Creating Dialogue for TV

Screenwriters Talk Television

Monika Bednarek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367139582
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639340
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

As entertaining as it is enlightening, Creating Dialogue for TV: Screenwriters Talk Television presents interviews with five Hollywood professionals who talk about all things related to dialogue – from naturalistic style to the building of characters to swearing and dialect.

Screenwriters/showrunners David Mandel (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep), Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time), Robert Berens (Supernatural), Sheila Lawrence (Gilmore Girls, Ugly Betty, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel), and Doris Egan (Tru Calling, House, Reign) field a linguist's inquiries about the craft of writing dialogue. This book is for anyone who has ever wondered what creative processes and attitudes lie behind the words they encounter when tuning into their favourite television show. It provides direct insights into Hollywood writers' knowledge and opinions of how language is used in television narratives, and in doing so shows how language awareness, attitudes and the craft of using words are utilised to create popular TV series. The book will appeal to students and teachers in screenwriting, creative writing and linguistics as well as lay readers.

1
Introduction

If cinema is said to be a director’s medium, then in the world of television it is the writers who rule.¹ There is no doubt that many industry professionals play an important role in creating the TV series that so captivate our attention – from directors to actors to cinematographers, and so on. Yet, it all starts with the writing team. In the famous writers’ room,² television screenwriters jointly come up with the stories that we encounter when we tune into our favorite shows. But with the exception of a few well-known showrunners, viewers often don’t know who these writers are or how they work.

In this book, I present extracts from my interviews with five Hollywood screenwriters: David Mandel (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep), Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, Once Upon a Time), Sheila Lawrence (Gilmore Girls, Ugly Betty, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Robert Berens (Supernatural), and Doris Egan (Tru Calling, House, Reign). Although some are showrunners, I use the shorthand “writers” or “screenwriters” to refer to them in this book. As a linguist, I am particularly interested in what they have to say about language use in TV narratives. After all, it is through language – using words in utterances – that characters are created and that stories are told. In this book you will find out what these writers say about what makes great dialogue, how to build a character through language, and how to express emotion through dialogue. You will also learn about their views on swearing and on particular expressions like ain’t or y’all. They will tell you what they think are the main differences between how TV characters use language and how people speak in the “real” world. The interviews also include many interesting anecdotes and observations about the series that the writers have worked on.

This book is therefore aimed at anyone interested in the craft of screen-writing, including students and teachers in screenwriting or creative writing as well as lay readers. It is for any reader wanting to find out more about language use in TV series and about writing the dialogue sections in a TV script. The book directly presents the words of the five industry professionals, rather than providing a critical scholarly analysis or comprehensive synthesis of what they say. In this sense, the book also offers primary material that others can use in their own research, including scholars in screen-writing studies, film, television and media production, and linguistics.

Of course, there is a wealth of existing material available on writing dialogue for television series. There are scholarly works by academics investigating screenwriting; there are handbooks or manuals on how to write for television; and there are interviews with TV writers or showrunners (some of which can be found online). However, apart from a few exceptions this material does not focus specifically on language.³ It is this unique focus on language and dialogue that makes this book a distinctive and special contribution to television writing. We live in an era that has been called a new golden age of television. TV shows are being praised and awarded for their writing (for example through the Emmy award categories) – thus, I strongly believe it is high time we paid more attention to their language use.

Although I am based in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, I interviewed the five industry professionals while I was on research leave at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Three writers were interviewed face-to-face while I was in Los Angeles, while two were interviewed via Skype from Santa Barbara (Goleta). Because the interviews differed in length, not all screenwriters answered all questions. In this book I only present the answers to the questions that I asked all five industry professionals.⁴ I have edited their answers somewhat for readability, although I have tried to preserve the “spoken” flavor. Keenly aware of the busy nature of an industry professional’s life, I am extremely grateful for their cooperation. I would of course have liked to have interviewed additional writers with different backgrounds, and would be very happy to include such in a potential second edition of this book.⁵

It is worth noting that these interviews are part of a larger research project that was written up in the scholarly monograph Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In this project I explored TV series from three perspectives, including production (creation), product (dialogue), and consumption (viewers). The interviews with screenwriters that I present in this book are part of the project component that focused on the creation of dialogue. As working industry professionals, writers have very specific views and attitudes about language and it is therefore interesting to look at what they say about how they create dialogue for TV series. Some of the observations from these interviews have been incorporated in my research monograph, which includes several citations from the five screenwriters. Here I offer their fuller responses to a number of the key questions concerning TV dialogue.⁶ In addition, the book you are reading now consists of edited and curated interview material rather than being a critical academic monograph. As such, its main audience are students, screenwriting teachers, budding screenwriters, and lay readers – who can all use this book to hear from industry professionals who present their own perspectives and experiences about creating dialogue for TV. The book is an attempt to share some of my interview data so that it may be useful for others. By focusing specifically on language use, this book can complement existing resources in this field: as part of the larger research project that I mentioned above, I examined 14 manuals on how to write for television to find out to what extent such material discusses language. I discovered that explicit or in-depth description of how to use language is rare, and that the manuals focus much more on structural or narrative aspects.

This book is structured into a series of short chapters covering interview questions and responses about a specific topic: in On great dialogue, each interviewee discusses how “great” (high-quality) dialogue could be defined. In the next chapter (On naturalism), writers explain differences between how characters speak in TV series and how people speak in “real” life. For example, just how naturalistic should TV dialogue be? They also give their opinions on specific words and phrases like you know, well, and like. This is followed by a chapter dedicated to the expression of emotion. How do writers tell us that a character is feeling a particular emotion? How can dialogue, as opposed to the actors’ performance, play a role? This chapter focuses on interviewees’ answers to such questions. The focus on character continues in the chapter On building characters through language. Whether we love or hate them, TV characters are their own personalities. In this chapter, interviewees tell us how writers build characters through language and how language differentiates characters from each other. In the next chapter, On swearing, I present industry professionals’ views on the use of swearing/cursing, which often attracts censorship. The final chapter before the conclusion, On dialect, presents writers’ views on how to represent dialects in TV series, especially when they themselves are not part of the relevant community of speakers. The chapter explicitly addresses stigmatized or stereotypical expressions like ain’t and y’all but also includes more general discussion.

Each of the chapters concludes with a summary that also presents readers with brief advice, mainly based on the screenwriters’ answers but occasionally supplemented by insights from my own research. Despite the inclusion of these advice sections, the book is first and foremost intended as a collection of interviews rather than a “how to” manual. In addition, the brief summaries do not attempt to link the interview answers to the wider body of research on television dialogue that exists in linguistics and other disciplines or to compare it to existing advice in screenwriting manuals. Such critical scholarly treatment can be found in the aforementioned research monograph Language and Television Series. The concluding chapter addresses five important points in relation to the advice sections, such as differences between scripts and on-screen dialogue, and issues to do with authorship.

Together, the interview material collected in this book provides fascinating insights into the language awareness, attitudes, and craft of using words to create popular TV series that are consumed by millions of viewers around the world.

Notes

1 David Lavery and Cynthia Burkhead, eds., Joss Whedon: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), vii.

2 Tim Adams, “Secrets of the TV writers’ room: Inside Narcos, Transparent and Silicon Valley,” The Guardian/The Observer, September 24, 2017.

3 A review of this existing material, with relevant references, is provided in Monika Bednarek, Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). A bibliography of linguistic research on TV series can be found in Monika Bednarek and Raffaele Zago, “Bibliography of linguistic research on fictional (narrative, scripted) television series and films/movies,” Version 2, February 2018. A very recent addition to interview-based books on screenwriting is Patricia Phalen’s Writing Hollywood (London/New York: Routledge, 2018), which focuses on television.

4 One answer was not included at the request of the interviewee. The writers were interviewed between March and May 2017. I initially used Twitter to contact Jane Espenson, who has a background herself in linguistics. During our interview, she kindly offered to put me in touch with other screenwriters who might also be willing to be interviewed. At that point, I was especially interested in interviewing writers who had created dialogue for one of the series that I was covering in an academic book (Language and Television Series). That’s why I asked Jane to identify writers for these particular series. I then contacted the suggested writers and interviewed those who responded to my email and agreed to be interviewed. The face-to-face interviews took place at a hotel restaurant, at a writer’s office, and at a writer’s home. Each interview lasted between half an hour and two hours depending on the availability of the interviewees. I used a method called “semi-structured interview”, which allows a more conversation-like interview where the interviewer asks follow-up questions or goes with the flow of the discussion. In editing the answers for this book, I have mainly taken out repetitions, deleted some words and phrases (like you know, I mean, like), and sometimes tidied up the structure a little, improved the flow, or introduced clarifications. The screen-writers were also given the opportunity to check their transcripts and suggest minor stylistic changes that did not compromise the integrity of the original interview. All in all, the spoken nature of the interviews is still very much apparent.

5 My contact information can be found on my university website: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/linguistics/staff/profiles/monika.bednarek.php

6 The questions that I asked in the interviews are included in the relevant chapters that follow. Sometimes the question was not posed because a relevant answer had already been given in relation to a previous question. In some interviews, follow-up questions were used to elicit further details. I don’t provide these in the manuscript; neither do I provide all variants of the questions asked.

References

Adams, Tim. “Secrets of the TV writers’ room: Inside Narcos, Transparent and Silicon Valley.” The Guardian/The Observer, September 24, 2017. www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/23/secrets-of-the-tv-writers-rooms-tv-narcos-silicon-valley-transparent.

Bednarek, Monika. Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Bednarek, Monika and Raffaele Zago. “Bibliography of linguistic research on fictional (narrative, scripted) television series and films/movies.” Version 2, February 2018. www.academia.edu/30703199/Bednarek_M._and_Zago_R._2018._Bibliography_of_linguistic_research_on_fictional_narrative_scripted_television_series_and_films_movies_version_2_February_2018_.

Lavery, David and Cynthia Burkhead, eds., Joss Whedon: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Phalen, Patricia F. Writing Hollywood: The Work and Professional Culture of Television Writers. London/New York: Routledge, 2018.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of images
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The writers/showrunners
• 3 On great dialogue
• 4 On naturalism
• 5 On the expression of emotion
• 6 On building characters through language
• 7 On swearing
• 8 On dialect
• 9 Conclusion
• Index