Bad Dialogue vs Good Dialogue (Writing Advice)

the best way to learn about dialogue is by studying the good stuff as well as the bad and that's what we're going to be doing today so stick around what's up guys my name is brandon mcnulty i'm a writer i'm the author of bad parts and welcome to my writing channel one of my subscribers requested a video on good dialogue versus bad dialogue and i thought that was a great idea for a topic because obviously there's a lot of things you can learn from good dialogue but sometimes good dialogue can be intimidating on its own

especially when it's some of the best stuff out there now on the other hand when we learn from bad dialogue not only do we get to see other people making mistakes but we can have a lot of fun in the process and for today's video i'm going to be explaining what makes good dialogue good and what makes bad dialogue bad and i'll be having examples of both i want to start out by explaining what makes good dialogue good and i think there are three things that help define good dialogue the first thing that good dialogue

does it sounds natural and this is going to vary from character to character obviously what marty mcfly from back to the future says in his movies wouldn't work in lord of the rings and what frodo says in lord of the rings wouldn't work in the world of back to the future so you have to be aware of who is speaking and in what world they're speaking but regardless of who your characters are and where your story world is the dialogue has to sound natural the second thing good dialogue does it attacks or defends and that's

because good dialogue involves conflict it involves characters trying to learn something that another character doesn't want to tell them it involves characters trying to push a world view on another character who is defending against it your character should always be wanting something in their scenes and they should be trying to obtain information through dialogue exchanges and the third thing that good dialogue does it expresses unspoken meaning or subtext and this means that there's some kind of meaning beneath the surface and i think the best way to think about this is that when you have the

spoken word going back and forth between two characters you have to remember that there's got to be some emotions hiding beneath it for instance if you've ever seen a married couple arguing about something stupid you know that what they're really arguing about is much bigger than that stupid thing they're not arguing about whether or not they're gonna have chicken for dinner tonight they're arguing about some kind of conflict that's going on within their marriage so keep that in mind there should be some higher stakes beneath the spoken words in your dialogue now we're gonna talk

about bad dialogue and for this video i came up with five specific types of bad dialogue what i'm gonna do i'm gonna go through each type i'm gonna explain what it is then i'm going to give you an example of the bad dialogue and then i'm also going to give you a good example that you can use in its place now the first type of bad dialogue is on the nose dialogue this is when you state the obvious it's when you're just stating thoughts and emotions without any subtlety without any subtext there's nothing beneath the

surface you are just saying exactly what you're thinking or exactly what you're feeling an example of this type of bad dialogue comes from attack of the clones it shouldn't surprise anyone that i'm going to be talking about attack of the clones today but in attack of the clones if you remember the one scene where anakin and padme are talking beside the fire and anakin just completely spills his unfiltered emotions out to her it's completely on the nose i'll play it for you right now now that i'm with you again i'm in agony the closer i

get to you the worse it gets i'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me you are in my very soul tormenting me believe me i wish that i could just wish away my feelings and this is of course on the nose dialogue it's stating exactly what he feels it is not natural and it feels totally cliched it feels like something that's just coming out of an afternoon soap opera and because of it we just you know we don't buy into it it doesn't feel real and it's just dull because there is

no deeper meaning here he's just saying exactly what he feels there is nothing to read into now if you want a conversation between two lovers that is a lot more fun take a look at back to the future the early scene between marty and his girlfriend jennifer they're discussing their upcoming romantic trip to the lake i'll play it for you now does your mom know about tomorrow night ah get out of town my mom thinks i'm going camping with the guys well jennifer my mother would freak out if she knew i was going up there

with you when i get the standard lecture about how she never did that kind of stuff when she was a kid i mean look i think the woman was born and none she's just trying to keep you respectable she's not doing a very good job terrible okay so notice how neither of these two characters outright states how they feel about each other it's obvious that their boyfriend and girlfriend they got this thing going on they're they're hoping to hook up at the lake but the feelings here are all in the subtext the dialogue itself is

just a lot of fun and it just dances around the subject of the romance the sex everything else that's going on here but it's much better than the star wars example because neither one of these characters is outright stating oh i'm so crazy about you i love you anything like that it's much more fun when they just kind of hide their feelings a little bit even though we know what's going on here the second type of bad dialogue is melodrama and i've talked about melodrama on the channel before and what it is it's emotion that

is way over the top it's emotion that is not earned sometimes you'll see stories where two characters are just yelling back and forth at one another but you don't really care about the conversation you don't feel the anger you don't feel the passion or anything like that because it isn't earned that's what melodrama is now for an example of melodrama i want to take it from one of my favorite video games castlevania symphony of the night i love this game to death but it opens up with a prologue that has some absolutely horrendous dialogue now

for context here the only thing you really need to know is that the guy in blue here on your screen his name is richter he's a vampire killer and he's going after dracula and once he meets dracula this happens time monster you don't belong in this world it was not by my hand that i'm once again given flesh i was called here by humans who wish to pay me tribute tribute you steal men's souls and make them your slaves perhaps the same could be said of all religions your words are as empty as your soul

mankind ill needs a savior such as you what is a man a miserable little pile of secrets but enough talk how about you okay so obviously the voice acting here is bad but one of the dead giveaways that it's melodrama is the fact that everything richter says ends with an exclamation point it's just a lot of yelling back and forth and this dialogue exists purely to create a sense of conflict that really isn't there and because of that it just comes off as laughable because it's just so over the top so you don't want this

type of melodrama in your stories instead try something like what the castlevania netflix series does in this next example and it's a very similar scenario we have alucard who is the son of dracula going into a confrontation with dracula and they're going to have a conversation here pay attention to how different it is from the first example i gave you father son your war is over because you say so it ends in the name of my mother it endures in the name of your mother okay so notice how the dialogue in this confrontation is toned

down and measured out you can feel the emotion boiling beneath the surface of their words and that's so much better than what we got in the first example where everybody's just shouting back and forth in this second example the two characters are practically restraining themselves from lashing out and we get the sense of the subtext the emotion that is underlying it and also we get the verbal battle the back and forth it sounds natural everything about this dialogue in the tv show is considerably better than what we saw in the video game now the third

type of bad dialogue is exposition specifically exposition that involves characters discussing things they already know and this is often called the as you know bob exchange basically what it means is that if you have two characters and one of them is named bob you might have a scenario where one says as you know bob the house down the street has been haunted for decades or as you know bob my wife works at the supermarket so she can help your kids get a job or as you know bob we're just saying this so that the audience

can understand where the plot is going that sort of thing the as you know bob exchange is not what you want in your stories because it's just a cheap attempt at telling the audience something an example of this comes from the first lord of the rings movie if you remember the party at the beginning where bilbo celebrating his birthday and bilbo and frodo have this exchange here pay attention for the as you know bob moment i'm very selfish you know yes i am very selfish i don't know why i took you in after your mother

and father died but it wasn't that a charity okay so in this example bilbo and frodo are discussing something that they both already know neither one of them is really gaining anything from this conversation it's purely there so that the audience can be brought up to speed on what happened to frodo's parents and frankly it's just lazy writing now on the other hand if you want to explain something through a dialogue exchange do what they do in john wick now if you remember early on in the story here vigo who is the main villain he

tells his son who john wick is and he does it in a way that is very cool and very creative i will show it for to you right now and the key thing to know here is that viggo's son is not aware of john wick's history it's not what you did son it angers me so it's who you did it too ooh the [ __ ] nobody that [ __ ] nobody john wick he once was an associate of ours we called him baba yega the boogeyman well john wasn't exactly the boogeyman he was the

one you stand to kill the [ __ ] boogeyman okay so this is much stronger than the bilbo frodo exchange because viggo is telling his son something that he doesn't know and it's also something that the audience doesn't know we finally get to learn who john wick is why he's such a threat why people are afraid of him and one thing i really like about this dialogue here is that viggo never actually calls john wick a hitman or an assassin that kind of things if he were to say either one of those that would be

on the nose oh john wick was a great hit man john wick was a great assassin that's kind of boring instead he gives this vivid description about baba yaga the boogeyman he's the one he's sent to kill the [ __ ] boogeyman those are some great details the fourth type of bad dialogue is forced poetry sometimes you have characters who normally speak like everyday people and then some kind of event arises in the story maybe it's like romantic related or maybe it's like a big moment in the story and all of a sudden they start

speaking in flowery language and purple prose and whatever it may be and it just doesn't sound like them it sounds totally unnatural i think one of the most notorious examples of this is anakin skywalker's i hate the sand speech i'll play it for you right now i don't like sand it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere not like here here everything is soft and smooth okay so anakin should not be talking like this it's way too flowery and it just comes off as unnatural now this isn't to say that characters who speak

like everyday people can't have a poetic moment every now and then because you can have characters who are gruff and nasty and they come away with a line of dialogue that comes off sounding pretty poetic but the thing is you have to keep that dialogue grounded in their character here's an example from game of thrones it comes from the second season episode nine it's it involves the hound who is the head of the kingsguard and in this scene he decides that he is done with the king's guard he is abandoning his army and in the

scene he has a poetic moment but it is still something that sounds natural coming out of his mouth your king's god clegane we must beat them back if they're going to take this city your king city [ __ ] the king's guard [ __ ] the city [ __ ] the king all right so that exchange the [ __ ] the king's guard [ __ ] the city [ __ ] the king that is poetic within the context of the hounds dialogue that is something that you know it sticks with you when you watch the

show it's something you don't forget because of the way it is delivered the way that the dialogue is arranged yet at the same time it's not flowery it sounds natural coming from this character and then the fifth type of dialogue is wooden dialogue this is dialogue that is too formal it's too stilted it sounds completely unnatural and one of the best and funniest examples of wooden dialogue comes from the original resident evil back on the ps1 and all you need to know in order to understand the context here resident evil takes place during a zombie

apocalypse it takes place inside a haunted house and the main character her name is jill she is trapped in one of those rooms where the ceiling falls down on you she's basically like a swat team member and she's calling for help and one of her friends manages to save her and after she's saved just listen to this dialogue oh barry that was too close you were almost a jill sandwich you're right barry thanks for saving my life but barry didn't you see you're going back to the dining room to do some research why on earth

are you here uh i just had something i wanted to check now let's get back to searching for the lost captain and chris shall we thank you barry yeah yeah okay so that dialogue is so bad that it's good and it's bad again obviously if you're writing a story you don't want to write like this you don't want to be repeating barry's name four times you don't want jill saying things like why on earth are you here like she's 10 times her actual age you want to avoid these things and what i actually did here

i rewrote the dialogue so that it works and makes sense and fits the characters so here's the rewrite it's very simple and to the point you okay yeah thanks thought you were headed for the dining room i got sidetracked by what nothing listen we should keep searching for the others so with this rewrite it's very simple but at the same time it's natural you believe that these swat team members would say things like this you're not having them say things like why on earth are you here so it's totally natural and there's also that attack

and defend going on here jill attacks with that line thought you were headed for the dining room barry he defends with well i got sidetracked and then jill attacks again by what barry again defends he says nothing and that of course puts questions in the reader's head we're aware that there's some kind of subtext there's something going on beneath here barry is not being honest with her and that makes us wonder well okay what else is going to go on in this story so i hope this helps question of the day what is your favorite

line of bad dialogue from a movie let us know in the comments section below thank you guys for watching if you want to support the channel please pick up a copy of bad parts if you haven't already also be sure to check out my other videos hit the like and subscribe buttons for me share this video with a friend and as always remember to keep on writing