What Are Words?
The Power of Wordless Story
As a writer one of my favorite things is to hear my dialogue coming out of an actor’s mouth. As a kid I loved quoting movie dialogue, bonding with friends over shared quotes. I dreamed of writing dialogue that other film fans would recite to their friends and find community in that shared joy. That hasn’t changed.
Now as a writing coach, one of the best things I can tell you is: you need less dialogue than you think you do. Yes, even in that sparkly wordplay comedy.
But what if you needed none?
Last year’s Oscar-winning animated feature Flow had not a single line of dialog in the whole film, and yet we never wonder what the animal characters are thinking, needing, wanting, or fearing. The visual images and the actions are all that is needed to clearly express all the elements of the story, including obstacles and character choices.
How about Wall-E—a movie that made us cry about a robot and a cockroach? Or the first ten minutes of Up? Not a single word uttered, and yet I defy you to watch the lifecycle of Carl and Ellie’s love story without tissues. Removing the words allows us to tap into the emotion underneath. Even in an extremely wordy comedy like Netflix’s The Residence, detective Cordelia Cupp’s most powerful moments come when she says nothing at all.
Here’s a surprising example: Spider-Man: No Way Home. I know, right? Dialogue subtlety in a Spider-Man movie? In a climactic moment when Toby Macguire’s Spidey and Andrew Garfield’s Spidey come face to face, I was expecting a whole lot of talking about what this all means for them, for the multiverse, blah blah blah. There had, after all, been more than a little repartee to this point. To my stunned surprise, not a single word is spoken. The two just look at each other. So much emotion passes over the actors’ faces in this singular moment that it succeeds in completing inner character arcs and moving the story forward better than any dialogue could.
This is precisely what a strongly written wordless scene should do!
We writers love words, so we can lose sight of the fact that film is a visual medium. Action shows character. Action advances the story. How can you show us what the character is thinking or wanting instead of telling us? Although crafting distinct, grounded character voices is important to an elevated draft, character is not dialogue, and dialogue is neither story nor action.
In our Rewrite Lab and Writing is Rewriting curriculum, one of my favorite exercises is to take a dialogue-heavy scene and rewrite it using no dialogue. As a rule, the writers in a given cohort react to this assignment with resistance and sometimes even dread. Don’t take our words from us!
And then something magic happens. As they go away and work on the scenes, they have to push past relying on dialogue to share feelings and intention. They dig deeper into the subtext and lean into their visuals. As we read these scenes in class, nearly every writer will say some version of “this is my favorite scene now.” Maybe the final versions of the scenes will need a line or two of dialogue put back in, but now our writers can be much more judicious and strategic about how they use their words. A scene is never solely about people just talking at each other.
I invite you, as you work on differentiating your character voices and submerging your on-the-nose dialogue into subtext, take a step back. What if you don’t need your dialogue at all? Or at least not so much? Craft your scenes with meaningful visual elements and strong actions. Then choose to include only the dialogue that augments and clarifies the scene. This will elevate your voice as a screenwriter.
Craving support with this? Join us for our Writing Is Rewriting curriculum either in person or online.