SCREENWRITING HOW TO:

Writing Convincing Characters and Dialogue (Part Two)

So in part one we went over what 'on-the-nose' dialogue is and how using subtext and understanding your character helps you to write believable, interesting dialogue. In Part Two we're going to look at the use of character diamonds and character dynamics layers as tools to help us achieve that great dialogue we're after.

Traditional character development requires huge amounts of back-story and mostly irrelevant personal style information such as childhood idol or favourite colour. The character diamond approach requires you to decide just four traits for your character and to decide how that affects their responses and actions. It's a quick and easy way to forge consistent characterization in your work. The rules are simple any action or line of dialogue that your character performs must display one or more of their traits.

So a trait is distinguishing personality characteristic such as secretive, gullible/naive, enthusiastic, imaginative, daring, optimistic etc. You select a trait for each point of the diamond, but just the trait on its own wouldn't be enough. Once you select your traits you need to write a brief bit about why the trait developed and how it affects them.

So as an example our character is naive, she has always been protected from the outside world by her father, now she is having to cope alone her lack of experience in the real world makes it easy for her to believe and trust others to her detriment. At times even the most fantastical story can fool her. Her other traits are in the image below.

So with that figured out we can start to get a picture of her character and we can also see how she will react to events in the story. Now if I placed Claire into a situation lets say a homeless person approaches her and asks her for spare change for a bus we can get the responses from the character diamond. Well she's Affable so she'd listen to what he says and being naive she would most likely believe him but no sooner does she give him the money then he enters the nearby off licence and buys a can of cider. At this point her response is to get all sensitive and to question herself even blaming herself for not helping him in a different way.

Refer to this diamond whenever this character is in a scene. Ensure that each line of dialogue and action is influenced by one of the traits. If you have a character arc planned then create a character diamond for each time the character's personality develops and changes during the story.

I hope hat this will be of some help. The link to the free PDF character diamond template is here.

In part three we will look at how to develop great interactions between the characters using a character dynamic layer sheet.