Doesn't French cinema have a tradition of lots of passaegs without dialogue? But I know nothing about it, so I'll shut up.

Rosy.

Swedish films certainly do

Especially if you turn the sound down. (Unless subtitles count?)

Rosy.

Can you quote some examples ? My guess is that usually this is the work of the director, where the screenwriter has just written some simple line like "JAMES BOND PARACHUTES INTO THE ENEMY BASE" and left it to others to fill in the detail

Hi Griff. I don't tend to read screenplays these days (I did at one stage, when I did a screenplay course at Birkbeck) so can't comment on individual screenplays, but many films have lots of passages of action rather than talking.

There are two different issues here, I think: whether most films have lots of bits with action and no talking, and how the screenplay writer represents that.

I agree that putting too much detail in the "stage direction" bit (I can't remember if there's a name for those bits in screenplays) is frowned upon, because the writer should do his job and the director should do his, and the writer shouldn't try to take over. However, you need to put enough in in order to get the story across, and while the beauty of the words doesn't matter in that situation, the choice of words probably does mean that one screenplay leaps off the page and another doesn't.

Maybe "JB parachutes into the enemy base" is sufficient - I think it depends on what details of that are important to the plot - but what about when a character is carrying out a series of mundane but crucial tasks?

For instance, to talk about tv rather than big screen, did you see the recent series The Lost Room, which I loved? Say the MC Joe went alone into "the room" and picked up various items, then notices something, then drops the key, then lies on the bed and weeps for his lost daughter... all that needs to be represented in words in the screenplay, because the detail is important. That's what I was talking about.

Deb

Debac, I agree completely, obviously screenplays do contain absolutely crucial action descriptions (which are probably called "slugs" or "tags" or something by the pros, I can't remember!). I guess my point was that even in these instances, they are usually written in plain, cut-down language. I just browsed the Dawn Of The Dead script as an example:

Charlie makes more notes and hands them to Fran. Still listening on the receiver, he speaks to the woman again.

No adverbs, no adjectives, no colour, no clues as to character, except that we can draw conclusions about people by their actions. This is the complete opposite of prose.

Normally, all of the important stuff in a screenplay is told through the dialogue.

It's not a hard-and-fast rule, like I said, there are screenplay writers who go crazy inbetween the dialogue, but my understanding is that producers, directors and script readers really dislike script directions like "Charlie makes copious notes in scribbly handwriting and hands them agitatedly to the panting Fran" etc.

It's just a different way of telling a story.

I totally agree with everything you've said there, Griff. 100%!

Deb

A friend asked me to read a screenplay he'd written, and with many provisos, since I'm the least film-literate writer on the planet, I did. He's a film cameraman by trade, so he was coming at it from the practical end, as it were, but it was an adaptation of a novel. I ended up thinking, 'Blimey, it's constrained. There's so little here. So much of what's essential to a novel just can't go in. How do they do it?'

And it's so different knowing that so much of the end product is someone else's control, ideas, inspiration. If a novel's like a whole body, a screenplay's hardly even the skeleton. Respect to anyone who can do it.

Emma

Yes, it does seem a far more collaborative process than novel-writing. I guess the writer has to be prepared to let go of many aspects because they're just not his concern.

Going off on a slight tangent, it must be really weird to have your novel adapted for tv or big screen and then hate the way they've interpreted it. Even if they keep the dialogue pretty much identical (which AIUI they usually wouldn't) there is so much else they can mess with - casting, clothing, settings, etc.

And I've heard lots of published novelists complain about the book covers their publishers impose on them, because sometimes they're inaccurate wrt the book contents, or just the wrong "feel". Have you had any problems with that, Emma or anyone else here?

Deb

Book covers, Deb. I have a novelist friend (who shall be anonymous!) - who writes contemporary romance and in one book the heroine is a brunette. The cover depicted a blonde - but she was just told, when she raised it, that a blonde looked better! Similarly, another friend writes crime fiction set in the Cambridgeshire fens. The flat landscape is a continuously present 'extra character' in the books - the defining point of their atmosphere. His publishers made him go with a cover with a photo of a blasted tree, and the skyline behind was... well, let's just say, he found out they'd taken it in Cumbria! True stories.

Rosy.

Ah, covers, yes. More blood spilt over them than any other routine thing in publishing, by all accounts. Build in the fact that designers aren't writers, but authors aren't designers, and a whole complex of preconceptions and snobberies (inverted or normal-way-up) on both sides, and you've almost always got potential trouble. I think the problem for authors is that, not being designers, on the whole we know what we like - and don't - but only when we see it. I could no more come up with a cover design from reading an MS than I could fly.

I'm interested to read that Fourth Estate, who've done really badly with the rather beautiful but decidedly literary-looking hb of Londonstani (6,500 sold, on a book they paid six figures for!) are re-thinking it entirely, to catch the young urban market, complete with a MySpace site and so on...

I guess I've been really lucky, therefore: I love both hb and pb of TMOL, which are different, and I really like the US cover too, which is not that dissimilar. My agent approves too, and so have the booksellers I've talked to, which is a different matter.

Emma

I don't think that "lots" of dialogue is a sign of a "good book". Reading the master writers, dialogue is just one of the tools they use. Most use them sparingly. You can go for pages and pages without dialogue at all and yet still be captivated with the story; but too much dialogue and it feels as if you are reading a radio script.

It's about quality, isn't it, in the end.
A book full of great dialogue is a great book.
A book full of lousy dialogue is a lousy book.
Ditto for descriptive passages.

Griff, I'd also say it was about balance, and about what's appropriate for that particular story in that genre.

Deb

Just to chuck my two pee into the pot:

I love dialogue in books and I love writing it too - I think it SHOWS so much about character and plot that description (even of relevant action) doesn't. Often when I am writing a scene I start with the dialogue because I can hear the characters speaking to each other in my head very clearly - probably need some medication for this, but there you go. It is only after I've re-read the dialogue that I begin to see where they are when they are talking, what they are doing, etc etc, and I build up the scene from there.

The disadvatage of this is that I am a regular perpetrator of 'as you know, bob,' where one character goes and tells another character something he already knows, just to let the reader in on it. It is unforgivable - I hate it when I read it in books, and I hate it even more when I spy it in my own work.

So I'd say my favourite writing and the most enjoyable part of my own work is dialogue - having said that, I've just read The Sea by John Banville which is a wonderfully quiet, uncluttered book, and, if I am remembering right, quite low on the speech-marks. Horses for courses?

B

I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez who uses almost no dialogue, especially in his two greatest works, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera".

There's a wonderful sense of a sweeping narrative in which you know the characters from what they DO and how they FEEL but not in what they say.

But then I also love Haruki Murakami's dialogue-filled books, especially how he uses it, as another WWer said, to SHOW the character.

I personally use quite a bit of dialogue, but I write for children. That's an audience that ideally needs to SEE all the key scenes unfold.

If you are going to get away without much dialogue you tend to need to be a master of readable yet delicious prose, which is a real skill.