  That’s because, when you ask a question— unless it’s not really a question: sometimes a question’s a statement, an accusation, a tease, a game, etc— but if you're really asking a question because you want to know the answer, you are not sharing anything of yourself. You’re basically playing the role of the therapist. And now your partner is stuck. They can answer the question, in which case all the drama falls out. You wanted to know, they told you, you're done.  Or, they can refuse to answer the question, in which case you have drama, but you're just having a fight.  Or, if they are quick and sharp enough and are feeling inspired, they can occasionally come up with the most brilliant, funny, hilarious, complicated response to the question ever, which makes it look like the question worked. But regardless, there's only one character doing any work when that happens. There’s no real drama, because all the weight, all the vulnerability of building the relationship has fallen onto the character answering. The same thing is true in writing.  When we are writing a screenplay, what we're really doing is improv on the page.  We may think, as screenwriters, that we're supposed to be the puppet master puppeting our characters, but when you do that, you're basically taking most of the work onto yourself. And most likely your characters are going to come off as exactly the puppets you’re turning them into. Whereas if you allow your characters to do the bulk of the work for you, then the characters will carry you in so many wonderful ways, and you don't have to work so darn hard.  When a character is asking questions, it often means that they're not doing any work. The other character’s doing all the work.  If I ask a character, “How you doing?” The character can either reply “I'm doing good,” or “I'm doing bad.” They can answer the question.  Or, they can refuse to answer the question: “how dare you ask me how I'm doing?”  Or, they can come up with the most fantastic answer to how they’re doing.  But regardless of how they answer, they're doing all the work.  Whereas if I say “It's a sad day,” that's inviting the same kind of response as “how you doing?” But now I'm sharing something of myself, my own point of view on the day. I'm doing some of the work.  Or if I say, “the wind today is just perfect. The perfect briskness.”  Well,